Factorio: Complete Guide (Base Game + Space Age)

A practical guide to Factorio from your first burner drill to launching rockets, then taking the factory into orbit and across the five planets of the Space Age expansion.

Researched September 2026 — current as of stable 2.0.77, with the 2.1 experimental branch (2.1.20) noted where it changes things. Live games change; check the linked sources if something differs.

Version note: 2.0.77 is the stable build (June 2026). Version 2.1 has been on the experimental branch since June 26, 2026 and is still being tuned. Wube warns that 2.1 saves and blueprints cannot be downgraded to 2.0 and that mods may not be updated yet, so back up your save before you opt in. Everything in this guide works on 2.0. Where 2.1 differs, it's flagged.

Quick Start

1. Automate early, handcraft less. Your first real goal is a burner or electric mining drill feeding a furnace, then assemblers making gears and belts. Handcrafting doesn't scale.
2. Research drives everything. Press T for the tech tree. Keep labs fed with red (automation) science, then red + green, and work out from there.
3. Build a main bus, or at least leave space. Beginners run out of room more than anything else. Leave wide gaps between production lines and run ore and plate belts in parallel.
4. Power is the heartbeat. Offshore pump, boilers and steam engines come first. If your machines slow down, check power before anything else (hover over any power pole).
5. Pollution attracts biters. Every machine gives off pollution, and when the pollution cloud reaches enemy nests they attack. Get turrets up early and research military tech before it's urgent.
6. Copy-paste everything. Shift + right-click copies an entity's settings, Shift + left-click pastes them. Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V copy whole layouts. Blueprints save you hours.
7. Use the pipette. Q over any building puts that item in your hand. It's the most-used key in the game.
8. Trains solve distance. Once ore patches are far away, rail beats long belts. Learn train stops and signals before the mid-game.
9. Construction robots change the game. When you research them, your blueprints build themselves. Aim for that milestone.
10. Space Age: planets are unlocked by research, not all at once. You need to launch a rocket and build a space platform before you can travel anywhere. Vulcanus, Fulgora and Gleba can be visited in any order; Aquilo comes later and needs their tech.

Core Controls (default keyboard)

You can rebind all of these in Settings > Controls. Turn on alt mode and leave it on. Seeing every machine's recipe at a glance is huge.

Science Packs and Progression

Factorio's progression is a chain of science packs. Each tier needs the previous chain to be automated.

Space Age adds planetary science packs, each made on (or from resources of) a specific planet:

Early build order that works

1. Hand-mine a little stone, craft burner mining drills and stone furnaces, and set up drills that feed each other: coal onto coal, iron and copper into furnaces.
2. Place an offshore pump > boiler > steam engines setup. One boiler supplies two steam engines, and one offshore pump can supply 20 boilers.
3. Switch to electric mining drills, belts and inserters into rows of furnaces.
4. Automate iron gear wheels, then red science, then green science (belts and inserters are its ingredients, so automate those as well).
5. Build gun turrets and give them ammo before your pollution reaches nearby nests.
6. Research oil processing, find crude oil, and set up pumpjacks > oil refinery > chemical plants for plastic and sulfur. That opens up blue science.
7. Scale up, build trains, and get construction robots and logistic robots.

Handy ratios (base game)

These are stable rules of thumb that don't depend on the patch:

• 1 offshore pump : 20 boilers : 40 steam engines.
• Yellow belt (15/s) of plates: about 48 stone furnaces, or 24 steel/electric furnaces.
• Electric mining drills: about 30 drills fill a yellow belt of ore (no mining productivity).
• Solar: the classic Nauvis ratio is about 25 solar panels to 21 accumulators for steady 24-hour power.
• Belt tiers: yellow 15/s, red 30/s, blue 45/s (and green turbo belts in Space Age are faster again).

Power

Make sure your power poles connect the whole network. A single disconnected pole is a classic reason that half the base stops working.

