Factorio Blueprints guide: the most useful Blueprints for beginners
Learn how to use blueprints to make your life as a factory manager so much easier
Blueprints are one of the most genius systems at work in Factorio, and it's a crime that many players don't know how to make proper use of Blueprints to save time and effort when building their factories.
Our Factorio Blueprints guide will not only walk you through how to get started using and creating blueprints, but also invite you to use RPS's very own Factorio Blueprint Book (along with a few other community-made blueprints) to help kickstart your factory!
How to use Blueprints in Factorio
There's a lot to learn about Blueprints - too much to fit into this guide. But here are the basics on how to use Blueprints in-game for Factorio beginners:
- To access your Blueprint Library, tap "B" or click the first button in the top-right of the screen in-game. The Blueprint Library is where you can access, inspect, and alter all your Blueprints.
- You can create your own Blueprints using the Blueprint tool, which you can access by hitting "Alt+B". Click and drag over whatever you want included in your Blueprint with this tool, and a Blueprint will automatically be created for you.
- You can destroy the Blueprint at any time by right-clicking on it in your inventory and clicking the red "Destroy Blueprint" icon. You can also open up your Blueprints Library and place your new Blueprint inside the library to permanently store it there, for you to use it across any save and world.
- You can also create Blueprint Books using the Blueprint Book icon to the right of your hotbar. Blueprint Books can be used to store multiple Blueprints.
How to share and use community-made Factorio Blueprints:
- Every Blueprint and Blueprint Book can be exported as a string of characters. To export a Blueprint to a string, right-click it in your inventory or the library and click the grey "Export to string" button.
- To use another player's Blueprint, you'll need that Blueprint's string. Once you have it copied, click the "Import string" button to the right of your hotbar, paste the string in, and click "Import".
Best Factorio Blueprints for early game
For the purposes of this guide, I decided to go back and freshen up all the Blueprints I made years back and still regularly use to this day. And thus, I present the first (and probably only) RPS Factorio Blueprint Book. Woohoo!
Copy the string in the box below to import the RPS Blueprint Book into your own Blueprint Library:
This book contains 12 Blueprints, meant to take you comfortably from the very start of a Factorio game into the mid-game and beyond. Let's take a look at each of these Blueprints and how they are to be used.
Extreme Early Game Blueprints
The first two Blueprints in the book are meant purely for your very first steps towards automation (in fact, I use them both in my Factorio early game walkthrough walkthrough). One takes in Iron and Copper, and outputs Green Circuits, and is meant for speeding up the manual construction of things like Electric Mining Drills and Inserters.
The second takes in Iron and outputs ammo, to help prepare you for your first few Biter attacks. It's so simple, it's barely worth having a Blueprint on it. But fuck it, I've made one now.
Green Circuits (Extreme Early Game):
Ammo (Extreme Early Game):
Steam Power Blueprints
The next Blueprints are related to Steam Power, and are designed to help get your factory set up with a reliable power source early on. The mini version is designed to be tileable so that you can just keep adding on new sections as needed, while the big version contains enough power once built to take you very comfortably into the mid-game.
Steam Power (Mini):
Steam Power (Full):
Solar Power Blueprints
Skipping ahead for a moment into the mid-game, we've got a couple of very easily tileable Solar Panel Blueprints to help you to more easily complete the massive project of Solar Power. Both Blueprints make use of the proper ratio of 25 Solar Panels to 21 Accumulators.
Solar Power (Single):
Solar Power (Double):
Smelting Blueprints
We've also got several item production Blueprints in this book, starting with our two smelting complexes. Each is designed to take in a full belt of ore and output a full belt of plates. The Blueprint with Stone Furnaces is meant for a full yellow belt, while the Blueprint with Steel Furnaces is meant for a full red belt.
Of course, if you don't yet have the stuff required to make the latter, you could always make do with two of the former!
Smelting (Yellow Belt):
Smelting (Red Belt):
Green Circuit Blueprints
After the basic resources patches found in the world, probably the most important intermediate item to mass produce is the Electronic Circuit (commonly referred to as the Green Circuit). Again we have two Blueprints: the first outputs a full yellow belt of Green Circuits, while the second outputs a full red belt.
Be sure to check the descriptions of these Blueprints so you know which resources to feed into which belts.
Green Circuits (Yellow Belt):
Green Circuits (Red Belt):
Steel Blueprints
Steel is one of the most painstaking early-game resources to craft in bulk, because it takes 5 Iron Plates to smelt into a single Steel Plate. The final two Blueprints in this book make smelting Steel easy - as long as you have the space to plant them somewhere in your factory. Yet again, there is one Blueprint for outputting a full yellow belt, and another for outputting a full red belt.
Steel (Yellow Belt):
Steel (Red Belt):
Tileable Science Blueprints
Finally we have Science. I was thinking about crafting my own Tileable Science Blueprints and placing them in this book along with the others I'd created, but there's really no point, because I won't be able to improve upon this Blueprint Book by Christoffer Ramqvist, which is absolutely perfect for any Factorian's needs. All the Blueprints in this book are infinitely tileable and very easy to understand. Give them a go! They've served me well for ages.
Christoffer Ramqvist's Tileable Science Blueprint Book:
And with that, you should be well on your way to using these and other top-tier Blueprints in your own Factorio worlds! But if you still have unanswered questions about Factorio, be sure to check out our other guides below.
- Factorio guide and top tips - Our practical top tips for Factorio beginners.
- Factorio early game walkthrough - How to ace your first weeks in a new Factorio world.
- Factorio mods for 1.0 - Here are the very best Factorio mods we've ever used.
- Factorio console commands - The most useful cheats in Factorio revealed.
- Factorio blueprints - How to use blueprints, and the best blueprints we've found.