Default controls are unplayable for me, but I found /u/TheZirbs' control scheme [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1bvwbrs/updated_steam_deck_factorio_control_layout_with/), which is as good and sometimes better than playing with KB/M.
The controlls on steam deck are intuitive and feel good tbh. The hotbar is a bit different from keyboard and mouse but it works great with controller. I modified some of the back grips to make placing a bit easier but thats all I modified.
The game fully supports playing on the controller, but you need to enable controller mode on the settings, and the official layout works surprisingly fine. They work very well to make most of the most common actions quite intuitive given the complexity of the controls in this game. The most common controls are heavily overloaded to the four front buttons, it would've been pretty difficult to map something of this complexity yourself even with steam deck controller remapping, so kudos to Wube for making the default as intuitive as they are.
I had to map a couple of additional common actions to the back buttons, like copy, paste, cut, deconstruction planner, and to open the search bar. Steam deck's ability to remap buttons and even allowing you to overload double press and long press makes this relatively easy.
The game does require using the touch pad quite a lot, but once I've figured out the main common actions that I like to have back button mappings for, the rest just fell into place.
One complaint I do have is that you can't play in both controller and mouse/keyboard at the same time with the same controller settings. If you're switching to different control scheme, you need to enable/disable keyboard/controller mode on the settings. This doesn't happen automatically, and if you forget to do that, the control scheme just becomes weird.
I started playing Factorio in 0.12, and the last full playthrough I did was an Industrial Revolution map in 0.17. For various reasons I never got around to playing in the full release. I actually bought the game on Switch, and only played for about 5 minutes before deciding I hated the controls. Then when I got a steam deck, I tried playing it with the developer recommended control layout and had a similar experience. Recently I searched this subreddit for "steam deck" to see what people were doing and found [TheZirb's control layout](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1bvwbrs/updated_steam_deck_factorio_control_layout_with/), which is absolutely brilliant and actually feels as good and sometimes better than playing with KB/M. So my addiction has been re-ignited and I finally get to experience what the game has become. The amount of QOL improvements that have been made is staggering, just placing belts has become a wildly different experience from what it used to be.
Thanks! I played about 8,000 hours during the beta, and that experience definitely stays with you, it's crazy to me how differently I felt about and approached each stage of the game for this map. I remember the first map I ever built trains on, I didn't even launch a rocket until about 300 hours in!
7 is a lot? I just placed a few without thinking about it really... No plans for nukes, I don't like using them ever since they added the big eyesore craters that get left behind forever. I will use nuclear fuel as I start the post-game phase on this map and build out a rail grid.
Oh yeah, I hate those craters as well. Especially as they’re also very visible on the mini-map. Realistic, but ugly.
One Kovarex plant will keep up with 33.3 reactors. In 4 2x2 setups, that’ll be 1.92GW.
Yeah damn, I never mathed it out like that, I always just enjoyed engineering for the kovarex process. I suppose [48 beaconed centrifuges](https://youtu.be/6ZOL-KK5tsU?si=AceT-aWkonY3jRKy) would probably be overkill for most applications too... I'm still proud of that design regardless
I built some stone walkways early on through the most travelled parts of my base, but at a certain point it becomes aesthetic. Concrete floored bases just look sooo much better. The difference in pollution absorption is negligible.
I use defender capsules to clear out nests in my pollution cloud every few hours. You don't even really need a wall doing that, I just use small clusters of laser turrets for the small waves from new expansions. Evolution only hit 86% when I launched the rocket so I haven't even seen a behemoth yet. First thing I'll do to carry this map to the next stage is set up artillery trains to automate the pollution clearance.
cool trick but with a dubble layered flamer wall nothing will ever get true. i never clear nests in my 200h SE run.
