Starting Out

So you landed on a new world with a pick, an oven, a mining unit and a small stack of iron plates eh?Well, it's better than showing up to the party empty handed and punching trees :)For folks starting out, it's a rough intro to what's honestly one of the toughest and most rewarding games I've ever played.This is about as in-depth as I'm going to get, but a fair number of people have trouble here, so I figure it's worth it.While I don't spend much time looking for my ideal starting patches of coal/ore, I usually do spam the generate preview button and look for maps where the starting area has close or mixed coal/ore patches.You're probably tempted (or have been told) to go drop that miner on an iron vein, slap the oven next to it and run off to the nearest tree or coal patch and run back and forth feeding enough coal into the miner and oven to keep the iron flowing and at some point do the same with copper andSometimes Notch had it right all along.Go turn that puny pile of iron in your inventory into more picks and chop some frigging wood, maybe the errant rock littering the landscape while you're at it.Drop the miner and a wooden box on the nearest coal patch. give it a reasonable handfull of wood (5-10 pieces) and walk away. Go hand-mine some iron or stone, then check in on the coal miner.When it's out of fuel, put half of whatever you collected back into the miner.The rest goes into the furnace along with your iron.If you're a type A, go mine more iron. If not, have a drink or two of your favorite beverage (if this game hasn't driven you to drink, you haven't played enough) and wait till you have enough mats to make another miner (or two and another two furnaces).While your little yellow hard-hatted friend makes the miner, run up to the coal patch and do another half-split of whatever's in the box. Half into your inventory, half back into the coal miner. If you keep doing this, you'll visit the coal miner(s) less and less frequently. Quality of Life is already improving!Now go back and place your second Miner on the iron patch. (You did put the furnace smelting the iron right next to the Iron patch didn't you? tsk tsk.) Give it half the coal. By now you should have enoughWash rinse repeat and get copper going, stone if you're in a world type that has it (I'm playing Bob's these days, and it doesn't. If you're playing bob's you should have figured out the bit about needing some burner grinders and few inserters. If you didn't, you probably shouldn't be playing Bob's yet)Expand your number of coal miners. Personally I run about half as many burner coal miners as I have burner miners doing other things. How many you build is really up to you and how many materials you want built up before leaping into electricity.Remember that bit about finding mixed coal/ore patches? at this point, with some creative use of belts and a burner inserter or two, you can run a fully automated burner only setup with self-sustaining coal miners, ore miners and furnaces to make stacks up on stacks of iron and copper plates and stone bricks.At this point, if you keep half-splitting your coal and feeding your miners and furnaces, you should be able to work your way up to enough materials for 1 pump, 1 boiler, 1 steam engine, 1 research dome and the requisite electric pole and pipe infrastructure.Get that going and start your research. I go for the first one that gives the level 1 assembler. Remember:At this point, I've got a self-sustaining burner mine/foundry setup, one researcher plodding along, and if geography willed it, a coal feed going to my first power plant.And here's where I conceptually zoom out to the bigger picture of this guide.I leave it to the reader to decide if they want to immediately scale up to electric mining or just expand their steampunk era setup to maximize exploitation of their first Iron/Copper/Coal/Stone fields. I usually go the electric route with iron, copper, and the coal that will fuel my furnaces, but recycle all of my burner miners to feed a dedicated coal line going to my boilers, which are also fed by burner inserters. That way they basically can't run out of coal unless you scale up MANY MANY more boilers or the coal patch runs out.