Some general tips on making your base:

• Decide on how high you want your roof to be, relative to the Colony Core. 20 tiles high is a good option, since that neatly allows floors of high 4 and 5. If you want to support floor heights of 4,5, and 6, then you will have to go up to 60. This guide uses a roof height of 20.
  
• If you've used up all your space between ground and the roof, build downwards. Not many things in this game care about what's below.
  
• Space is infinite in this game, so put it to good use. It's a lot easier to design in too much space than too little space.
  
• Color your floors to setup zones. This is important for deciding how big you want to make things without committing.
  
• Each giant building you make should be dedicated to a specific purpose. For example, don't try to smelt iron and copper in the same smelter - the inputs and outputs will be a lot more complex, and your production will be a lot lower from attempting it anyway.
  
• Infinite amounts of an item can be stored in machinery. You will need logic blocks to use more than one resource converter in a factory, or the first resource converter will steal all the input resources for itself.
  
• Belts are SLOW in this game. You will need to design around providing lots of input, and preventing traffic jams in output.
  
• Do not attempt to send in/out more than 4 belts from a base warehouse.
  
• Use this formula to calculate how many factory buildings you need:
  
  • (Number of Buildings) = FLOOR[ (Number of Items Served by Belts per Minute) / (Number of Items used by Recipe) * 60 / (Recipe Completion Time) ]

The first big thing you need to make is a power facility. To do this, you're going to need tons of gold (for the solar panels), iron (for the floor), and copper (for the wires). You will also need to advance enough to unlock solar panels in the tech tree as well.

Early game guides should tell you what you need to know for getting a large treasure trove of goodies. When you're ready to proceed, you should ideally have a couple hundred gold wires, a couple hundred iron plates, and be parked by a planet that's actively mining more gold. It should also go without saying that you should have a small temporary factory for turning gold ore into gold wires too.

Start things off by building a catwalk of foundation away from your initial base, and zone areas for solar panels.

I made my power plant a square. There's a 4 tile thick perimeter of walking space, four 20x20 zones of solar panels and connecting wires, and walkways that lead to the center that are 8 tiles thick. The center has double ladders that lead up to the next floor; the central ladder apparatus on each floor contains 4x4x4 space.



The wiring mostly goes under the floor. I haven't placed panels on the floor higher up yet; otherwise, the ceiling would have wires too.



When you've placed a good enough number of solar panels to handle your initial base's power needs, you can proceed to the next section.

When you have a reliable 300 MW, you're ready to build up to the roof and build some asteroid catchers there.



How this works is a bit complex, but I'll explain best I can:

• In my particular setup, I have just enough space to fit two sets of 5x4 Auto Asteroid Catchers. I don't want to interfere with the walking space by the ladders, so the center is untouched.
  
• From the screenshot's perspective, I have four conveyor belts moving south. These conveyors are flanked by the AACs, which are facing in different directions - the AACs to the west of a particular conveyor belt are all facing north, and the ones to the east of that belt are facing south. This ensures that the AACs for each belt have 180 degree vision for catching asteroids, which is important for my next point.
  
• For each set of AACs dedicated to a belt, also dedicate them all to a particular resource. There are four belts, and four resources to choose from. While it may be tempting to have two belts focus on the same resource, that would be a bad idea. Keeping the resources diverse lightens the strain on the belts.
  
• There are five base warehouses all the way to the south. They are staggered by one tile relative to the warehouse next to their neighbors - this is to ensure the transfer belts line up. Each warehouse is dedicated to a specific resource, and gold, the only resource from AACs that can't be chosen, goes south of the ladders.
  
• When warehouses start getting material, you will need to use belts on the sides to transfer material to where it needs to go. If material needs to go west, place a filter block right in front of the warehouse output on the side, and filter on the materials that have to go west. Then belt it out there. It's the same idea for material that needs to go east. If the material is in the right spot, keep it out of the filter for that warehouse.
  
• Keep in mind that the warehouses are set to receive all the material, but they aren't purely that material at all times. If you want that, you'll need to put another filter on a warehouse output and belt the stuff out.

Making one of these is harder than it appears. This is an example factory I made:



Building a good factory in this game requires some math with getting good ratios. The Tier 2 belts (green belts) move 100 items a minute. The Advanced Smelter makes 3 Iron Bars from 4 Iron Ores every 5 seconds. After multiplying the ratio a bit, we get 48 Iron Ores per 60 seconds/1 minute. This means that we can fit 2 Advanced Smelters per belt.

I'm sourcing my Iron Ore from another base warehouse. I'm pulling two belts from it, which means I need a factory containing 4 Advanced Smelters.

The setup you make for the first smelter will be the exact same for the others, so put the implementation in a blueprint when you know it's working correctly. Building these components is too tedious to do multiple times by hand.

Anyway, the idea for how to get a single smelter to process the iron is this:

• Place splitters that send the iron ore into the nearby smelter, or further along towards the next smelter.
  
• Put blockers right in front of the entrances to the smelter.
  
• Place two deciders by each blocker. Link each decider to its corresponding blocker. Set the resource type to iron ore. As for the condition, you'll want something of the form >= N, where N is what you want the input cap to be. I want no more than 20 iron ore to be in a smelter at a time, so I'll set each decider to do >= 20.
  
• Place an inventory sensor by the smelter, and link to it. Set its resource type to iron ore. Then, place wires that link the inventory sensor to the two deciders.
  
• Power the smelter by extending a power line from your power facility through the area under the floor to the smelter.
  