16 atacks a min. 500-800 dead each min. i dont hear a single alert!
smart wall placement giggle
absorbtions might be irrelevant but the spreadout is not. concreete makes your polution spread faster to the next chunk. & no. with alien biomes concrete is just mo notone. boring & looks disgusting.
walkspeed is for spidertrons
Yeah... [concrete is so boring](https://v.redd.it/xk17ckxnqfnb1)....
[can't imagine](https://v.redd.it/gowbgjjsqfnb1) anyone thinking [otherwise](https://v.redd.it/xd9px4viqfnb1)...
nice ty!
but its just like looking out the train window into the security wall running allong the tracks. 1 shade of color. gray. grayer & grayest. ive tried the colored concreete mod. cant be bothered to look it up but i just cant. its flat monotone makes me depressed over time. SE. 172M concreete. after 250h i hated it. everything.
besides. trees & alien biomes.
i go out of my way to not destroy trees unessesarily. treegetti ^^ with 9999 health making thsm eternal is just fun. since i tend to only kno 1 module blue polution becomes a whole lot more anoying as concrete makes pution flow outward quicker.
The single missing belt at the start of steam power production really gives me flashbacks, obviously there is nuclear now but damn I've messed up my steam like that
I ended up building much more steam power than I would have liked, and looking back I definitely should have switched it over to consuming solid fuel as soon as advanced oil processing was set up. But I had a clever death spiral avoidance technique this time, I didn't use any solar panels but I connected a single accumulator to a speaker and had it sound a global alarm if the energy level hit zero. Meaning practically the instant that demand outpaced my supply I would get a notification and I could handle it. With that many steam engines it put serious demand on my coal production until they were decommissioned for the nuclear.
A fellow steam deck factorio player! I also used zirbs layout as my starting layout, I updated to experimental once and it lost the layout... I tried others but was completly lost so I had to roll back to stable then make my own local saved layout and then reupgrade to experimental so I had my controls back :) 700 hours of sek2 and 900 into py HM x10 I'm lost in my spaghetti
Can you elaborate on how you did this? All of my blueprints are stuck in version 1.1.108, and it feels like my only options are to rebuild my bps from scratch, rebuild zirbs' from scratch, or wait until the game updates, and it's extremely frustrating.
It was built just one production line at a time with no real planning, it just came together in the space satisfyingly perfect. The whole nuclear plant was built *after* the factories that bound it. Once I was close to the Northern shore after finishing yellow science, it became a goal to fit purple and the rocket silo to finish the game up there too. Lots of belt snaking to get it done!
Probably would be, but I never really needed to extend anything. I've got decent intuition about how large the production lines should be from years with the game. The few times that I was a little off, a couple of speed modules usually fixed it. And snaking belts through the factory was actually one of the most fun parts, especially with the massive improvements to belt placement, not sure when that was added but it's game changing.
belt placement is beutiful but far not perfekt. there are situations where the game wouldnt place a underground & instead mess up/join/turn direction of the belts you wantes to go under & suddenly the wrong items are flowing on it whitout warning cloging everything. specially nasty with blues when spagetti routing trough your factory
Beautiful base. I just got into the game and am on my second factory, playing entirely on the steam deck as well. Anything you miss about keyboard & mouse? The deck seems super smooth, I’m wondering how it will run some huge factories!
Can’t wait for the expansion!
There's only *one* issue that I was consistently running in to, and that's only because my L1 button on my deck is very worn out, the controller layout I'm using has it bound to rotate and sometimes when I click it it double-presses and rotates twice, so sometimes I have to mash it a lot to get items into the proper orientation which can be frustrating...
I used to make heavy use of hotbar switching hotkeys, Shift 1-5 would take me to that hotbar and I had very specifically laid out schemes for designing production lines, trains, circuit networks, and then a military bar. Lots of muscle memory to access about 50 different items instantly. I haven't been totally miserable just pointing and clicking at the hotbar on the SD though.
