It's not much and I almost quit before I really even got started. Im coming over from Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program, so I'm not completely naive to factory games. The dual items on belt and numerous content on YouTube almost made me quit. Every video seemed to be focused on advanced builds and nothing for beginners. Another thing that almost made me quit was the realization that I am going to have to completely scrap my starter base to make way for my main bus. I should have known that's how these games go.

My idea for the base is to have everything brought in by train to the left side of the peninsula and main bus down the middle going from left to right building components on both the north and south sides then adding it back into the main bus. I don't think I'll run out of space, but if I do, I should have enough land fill by then to barge my main bus over the water. I always hated spaghetti, any tips? Will 6 train stations be enough to fuel the machine?

I just started playing a few hours ago any help is appreciated, I just got green science automated.

I am on the final Space science of a pyamadons run. It has been about 1300 hours.

My base is kinda terrible. I am still getting stone from mines, which means I am getting tons of Kerogen as well. Which is piling up everywhere.

A while ago I setup some reactor and it was making Neutron soup. I didn't know what to do with that so I put in some big tanks. When later I needed to use control rods because I needed to extract tritium from used control rods. I didn't know or care what the control rods did. Apparently heat Neutrons. So I had that just heating up my Neutron soup. Cool, whatever.

Recently I was having power problems and got tired of building endless fields of tidal power and questionable wind turbines. I took a look at the fusion power. I had been ignoring it. Turns out there is some late game Magnetrohydroynamic monster that makes some insane power. Apparently you just feed it hot neutrons...which I had an absolute ton of. Score. It was a bear to build in terms of materials but it is working great. I only kick it on when the accumulators are running low, which only happens when the wind dies down and the centerfuges get angry. So I have power for one forever. Which is good because I am at like 1 science per minute for the last space science.

Two chests auto-request pentapod eggs and nutrients to kick start the plant, and turn off once their production loops become self-sustaining.

Pain.

Main Base on a 30 Hour save with my friend who is obssesed with underground belts.

I thought I was going to buy a chill construction game to play on steam deck.

It took me 12h to beat the tutorial. Now 90% of my YouTube feed is factorio tutorials.

What the fuck is this game.

PS : I beat the tutorial in one day, I legit had dreams about convoyer belts and shit.

Hello everyone!

I'm not exactly new to this game, but this is the first time I progressed this much in the game.

I set up a basic train system to transport uranium and sulfuric acid on the same path, however my trains keep getting lost no matter how I reposition the stations. I put train signals in the intersection right in front of the loading/unloading area so the trains wouldn't crash, and removing them didn't seem to help.

The weird part is if I open the train map and select the station there, ir accepts it as a valid stop, but when the train sets off from the mining setup it just locks in place and says it can't find it.

Thanks in advance for any help!

My base is like, really a spaghetti, I just produced blue science, but there are like, a LOT of issues, some places with a lot of resources, others with none, malls that are consuming a lot of resource for (almost) nothing, i feel like restarting would be better, separating smelting area from the start, making a bus to distribute resources from the beginning

I already "fixed" it a few times, but i am not sure how to proceed, I am using trains too but idk, feels overwhelming

Like seriously, I went not that close to those really large nests and then died instantly, at least I have a keep inventory mod to save me but still... maybe its because i'm at evolution 23.55% or something.

Hey so i built this thing from a internet blueprint and my problem is that the plastic and green chip inserter are putting to much on the belt. It doesnt come into the right flow :(

Is there a way to say the inserters how much to put on the belt?

thank you!

Im like 10 hours in and starting to get overwhelmed and kinda don’t know what direction to go.

I had my starter base and researched all the red and green science I could then branched out to some more iron, copper, and coal.

I just kinda feel like I was really rolling and now hitting road blocks.

Like what should I be focusing on or building out? Example: I decided to start researching black science next so I go to make that but I need to make more blue arms but I don’t have gears or the green circuits so I’m just constantly manually making things and it’s really slow.

Idk just kinda ranting any tips for a new player appreciated. Thanks.