Logistics: Belts, Trains, Robots

• Belts: The main bus layout (parallel belts of plates and intermediates running through the base) is the standard beginner-friendly design. Use splitters to pull off lanes and underground belts to cross.
• Trains: Use one-way rails with loops at the ends to keep it simple. A rail signal marks where a block ends, while a chain signal looks ahead to the next block. The core rule is: chain signals going into and through intersections, rail signals coming out. Space Age adds elevated rails and rail ramps, which let you build flyovers.
• Robots: A roboport network with construction robots builds and repairs from blueprints. Logistic robots move items between requester, provider, buffer and storage chests. They're great for mall builds and low-volume items, but they make a poor replacement for main-line ore delivery.

Combat and Biters (Nauvis)

• Biters and spitters live in nests. When your pollution cloud reaches a nest, the nest sends attack groups.
• Evolution goes up over time, with pollution, and when you destroy nests. Stronger variants show up (medium, big, behemoth).
• Defence progression goes: gun turrets with piercing ammo, then laser turrets, then flamethrower turrets and artillery.
• 2.1 experimental change: Biter expansion was reworked. Expansion parties are larger but less frequent, scale with evolution (2.1.13 toned the starting size down), and head for open areas or areas you've cleared before instead of filling in already-infested ground. With radar coverage you now get alerts when a new expansion base appears. Check your perimeter defences after moving to 2.1.
• Don't want combat? When you create the map, you can turn off enemy bases or set them to peaceful.

Space Age: Going Off-World

Space Age is the paid expansion released with 2.0. It adds space platforms, quality, elevated rails, and four new planets besides Nauvis.

Getting to space

1. Launch rockets from the rocket silo. In Space Age they carry cargo up to your platforms and planets.
2. Build a space platform starter pack, launch it, and build the platform in orbit: foundations, asteroid collectors, crushers, thrusters and turrets.
3. Asteroids are the platform's raw material, and they are also a threat. Use gun turrets with ammo made on board, and later rocket and railgun turrets, to shoot down the larger ones on dangerous routes.
4. Fly the platform to another planet and send down a starter kit to build a foothold.

The planets

Common planet order: Vulcanus or Fulgora first (both are fairly forgiving and their tech speeds up everything else), then Gleba, then Aquilo last, since it needs imports from the other planets. Past Aquilo, the solar system edge and Shattered Planet are deep-space destinations for promethium and the endgame.

Quality

Quality tiers are normal, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary. Put quality modules in machines and there's a chance of producing a higher-quality result. The standard loop is quality modules, then the recycler (which returns a quarter of the ingredients), then craft again. Better quality means better stats: faster machines, more module slots and so on.

• 2.1 experimental: Quality modules can no longer be used in asteroid reprocessing, which closes the popular "legendary asteroid farm" trick. Trains (locomotives and wagons) can now have quality, and the upgrade planner now works on trains.

Spoilage (Gleba)

Some Gleba products spoil into spoilage over time. Design for throughput, not storage. Keep belts short, don't buffer fruit, and send overflow to burners or recycling. Use agricultural science packs quickly, because their freshness affects research.

2.1 Experimental Highlights (as of 2.1.20)

If you play on the experimental branch, these are the headline changes from the Friday Facts:

• Space logistics: rockets can carry mixed payloads. Orbital requests can import from any location. Platforms won't leave with items in their trash slots. Platform-to-platform transfers are possible. Hub requests can be set by circuit, and radars get a "universe mode" that shares signals across planets and platforms.
• Landing pad unloading bay: lets inserters pull items from the landing pad area onto belts, chests or trains.
• Circuit/QoL: labs can switch research through circuit conditions. Boilers and heat exchangers can connect to circuits. Land mines can act as enemy detectors. Wire input/output can be split.
• Fluids: new safeguards against accidentally mixing fluids, filters that actually work on passthrough ports, and fluid throughput based on buffer volumes.
• Building: more entities can be flipped (pumpjacks, burner miners). Belts show which lane machines will drop onto. Inserters always drop onto the input sides of splitters. Flamethrower turrets can be placed diagonally. Pumps can stretch to reach fluid wagons.
• Platforms: ARM64 Linux builds, including Steam Frame support (FFF #446).

