Wube Software’s Factorio has turned into an overwhelming success for the company thanks to its unique take on the survival and crafting simulation sub-genre. The game has managed to garner quite an audience, but it’s not the easiest game to get into. If you need some help getting started with setting up drills, crafting furnaces and refining ore, there are some hints and tips guides available for beginners.

YouTuber Aavak did a very detailed and thorough beginner guide for getting started in Factorio, teaching gamers how to build mining drills, how to gather resources and ore, how to store them, how to craft basic gathering equipment and how to unlock the next tier of equipment all within the span of just 20 minutes. You can check out the video below.

At the start, each location will be completely different based on the procedural map generation. Aavak walks gamers through what the basic ore and gathering material is, such as the gray stuff on the ground being iron. The bronze blotches happens to be copper. The brownish black patches is coal. The rocks are stone. The black spots on the ground is oil.

Mining resources will cause them to disappear off the map, except for oil. You can continue to siphon oil out of the ground and it won’t completely disappear.

To access your inventory press the ‘E’ button where you can see what items you have in your inventory and what items you can craft.

For the start, you will need to build an iron pickaxe and mine coal or whatever else is nearby and chop down the trees. You will need to place down a burner mining drill and use the trees you’ve chopped down as fuel for the burner mining drill.

You will need to build a wooden chest from your inventory and place the wooden chest down by the burner mining drill so that the output of the drill will place the coal or the other ore into the wooden chest.

The output of the mining drill will be indicated by the little yellow arrow, which will point to where the output of the mining drill will be. You can also see where the output is by holding down the ‘Alt’ button. If you don’t put a wooden box down at the output of the mining drill then it will stop drilling.

For iron, you can use a burner mining drill on the iron ore areas and use some of the coal to fuel it. Place a stone furnace directly underneath or next to the mining drill and have the burner drill output to the stone furnace so that the iron is mined and then refined in the stone furnace to turn the iron into iron plates. The stone furnace can hold up to 100 iron. Be sure to check in on the stone furnace to see how many iron plates its refined every once in a while.

You can rinse and repeat the method above with the burner mining drill and the stone furnace for copper as well. This will cause the drill to dig up the copper and the furnace to refine the copper into plates.

Stone is mostly only used for helping to get the drills up and running and later on the stone can be refined to make fortifications to keep enemies out.

Factorio is available right now for the PC as part of the Early Access program on Steam. The game currently has a price tag of $20 even. The game is expected to stay in Early Access between eight and 12 months. You can learn more by visiting the Steam store page.