10 beginner tips to help you be effective in supplying CentreBrain.
Take a Look Around and Clear Your surroundings.
Take a few minutes to clear the trees a rocks close by. The leaves and wood can be used to power your mecha and the stone will come in super handy when producing your first machines.
Queuing Actions.
Use shift and right click to queue actions such as movement, gathering rocks, harvesting trees and mining resources.
Locate coal and stockpile.
There is normally a local source of coal nearby. Get the collection of this coal automated asap and start to stockpile. This will be great for powering your mecha until more advance fuel supplies become available. Also it is great for powering your factories.
Quick keys.
We all love a quick key in the factory genre. The following will save you countless hours so start using them from the start.
X - activates delete mode
C - Opens your mecha panel. This allows you to access your fuel supply
E - Opens your inventory
F - Opens your crafting panel
P - Opens the statistics panel
There are many more but these will be used a lot in the beginning and just make things a little quicker.
Copy and Paste
I was going to include the copy and paste in the quick keys but decided to seperate them. This is a massive quality of life improvement. One key press to copy and one to paste. This is mainly used when building multiple smelters or assemblers and they all have the same recipe.
Mouse over the building you want to copy the recipe from and press "," then mouse over the build you want to give the recipe to and press "."
Simple as that.
Don't fear spaghetti
We all have to start somewhere, experimentation and playing about is how we find what works. You can go and find Youtube videos and websites that will show perfect compact designs but don't be dis-heartened when you compare them to this messing of belts, smelters and assemblers you have created. Embrace the spaghetti, perfection will come.
Space is NOT at a premium
The starting planet will have plenty of space to build your first factories and experiment with expansion and design. Then, when you are ready, you can branch out to many more planets. You have vast amounts of space to play with so don't think you need to make everything compact.
Stop manually crafting
The goal of the game is automation. Manually crafting items is slow and wastes mecha fuel so start crafting even the basics as soon as possible. You will see a difference immediately when having the various buildings doing the work for you.
Storage areas
Once you have setup small factories to produce items, try and route the finished products to storage boxes. This gives you much larger amounts of storage and makes it easier to collect the items when needed. Also, it is a good idea to have all these boxes close to each other so you don't have to run about and try to remember where you built something.
The Power of 6
Your first belts to transport items ( you will be using a lot of these ) are Mk1. Rather than explain the maths I use a simple rule. To fill a Mk1 belt with resources requires harvesting 12 resource nodes, this will normally require 2 harvesting machines. A full belt of raw resources will provide enough resources so that 6 smelters can run at 100% efficiency. These smelter will go on to fully saturate their output belts. Simple power of 6.