• Place a filter right outside the output. Set it to only allow iron bars through.
  
• Restrict the smelter to ONLY do the iron bar recipe.

With that, your first smelter should work. Blueprint it and copy the design for the other three smelters. Now, you will need to load balance the inputs and outputs.

Place splitters on the input belt farther away from the smelters. Ensure that the splitters on the closer input belt have the chance of going to the farther belt as zero. On the output side, use pushers to push the iron bars onto the farther belt when the load is too much.

Like the input, the output uses a base warehouse too. However, the output warehouse has its inputs and outputs reversed, which can be changed in the warehouse's modify screen (icon in top right of the screen).

The other recipes that have a smelter convert one type of solid item (such as ores) into another type of solid item (such as bars) use the same design, except the resources recognized by the logic blocks use the other corresponding types of resource instead. For example, for a Copper Bar Factory, the design would be identical to the Iron Bar Factory, except the number of smelters would be different due to the different recipe ratios, and the input would sense the smelter for copper ore while the output would be filtered on copper bars.

This is a closer look at this setup for Copper Ore -> Copper Bar:


The build time for Titanium Rods is relatively long. Therefore, you will probably want to split up the conveyor belt feeding it, and reintegrate the output belts:

It takes a lot of Ice Breakers to fully handle even one belt of ice, and you need to store the output water in a tank rather than keep it in another base warehouse. I advise dedicating 10+ Ice Breakers (the exact amount depends on the tier of belts you have) to each belt of ice, and then sending the water to one of the sides of the factory. 10+ Ice Breakers takes up a lot of horizontal space, so your tank will also be big.

The purpose of the inventory sensors, deciders, and blockers are the same. The only notable difference between each ice breaker setup is how the water is being sent to the tank.

This applies to anything that takes ones solid item, and converts it to another solid item, using a constructor. Such recipes include Iron Plates, Copper Plates, and Gold Plates.



The two entry ports are placed toward the input belt, with the power hole facing toward the base warehouses. Once again, two deciders are used to manage access with the help of an inventory sensor, and two filters are used to handle the outputs.

Be aware that the setup for each constructor needs one tile of extra space to prevent the wires from different constructors from connecting.



The Carbon Fiber setup uses a similar setup as the Iron Plate, but due to the immense carbon intake, this recipe will test your mastery of load balancing. You will need to calculate ratios for when each belt will run out of material, and then split/push replacement material onto the exhausted belt when that happens.

You need a Water Valve to fully automate this one, but you can build/destroy the water pipe leading to this factory as needed until you're able to get a valve. The reason why you need a Water Valve is explained below.



Oxygen takes water, and water only, as input. Water uses pipes, which sends water to every machine it's attached to instantaneously, like power. If you do not place a limiter on this water intake, your oxygen factory will constantly create more oxygen without stopping. If you try to place blockers by the base warehouse, the oxygen will simply build up in the oxygen generators.

Therefore, you first need to setup an inventory sensor (for the oxygen in the base warehouse) and a decider for the water valve. The water valve should be installed after the pipe branches off into the factory, but before it reaches any of the machines. Unlike the inventory cap threshold logic we've been using previously, we want the water valve to be active when the oxygen in the base warehouse is lower than the cap, so the decider should use < N. I set N to 5000 in my factory.

As for the oxygen generators themselves, you only need a filter on the output. When you first make an oxygen generator, the port will be input, so you need to use Modify to switch that port to output.

This is the first recipe that requires conveyor elevation. Send the output out the bottom of the smelters, and then move it over one of the other inputs' conveyors. Ensure that there is a sufficient amount of space between the input and output base warehouses.

Each input gets an inventory sensor to sense the smelter for the appropriate input, which is then sent to deciders and blockers.

To avoid issues with resupplying an exhausted belt, the input ports are placed perpendicular to the input belts.

This one is similar to the oxygen generator, but this one doesn't need a valve - the input is bounded by the carbon.

You can certainly put the water pipe underground if you wish, though I find the water pipes pretty.

Each manufacturer node takes up a bit of space due to the bizarre port placement. However, it is still doable by sending conveyors to the input ports from the side, and having the output port face the output base warehouse line.

This one has some additional design considerations.



First, while Wheat is an input, it will be constantly recycled, so it will multiply infinitely even if you put just one in a single farm. Therefore, the Water Valve trick for Oxygen will need to be reused here. To ensure you don't run out of Wheat, I advise setting the Reproduction Max to 4 times the farm plot space in front of the farm. Since I'm placing 6 farm plot space in front of each farm, this would be 24 Reproduction Max for each farm.

Second, you will not need to wall off the farm if this farm is more than ~6 tiles away from a farm producing something other than Wheat/Grain. Farmers don't wander all that far, though the Wheat farms here are close enough for the Wheat to propagate from just one farm.

Third, the equation used to determine how many farms you need will only be considered a minimum here. Wheat takes one minute in total to produce 1 Grain, but there are other considerations like harvest time and bot travel time. You may need to make additional Farms to saturate a full belt.

Fourth, farms don't transition the plant it's set to grow from blueprints very well. You'll have to turn the plant that farm will plant off and on again when you place it with a blueprint.


Lumber uses the same idea as Wheat, but Lumber takes up CONSIDERABLY more space.


The second image is a bird's eye view of the start of a lumber farm. The goal is to add new rows of 10 downwards (from the image's perspective) until I get a decent amount of wood per minute. Don't mind the Robot Assembler in the image - it isn't important for the design.