First Factorio Playthrough #1
I started playing factorio for the first time the other day. I love this game so much.
I've bought the game not long after Space Age released and I've been meaning to play it, but I lost my computer mouse not long after finishing the tutorial and was too stubborn to buy a new one until recently.
Outside of watching most of Doshdoshingtons challenge videos and a few Trupen starter guides I'm going in without any real help since no one I know plays the game.
I did import a furnace stack blueprint from a trupen video, and plan to do the same with a bunch of belt balancer blueprints, but I haven't used it yet. I just don't feel like reinventing the wheel is all.
I'm about ten hours in across two days and just launched my first satellite, so its time to start getting into the space age stuff.
I named the satellite Puppy 1 because I'm dog sitting right now.
Keep in mind I'm still on my starter patch and, thanks to spawning in a massive forest, I've only had to deal with a couple biter attacks. Like less than ten.
No biters means no military science, it just seems like a pain in the ass to deal with and I don't want to. Same with purple and yellow science actually, I've been avoiding them because I'll have to scale up my circuit production and my base is already a spaghetti mess and my starter patches are almost drained dry.
I am starting to get ready for nuclear power though, I just need to route the sulfuric acid across my entire base to get it to this tiny little uranium patch thats right by spawn. When I say tiny I mean I managed to fit six electric miners on it, and two of them were hanging off the edges lol. The next closest uranium patch is probably 15-20 times bigger than this one.
I have a location picked out for roughly where I want to build my base but I'm hesitant to make the move because my options for copper are either clear out three massive biter nests or run a massive train.
Oil is also a bit out of the way but I already have a pipe line half way there to bring it to my starter base so I don't really care.
There's also cliffs and trees everywhere but thats just whatever, I have explosives and grenades automated and I'm thinking of holding back on the move until after I get Vulcanus set up so I'll have cliff explosives. Plus I want to incorporate foundries into my main base for the 50% production bonus they give, so it was going to be my first stop anyways.
Worst case I just set up the mining outposts early and route them into my starter base. Or just, pick a different spot. There's a big ass desert near me that would be perfect but it's absolutely infested with biters and like I said before, I've got no military science, meaning I'd be related to turret creep which I am very bad at.
Also did you know fish spoil? Took me probably four hours to realize thats where the spoilage in my inventory came from, thought it was something you could only get once you reached Gleba.
Looking back through my achievements I actually almost got the Steam All The Way achievement, but I set up a radar to keep an eye on some biters and rather than run a massive power line back to base I just slapped down some solar panels and accumulators.
Unless the personal solar panels count, because I used a bunch of those to power my night vision, exoskeleton, and so on but if they expect us to build a rocket without using modular frames at all for the achievement then I'll cry.
Speaking of holy crap exoskeletons are great, after so many hours of feeling like I'm walking on two broken legs I'm practically flying around now, even with just one pair.
I know you can technically send yourself down to each of the planets except Aquilo alongside a bunch of supplies, but I kinda want to strand myself on each planet and make a totally self sufficient factory to escape the planet with completely from scratch.
Sure it'll be harder and take longer but I feel like I'll be able to experience more of the game this way you know? Get the pure Vulcanus/Fulgora/Gleba experience and all that.
Yes I'm aware thats rich coming from the guy who skipped three whole sciences. I'm going to do them, it's just not happening in my starter base.
And it's not like I won't be able to manage my main factory should anything go wrong, I'm planning on utilizing bots pretty heavily in my main build, it's just to expensive for me right now.
Side note but I can't help but wonder if its possible, even if tottaly impractical, to have my main base be entirely built in orbit?
I'd have to spend so much of my planet side base production on rockets lol. I kinda want to do it just for the sake of it.
Not in this run though, there's a limit on how tall you can make your satellites and I'd probably need to remove that via a mod in order to make it work, and I'm pretty sure that would make it so I can't earn Steam achievements anymore in this run.
If that wasn't the case I'd have gotten the disco labs mod installed and probably done all the sciences XD
I am very easily entertained.
Speaking of disco labs, does anyone know of a way to get the mod working with biolabs? It's not urgent, like I said I'm not modding until my second playthrough at the earliest, but I was looking around and it seems like the mod doesn't work with them and that the mod author doesn't intend to make them work, but I've also seen videos of it working on biolabs so like, whats the deal?
Speaking of biolabs, I'm actually considering running all my science on Gleba actually. My thought process is agricultural science spoils and if I recall correctly might become less effective the closer it is to spoiling?
So anyways if I use the agricultural science right there on Gleba then I both don't have to worry about it spoiling and get the most science per science right? Since I'm cutting out all that travel time?
I'd have to import all my science to Gleba for this to work obviously, but I'm already building the infrastructure to import the other five space sciences to Nauvis right? No point not going all out and exporting the six base sciences to Gleba as well!
Anyways thats all my rambling done for now.
TLDR: I love this game, and have some really cool ideas for future base expansions.