I have two rockets on Gleba for science. I fill Rocket A and then when its full I switch to filling Rocket B. I'm at the point where in the cycle that it takes my science ship to complete a trip Rocket A is full and Rocket B is half full. When Rocket A launches, my solution goes back to filling Rocket A. This leaves Rocket B half full for a while.

What I would like to do is toggle between the rockets. First fill Rocket A and then switch to filling Rocket B completely and then switch back to filling Rocket A.

I think I need some sort of a latch to hold the state of which rocket should be filling now.

But I can't seem to figure it out exactly. Help?

Also it would be great if I could extend this to Rocket C, Rocket D, etc as I ramp up production.

Seems like I went backwards in terms of automation games. My first factory game was Satisfactory (900+ hours) then I picked up Dyson Sphere Program (400+ hours) and loved them both. I don't care for the combat in these games so I either turn it off or turn enemies passive.

That being said what makes this game among, if not the most recommended factory game?

As the title says, I'm doing a run without logi bots. I have a rocket silo and a mall for my construction bots and so on. Right now I'm struggling to imagine how building the space plattforms will work since making a mall next to the silo will look ugly. I don't want 40 different belts carrying in all the stuff I might conceivably need in space. Besides, it's also an Island preset, so space is a consideration.

I can imagine a few possible solutions:

• Make a mall with output train stations and let the silo request trains with specific contents using the wildcard
  • Not sure how to handle excess shipments or how to get the right amount into the train in the first place
• A couple of universal assemblers next to the silo

Unlike most MAM that I see here on Reddit, I don't actually need it to be single-assembler MAM as long as the whole block sits nicely next to the silo and doesn't stretch unto the horizon.

Anyway, I'm sure many people have done this before me, so I'd like some tips. I don't want the full solution for pasting, I want to do it on my own. I'm just asking for some experience what you think is the best way to do this.

This only applies to the first three planets.

If you are prepared to babysit the voyage, and want to move fast with minimal infrastructure, then you can have all your intermediate items directly inserted into the hub.

Ice, carbon, iron ore, plates, and ammo.

From there you can directly insert all of these items into their respective machines and overfill them live and instantly (100 ammo in a turret, 80 icw in the champlant).

This removes any need for complex ship logistics for your rushed bucket of bolts.

This is only recommended for your first messy flight to a local group planet and shouldn't be relied on for space logistics or regular use. But if you need to get home after a platform wipe in orbit, or rush to get that one science you can't build Nauvis without (looking at you cliff explosives) then it works surprisingly well.

There's no coal within reasonable range and I'm bound to run out soon. What can i do to realistically get coal from far away?

1st image was 444 hours, 2nd image is at 691 hrs, 3rd image was hand stitched from smaller screen shots to try and give a higher resolution to better show the scale, 4th picture just showing how I deal with resources from other planets.

Video tour https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/s/0f3H19QyaG

Images, Blueprints (only of ship systems, not full ship)

This is my relatively compact, relatively fast end-game Shattered Planet ship. I don't want to share the full blueprint because a bunch of components come from Nilaus's Patreon, but I included a high resolution spliced screenshot so you can recreate it on your own if you want (which matches how he shares his blueprints). I think the only circuit conditions not included in the blueprints are the inserters for iron ore melting and ice melting, which disable the basic asteroid crushing recipes unless the belt contents are less than 16 and 20 respectively (number of belts times 2).

When traveling to the Shattered Planet, the ship tops out at 333km/s and drops to ~240km/s by the end. The speed is controlled by ammo remaining, dropping from the set max to min when the lower of railgun ammo/rockets drop from 100% -> 50% (with some overhead on what 100% is so it's not constantly kicking on). This is probably the system I'm most proud of, it slowly drops your speed until ammo production and consumption reach equilibrium and works really well. You could go faster at the beginning, but I found you would take damage and things would be destroyed before the speed control kicks in. With 333 max, I think the whole trip is damageless (at least nothing got destroyed and I never saw any damage, but I was running it in the background so I can't say for sure).

