Starter guide (WIP)

Introduction
This guide is based on u/DanielKotes guide on reddit (which can be found here, go check his works out.) but sorted by science stages instead of by production category, and yes, some of this is strait up copied from there, i do not have enough willpower to write all of this by myself.

I (u/bluehatgamingNXE, yes that's a long username but i am too lazy to create a new account) never write anything before on this site, but since someone have to do the job first to kickstart the progress i guess i will do it anyway, feels free to edit this part out.

So welcome to seablock, it can be found here, with Guides:Installation, if you don't know how to download. The basis of Seablock is a modified Bob & Angel pack, so expect around 10x the amount of items, recipes, and buildings as you would in vanilla Factorio. The key difference between a regular B&A playthough and Seablock being that there are no ore patches and even land itself is at a premium - you start on a single block of land that you must expand. Nearly everything comes from water, and that includes the ores. On the positive note, there is very little interaction with biters, exclusively in the form of worms that you must snipe from afar and no actual nests. This make the game more like peaceful mode, where the only worry you have is to expand the factory.

In this guide, i will only show 1 set-up for start of the game, as the game would be more interesting if you design your own set up later on, if you want blueprints for a certain thing you could go ask Reddit/Discord community, otherwise i will only provide charts make by u/DanielKotes and his program Foreman as it provide a general flow through the technology tree that i recommend, along with some recipe charts that you can use as a basis for your builds.

Go play the vanilla tutorial before play the pack by the way.

There should be more words here but someone else would probably contribute that here instead.

Terminology
When talk about building tier, except for furnace, T0 is burner tier, T1/T2/etc is the tier that is in the building's name (for example: burner ore crusher is T0, ore crusher 1 is T1).

When talk about circuit, we associate them with color (for example: basic circuit is brown circuit), same for science, but there are also misc science such as optimized biome planner, aka plant science, or ablative weapons testing kit, aka weapon science.

When talk about recipe tier, it's similar to building tier, but instead it have roman number as they are shown in their recipe icon (for example: dirt water electrolysis have I in it name, we call it TI instead of T1 because of the roman number I in the icon, same for fast water electrolysis, we call it TII instead of T2).

For belt/underground belt/belt splitter/inserter/filter inserter/stack inserter/stack filter inserter we associate them with color (the tier in the order from low to high would be white->yellow->red->blue->purple->green.)

First step (Pre red-science)
Alright, you have landed your ship on a small island and the ship magically turn into a rock full of resource that can and will kickstart a factory, congratulation, it took some skills but you have landed on hell, but progress can be made, and the factory can't grow by itself (unless extra mods were added for that purpose)

Ok let's start. I suggest turning on alt mode (by press alt) because without it you're basically blind. Grab the said resource in the rock by either open it like a chest or de-assemble it, with the landfills, expand the island (i recommend building it in a horizontal island), place all the available windmills, then go foraging cellulose fiber, craft it when you don't craft important things (in example: machines), it will be your furnaces's fuel and important as material to craft things until you automated it all, if you want to afk and craft 1k of those, then it is your choice, although it is unnecessary to do that.

Your windmills is crucial because it provide free powers, no need to be fed fuels or anything much beside space, i don't recommend crafts them as the material used to craft them can be more useful than 15kw per windmills, but in the same time, just don't remove them, and beside, de-assemble them took too much time so just left them there. Now after that your current goal is getting though the science tutorial, which is the whole pre red-science phase:


 * 1) Crushed stiratite.
 * 2) Farm brown algae.
 * 3) Craft brown circuit.
 * 4) Craft 1 lab.

