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Factorio Blueprints guide: the most useful Blueprints for beginnersLearn how to use blueprints to make your life as a factory manager so much easier

Learn how to use blueprints to make your life as a factory manager so much easier

Blueprintsare one of the most genius systems at work inFactorio, and it’s a crime that many players don’t know how to make proper use of Blueprints to save time and effort when building their factories.

OurFactorio Blueprints guidewill not only walk you through how to get started using and creating blueprints, but also invite you to use RPS’s very own Factorio Blueprint Book (along with a few other community-made blueprints) to help kickstart your factory!

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How to use Blueprints in Factorio

There’s a lot to learn about Blueprints - too much to fit into this guide. But here are the basics on how to use Blueprints in-game for Factorio beginners:

How to share and use community-made Factorio Blueprints:

A glimpse at the Blueprint Library in Factorio (and one of the Blueprints included below).

Best Factorio Blueprints for early game

For the purposes of this guide, I decided to go back and freshen up all the Blueprints I made years back and still regularly use to this day. And thus, I present the first (and probably only) RPS Factorio Blueprint Book. Woohoo!

Copy the string in the box below to import the RPS Blueprint Book into your own Blueprint Library:

This book contains 12 Blueprints, meant to take you comfortably from the very start of a Factorio game into the mid-game and beyond. Let’s take a look at each of these Blueprints and how they are to be used.

Left: Green Circuits (Extreme Early Game). Right: Ammo (Extreme Early Game).

Extreme Early Game Blueprints

The first two Blueprints in the book are meant purely for your very first steps towards automation (in fact, I use them both in myFactorio early game walkthroughwalkthrough). One takes in Iron and Copper, and outputs Green Circuits, and is meant for speeding up the manual construction of things like Electric Mining Drills and Inserters.

The second takes in Iron and outputs ammo, to help prepare you for your first few Biter attacks. It’s so simple, it’s barely worth having a Blueprint on it. But fuck it, I’ve made one now.

Green Circuits (Extreme Early Game):

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Ammo (Extreme Early Game):

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Left: Steam Power (Mini). Right: Steam Power (Full).

Steam Power Blueprints

The next Blueprints are related to Steam Power, and are designed to help get your factory set up with a reliable power source early on. The mini version is designed to be tileable so that you can just keep adding on new sections as needed, while the big version contains enough power once built to take you very comfortably into the mid-game.

Steam Power (Mini):

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Steam Power (Full):

Left: Solar Power (Single). Right: Solar Power (Double).

Solar Power Blueprints

Skipping ahead for a moment into the mid-game, we’ve got a couple of very easily tileable Solar Panel Blueprints to help you to more easily complete the massive project of Solar Power. Both Blueprints make use of the proper ratio of 25 Solar Panels to 21 Accumulators.

Solar Power (Single):

Solar Power (Double):

Left: Smelting (Yellow Belt). Right: Smelting (Red Belt).

Smelting Blueprints

We’ve also got several item production Blueprints in this book, starting with our two smelting complexes. Each is designed to take in a full belt of ore and output a full belt of plates. The Blueprint with Stone Furnaces is meant for a full yellow belt, while the Blueprint with Steel Furnaces is meant for a full red belt.

Of course, if you don’t yet have the stuff required to make the latter, you could always make do with two of the former!

Smelting (Yellow Belt):

Smelting (Red Belt):

Left: Green Circuits (Yellow Belt). Right: Green Circuits (Red Belt).

Green Circuit Blueprints

After the basic resources patches found in the world, probably the most important intermediate item to mass produce is the Electronic Circuit (commonly referred to as the Green Circuit). Again we have two Blueprints: the first outputs a full yellow belt of Green Circuits, while the second outputs a full red belt.

Be sure to check the descriptions of these Blueprints so you know which resources to feed into which belts.

Green Circuits (Yellow Belt):

Green Circuits (Red Belt):

Steel Production (Yellow Belt). The Red Belt blueprint isn’t pictured as the two were too big to fit in a single screenshot.

Steel Blueprints

Steel is one of the most painstaking early-game resources to craft in bulk, because it takes 5 Iron Plates to smelt into a single Steel Plate. The final two Blueprints in this book make smelting Steel easy - as long as you have the space to plant them somewhere in your factory. Yet again, there is one Blueprint for outputting a full yellow belt, and another for outputting a full red belt.

Steel (Yellow Belt):

Steel (Red Belt):

A glimpse at the excellent tileable science Blueprints in Christoffer Ramqvist’s Blueprint Book.

Tileable Science Blueprints

Christoffer Ramqvist’s Tileable Science Blueprint Book:

And with that, you should be well on your way to using these and other top-tier Blueprints in your own Factorio worlds! But if you still have unanswered questions about Factorio, be sure to check out our other guides below.