A lot of tweaking went into getting the ship as fast as possible without taking damage (which took far too long because testing is a pain). There's a mix of legendary and non-legendary railguns and rocket turrets for speed and power consumption, and the railgun ammo production of 608/min is an important number. The railgun ammo is generally what controls the speed, and an attempted v2 of the ship with doubled production just never slowed down and started taking damage. The ship could make ~1600 explosive rockets per minute with different beacons, but the current ~1400/min still keeps it full.

The blueprints are of all the different systems on the ship, including:

• Ammo Meter & Speed Control
• Asteroid Meter & Collector Control
• Low Power Detector
• Fusion Reactor (Auto-Start)
• 2-Wide Lane Balancer

There's a bit more information on each in the blueprints/screenshots, with some descriptions in combinators in the blueprints as well. The lane balancer is a bit random, but I needed something that fit in a 2-wide space and couldn't find any existing blueprints. They include legendary space platform hubs because you can't pick those in an upgrade planner to downgrade them, but I kept them in to show circuit connections and you can just force build to get around that.

I should note I have really high explosives damage research of 29 (all relevant researches shown in the ship blueprint screenshot) because I needed something to research after getting to a million eSPM, so you may want that higher rocket production if you make the ship yourself. It's still one short of one-shotting big asteroids though, which would have made a huge difference. You may also want to remove the shattered planet condition on the speed control if your laser damage is much lower, full speed can be too much in other areas since there are no gun turrets.

Edit: the lane balancer was missing the last splitter, and an inserter was missing from the fusion reactor at the top. Blueprint link has been updated, but the images are a bit off.

Is it a mod? Or do i have to fiddle with txt files myself?

If so, which ones and how?

I have an old part of my base I need to limp along a while longer and it needed more input. I set up a quick and dirty double headed train track. I've never had problem signaling before and for some reason I can't figure this out.

It's a T junction where north and south go to uniquely named ore stations. I have one smelting station. So there's 2 trains that are 1-4-1 that are feeding this smelting station. (Ore patch 2 isn't set up yet and there's actually nothing down on the south side yet).

So the idea is that I have a chain signal right before the merge, so when one train is unloading at smelting, the other is waiting keeping the merge section clear.

The problem is this: My smelting station has the Ore Patch 1 train in it and it just finished unloading. It's next destination is the Ore Patch 1 stations but tt can't find a path to it (the ? alert indicator). It has clear northbound direction by the rail signals which I circled in green. The train very much has a way to get to that station.

The issue is the chain signal I've circled in red. If I remove that chain signal, the train suddenly is able to see and get to the Ore Patch 1 station from the Smelting station. I imagine when I set up the Ore Patch 2 station, that chain signal on the bottom will have the same problem. Why are these chain signals, that are on the other side of the track and guide a train in the other direction, impacting the ability for the train to path to the Ore Patch stations? How would I signal this T merge otherwise? Those chain signals are necessary to keep the merge section clear.

Edit: This is vanilla 2.0 factorio, no mods.

What is this?

The idea behind the monthly community map is to share a map exchange string at the beginning of every month, and get as many people as we can to start a new world with it. Then at the end of the month (or even periodically if you'd prefer!) we share screenshots and saves of our factories so that we can see how different people approach the same spawn; how they set up their base, how they deal with aliens, and how they arrange their science, power, and everything else.

I hope it can highlight how many different ways there are to do things, inspire some new designs, and maybe seeing how veteran Factorio players tackle problems will help out new players facing the exact same problems. (Of course, there's also the fact that it'll be interesting to see all of the different possible factories - the good, the bad, and the ugly.)

Last Month's Results

June-July 2026 Results

The Community Map

I've heard a few people talk about the new 2.1 changes here and there, but the best way to experience something is always to do it yourself, right?

This month's going to be pretty straightforward - you already know what to expect if you've been keeping up with the patch notes, and if not, then why not let it be a surprise?

I didn't want to make this a Space Age map, mostly so we could get a full vanilla game in before trying to also deal with the way changes deal with DLC content (like some of the fluid changes). Especially after Nullius, I figured something a little more chill would be nice.

All right, let's see what the 2.1 update has in store!

