First attempt was just to get my feet wet. Second attempt, I got a pretty awful starting locations with iron, copper, and coal all far apart from each other and a lot of water between. Third attempt I got a pretty good spread of resources close together, and started a very basic resource bus
* at the planet's equator. Right now, it's only three lines of graphite, iron ore, and copper plates. I'm not smelting the iron immediately, since there's two possible outputs for iron ore: plates and magnets.
I recommend at the start to set up automated production of conveyor belt Mk.1s, since you'll need a lot if you're going to use an equatorial conveyor bus.
Conveyors are made from 2 plates and 1 gear, and take 1 second to produce(and produce 3 per run). Smelters produce 1 plate from 1 ore per second, and the Mk.1 assembler produces 1 gear from 1 plate per second. Mines in this game have a slightly different way of calculating output, which is neat but a pain in the ass for managing efficiency. Every deposit in the miner's working area(a 90° fan extending out a few meters) adds 0.5 ore per minute.
So, to make conveyors at 100% efficiency, you need miners with a total of 6 veins(mines can share veins), 3 smelters, and 2 assemblers. One of the smelters needs to feed one of the assemblers producing gears, and that assembler along with the other two feeds the assembler producing conveyor belts. Do note that the starting sorter does not pull items at a rate of 1/second, especially if you place the adjacent conveyor belt one extra tile away. Which I tend to do since I've found it sometimes gets finicky about letting me add a sorter when I place belts directly adjacent to the building. However, nearly all buildings have multiple I/O ports for placing sorters, so you could probably just add an extra one.
After that, I suggest automated production of blue science blocks(or "Energy Matrixes" as the game calls them) so that you can research the things you need. Much of the things you can research with blue blocks are some of the basic necessities, like thermal generators and oil pumps. The ratio for both coils and circuit boards to blue science is 1:3, so if you can produce one coil/circuit per second(not hard to do), you can support 6 Matrix Labs(three to produce science, three to research). This will speed up your early research considerably.
Definitely also want to get a decent thermal energy setup going as well. It can initially be automated directly with coal, but once you research graphite, switch to that(for both thermal generators and yourself). Another thing to be aware of is that placing a lot of belts at once will drain your energy significantly, because of your drones. This can particularly be a problem if you're building a belt across water.
Also, the planet I started is a lot of strips of land and a lot of water, making placement difficult.
You can put down "foundations" fairly early on, which levels everything to 0 altitude, removing water. I'm just not sure yet if water is used in production lines. It might be, since there are water pumps, but their tooltip seems to indicate that they're for sulphuric acid.
My planet is like that too btw.
Think the starting planet is explicitly designed this way. At the least, all three starts I've made were. Also, water is apparently used to produce various things(including synthesizing sulphuric acid) in the chemical plant.
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Topic: Dyson Sphere Program: Factorio on a Galactic Scale. "Dark Fog" Combat Update (Read 14050 times)