Starter Base

Starting from scratch can be a daunting task in Factorio. With limited resources and recipes initially, it can be difficult to know where to begin. There are, however, a few different ways to set up your first base to get the most bang for your buck in Factorio. With that in mind, here's our guide for starter bases.

Starter Base Ideas for Factorio

The good news is, there's 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.

1. The Copper and Iron Farm
2. Paul's Starter Base
3. Something Simple
4. Starter Base In a Box
5. Compact Starter Base

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 come across. Setting up a base designed to mine these two resources is key to progressing in the early and mid stages of Factorio.

You'll want to look for a starting location near Iron, Copper, or Coal, and not too far away from a small body of water.

Tip!

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 touches the 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.

Set up 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 Plates 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 begin 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 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.

This base is massive, so you'll need a ton of space to build it, however, if you hold shift while importing the Blueprint, you can build everything that is currently blocked by another Entity on the map.

The Blueprint is labeled into multiple different parts, so you can import each piece separately as you gather resources on your own once you've laid out the outline. It's a nice easy way to know what to work toward next. You can see each piece of the Blueprint here, so just pick what you want to work on next, and go from there.

This Blueprint will require a ton of resources to build because of its size, but because it's entirely self-contained, you won't need anything else for a long time. This starter base features its own electricity network, Steam Engine farm, and railway system.

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 full blueprint here. Just hit the copy button at the top, and then import it into your game. If you're unsure of how to import Blueprints in Factorio, check out our guide on it here.

Something Simple

Another community member, Colonel Damneders has created a simple starting base that will give you everything you need to succeed. 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 begin to need more and more pieces.

Starter Base In a Box

Created by Gebnar, this starter base in a box is meant for early game production of Blue Science. It's not meant to be a late-game base but will provide you with a useful production line to build out into a larger base once you've crafted enough Blue Science.

While this is certainly the most advanced of the starter bases we've recommended so far, it's designed to push you into the mid-game, so learning how it operates is worthwhile to progress quickly in Factorio.

It may look complicated at first, but everything has a place in this base. Raw iron and Copper are fed into the middle of either side of the base to create Red and Green Science. Once you begin the production of Military Science, you'll need to add Stone into the equation, which can be fed into the belts from a nearby stone deposit.

This base is entirely designed to give you enough Red, Green, and Military Science to create Blue Science, which will allow you to push through the rest of the Tech Tree and unlock more machinery for your factory.

Compact Starter Base

This base created by Acidius is similar in concept to the starter base in a box listed above, but its design is a bit more compact. This base blueprint is also designed to use the lowest level of each machine available. It's designed to be upgraded as you progress, so you can take things a bit slower.

Feed your Iron into the top belt and your Copper into the middle belt to start creating Red and Green Science. As the ore works its way down from the top right of the base, it will be constructed into all of the components needed to craft Red and Green Science, until it reaches the labs in the bottom right.

Once it's there, it will be fed into the labs using the Inserters, giving you more than enough resources to begin researching new machinery in the Tech Tree.

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