At step 1, start by craft a T1 crystallizer, 2 flare stack, 4 T1 electrolyser, 3 T0 ore crusher, 1 offshore pump, 1 T1 liquefier and 2 filtering furnace (the blue furnace). Set your machine up by electrolyser with TI water electrosis, connect electrolyser hydrogen (white gas) and oxygen (red gas) output with the flare stacks, get the slags out and put it on the burner ore crusher (which set to make 2 crushed stones), put cellulose fibers into ore crusher as fuel, take the crushed stones and put them to the liquefier (set to create mineralized water), connect the output of it to the input of the crystallizer (which set to mineralized water crystallization) (note: the center of one the sides of the machine is the input slot, which only show when you set a recipe), place 2 burner ore crushers to crush stiratite and shaphirite and 2 furnace to smelt them into copper plate and iron plate, you could place like the image on the side as you see, or place in a way you want to. So you got your starter factory, now collect slags, put slags on stone crusher, take crushed stone out and put it in liquefier, the mineralized water should automatically go to the crystallizer, repeat until you get stiratite as crystallizer's product, and when you got it, you take it and crushed it, then you automatically researched the first thing in the tutorial research tree, now with the crushed stiratite and saphirite, put it in the furnace with cellulose fibers as the furnace's fuel to make copper plate and iron plate (also don't forget to take the crushed stone byproduct out of the ore crusher as if it's full the crusher will stopped working).

At step 2, you unlocked the algae farm, and a way to produce basic circuit board, craft 1 algae farm, place down the algae farm somewhere that you could pipe a water source in it, chose Green algae I and you're done, you researched step 2 of the tutorial tree.

At step 3, for now don't care about the green algae, it will be used later as automate wood board and automate fuel source, and with the brown algae, copper plates from the smeltings and the available cellulose fiber that i told you to craft when not craft anything important, you will craft your first basic circiuit.

(Some note: It's recommend to only use stone pipe during the early  phases  of the game, unless you got too much coppers in hand, which is a regular occurrence in the early game, then you could use copper pipe, which unlocked after step 3 above)

Step 4 and final, craft a lab, because you already have all the materials in the rock so you just have to simply click on the lab recipe and you're pretty much done, now the red science stage has begun.

Start of automation (Red science stage)
When you finished step 3 of the previous stage, you unlocked the foundation of logistics, which include yellow inserter (we also unlocked burner inserter but idk why we even have burner inserter, it just doesn't make sense if yellow inserter is unlocked at the same time, but you could challenge yourself by try to launch a rocket and only use burner inserter in the playthough, worth alot of internet points), belts, and other intermediate products along side with iron and copper pipes/underground pipes. Unlike the vanilla Factorio, this variant  of inserters are now more versatile in term of direction and have longer range when you researched the upgrade for inserters. Along with that, when you finished step 4 you unlocked boiler and steam engine, first tiers of power production.

Red science production, basics researchs and goal
This isn't pie baking, so your basic red science is rather simple. three assembling machines (or 1 player), some iron and copper plates, and we are done. Your goal at this stage is to get some proper power, upgrade ore production, and reach green science (in roughly that order). You can ignore belts for now as your first few hours will likely involve alot of hand-feeding (optional: get even distribution mod). The main part of the technology tree order will look something like this:


 * 1) Automation (electrical ore crushers are very nice, and assembling machines are vital in Factorio)
 * 2) Wood processing 2 (any bonuses on fuel are good)
 * 3) Green algae processing (this is what we were looking for! Milestone!)
 * 4) Washing, Basic chemistry, sulfur processing (you can get your first sulfur prepped at this point)
 * 5) Fluid control, water treatment, slag processing (this is your actual ore generation. Still just the start, but already 2x better than what you have right now. Milestone!)
 * 6) Fluid control, steel, mechanical refining, coal processing, basic solder casting, electronics, basic logistics, logistics, long inserters (QoL), near inserters (QoL), electrochemics lab, single-use ATMOS set (green science... Milestone!)

HINT: Once you have warehouses (or silos) researched (a bit of a side project in terms of technology), you will be able to set up some really compact direct insertion assembling chains where you can drop the base metals into the silo, and the ring of assemblers around it will pick what they need, craft the intermediates, and pass them on to the next assembler (that uses said intermediate), with the final product being dropped back in the silo. This leads to a compact 0 belt design which works perfectly for those first few hours.

