Beginner guide: your first hour
You spawn on a planet that is supposedly empty, and the game does not hand you a quest log — it hands you a pickaxe and a lot of rock. The order below is what actually keeps your first factory alive, and it comes from the official feature list, the v0.5.x patch notes and the questions players are already asking in the Steam discussions.
1. Read the ground before you dig
Every block of the voxel world is destructible, so the first decision is geographic, not mechanical. The official feature list is explicit about the four moves that make terrain worth reshaping: dig shafts down to deep ore veins, carve canals for cooling water, flatten a mountain for a mega-factory, or tunnel your logistics straight through the rock.
That means your starting spot should be chosen for three things at once — an ore body you can reach, a water source you can move, and enough flat ground that you are not rebuilding belts every ten minutes. Water matters more than it sounds: this is a game where temperature is simulated, and cooling is not optional.
v0.5.16 added two overlays that make this step cheaper: Flow View (belts, pipes and the buildings on them — red where a line can never work, amber at belt-tier changes; belt/pipe tools, Overlays, or Y) and Area Guides (terrain height lines and matching-level highlights). Both have strength sliders under Settings. Turn Flow View on before you commit a long belt.
2. Ore to plates before anything clever
The Production Planner screenshot illustrates Steel Plate and Steel Gear targets. Set targets for the materials your next build actually needs. Get a drill onto ore, move it to a smelting step, and turn it into plates and gears before you design a bus, a rail or a drone route.
The planner reports each machine as a count plus a load factor — x1 (0.88) — which is the game telling you how hard that machine is working, not how many you own. One machine at 0.88 is fine; a chain of them at 1.00 with no spare capacity is a bottleneck waiting to happen.
3. Get power online, then keep it cool
Power and heat are the same problem here. Boilers feed steam turbines, furnaces warm their surroundings, snow melts and water boils away — all of that is simulated rather than faked with an animation. So the sequence that works is: build generation, build the cooling for that generation, then expand.
Players noticed this before the wiki did. One launch-week thread is titled simply that the game causes temperature problems, and the official store page lists exchangers and thermostats as the tools for managing waste heat "before your factory cooks itself."
| First-hour step | What it unlocks | What goes wrong if you skip it |
|---|---|---|
| Pick site near ore + water | Both loops you need | You rebuild belts and pipes later |
| Drill → smelt → plates/gears | Every recipe that follows | Nothing else can be built properly |
| Power + cooling together | Stable expansion | Waste heat accumulates and machines overheat |
| Set 2 planner targets | Bottleneck visibility | You expand the wrong machine |
| Route fluids by temperature | Lava, hot water and oil stop fighting you | Channels clog or fluids react where you did not plan |
4. Fluids move, and they react
Water, lava, oil and stranger substances flow, pool and press against what you build. Where they meet they react, lava hardens into rock inside your cooling channels, and a hot spring can power an early base if you pipe it correctly. The practical rule for hour one: pump it, pipe it, and route it by temperature, not by whatever direction is shortest.
5. Drone logistics is a mid-game answer, not hour one
The previous systems patch, v0.5.17 (September 27), reworked inventory: there is no fixed slot count any more — you carry any mix of item types up to a single total, starting at 10,000, listed in groups of blocks, items and fluids. anything an older save was carrying above that total moved into Overflow Storage. v0.5.18 (October 3) then added Keep in Inventory carry rules — a set amount per item type, refilled from nearby storage — and Work Orders that stay with the nanobots until finished and save with your file. v0.5.19 (October 8) puts the Materials Bar on screen from the start, introduces Area Mine and the Work Orders panel in the ore tutorial, and makes the nanobots take the nearest work first unless you switch that panel to list order. v0.5.20 (October 17) adds community translations and a Fahrenheit temperature unit, and moves Deep Extraction earlier in the research tree. Two research consequences matter in the first hour: Carry Capacity now adds 1,000 to your total per level (up to 20,000) instead of 2 slots, and Stack Size research was removed entirely — do not look for it. The auto-pickup and emptying into nearby storages that v0.5.17 promised for the next update is what v0.5.18 shipped as Keep in Inventory. Before that, v0.5.16 (September 26) was about seeing flow and fixing Routers — not about unlocking drones earlier. Drone routes still arrive after you already have production worth moving. Long-distance transport is one of the questions players are asking most (a thread titled exactly that is open in the discussions), and it is covered on the Logistics & Drones page.
Demo progress carries over
The developer answered this in a pinned thread: yes — demo progress carries to the full version. That matters if you are reading this before buying, because you can start the loop in the demo and keep it.
Set priorities before expanding
- Open Work Orders (N). Nanobots choose the nearest job by default in v0.5.19. Switch Priority to List order when a specific excavation or build must finish first; hovering an order shows the blocks still waiting.
- Set Keep in Inventory targets for supplies you regularly use, then keep nearby storage stocked. This carry rule is separate from the shared inventory capacity; the old Stack Size research is gone.
- Check solar and wind average weather output, not only peak output. Their build cards show both. Check repair packs per hour in the Maintenance box before choosing a location.
- After Fabrication, research Deep Extraction for stone, clay, water, limestone, coal, iron and copper. II adds sulfur, oil and gold; III adds bauxite and titanium. The scanner's Deep Veins filter only shows resources your research opens.
- When changing computers, v0.5.21 syncs settings, keybinds and language through Steam Cloud. Graphics and display choices stay local, so set those again on the new machine.
Window close and Alt+F4 now save the world first, like Save & Quit. This change does not make a process crash or power failure a safe way to save.
See the official update notes for v0.5.19–v0.5.21. The new hotbar, revised pipe connections and nuclear power described in the October previews belong to the upcoming 0.6 update.
Next: Heat & Steam · Fluids & Pipes · Production Planner