#Factorio cheats how to#

“Making little optimizations to save space and increase throughput isn't all you'll be concerned with, though you’ll need to prevent your logistics puzzle from being smashed to bits by those ever-expanding alien nests. The map is sprawling enough to accommodate some truly magnificent and intricately designed manufacturing facilities – the only limit is what you can wrap your head around and your CPU finally saying enough is enough. And even after more than 40, my most advanced factory still has a lot left to unlock. It’s one of those games that feels like it doesn't even really start until you’re 20 or more hours in and have access to a lot of tools that make your life much easier. And eventually, populating your base with autonomous drones will allow you to do things like move resources from extraction sites to refineries without a maze of conveyor belts, or even copy and paste large, multi-part structures for easy expansion. Cars, and later tanks, give you personal mobility and a major combat advantage against this alien world's single-minded insectoid inhabitants who resist your industrial revolution. Unlocking trains lets you ship large quantities of materials quickly over long distances on a schedule. What really saves Factorio from slipping into monotony are some key techs that can totally change the way you play, and they’re spaced nicely through the tree. But the satisfaction of getting everything working properly is a hell of a drug. Trying to figure out what steps I needed to take and in what order could give me a slight headache, and there’s a fair amount of repetition involved in setting up a new supply line that works exactly like the previous ones but with a different extractor building. And also you're running out of copper again so you need to explore new areas of the map and build an outpost that can supply more to your main base.

Progression can feel a bit tedious now and then, like when you realize your next level of science – which is “researched” by manufacturing different colored science units out of various materials – requires two products you don't have, and each of those is made from two or more secondary products you also don't have, which may even require you to seek out new raw resources far from your main base. There are tons of hotkeys and keyboard shortcuts that let you perform important tasks quickly and precisely, but it took quite a bit of fumbling before hitting Z to manually feed items to a machine or shift-clicking to duplicate a factory's output onto another became muscle memory. That said, the interface– like everything else – takes some getting used to. It's usually very easy to see which buildings are making what, if they're getting enough power, and where all of your supply lines are going. “Everything from your astronaut to the heavy industrial equipment is drawn in a readable, colorful pixel art style, which cuts down on the overall stressfulness a lot.

You’re best off doing your homework and reading wikis and watching tutorial videos, or bringing along a friend who knows what they're doing in multiplayer, because Factorio won’t guide you away from frustrating disaster. My first couple of experimental factories ended up being such a mess that I decided it was better to simply abandon them and start over rather than trying to salvage the tangle of assembly lines and mining drills I had created before I understood some key tricks and common pitfalls.

#Factorio cheats how to#

The most important thing to understand about Factorio is that it's one of those games you probably won't figure out how to play optimally through trial and error alone. While it gets a little slow in certain places and its ultra-complex logistics chains can be overwhelming, the rewarding depth that can be extracted from its whirring conveyor belts and steam-belching power plants are worth the trouble. It starts you off as a spaceship crash survivor with only a pickaxe with which to explore its randomly generated 2D planets, but stick with it long enough and you can build all the way up to fighting aliens with tanks and creating manufacturing megastructures in seconds with a personal robot swarm. Rags-to-riches survival games are a dime a dozen these days, but Factorio’s wild ambition and open-ended format takes the potential for complexity up several notches.