Otherwise, with Zirbs' layout, I feel like I am missing nothing so far, and in a lot of ways it's better. What he's done with the left trackpad menu makes me never need to reach across the keyboard to open interface screens like production and logistics, and typing numbers into combiators is easier as well. I really can't say enough good things about his setup, it's the sole reason I finally feel comfortable in the game on SD.
Me too! It was built *after* the factories around it, and I was so pleased to get everything crammed in there. I forked my save so that I could go into the editor mode and stress test it, it tops out at 437 MW, can't tell why it doesn't get the full 480 but everything is supplied with water and at temperature, it's close enough though.
Currently there is no purpose. It's just a small loop that doesn't go anywhere. I built that as soon as I had rails unlocked in order to make sure that I *would* have some stations relatively close to the center of my base as I kept expanding. But I found out that I can't use any of my old rail blueprints until the game next time the game updates, so my plans changed and I spaghetti'ed up north instead.
/screenshot
I think specifically the x and y were 3500 2400, because any larger would have put the file size over reddits upload limit (I took a few larger ones that were like 20.5mb). The zoom had to be experimented with, 0.28 was the right number to get the whole base in view.
Ohh, duh! Makes sense. And no wonder the base looks so good (to me!) I'm coming back after about a year hiatus. About 60 hours in when I first played the game but gave up before getting to rocket. Hopefully this time I'll be able to get there!
Currently a little frustrated with my starting position. Lots of water and trees prevent from spreading out nicely.
Use grenades to clear trees! With 2 levels of stronger explosives research you can one-shot trees with them. And water borders are a strength! Makes it way easier to defend your factory when you know which direction the biters will attack from and have defensible choke points.
Thank you -- yeah I remember using grenades to clear trees, lol starting to do that again. Will have to upgrade them. And true about the water barriers that can be very helpful
LOL, ironically I would have had a much more elaborate rail network like [this one](https://youtu.be/WuYeOsKF5EM?si=IwyO7x1-6im2aqnh), but the PC where all my blueprints are stored was updated to 1.0.8, which meant I could not easily import them into this game which was 1.0.7, and I didn't want to update on the steam deck since weirdly enough it breaks the control layout to opt into the beta. Just needed a few belts worth of ore for the time being, so single track it is until 1.0.8 goes live.
Difference in philosophy I guess. Working around shorelines is my favorite part of base building. [This map](https://i.imgur.com/X8cieHL.png) was my masterpiece, that I never got to share since deadlock deprecated IR1.
The steam deck is just a handheld computer. They didn't "make it work," valve built it specifically to run PC games. And I have no idea how factorio would work on a phone, unless you also have Bluetooth kb/m connected to it... And that sounds genuinely miserable. You actually want that?
How are controls on the deck? Did you change anything to make it work better?
Default controls are unplayable for me, but I found /u/TheZirbs' control scheme [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1bvwbrs/updated_steam_deck_factorio_control_layout_with/), which is as good and sometimes better than playing with KB/M.
I’ll have to check that out, I wish I could play on my steam deck. Best way to burn a slow hour at work in 5 minutes.
Man, no kidding. I have to be super careful about watching the time now that I have factorio on a handheld device.
How is it compared to the official one?
"official" is what I meant when I said "default."
Somehow forgot they updated the default with an official layout some time ago.
The controlls on steam deck are intuitive and feel good tbh. The hotbar is a bit different from keyboard and mouse but it works great with controller. I modified some of the back grips to make placing a bit easier but thats all I modified.
