Guides:GettingStarted

# Starting a Sea Block World

When first creating a new Sea Block game, things can seem overwhelming! Fear not, with the help of other stranded engineers, this page will gather all your early game tips and tricks! **Good Luck!**

## Starting Supplies

Players who dig through the suspicious rock on their starting island will find a set of conveniently useful machines, pipes, and crafting materials! The first step they should then take, is to expand their island! One of the defining features of a Sea Block playthrough is the addition of space as a resource. In the form of both the landfill needed to expand, and the stranglehold of powerful spitter islands not far from the starting safe zone, engineers will find that planning compact designs poses a larger challenge than it may appear to at first.

To new players, one last piece of advice: be careful of overly compact designs, as the constant stream of new techs and supply chains can cause a small, un-modifiable section of factory to become a headache whenever an upgrade comes along.

## First Steps

While you may be used to starting out trying to make automation science packs in vanilla Factorio, in Sea Block you first have to complete a series of 'quests' before unlocking science packs. There are four in total, in order, they require you to:

1. Crush stiratite
2. Farm brown algae
3. Craft a Basic circuit board
4. Craft a Lab

The following paragraphs will walk you through the process.

If you want to figure out the production line for yourself, see this page for how to use FNEI

## Making Crushed Stiratite

To go about the first quest you will need the following buildings:

* Wind turbines (found in your inventory)
* 4 Electrolysers, 2 flare stacks and 1 liquifier (found in the Petrochemical refining tab)
* 1/2 Burner ore crusher and 1 crystallizer (found in the Resource refining tab)
* 1 Offshore pump (found in the production tab)

1. Before you can place down any buildings you're gonna need to use the sand in your inventory to make yourself a decent sized island, it works just like landfill in vanilla Factorio. (click the + and - keys to increase the amount of tiles you're placing down.
2. Then you will start with making a wind turbine array, this will serve you for power until you get to making a green algae farm
3. Once that is created you can place down your first offshore pump. Now you have a water supply.
4. Connect the pump to the first new building, the electrolyser. It has three products: Hydrogen, Oxygen and Slag. you cant do anything with hydrogen or oxygen for now so for the moment you should just connect the hydrogen and oxygen outputs to 2 flare stacks. Flare stacks do not produce anything and just serve as dumps for chemicals you can't use yet. The only product we want is Slag
5. Put the Slag into the burner ore crusher. For fuel you can use cellulose fiber. You obtain cellulose fiber by going to the Bio Processing Vegetabilis tab and clicking the 'forage for cellulose fiber'. If the icon for 'forage for cellulose' is red and unclickable, you may have to disable some of your mods and start a new Sea Block game to get it to work.    Instead of using cellulose you can also make a bridge with landfill to the closest tree which should give you enough wood to last you until you are able to automate fuel production.
6. Place down the liquifier and connect it to your water supply. Place the crushed stone you got from the burner ore crusher into the liquifier.
7. Connect the output of mineralized water from the liquifier into the crystallizer.
8. From the crystallizer you will get both Saphirite ore and Stiratite Ore.
9. Finally to create Crushed Stiratite, place the Stiratite Ore into the burner ore crusher.

## Early Game Guides

 Early Game Power Management

 Charcoal vs Ceramic Filtration