Power Generation for Red
In the beginning, your only power options are 1: the windmills, and 2: foraging for cellulose fiber. You should place all your windmills, and always be foraging for cellulose fiber. Your first few assembler machines can be used to refine the fiber into wood pellets, which can be burned to charcoal as soon as you have researched wood processing 2 (aka: quite early). The only time your buildings should be burning cellulose is in the beginning when you dont have a crafting machine to refine the fiber into pellets (dont bother refining it by hand - you get more energy per second just hand-crafting the fiber).

Now - on to actual fuel production that doesnt involve hand crafting: green algae. You have 2 options:


 * 1) Tier 1 green algae (with brown algae byproducts)
 * 2) Tier 2 green algae (without brown algae byproducts, but with mineralized water requirement)

Interestingly enough both require roughly the same amount of power, though this includes the 3 electrolysers for crushed stone in case of T2. Once you move into green science and basic chemistry 2 and start producing mineralized water as a byproduct, T2 becomes the uncontested winner (at least within the algae power).

Optionally, you could wait a bit and go straight into T2 green algae. It just makes things easier. Plus the fact that T2 green algae requires ~3x less algae plants (which are huge), means that you spend less time crafting more landfill and more time progressing through the tech tree.

You could also try to aim for 4 - 6 T2 algae plants for the power generation. This requires 4-6 boilers & 8-12 steam engines, and is enough to power 12-16 electrolysers with necessary overhead.

NOTE: in terms of storage and transportation, it's recommended to store your fuel and transporting it in wooden blocks (and burning them to charcoal on site). This just makes sense as 1 wooden brick makes 5 charcoal, so you require 5x as much space and belt speed to store/transfer the same amount of fuel power.

Ore generation for Red
Your first ore generation methods will be extremely inefficient, and as such it is highly recommended to get away from them as soon as possible. Don't bother with building a large production facility until you are well into green science territory, and don't go full mega scale until late-game unless you know what you are doing.

The absolutely first ore generation will be through mineralized water, and as much of the metal production as you can should go towards research. From the three charts above you can see that direct smelting of stiratite and saphirite is the way to go. Sorting them to iron and copper ores will actually produce LESS plates, so should be avoided. The only reason to sort at this stage of the game would be to sort stiratite in order to get just a tiny bit more iron production, since copper isn't quite useful in the early game and you will likely stockpile quite a bit.

NOTE: crushers -> you will quite early on be able to upgrade to electrical crushers (instead of burner ones). Make that upgrade and don't look back. The graphs show how much of your hand-crafting time (30%) will be spent making cellulose fiber for fuel in the beginning (so again - if you aren't crafting anything, craft cellulose fiber), but the moment you can switch to electrical you should.

After setting up your ore generation and have crafted the first 10 red science, as mentioned above, put it in the lab and research Automation.

Landfill options for Red
To expand your island you need landfill. In the beginning your only option for more landfill is to divert some of the slag away from the ores and into producing landfill. Keep in mind that you end up with 0.2 landfill per second from 4 electrolysers, which is enough to make 0.12 metal plates through mineralized water or 0.24 metal plates from slag slurry. So if you require 1k landfill to expand, that is roughly 270 to 530 red science packs worth of research that you could have done instead. It is for this reason that it's recommended to expand only after you have a stable initial base + alternate landfill options available (aka: once you are in green science).

Washing becomes available rather early on, and is much better energy wise (each washing plant requires 1/3 the power that an electrolyser does), while being roughly comparable in terms of space. It should also be relatively simple to set up a few lines of 5 plants with a clarifier shared between every 2 lines and a dedicated landfill assembler per line. It's recommended to get at least 4 lines set up somewhere, and just leaving them running. Landfill is something you will be needing more of for quite a while.

There is also geodes and stuff but we'll cover that at green science.