Aiming for a Rocket Launch from a Crash-Landed Planet: A Chunk-by-Chunk Factorio Factory-Building Log

The first task was salvaging a small amount of materials from the spaceship wreckage. There were iron and coal deposits nearby, and mining and processing them makes it possible to craft all sorts of things. The speaker first mined the coal in plain sight and used it as fuel to smelt iron ore. Since a mining drill and a furnace were available as starting items, the speaker loaded the furnace with coal to smelt iron ore, then used the resulting iron to build more mining drills and furnaces.

The first automation shown is an arrangement of coal mining drills. The drills run on coal and output whatever they mine to the front. By placing drills facing each other and starting them up, they supply each other with coal and keep running until the deposit is exhausted. The speaker calls this "automating coal mining." At this stage, however, the speaker still had to periodically pick up coal and deliver it to the drills and furnaces scattered around. Gradually expanding production with the resources obtained is the flow of the early game.

To build something as advanced as a rocket, you need to advance research and unlock recipes. Research is structured as a tree, and the rocket research itself requires many prerequisite technologies. For the time being, progressing through this research tree became the goal.

Because research requires electricity, the speaker lined up an offshore pump, boilers, and steam engines to build a small steam power plant. The speaker was still delivering fuel by hand but said they wanted to automate it eventually. After placing a lab near a power pole and manually crafting the items made from iron and copper to deliver to it, the lab began to glow, and after waiting a while, the research was complete.

The first research unlocked the assembling machine, a facility that automates crafting. Using it, the speaker automated one task after another that had previously been done by hand. Once belts could be produced automatically, the speaker set up a loop: lining up large numbers of furnaces, feeding in iron ore, copper ore, and coal, getting large amounts of iron and copper, and then building even more assembling machines and belts. With power generation in place, the coal-fired burner mining drills were replaced with electric mining drills. This eliminated the need to deliver coal and also increased mining speed.

At this point, smelting and power generation in the factory were fully automated with large numbers of furnaces and electric mining drills. Smelted iron and copper flowed north, where a variety of items—belts, power poles, assembling machines, mining drills, and so on—were automatically produced in fine detail. To pursue more advanced research, the speaker unlocked a new science pack and began automating its production as well.

Once factory construction had reached a stopping point, the speaker explored the surroundings. The speaker jokingly refers to the planet's hostile inhabitants as "the natives," and describes the exploration as "doubling as a round of courtesy visits." As a result, a wide stretch of land and resource deposits were found to the northeast. The speaker therefore decided to keep producing more belts and assembling machines in the existing factory while building a huge new factory to the northeast.

The speaker said it was reassuring to place markers before setting down any facilities, and put rough markers on the map. The lower left is the existing factory, and the upper right is the planned site for the new one. The concept for the new factory is "easy to understand." The overall idea is for materials to flow from left to right: first, ore and other resources are smelted in a giant smelting area, then fed into a huge array of conveyor belts to the right. The speaker describes this as "the so-called main bus approach."

The design pattern the speaker prioritized for the new factory was making every facility the same size unit. Changing a setting displays a grid, with a thick line every 32 tiles. The speaker decided to design each facility using these 32×32 tiles as the basic unit. This unit is commonly called "one chunk," so the video refers to it as a chunk as well.

The speaker also made use of the blueprint feature. Blueprints make it easy to place markers for structures, and you can also create blueprints that always snap to the grid. The speaker figured that using such features well would make it possible to plan a clean factory with minimal effort.

This approach first paid off when laying power lines. To mine a distant copper ore deposit with electric mining drills, power had to be run out to the deposit, so the speaker laid an endlessly long power line. Using chunk-sized blueprints made it possible to place power pole markers neatly. As planning one chunk at a time became tedious, the speaker also prepared a blueprint covering 6×6 chunks, making planning even more efficient.

With the remote mining lines complete and connected to the central smelting area, four products—stone bricks, steel, iron plates, and copper plates—were now being produced. These were fed into the main bus on the right, and construction of the factory proper began. The main bus was planned to accommodate multiple lanes in preparation for future production increases, but the speaker judged that one lane per material would be enough for now. On the overview map, purple areas indicated where construction markers had been placed, and yellow areas indicated transport belts that had already been laid.

To advance research, the speaker started with the science pack production facility. Placing a blueprint prepared during spare time onto the planned site, the speaker positioned equipment according to the markers and pulled the necessary materials in from the main bus. Since science pack production requires electronic circuits, an electronic circuit factory was built alongside it.

According to the speaker, all the materials needed for the rocket are listed in the game. So the speaker placed icons in advance at the planned sites for facilities that would likely be needed.

In the adjacent block, the speaker built a production facility for black science packs. The speaker explains that red, green, and blue science packs are enough for the rocket, but researching with black ones yields recipes for powerful ammunition and weaponry that "make interactions with the natives go more smoothly." Since research doesn't progress unless science packs are delivered to labs, labs for receiving them were built next door. This unlocked recipes such as land mines, and the speaker jokes that they can now efficiently deal with residents who oppose the factory's construction.

To make future expansion more comfortable, the speaker also built an equipment factory in the lower center of the main bus. It can produce more or less any equipment available at this stage, including belts, splitters, mining drills, furnaces, power poles, and steam engines.

