This is a guide on the basic game-play along with some helpful strategy, pointers and tips.
Perhaps the biggest beginner mistake people make, is that they connect one extractor to one belt to one building to one belt then to the Hub. They take a look at it, figure it's slow so they build another one just like it. One extractor to one belt to one building to one belt then to the Hub. Still slow? Repeat. This will take up a lot more space than it needs to, it is also inefficient.
Another similar mistake is designing factories with no sense of how many buildings they need, i.e. just keep building until it "feels" like it's enough.
All the different buildings have different speeds so designs such as the aforementioned ones are full of bottlenecks. What you want is to use one single belt and make sure it runs at full capacity between factories and scale all your factories to match.
Prior to reaching level 27 (Freeplay) you might want to advance levels synchronized with upgrading tiers since many levels have upgrade shapes that matches the level shape. Since advancing levels don't consume shapes you will want to advance the level first. See the Levels page for which levels correspond to which upgrades. When there isn't a level that corresponds to an upgrade you should prioritize upgrading building tiers over advancing levels since upgrades makes everything faster. The speed improvements are significant until reaching tier 8, then the speed improvements decrease by an order of magnitude (1/10).
Main game area[]
The game area consists of a Hub in the middle and areas with Shapes and Dyes scattered around. The main objective of the game is combining these into various Shapes and deliver them to the central Hub.
As you deliver shapes you will be able to upgrade building tiers as well as progressing to higher levels. As the same type of shape is often requested for both upgrading and levelling up, you should keep delivering them until you are absolutely sure you don't need any more of them. The first big opportunity to destroy old factories comes at upgrade tier 6 which corresponds to level 19.
You should try to build your Factories some distance away from the main Hub to avoid running out of space for crossing lanes and such. I would recommend keeping at least 32 tiles in either direction of the Hub clear of anything that doesn't directly have to do with delivery to the Hub.
Extracting ore[]
You get access to chaining extractors at level 12. In the early levels before that, you might want to use several non-chaining extractors which you combine with balancers to deliver dyes and shapes at the belt's max capacity to somewhere else, typically a factory.
In the illustration there's used one more extractor than what is considered optimal. While this was primarily done for aesthetic reasons, it will help keep the belt at full capacity when you upgrade it. This is more of an issue in the earlier levels so it's recommended using the usual 1:5 ratio once you reach level 12.
Delivering shapes to the Hub[]
Delivering shapes efficiently to the Hub is important. Try to deliver them at the maximum speed that one conveyor belt will allow.
The best way to deliver shapes is to use a single dedicated Belt to deliver shapes directly to the Hub. This guarantees max throughput, and is also the most flexible option as you can route the belts anywhere you like, but this can result in a messier game area.
A cleaner but less flexible version of this strategy use four lanes extending inwards toward the Hub in all directions. You deliver shapes to just one of the belts, and use tunnels on the other lanes to keep their flow going. Doing it this way might force you to spread out your factories in all the four directions from the Hub, which is arguably a good thing. The basic tunnels have a range that is just long enough to pass under these lanes, which is convenient.
Some players use balancers on the main lanes leading in to the Hub, effectively sharing traffic on all four lanes. This is discouraged since you will have chokepoints where inflow lanes have to compete with existing traffic on the main lane, thus reducing throughput.
Note: Once you reach Freeplay and consider building Everything Machines you should build them so that their output is close to the Hub (but not too close), since this will reduce the latency to deliver shapes to the Hub. This means that it will probably be a good idea to clear some space closest to the Hub to make space for your first Everything Machine. Your other factories producing blueprint and upgrade shapes won't be affected by latency so their distance from the Hub doesn't matter. By now you will probably have 4-6 dedicated lanes occupied delivering upgrade shapes and the blueprint shape, this leaves 10-12 lanes for delivering the requested shapes on, this will be plenty until later levels. When you start needing more lanes you can build a system to temporary halt flow of upgrade shapes and blueprint shapes while your requested shapes are being delivered to the Hub.
Factories (Constructing shapes)[]
A factory is basically a set of buildings that transforms one shape into another shape. You can chain factories together with a conveyor belt to perform complex operations.
You get access to Blueprints after completing level 12. Keep producing the Blueprints shape efficiently as it is used for currency for Copy, Cut and Paste operations. Use Blueprints to make stackable designs for Factories. Stackable designs are nice since you can very easily scale them up to any capacity you want when you need to. A typical horizontal stackable design will have multiple input lanes running horizontally with "worker" buildings vertical/perpendicular to one side of it, and one output lane running horizontally on the other side. Use Balancers and Tunnels to help connect everything.
Remember that you can rotate factories before pasting them. With stackable designs it is also fairly simple to change the direction of the output lane. You could do this with input lanes too, but since you often have multiple inputs it is simpler to just rotate the whole factory.
