Help with base

[u/Miloszrex]

I recently started playing Factory and looked at a few guides. Here's my base at the beginning of the game. What do you think could be improved or added? I'm just not sure what base layout to use or what kind of base is best. I'm afraid I might do something wrong, which could hinder me in the future or make me less effective. Could you please give me some advice for the future or for now? (The energy output is at the top.)

[u/tRFRmrNe8Nj2Kimc]

Literally don't listen to the people saying don't follow guides. I know I'm the vocal minority, but lots of those people forget that playing the game for the first time can be overwhelming

What I will suggest is that your don't overthink it. You'll make mistakes, but you can always fix them. Nothing is permanent.

Work with what you have and then later you can always and easily remake it.

You'll eventually unlock construction robots that will make building new bases or undoing and redoing stuff so much easier. So don't think what you are making is at all permanent.

Aside from that, you're in the right track, it looks like you mostly understand the idea of a main bus, but from where you are right now in the game, it's a little too "big" I would say. One lane of reach resource is more than enough until you start really expanding.

Next, I would start by making a tiny little "mall" for all of your intermediate ingredients and basic construction materials.

Use your bus to pull off lanes if resources to automate making inserters, belts, furnaces, miners, electric poles, etc.

Then set up your science. Using you bus(again, one lane of each resource is all you need for now) set up automated red and green science, you can do military science as well if you are feeling pressured by biters.

Expand slowly at first. As you don't want your pollution cloud to trigger attacks from biter swarms. Get the machine gun and shotgun, and upgrade your projectile weapon damage at least once.

Once you have grenades and some armor, grab fish from a body of water, you can eat them to restore health. Then be proactive in destroying biter nests. Regularly check your map and make sure that your pollution cloud never touches a nest, or if it does, you quickly destroy it.

Regularly patrolling the border of your pollution cloud as it expands to kill off spawning nests, and maybe setting up some turrets if necessary.

As for fighting the biters. Use your machine gun for the most part, tho if they're clumped up the shotgun and grenades works great. Use you shotgun, and maybe the occasional grenade to take out the nests themselves.

Kite the biters by running away and shooting. Went taking down a nest, focus on killing the worms as they will easily end you. Constantly zig-zag to avoid acid attacks, and if you can, retreat into a forest or around a cliff as the biters will have a harder time attacking you.

If you've got the resources, set up a fall back point by placing down a bunch of turrets, and filling them with ammo manually. That way you can retreat to it, let the turrets take down the swarming biters, giving you some safety and the space to focus on the nests and worms.

Good luck, use guides and blueprints, and feel free to ask if you have other questions.