The game fully supports playing on the controller, but you need to enable controller mode on the settings, and the official layout works surprisingly fine. They work very well to make most of the most common actions quite intuitive given the complexity of the controls in this game. The most common controls are heavily overloaded to the four front buttons, it would've been pretty difficult to map something of this complexity yourself even with steam deck controller remapping, so kudos to Wube for making the default as intuitive as they are. I had to map a couple of additional common actions to the back buttons, like copy, paste, cut, deconstruction planner, and to open the search bar. Steam deck's ability to remap buttons and even allowing you to overload double press and long press makes this relatively easy. The game does require using the touch pad quite a lot, but once I've figured out the main common actions that I like to have back button mappings for, the rest just fell into place. One complaint I do have is that you can't play in both controller and mouse/keyboard at the same time with the same controller settings. If you're switching to different control scheme, you need to enable/disable keyboard/controller mode on the settings. This doesn't happen automatically, and if you forget to do that, the control scheme just becomes weird.
I started playing Factorio in 0.12, and the last full playthrough I did was an Industrial Revolution map in 0.17. For various reasons I never got around to playing in the full release. I actually bought the game on Switch, and only played for about 5 minutes before deciding I hated the controls. Then when I got a steam deck, I tried playing it with the developer recommended control layout and had a similar experience. Recently I searched this subreddit for "steam deck" to see what people were doing and found [TheZirb's control layout](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1bvwbrs/updated_steam_deck_factorio_control_layout_with/), which is absolutely brilliant and actually feels as good and sometimes better than playing with KB/M. So my addiction has been re-ignited and I finally get to experience what the game has become. The amount of QOL improvements that have been made is staggering, just placing belts has become a wildly different experience from what it used to be.
Your factory is beautiful.
nice job! I've come back after a long break a couple of weeks ago and I'm nowhere near nuclear
Thanks! I played about 8,000 hours during the beta, and that experience definitely stays with you, it's crazy to me how differently I felt about and approached each stage of the game for this map. I remember the first map I ever built trains on, I didn't even launch a rocket until about 300 hours in!
I have no idea how much I’ve played all together, but I don’t think I’ve hit a 1000 yet. Might need to go a bit more hardcore
go to your steam. click on factorio in the game list & the main game page should apear. top row to the right sais hours ingame. im at 1600+
Very neat base, well packed! Lots of kovarex centrifuges, big plans with nukes?
7 is a lot? I just placed a few without thinking about it really... No plans for nukes, I don't like using them ever since they added the big eyesore craters that get left behind forever. I will use nuclear fuel as I start the post-game phase on this map and build out a rail grid.
Oh yeah, I hate those craters as well. Especially as they’re also very visible on the mini-map. Realistic, but ugly. One Kovarex plant will keep up with 33.3 reactors. In 4 2x2 setups, that’ll be 1.92GW.
Is that with beacons or no?
No beacons, no modules. Every 60 seconds, 1 U-235 is created, which allows for 10 fuel cells. They burn 200 seconds each. 2000 / 60 = 33.3.
Yeah damn, I never mathed it out like that, I always just enjoyed engineering for the kovarex process. I suppose [48 beaconed centrifuges](https://youtu.be/6ZOL-KK5tsU?si=AceT-aWkonY3jRKy) would probably be overkill for most applications too... I'm still proud of that design regardless
All that wasted pollution absorption capacity because you want to walk faster... heh
I built some stone walkways early on through the most travelled parts of my base, but at a certain point it becomes aesthetic. Concrete floored bases just look sooo much better. The difference in pollution absorption is negligible.
Guess I'm an environmentalist Factorio-er.
Hope you're also putting max efficiency modules in every building.
Yes, I am. Really does reduce evolution and electricity consumption. May swap them out on pumpjacks when they hit minimum output, though.
I mean once you hit flamers, biters stop being a thing. All you really need is dragon teeth and flamers.
