Getting On Track Like a Pro

This is an achievement in Factorio requiring the player to build a locomotive within the first 90 minutes of the game.

This challenge is more devious than it seems. "Hah, easy. We'll get electricity setup, get a lab going, make some reds to bootstrap our automation, and we'll get to greens in no time!" Such hubris! You'll get there with maybe 20-30 minutes to spare, thinking "I got this", only to realize you have multiple hundreds of reds and greens not only to assemble, but also process. Welcome to Factorio. :)

To pull off this achievement, you need to approach it like a project. Because it is. While still staying within the default game settings and rules, players can preview their map seed before selecting it. This allows you to "shop around" for a game world setting that will make this challenge easier.

Because there isn't a lot of time to pull this off, try to optimize the distance between the starting veins of resources. For further optimization, be sure to spawn near trees, and have a water source close to your coal vein. This will allow you to get to electricity as quickly as possible, and reduce the distance for the myriad trips you're going to be making while rapidly growing the factory. We won't have access to concrete to increase our movement speed in this strict time limit.

To simplify, your spawn area should have:

• starting resources close to each other
• trees nearby
• coal close to water
• coal between iron and copper (to reduce distance and manual play)

Try not to worry too much about the stone vein; you're only going to need it for furnaces, and there are typically enough surface boulders to reach furnace goals. If you must mine it, do it after you have solid iron, copper, and coal lines going and no more than one mining rig. It should be treated as a nice-to-have; remember, we have 90 minutes to build a dang train!

Before you start building, get an idea of what the real requirements are, by working backwards from a locomotive's required materials:

Each of those can be broken down into the requisite raw materials, and that will form the "endgame" requirement for us. That leaves us with:

• 340 × iron plate
• 15 × copper plate

However, we can't build this without researching it! Therein lies the rub. Let's plot out the research requirements, which conveniently fit into the research queue:

In short, you'll need 530 × automation science packs and 375 × logistic science packs. That breaks down to roughly:

• 1095 × copper plate
• 3685 × iron plate

So, definitely more emphasis on iron production than copper.

Also, see the "Duration Per" column? We'll need some math massage to make it relatable, but the total is 10775 seconds of research time. (179m35s, or roughly three hours) We have to crunch that to under half to fit under 90 minutes, and there's a lead time on establishing the means to research. Any snags you run into will slow you down, and there's the crafting time on science packs. How does one do it!?

The answer is the nature of Labs. Because they only need a power source and science packs to work, labs can be strung together with inserters and you can spread a workload out across multiple labs. In computing, this is called parallelism and is exceptionally good at dealing with problems like our research goals, which simply wait for a cooldown before ticking percentages. More cooldowns, more ticks. More ticks, more research, meaning faster progress. It's more efficient to let four labs process something for 45 seconds than to wait 180 seconds for a single one. As you acquire more lab ingredients, invest in them! They will shorten the challenge and get you there much faster.

There is a limit to the benefits you'll gain within the timeframe, since the resources you devote to lab building are going to slow down your factory growth. Slight increases to ore production, and swapping to electric mining rigs ASAP, are both good ideas to set yourself up for success.

Every tile of distance means little on its own, but adds up when we're talking about minutes being the difference between success and failure. You paid attention to the above advice, right? It bears repeating: the more time you spend walking around tending to fueling needs instead of gathering resources and building out your factory, the further you slip behind.

All you need for electricity is a pump, boiler, and steam engine. The poles are cheap to make, too, assuming you followed the prior advice and have trees near the spawn point. To avoid throwing away resources, try to avoid making burner inserters unless you're directly handling coal so they can self-power. It's possible to get to electricity in as little as 10 minutes, if conditions are ideal, so it's worth doing.

This is the biggest game-changer aside from going parallel with labs: the sooner you can get going on research and begin making reds, the sooner you'll be able to integrate greens, scale up, and sail through the challenge. You ought to have a lab within 15 minutes, 20 tops. There's an achievement tracker in the game that will track the remaining time in the top corner. Use it, it is extremely valuable in helping you prioritize tasks and stay focused. Pretend the moon is falling, if you must!

It's worthwhile to send coal along the iron ore and copper ore belts so they can fuel the furnaces simultaneously. This cuts the player out of the maintenance loop entirely, and frees mental resources for active development. It does, however, require a bit more coal production since you'll be fueling a boiler or two with it (you've got electricity, right?), and will depend on belt build-up to ensure all furnaces are burning.

Pollution is a concern, because you don't have the time (or resources) to research Military tech! It will eat into your budget. You should build a stockpile of ammo (~30-50 is good enough), hunt fish, and wear armor. The time limit really screws with this because the production needed to hit our target is at odds with the biters invading every so often. You can invest in turrets (it's only 100 seconds and 10 reds) but then they'll need ammo, too. There's always a cost.

You can nip this in the bud once you get to a spot you can take a small breather, have fish-armor-ammo, and seek out the nearest spawner nest to obliterate. There's typically only one spawner and a spitter at this nest, and it's the one most likely to attack your infrastructure while you're grinding away at resources. If you run out of ammo but still have a decent amount of fish, you can melee a spawner to death.

If you must have some sort of military tech, go with turrets since walls will only slow an assault and you have better things to be doing in these 90 minutes than killing the local fauna.