You might want to find a large open area a long way away from your main Hub and place a map marker on it, and call it for instance "Blueprintia". You can use this area to store your favorite optimized blueprints, so you can easily copy and paste them. If you also place a map marker on your construction area you can use this to quickly jump back and forth. Most of the factory designs can be standardized as 2-color mixer, 3-color (white) mixer, painter, 2-layer, 3-layer and 4-layer stackers. Note that mixers and stackers can both use the same designs. Later in the game you might want to add a double-painter and a 4-color painter too. Since double-painters use only half the paint, this can allow you to have one color mixer factory supply two painter factories. The 4-color painter use up to four times as much paint as the regular painter so it basically trades away resource efficiency for area usage.
There's no good way to standardize cutters however, as pure cutter factories will typically be inefficient. Because they will have to be combined with stacker factories, this means the combined cutters and stackers will end up taking up a large area. Often pure cutter factory designs discard materials too which means you will need more extractors. On the positive side, lazy players might save some time using them.
To be reasonably efficient, what you want instead is a tailormade "Assembler" factory to produce one or more specific shapes, that is made from a combination of cutters and stackers. When these assembler factories produce more than one shape you will want to collect them on multiple output lanes, not to clog up your factory. One strategy to cut down (pun intended) the time it takes to make new assembler factories is to have 3 blueprint designs that could be used as a starting point to create your finished factories. The observant reader will notice the designs all use element widths that are multiples of two, so you will simply have to pick the element width you want to work with.
- A half-cutter factory with two output lanes consisting of four elements, where each element is 2 tiles wide and made from one regular cutter. This factory is rarely suitable as a starting point for more complex shapes, but it is very useful on its own, since the need to simply cut things in half comes up so often. You can make efficient Windmill factories that consume half-Windmills with this as a starting point though.
- An efficient diagonal cutter factory with two output lanes consisting of four elements, where each element is 6 tiles wide and made from one quad-cutter and four stackers. While it is possible to pack every element together so that it only effectively occupies 5 tiles, this will obviously leave less space for your designs so it's recommended you leave the element width at 6 tiles. This element width is considered to be the sweetspot for complex designs.
- A lazy diagonal cutter factory with two output lanes consisting of eight elements, where each element is 4 tiles wide and made from one quad-cutter and two stackers. The lazy diagonal cutter is dirt simple to modify to make 1/4 + 3/4 shapes. To accommodate more complex designs you can combine two neighboring elements for a total width of 8, this will give you plenty of space to work with. Another trick to accommodate more complex designs into a width of 4 is to have your input lanes run perpendicular between the elements. While this works very well, it results in designs that tend to be very long.
Of course, the most efficient factory is the one you don't have to make, so if you can use naturally occurring shapes, do that instead.
Do not mix buildings that has anything to do with color with buildings that do not, at least not until you reach Freeplay. The reason for this is that these buildings belong in two different upgrade categories, and so you will get internal mismatch in capacities if you do.
Note: Until you get access to blueprints you may as well just improvise the game-play. It's just not efficient trying to make nice designs before you are able to copy and paste them.
Throughput[]
What you should aim for is to try and match the throughput of your factories with the maximum throughput of your belt. This way there shouldn't be any bottlenecks on your whole assembly line.
A single belt has a certain maximum throughput times a multiplier that increases with the upgrade tier, the same is true for other types of buildings too. The throughput ratio is constant for the same upgrade tiers so it might be a good idea to keep upgrading your tiers evenly instead of constantly changing the stacking size of your factories to match the current belt speed. See the Buildings page for how many buildings are optimal to use per belt.
Typically one of four things happen whenever there is a mismatch in capacity, either you starve a factory by delivering less materials to it than it needs to operate at peak efficiency, and this effect will propagate downstream as well. The other situation is where your factory doesn't produce enough material to match the rate of your conveyor belts and this will also starve other factories downstream as well as being a chokepoint for materials arriving from upstream, meaning this effect will propagate upstream too. Another situation that can occur is if you deliver more materials to a factory than it can consume, which can't happen if the factory operates at the same capacity as the belt. Likewise if a factory tries to produce more items than the belt capacity, it will be limited by the belt.
A quick way to check throughput is to temporarily attach a Belt Reader and a Trash to the output of your factory. If the throughput is not optimal the problem is located somewhere upstream.
You can also spot throughput problems with the naked eye. If shapes are packed tightly together and moving slower on a belt than full speed, you've got a problem somewhere downstream. If shapes are moving at full speed but there is empty space between the shapes, then you've got a problem upstream.
Balancer tricks: Since the Balancer operates at twice the speed of conveyor belts and have an internal buffer of at least one item, this allows for some neat tricks if you chain them together. One such trick was described in the "Delivering shapes" chapter.
Miscellaneous tips[]
- Try to avoid putting pieces of shapes in the trash. Often they can be used elsewhere. For instance if you are tasked to produce half rectangles
, you can cut a rectangle in two, rotate the other half 180° and output both. This will reduce the need for cutters by a factor of two.
Efficient designs[]
***Spoiler alert***
As this is a puzzle game, all the fun comes from solving things yourself, so you should avoid the temptation of looking at other people's designs. Pages on the wiki gives hints where appropriate, but there is also a page dedicated to Efficient Designs.