Starter Base - Factorio Guide Guide - IGN (2024)

Starting from scratch can be a daunting task in Factorio. With limited resources and recipes to start with, it can be difficult to know where to start. There are a few different ways to set up your starting base to get the most bang for your buck in Factorio.

There truly is no right or wrong way to construct your first base. Chances are after you've made some of your production pipelines, you'll need to redo your factory to accommodate for the new technologies you'll learn through research. So nothing is too precious to destroy and rebuild.

The Copper and Iron Farm

Two of the most important materials you'll want to start mining are Copper and Iron. These resources will be used in almost every recipe you'll come across. Setting up a base designed to mine these two resources are key to progressing in the early and mid stage of Factorio.

You'll want to look for a starting location that is near Iron, Copper, Coal, and not too far away from a small body of water. If you start a world and it looks like you can't find these together, try restarting to make your life a bit easier.

Ignore Conveyor Belts for now. The most effective way to mine and smelt resources is to build a Stone Furnace and a Mining Drill. Set it up so the yellow arrow displaying where the Mining Drill will drop off the resource is touching to entrance to the Stone Furnace.

This will put the Iron or Copper directly into the Stone Furnace, allowing you to skip extra steps like an Inserter or Conveyor Belt.

Setup a couple of Coal Mining Drills too to ensure you have enough fuel to keep all of these machines running. You may have to manually add the Coal to your machines and furnace for a bit. Don't worry about setting up ways to automate it, this base is designed to be redone over and over as you progress in the recipe skill tree. Your goal here is to keep producing Iron and Copper until you can create the Lab, which requires 36 Iron Plate and 15 Copper Plates.

The Lab will require electricity, so you'll need to also build an Offshore Pump, Boiler, and Steam Engine near a body of water. This will allow you to being producing electricity using small electricity poles.

Build a Conveyor Belt from a Coal Mining Drill to the Boiler, and attach an Inserter from the end of the belt to the mouth of the Boiler. This will ensure you don't run out of fuel for your electricity. Remember, it doesn't have to be pretty or perfect, it just needs to work.

Once you've built the Lab, you can begin researching different recipes and going in any direction you want. Decide what skills you want next, and from here you'll redo your base depending on what you set as your next task.

Paul's Starter Base

The community has some really great tools and Blueprints for building starter bases. This base Blueprint from Paul over on the Factorio Steam Forums is an easy way to construct a base that will carry you into the mid game. It's a fully self-contained base that will farm everything you need once you've built it.

Since you can import Blueprints into Factorio, you can copy and paste this into your game, and then just mine the required resources to build the layout you'll put down from the Blueprint.

You can get access to the blueprint here. Just hit the copy button at the top, and then import it into your game. If you're unsure on how to import Blueprints in Factorio, check out ourguide on it here.

Something Simple

Another community member, Colonel Damneders has created a really simple starting base that will give you everything you need to succeed. In this video, you'll watch them build each piece of this base step by step while explaining how each piece works.

Essentially, you'll be starting with the Copper and Iron farm from above, but expanding it out to start including Electric Mining Drills and more automation. It's an excellent resource for building your first starter base with a visual element.

This base focuses on creating early Assemblers, which can make recipes that require two components. Assemblers are key to scaling up your pipeline as recipes being to need more and more pieces.