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The original was posted on /r/factorio by /u/TechSupportGeorge on 2025-09-23 06:52:59+00:00.

Alternative title: Blueprint Addict

I love Factorio. Every year I get a hankering to play it, and I end up spending hundreds of hours tweaking small things, expanding, and building more.

But that’s the thing. I only tweak, because I rarely, if ever, build a properly planned-out base myself. I used to, back when I first played. I managed to cobble something together to launch a rocket, but it was hardly fully automatic. Several input and output ratios were wrong, leading to clogs in the system that needed manual fixing.

Then in 2014, version 0.9.0 happened, and all my future playthroughs have been a fraud. A lie. I am now completely overwhelmed by even the smallest projects. I have several sets of blueprints I usually rely on, downloaded from the web. When Space Age landed, I was excited. New content! But then the horror settled in. Recipes had changed, new science appeared. Many blueprints no longer worked, and I never actually got around to getting into space.

Now I’ve done it again. Both my starter base and my megabase are, at best, modified versions of blueprints I found. My first space platform is a design entirely stolen from someone else’s blueprint.

And. I. HATE. IT.

I’ve landed on Vulcanus for the first time, determined not to just grab a blueprint with a perfect ratio setup. I’ve made my first few foundries, but now I’m stuck, eternally fighting the urge to take the easy path, paralyzed by the fear of not making a perfect setup. I don’t know how many foundries I need, or how much space to set aside. Should I keep handcrafting a few things, or actually try to set up full-scale production?

I hate this. I want to build my own designs, but what’s the point when they always end up so much worse than the easy route?