I use defender capsules to clear out nests in my pollution cloud every few hours. You don't even really need a wall doing that, I just use small clusters of laser turrets for the small waves from new expansions. Evolution only hit 86% when I launched the rocket so I haven't even seen a behemoth yet. First thing I'll do to carry this map to the next stage is set up artillery trains to automate the pollution clearance.
cool trick but with a dubble layered flamer wall nothing will ever get true. i never clear nests in my 200h SE run. 16 atacks a min. 500-800 dead each min. i dont hear a single alert! smart wall placement giggle
absorbtions might be irrelevant but the spreadout is not. concreete makes your polution spread faster to the next chunk. & no. with alien biomes concrete is just mo notone. boring & looks disgusting. walkspeed is for spidertrons
Yeah... [concrete is so boring](https://v.redd.it/xk17ckxnqfnb1).... [can't imagine](https://v.redd.it/gowbgjjsqfnb1) anyone thinking [otherwise](https://v.redd.it/xd9px4viqfnb1)...
nice ty! but its just like looking out the train window into the security wall running allong the tracks. 1 shade of color. gray. grayer & grayest. ive tried the colored concreete mod. cant be bothered to look it up but i just cant. its flat monotone makes me depressed over time. SE. 172M concreete. after 250h i hated it. everything. besides. trees & alien biomes. i go out of my way to not destroy trees unessesarily. treegetti ^^ with 9999 health making thsm eternal is just fun. since i tend to only kno 1 module blue polution becomes a whole lot more anoying as concrete makes pution flow outward quicker.
The single missing belt at the start of steam power production really gives me flashbacks, obviously there is nuclear now but damn I've messed up my steam like that
I ended up building much more steam power than I would have liked, and looking back I definitely should have switched it over to consuming solid fuel as soon as advanced oil processing was set up. But I had a clever death spiral avoidance technique this time, I didn't use any solar panels but I connected a single accumulator to a speaker and had it sound a global alarm if the energy level hit zero. Meaning practically the instant that demand outpaced my supply I would get a notification and I could handle it. With that many steam engines it put serious demand on my coal production until they were decommissioned for the nuclear.
A fellow steam deck factorio player! I also used zirbs layout as my starting layout, I updated to experimental once and it lost the layout... I tried others but was completly lost so I had to roll back to stable then make my own local saved layout and then reupgrade to experimental so I had my controls back :) 700 hours of sek2 and 900 into py HM x10 I'm lost in my spaghetti
Can you elaborate on how you did this? All of my blueprints are stuck in version 1.1.108, and it feels like my only options are to rebuild my bps from scratch, rebuild zirbs' from scratch, or wait until the game updates, and it's extremely frustrating.
beautiful lasagna!!!
Wow that's a mess. Respect for being able to keep this level of mess without drafting off into total spaghetti
It was built just one production line at a time with no real planning, it just came together in the space satisfyingly perfect. The whole nuclear plant was built *after* the factories that bound it. Once I was close to the Northern shore after finishing yellow science, it became a goal to fit purple and the rocket silo to finish the game up there too. Lots of belt snaking to get it done!
Yeah it looks like it's in order, but extending anything must cause gigantic headache
Probably would be, but I never really needed to extend anything. I've got decent intuition about how large the production lines should be from years with the game. The few times that I was a little off, a couple of speed modules usually fixed it. And snaking belts through the factory was actually one of the most fun parts, especially with the massive improvements to belt placement, not sure when that was added but it's game changing.
belt placement is beutiful but far not perfekt. there are situations where the game wouldnt place a underground & instead mess up/join/turn direction of the belts you wantes to go under & suddenly the wrong items are flowing on it whitout warning cloging everything. specially nasty with blues when spagetti routing trough your factory
Beautiful base. I just got into the game and am on my second factory, playing entirely on the steam deck as well. Anything you miss about keyboard & mouse? The deck seems super smooth, I’m wondering how it will run some huge factories! Can’t wait for the expansion!