With red and green science packs already completed, the next goal was blue. Making blue requires sulfur and advanced circuits in addition to engine units, which are easy to make. The speaker laid out the dependencies like this: sulfur requires water and petroleum gas, and advanced circuits require plastic. Plastic also requires petroleum gas, and petroleum gas requires crude oil. In other words, to make blue science packs, you just need to bring in crude oil and process it in various ways.

Exploration revealed crude oil gushing up from underground near the upper left. The speaker destroyed the surrounding plants that were in the way with grenades, set up machines to pump the crude oil, and then extended pipes to the factory to bring it in.

The facilities for processing crude oil were also built by placing construction plans prepared to fit the grid. The facilities lined up are as follows:

• Petroleum gas plant: takes in crude oil and outputs petroleum gas
• Sulfur plant: takes in petroleum gas, water, and iron plates and outputs sulfur and sulfuric acid
• Plastic plant: outputs large amounts of plastic bars from petroleum gas and coal
• Battery plant: makes batteries from sulfuric acid and manufactures solar panels from those batteries
• Advanced circuit plant: slowly makes advanced circuits from copper plates, iron plates, and plastic bars

As for why they make solar panels, the speaker says that with power currently dependent on steam engines, spreading pollution causes "the natives" to come protest from time to time, so they want to transition to clean solar power going forward. Since advanced circuits take a fair amount of time to produce, the speaker plans to build another row next to them as soon as demand increases.

Finally, a facility was completed that gathers these oil products and takes in the materials along with iron plates, sulfur, advanced circuits, and so on to output blue science packs. This made it possible to advance research toward the rocket recipe.

Looking at the factory as a whole at this point, the speaker assesses that the effort to design in chunk units has paid off and that the factory is becoming easy to understand overall. On the surrounding map, light blue lines show the power grid, and radars for scouting the surroundings have been set up throughout so that they can "welcome the natives as early as possible."

Advancing research with blue science packs first unlocked advanced oil processing technology. Since higher-performance refineries could now be built, the speaker tore down the existing facilities and rebuilt them as new oil refineries. The speaker says that by feeding in water and crude oil, the new refineries could now produce large amounts of three products, including light oil and petroleum gas.

While waiting for the rocket recipe research to finish, the speaker decided to build robots to make factory construction easier. Since the materials for robots largely overlap with those for yellow science packs, the speaker planned and built a facility capable of producing both, setting up mass production of robots.

As the speaker explains, robots handle construction and transport on your behalf, but can only operate around roboports. So the speaker first placed roboports in a mesh pattern covering the factory, creating a logistics network that spans the entire factory. Within this range, robots find construction-site markers, carry materials out of available chests, and build things on their own.

However, right after setting this up, a warning appeared saying "there are construction sites everywhere but no materials." This was because robots cannot access ordinary chests. The speaker first manually replaced the chest holding chests with a robot-compatible one, then used a feature called the upgrade planner to order all existing "crummy chests" to be replaced with chests that robots can use. Swarms of robots then descended on the chest holding chests, and ordinary chests were replaced one after another with robot-compatible ones. The speaker grandly describes this as "the age of humans is over; from now on, it's the age of robots."

From then on, robots took over construction work, and the factory became overrun with robots. Since construction orders can be issued from the map, the speaker says they have become "fully remote."

Having secured a large construction workforce, the speaker built a solar power plant "to show a commitment to environmental protection." The plant, whose construction plan was issued while looking at the map, is packed with solar panels to collect sunlight and accumulators to supply power at night. When the robots arrived, construction progressed gradually from the upper right until it was complete. The speaker says the days of building by hand already feel nostalgic, and, seeing the robots resting at the stations after finishing their work, jokes that they need to get them onto their next job quickly.

The main bus that the speaker had meant to lay down later was also completed at some point while they were zoning out. Saying there's almost nothing left for them to do, the speaker jokes that the age of AI taking our jobs is just around the corner.

Before the speaker knew it, the rocket-related research was complete, so they finally got to work on developing the rocket. To launch a rocket, you build a rocket silo and deliver a set quantity of three types of materials to it. The speaker ordered the construction of the production facilities and the silo from the map, then left the rest to the robots and waited. The production facilities for the three materials were completed, and after a while the rocket silo was brought in as well. The rocket is assembled inside the silo, and when progress reaches 100%, it is ready for launch.

Once everything was ready, the speaker counted down and launched the rocket, and the launch was a success.

Finally, the speaker looked back on the journey while viewing the final factory as a whole. It started with coal mining, and after building a small temporary factory in the lower left, the speaker began constructing the main stronghold: the giant main bus factory. Once robots arrived, construction progressed rapidly, and the speaker says they made it to the rocket without a hitch.

The speaker says they initially thought it looked like a difficult game, but the cycle of planning and building was fun, and they ended up losing track of time completely absorbed in it. What was especially enjoyable was the time spent planning: the speaker says the best part was being able to obsess to their heart's content over "things that don't really matter," like the versatility of blueprints and the visual beauty of the facilities as a whole. Saying that space exploration after the rocket launch also looks fun and that they'd like to play it when they get the chance, the speaker wraps up the video.