#Tips for dealing with design perfectionism as a new player?

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

fierce trellis
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So this is my second time trying to get into Factorio. I have noticed that I have a tendency to spend way too long trying to come up with "perfect" designs, which ends up being wasteful in the early game. It also makes me hesitant to just build anything, since I know it'll most likely be inefficient since I'm new.

In essentially every other game I am a "new" player in, I just plow right in, make absurd mistakes, and laugh it off when I know better. I feel as though I struggle to do this in Factorio though, since I view what I make more in the long-term (as the game is certainly a long term commitment). The community is also insanely knowledgeable and smart with their designs, which makes me want to be the same, even though I know I don't have the experience to do so.

Basically, has anyone else struggled with prefectionism in this game as a new player, and if so, how did you manage it? I think my current strategy is just to embrace the spaghetti, and nuke my base when my science develops enough to make something good. I do think I remember that unlocking bots during my first go around made the problem go away mainly.

latent ibex
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Have you tried going into a different save with the editor and designing there? That way the time pressure or wasting resources isn't a factor

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Also up until bots it doesn't really need to be pretty, as long as there is space to expand later

lean bramble
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There are pros and cons to every design

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One design may be the best for UPS but is likely expensive and space intensive

One may be cheap and quick to setup but slow and inefficient in the long run

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One may be well optimized but hard to expand, another is easy to expand but wastes a lot of space or resources

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(UPS is updates per second, you likely won't have to care about it)

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Earlygame it's bad to pursue effecient lategame designs if you're new cause it's impossible to know what makes a design

As long as you follow ratios youre fine

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There is no real wrong way to play factorio
But the worst way to play this game. Comparing yourself with people with, literally, over 10k hours of factorio.

fleet veldt
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You really need to do your best to get into the groove of "Just implement it now, fix it later"

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Try to measure progress in how far you've gotten with automating something, rather than how well you've automated it.

A good lesson is to not overly focus on the inputs into something, unless you actually know the build far enough to make use of everything.

Always try to design backwards. This makes it so much easier to figure out how much of everything you need to automate. When you don't know how it will quite shape out, reserve plenty of space, and don't worry about having to pull slightly longer belts to connect it in the end.

If you end up using a bus design, once again, don't overly worry about inputs, just as a bus allows you to take resources when you need them, you can also inject more resources into it later.

umbral spade
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one other thing to always keep in mind as a beginner is the fact that "you don't have the resources to make the perfect design at the moment"
sure, that "perfect design" may be more efficient if you were in god mode with infinite resources, but in your current situation, that design is simply "not perfect"

on the contrary, if you can make an inefficient design few mins earlier without putting much thought into it, then those few mins of extra production will help you more than a perfect designed blueprint could have

median vale
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there's also no cost to tearing something down and rebuilding it better
(especially when you have bots, before that you have to invest some time to do it)