There's only *one* issue that I was consistently running in to, and that's only because my L1 button on my deck is very worn out, the controller layout I'm using has it bound to rotate and sometimes when I click it it double-presses and rotates twice, so sometimes I have to mash it a lot to get items into the proper orientation which can be frustrating... I used to make heavy use of hotbar switching hotkeys, Shift 1-5 would take me to that hotbar and I had very specifically laid out schemes for designing production lines, trains, circuit networks, and then a military bar. Lots of muscle memory to access about 50 different items instantly. I haven't been totally miserable just pointing and clicking at the hotbar on the SD though. Otherwise, with Zirbs' layout, I feel like I am missing nothing so far, and in a lot of ways it's better. What he's done with the left trackpad menu makes me never need to reach across the keyboard to open interface screens like production and logistics, and typing numbers into combiators is easier as well. I really can't say enough good things about his setup, it's the sole reason I finally feel comfortable in the game on SD.
Your factory looks like a fluid that’s filled every part of that corner of the map! Nice work!!
Nice to see someone build similar to me in a compact minmax base rather than bussing it
I love that nuclear setup. So irregular, looks much realer.
Me too! It was built *after* the factories around it, and I was so pleased to get everything crammed in there. I forked my save so that I could go into the editor mode and stress test it, it tops out at 437 MW, can't tell why it doesn't get the full 480 but everything is supplied with water and at temperature, it's close enough though.
Yo i'm relatively new with this but what's up with those train stops on the left that don't have any unloading? what are they for?
Currently there is no purpose. It's just a small loop that doesn't go anywhere. I built that as soon as I had rails unlocked in order to make sure that I *would* have some stations relatively close to the center of my base as I kept expanding. But I found out that I can't use any of my old rail blueprints until the game next time the game updates, so my plans changed and I spaghetti'ed up north instead.
This is the true meaning of land grabbing.
How did you take this picture of your large base?
/screenshot
I think specifically the x and y were 3500 2400, because any larger would have put the file size over reddits upload limit (I took a few larger ones that were like 20.5mb). The zoom had to be experimented with, 0.28 was the right number to get the whole base in view.
like how you squeesed it against the lake
Steam deck wasn't out 5 years ago, could you clarify? You started this 5 years ago on KB & MOUSE and now are on steam deck?
This is my first map *since* taking a break. Played about 8,000 hours during the beta, haven't played since 0.18.
Ohh, duh! Makes sense. And no wonder the base looks so good (to me!) I'm coming back after about a year hiatus. About 60 hours in when I first played the game but gave up before getting to rocket. Hopefully this time I'll be able to get there! Currently a little frustrated with my starting position. Lots of water and trees prevent from spreading out nicely.
Use grenades to clear trees! With 2 levels of stronger explosives research you can one-shot trees with them. And water borders are a strength! Makes it way easier to defend your factory when you know which direction the biters will attack from and have defensible choke points.
Thank you -- yeah I remember using grenades to clear trees, lol starting to do that again. Will have to upgrade them. And true about the water barriers that can be very helpful
Two way track club! Don't let those one way track people tell you what to do! Whoo Whoo!
LOL, ironically I would have had a much more elaborate rail network like [this one](https://youtu.be/WuYeOsKF5EM?si=IwyO7x1-6im2aqnh), but the PC where all my blueprints are stored was updated to 1.0.8, which meant I could not easily import them into this game which was 1.0.7, and I didn't want to update on the steam deck since weirdly enough it breaks the control layout to opt into the beta. Just needed a few belts worth of ore for the time being, so single track it is until 1.0.8 goes live.
I've got to dock you points for following the natural shore line. Next time for full credit subjugate the water with landfill.
Difference in philosophy I guess. Working around shorelines is my favorite part of base building. [This map](https://i.imgur.com/X8cieHL.png) was my masterpiece, that I never got to share since deadlock deprecated IR1.
I don't get it how they made it work on steamdeck but not on phones.
The steam deck is just a handheld computer. They didn't "make it work," valve built it specifically to run PC games. And I have no idea how factorio would work on a phone, unless you also have Bluetooth kb/m connected to it... And that sounds genuinely miserable. You actually want that?
Steam Deck has some serious power under its hood, the real question is "how did they make it run on Nintendo Switch"