A brief and basic tutorial to get you started with the gameplay of the River Town Factory game.
Contents
Guide to Basics
At the Beginning
After a quick intro, you will find yourself stranded in one thousand years in the past at your father workshop.
You will be given a few tasks to learn the basics of the game, just follow them through. The first quest will allow you to gain access to the pickaxe (the only tool needed to harvest ressources) and your first blueprints
The basic forge requires you to select a recipe (iron ingots), feed it iron ore and coal as a fuel :
While you are smelting your ingots, turn toward the crafting table:
You will see your available recipes, aggregates (made out of rocks, but you can’t mine them yet) and lumber for which you already have 20 wood.
Select them and start crafting. Once you have your 10 lumbers, gather ingots from the forge and go back to River Town:
Turn them in to Lin Shanshi by right clicking on them or dragging them in the proper slots :
With your new pickaxe in hand, you will be tasked to visit the Oracle Envoy Temple (right side of your workshop).
Follow the cutscene, report back and with your newly gained money, buy at least 3 ressources sites (the central area offers you coal, rock, copper, iron and wood). Having one of each allows you to start making the first repairs on the Oracle Temple.
The resource panel (default key : K) will show you the resources you will receive every morning :
Report back to Lin Sanshi, gain new blueprints, return to your workshop and start crafting the first materials needed for the repairs.
Same deal, transfer the ressources (this mechanism is used for all the quests requiring dedicated ressources or the repairs of the temple) and select “Complete”
Congratulations, the training wheels are off and you are getting into the main part of the game now:
This central hub will allow you to exchange resources for knowledge crystals which will allow you to unlock more and more technologies.
We all have to start somewhere.
Automation, Technologies and First Nodes Repairs
After a few morning visits from the different NPCs that will teach you about the others aspect of the game you can start focusing on the temple repairs, learning more technologies and automating your actions.
You will trade iron and copper ingots for the Red crystals which will allow you to unlock the first parts of the tech tree:
The temple repairs and the tech unlock goes hand in hand, T1 – Node 4 for example will requires you to learn how to make food fiber and turn it into threads and cloth.
Combining the Auto Supplying Chest and the Constructor will allow you to automate the basic elements you have unlocked.
While they can run for a while on coal, making the switch to electricity is the right step to move deeper into the factory lines and directly smelting your ores.
No more will you have to fill your basic furnace with both ore and coal, now with your iron ore set to be delivered into your Auto Supplying Chest and a Smelter in line your troubles are over (you will still have to make sure your Small Coal Generator have coal… for now!)
Quickly you will be able to upgrade your factory lines, one Smelter was not enough, a Splitter at the output of the Auto Supplying Chest will divide it into 3, allowing you to feed 3 Smelters… and a Merger on their own output will allow you to merge those lines into one single chest.
Make sure that the input / output coincide properly, specially when you start to run more and more complex lines. The Logistic Mode (F1 by default) allow you to check those output (orange) and input (blue).
Using the examples above and your own creativity, you will be able to go through most of T1 and the technology tree, untill you hit your first bottleneck, the Automatic Manufacturing II which also requires Green Crystals :
While you can power through and make the necessary Primary Tools on your bench to repair T1 – Node 5, you will only need 4 Tools and 6 Cloths to unlock the Assembler and 10 Tools and 15 Clothes for the Basic Iron Forging, the new steps into making your life easier!
Assemblers or How to Turn Two Items into One
So far, we have been turning a ressource or item into another using the Constructor. You probably got tired of waiting for the complex lines to manufacture your items and went for a modular system like this one :
Select your recipe, place the needed ressource in the Storage Chest and let the multiple Constructors do their job.
With faster transport belts you will be able to chain more Constructors / Assemblers or fabricators of any type.
After a quick trip to the workbench to get the necessary mats for your first Assembler (bricks, reinforced iron plate and Primary tools) you have finally placed it!
Remember how many times you had to hammer those guys? Not anymore, feed two items to the assembler, a recipe and just relax while it does the job!
Now you will probably tell me it’s too slow for you and the hundreds of parts you need… and I totally agree, which is why we will use our friends the splitter and merger again:
Quite obviously, your factory lines will be limited by your current technology, but as you move forward down the technology tree, the sky becomes the limit:
But I will get there as my second playthrough progress.
Nifty Tooltips, Tricks and How to Use Them
When you are running factory lines with multiple items you might want them to stop fabricating some when you reach a certain amount, click and drag the stop button will prevent those items from filling your storage.
Electricity is fine and all, but you need enough power to keep your factory lines working, a mouse over any electric line will give you this:
You will know the current consumption, the max consumption and how much you are generating, allowing you to adjust the amount of generators you need.
The same type of tooltip will give you the current amount of water you have running in your pipeline:
Remember that some systems will stall and others like Coal Generators will completely fail if you lack enough water.
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