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Building too compactly early. Spaghetti is fine, but boxing in your smelting leaves you nowhere to expand. Leave room.
• Ignoring defence until the first attack. Turrets need a steady supply of ammo. Automate magazine delivery or use laser turrets.
• Mixing items on belts by accident. One wrong inserter can clog a whole line. Filter inserters, splitter filters and dedicated lanes prevent this.
• Double-headed trains with no signals. Unsignalled rails lead to deadlocks. Signal every junction.
• Putting robots on bulk ore. Robots are good for the mall and for construction. They're a poor fit for thousands of plates a minute.
• Launching into space unprepared (Space Age). A platform without enough turrets and ammo production will be shredded by bigger asteroids on longer routes. Test on the short Nauvis to Vulcanus/Fulgora routes first.
• Hoarding on Gleba. Buffers rot. Keep production flowing.
• Updating to 2.1 without backups. You can't go back to 2.0 with that save.

Advanced Tips

• Build a mall. Automate belts, inserters, assemblers, poles, rails and turrets into chests. In 2.0+, logistic requests let you pull them into your inventory automatically.
• Use blueprint books. Community blueprint sites and your own library carry over between saves. City-block rail grids make scaling predictable.
• Productivity modules in mining, science and intermediates stretch your ore patches a long way. Pair them with beacons full of speed modules for the late game.
• Circuit networks: Start small. Turn off a pump when a tank is full, or enable a train stop only when the chest has room. In 2.0, decider and selector combinators make logic far easier than before.
• Train interrupts (2.0): Generic schedules like "go to the nearest stop that needs iron" replace dozens of dedicated trains.
• Foundry and big mining drill (Vulcanus): Casting from molten iron/copper saves huge amounts of space and has built-in productivity bonuses. Many players rebuild Nauvis smelting around them.
• Fulgora scrap: Design so that sorting overflow goes into recyclers that loop back, so the line never jams on one byproduct.
• Megabase planning: Measure goals in SPM (science per minute) and use the production stats (P) to find bottlenecks.

FAQ

Is Space Age worth it? If you finished a rocket launch and want more, yes. It adds new planets, space platforms, quality, elevated rails and the 2.0 engine improvements. Note that 2.0 itself is a free update for the base game, so you get many of the QoL changes even without the expansion.

Should I play on 2.1 experimental? Only if you want the new features now and don't mind bugs. Saves can't be downgraded, and mods may lag behind. For a long-running save or a heavily modded game, stay on stable 2.0 until 2.1 goes stable.

Does Factorio ever go on sale? Wube's store page says they have no plans to take part in sales or reduce the price for the foreseeable future.

How do I turn off biters? In the map generator settings, disable enemy bases, or pick the peaceful preset. You can also adjust expansion and evolution settings.

What's the fastest way to get construction robots? Get chemical (blue) science automated, then research the robotics techs. That needs oil processing, advanced circuits and steel.

Which planet first in Space Age? Vulcanus (the foundry is a huge upgrade and demolishers can be avoided) or Fulgora (the recycler and EM plant). Leave Aquilo for last.

Can I play multiplayer? Yes. Co-op multiplayer is supported through Steam or dedicated/headless servers. Everyone needs the same version and mods, and Space Age too if the server uses it.

Sources

• Factorio Friday Facts #444 - 2.1 Experimental release
• Friday Facts #441 - Space logistics improvements
• Friday Facts #442 - Flip, Flow, and Fresh Paint
• Friday Facts #443 - More Planet Deliveries
• Friday Facts #445 - The Biters Bite Back
• Friday Facts #446 - An ARM and a Frame
• Factorio latest releases (version API)
• Factorio on Steam / news
• Official Factorio Wiki
• Official Factorio Wiki: Keyboard bindings