Hello!
I’ve been playing Factorio for a while and have loved it. The stigma around the game is that it’s a time-sink, and this is definitely true. I haven’t even launched a rocket yet, but I wanted to share some stuff I’ve learned about the game. I’m gonna talk about Red Science in this post.
The technical name is “Automation Science,” and more can be found about it on the Factorio Wiki. However, there is a lot of information that’s not easily acessible, and I hope to cover that here.
To make Red Science, you need a copper plate and a gear, same for expensive mode (although a gear costs 4 iron plates instead of 2 in expensive mode). You’re going to be using this science a lot, and you should be prepared to make a ton of these. Every technology in the game will require this science.
Lucky for you, it’s pretty easy to make this. 2 iron and 1 copper is a very cheap cost, especially compared to later sciences. It also is fairly quick to make, as shown below.
Using this fantastic website, I was able to create a simple schematic for creating red science. This specific shematic assumes the most basic equipment available.
This setup produces 6 Red Sciences every minute. As you’ll notice, we’re not using our resources very efficiently. We need 0.4 furnaces making copper to keep up with this.
There are two approaches to handle these bottlenecks. What I, and I believe the majority of players, do is just handle bottlenecks as they arise by incresing production. This works 99% percent of the time but is not very efficient, and can lead to very messy factories (called spaghetti).
It’s much better practice to take time and plan these things out. The site I’ve linked is a fantastic resource for this, and let’s you adjust what equipment you’re using. I have a brief summary of times below.
Obviously there’s a lot more analysis that could be done, this is just a quick table with some basic facts. Maybe in the future I’ll go more in depth.
Now in terms of actually making these things, the diagram above gives a pretty good layout. I’ll show you what I like to use when making Red Science.
Here is a simple, mid-game setup for producing red science that can easily be repeated. With sufficient amount of iron and copper, you can make a long row of these. Note that I put the long inserter on the copper plates because only one is required, and the long insterter is not quite as fast.
I enjoyed writing this! Let me know if you have any more facts related to red science, or if you have questions.
-Cole
Word of Cole 