Tips: Things I wish I knew when I started

[Clover]

General:
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Organize your bases conceptually, and keep notes of what is where outside the game. The game does not have great tools for tracking things down in game.

Plan ahead for managing hydrogen. At first you're going to want to use it all for red science. Then you're going to have way too much of it and will want to burn it for energy. Then you'll need it for green science ingredients and will want to stop burning it for energy. So plan ahead with setups that can gracefully switch from one to the other and have well-prioritized overflows, preferably in a single consolidated location for easy management.


Early game:
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Press shift to accelerate past 100 m/s in space. I think it tells you but it's easy to miss. Also, don't miss planets you're aiming at because it's hard to turn around early on if you're short on energy.

Your starting planet has lots of oil you can burn for power and it does not run out. You won't need all that oil for production for a very long time.

Don't bother conserving or carefully organizing your coal and feel free to use it for power/whatever early on. In the long term oil and other special resources take over the production of things that require graphite.


Base structure:
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For those that did not play factorio: build a mall early to provide at least the high volume buildings. I know it seems easy to just build things in the replicator but having it automated is well worth the investment in the long run.

Be very careful about the interplanetary demand and supply configuration of your hubs. If an interplanetary hub requests materials from another system and space warpers are not available, ships will slow-boat between stars, stranding them for hours.

This one is a bit controversial: Use interplanetary logistics hubs exclusively for interplanetary resource transfers and consolidate them in one location on each planet. I know that at first it seems like they're just a better version of the small one and so it's tempting to just throw them around everywhere, but if you do, you'll regret it later for a couple reasons:
1. They will need space warpers later and if they're all over it's hard to find them all and then it's easy to end up with logistics vessels slow-boating through interstellar space.
2. They exclude a large area from having other logistics hubs, and the smaller logistics hubs can be packed more tightly.
3. You will also need more warpers to supply them if they're being used for purposes other than import/export. It's also easy to distribute warpers to several without using logi slots if they're together.

It seems best to create independent areas for each item you produce. How you build many things will change over time, so complex direct feed setups lack the flexibility to transition gracefully. There are exceptions but it's hard to know what they are your first time though. This is especially true for mining -> smelting, oil products, hydrogen, and all items that have an advanced recipe with a special resource. You'll want to end up building them almost exclusively with the special resources eventually, but that's not an option early on.

Do not use larger buffers than necessary in your logistics stations because it will hide problems. The concepts of lean manufacturing are highly applicable in this game.

Do not use excess logistics bots on hubs receiving belt inputs. They will end up carrying one resource each making it a waste of resources and power.

Drag the charging rate setting to the minimum on logistics hubs. Otherwise they'll draw tons of power and the minimum setting seems more than adequate for almost all situations.


Power:
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Solar panels are pretty bad unless you're talking about a tidal locked planet. At first, wind is great. Then burning oil products and hydrogen provides plenty until late game when other techs take over. I know the rings of solar panels around a planet look cool so go for it if that's your thing, just know that it's not a prudent use of resources most of the time.

Put your first ray receivers on the poles of planets and design your sphere with a vertical orbit. That way your receivers will have long active durations that go by season rather than day, improving their output and efficiency.

The best way to get your dyson sphere going is to build the nodes first (max side length triangles), without the lines between them. Then once the nodes are all built, connect them, fill in the areas, and start launching sails. You can even stop sending rockets at this point--the frames between nodes provide only a small amount of power at high cost and are not necessary to support the sails. That said, to build the next phase of the sphere you will have to end up spending rockets to fill them in.

The larger a dyson sphere, the more sails it can support in the area between nodes (this is a good thing). So, build your spheres as large as possible. Combined with the previous tip you can get huge dyson sphere power output with only a few rockets.


Noob traps:
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Do not use the particle accelerator to make deuterium unless you are intentionally trying to waste power/hydrogen. Use the fractionators with high speed belts instead. They are better in practically every way.

There's little reason to build solar sails / dyson swarm until you have the first dyson sphere structural upgrade. That is the point at which you can build actual sphere sections, which the sails will fill in. Until then they will just expire and disappear so there are better ways to get power.

Fusion power plants and the artifical star are a waste in most situations because they have complex fuel costs that use finite resources. You have better options for generating power. The fuel cells are excellent for powering your mech though.

[Halabec]

Solar panels are most definitively not bad. I created a equatorial ring around my starting planet generating over 300 MW that's supported me virtually all the way to the endgame in creating green cubes and dyson spheres. They don't have the space wastage of wind turbines nor require the constant manual balancing of power generator inputs as your fuel needs change over time. Build them once and they give consistent output (assuming you create them around your equator), are 100% reliable and give you no fuss whatsoever.

[Nailfoot]

Solar panels at the poles may be more resource efficient.

[Halabec]

Even if that's the case, equatorial panels were far less hassle than all of the thermal station input juggling I was doing as my needs for oil and hydrogen kept changing over time. I'm mostly responding to this guide saying "solar panels are pretty bad" which is just patently false.

[matrimvidz]

Lol, i'm 240+ hours into the game and i just found out that you can click+DRAG to build in a line.
It's freakin amazing, and i also feel so stupid for not trying it before :P

Filling a tidal locked planet with solar panels is going soooo much faster now !!

[TLHeart]

If you miss the planet do NOT use the "a" or "d" keys to turn, just use the mouse to move the cursor to the planet again while holding "w"... Icarus will turn without using power, and retarget the planet.

[josmith7]

Originally posted by matrimvidz:

Lol, i'm 240+ hours into the game and i just found out that you can click+DRAG to build in a line.
It's freakin amazing, and i also feel so stupid for not trying it before :P

Filling a tidal locked planet with solar panels is going soooo much faster now !!

Not sure when you started that 240+ hours; but that click+DRAG chain-build feature was only added earlier this month - so it may not have existed when you were learning the game.

But it is a huge game-changer and makes setting up production lines or solar panels so much quicker. (But when they add full blueprints it should be even better because you can lay down copies of even complicated production lines)

[Unstator]

I use these interplanetary logistics hubs for everything, not only do they hold more materials, they give you greater options, being that they can output up to 6 items making them the awesome for your production lines once you stream line.. I disable remote demand and use local only , as I have a import and export hub on a planet that they can send there items too.