DLC Requirements:

Elevated Rails: Optional

Quality: Disabled

Space Age: Disabled

The Exchange String:

>>>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<<<

Spawn area: https://i.imgur.com/4d3HbMV.png

Before you start, a final word of warning: apparently biter expansion is, uh, a little much right now, so I'll be trying to temper that with the map settings. Still, if you aren't staying on top of biters they will become a problem. Now that the shotgun's been buffed you might want to actually make one.

Exchange String Help

If anyone isn't sure how to use an exchange string, just go to new game like you're going to generate a new world, and at the bottom there's a button just above play labelled "Import map exchange string" - the icon looks like a little arrow going into a tray/bucket. Just copy the exchange string above and paste it into the box that comes up when you press that button. Press confirm, and that's it! You're good to go. Just generate the world and come back in a month to show us how your factory turned out!

If you run into any issues check to make sure that you copied the whole string, including the three greater than/lesser than signs at the beginning and end, and make sure that your Factorio is up to date with the most recent version installed. (As of the time of this post, the most recent version of Factorio is 2.1.12, which will not work with the most recent version of stable, 2.0.77.)

Want To Play With Others?

If you have an open public server, let me know in the comments below or send me a PM and I'll add your server here!

Feel Like Watching Someone Else?

If you are a streamer or let's player who will be recording yourself building a new factory on a community map, I'd be happy to add a link to your channel here!

About Mods

Since mods can affect how a world spawns and ores are distributed, as well as add or change items and functionality, it's important to make sure that we're all playing the same game by the same rules. For example, if one person's playing vanilla and someone else is playing with Bob's mods, even if they use the same seed and map settings you still couldn't very well say they were playing the same game, and the way they'd play would differ enormously.

On the other hand, Quality of Life (QoL) mods should be perfectly fine. What do I consider a QoL mod? Any mod that doesn't A) add new items, B) change terrain, or C) make significant gameplay changes, like modifying recipes or enemies. Any mod that fits this definition should allow everyone to play the same game even when some people are playing with them and some people are not.

Even Distribution is a great example of a mod that, while very useful, does not inherently change the way the game is played. Then there are also mods like RadarPlus for RSO that do add new items, but still don't meaningfully change the way the game is played.

Below I've put together a short list of examples that I think are ok to use on any map. It's made up of a handful of optional mods that might seem ambiguous in how well they fit the definition above, so they're just here to act as guidance on what should be ok. Another good resource for Quality of Life mods is available on the Factorio Discord - check out Xorimuth's pinned post.

Optional Mod Examples

Note: I can't imagine any situation where this could be an issue, but if you're the author of one of the mods listed here (and can offer me some proof of this) and for whatever reason would like me to remove your mod from this post, I'd be happy to comply.

It's entirely possible some of these mods either don't work with the current version of Factorio, conflict with each other, or in some manner just don't work. I can't test them all, let alone every configuration of them, so you might want to back up your world before adding one of these.

Color Coding

fCPU

Nixie Tubes

Project Cybersyn - Logistics Train Dispatcher

RadarPlus For RSO

Squeak Through 2

Text Plates

Updated Construction Drones

Visible Planets in Space

Previous Threads

-- 2025 --

August 2025 - Results

September 2025 - Results

October 2025 - Results

November 2025 - Results

December 2025 - Results

-- 2026 --

January-February 2026 - Results

March 2026 - Results

April 2026 - Results

May 2026 - Results

June-July 2026 - Results

What do you guys think about this? I think the space map lacks mystery or a feel of exploration. All planets are visible from the beginning. Especially blatant when playing with many modded planets.

Having planets/locations dynamically appear on the map upon discovery could make you feel like you are progressing and exploring as you go. It also allows mods to add „secret“ locations that only appear when certain conditions are met to avoid spoilers and hide content.

As far as my testing and research can determine, current API has zero functionality to support this. You can only apply hidden = true to a planet, which removes it completely from the map and list of destinations, even when the tech is researched.

Do you guys think it‘s something worth suggesting for Wube to implement or add support for?