Guides:Seablock Starter-guide (/u/DanielKotes)

## Introduction

This guide is based on u/DanielKotes guide on reddit (which can be found here, go check his works out.) but sorted by science stages instead of by production category, and yes, some of this is strait up copied from there, i do not have enough willpower to write all of this by myself.

I (u/bluehatgamingNXE , yes that's a long username but i am too lazy to create a new account) never write anything before on this site, but since someone have to do the job first to kickstart the progress i guess i will do it anyway, feels free to edit this part out.

So welcome to seablock, it can be found here , with Guides:Installation, if you don't know how to download. The basis of Seablock is a modified Bob & Angel pack, so expect around 10x the amount of items, recipes, and buildings as you would in vanilla Factorio. The key difference between a regular B&A playthough and Seablock being that there are no ore patches and even land itself is at a premium - you start on a single block of land that you must expand. Nearly everything comes from water, and that includes the ores. On the positive note, there is very little interaction with biters, exclusively in the form of worms that you must snipe from afar and no actual nests. This make the game more like peaceful mode, where the only worry you have is to expand the factory.

In this guide, i will only show 1 set-up for start of the game, as the game would be more interesting if you design your own set up later on, if you want blueprints for a certain thing you could go ask Reddit/Discord community, otherwise i will only provide charts make by u/DanielKotes and his program Foreman as it provide a general flow through the technology tree that i recommend, along with some recipe charts that you can use as a basis for your builds.

Go play the vanilla tutorial before play the pack by the way.

There should be more words here but someone else would probably contribute that here instead.

### Terminology

When talk about building tier, except for furnace, T0 is burner tier, T1/T2/etc is the tier that is in the building's name (for example: burner ore crusher is T0, ore crusher 1 is T1).

When talk about circuit, we associate them with color (for example: basic circuit is brown circuit), same for science, but there are also misc science such as optimized biome planner, aka plant science, or ablative weapons testing kit, aka weapon science.

When talk about recipe tier, it's similar to building tier, but instead it have roman number as they are shown in their recipe icon (for example: dirt water electrolysis have I in it name, we call it TI instead of T1 because of the roman number I in the icon, same for fast water electrolysis, we call it TII instead of T2).

For belt/underground belt/belt splitter/inserter/filter inserter/stack inserter/stack filter inserter we associate them with color (the tier in the order from low to high would be white->yellow->red->blue->purple->green.)

## First step (Pre red-science)

Alright, you have landed your ship on a small island and the ship magically turn into a rock full of resource that can and will kickstart a factory, congratulation, it took some skills but you have landed on hell, but progress can be made, and the factory can't grow by itself (unless extra mods were added for that purpose)

Ok let's start. I suggest turning on alt mode (by press alt) because without it you're basically blind. Grab the said resource in the rock by either open it like a chest or de-assemble it, with the landfills, expand the island (i recommend building it in a horizontal island), place **all** the available windmills, then go **foraging cellulose fiber, craft it when you don't craft important things** (in example: machines), it will be your furnaces's fuel and important as material to craft things until you automated it all, if you want to afk and craft 1k of those, then it is your choice, although it is unnecessary to do that.

Your windmills is crucial because it provide free powers, no need to be fed fuels or anything much beside space, i don't recommend crafts them as the material used to craft them can be more useful than 15kw per windmills, but in the same time, just don't remove them, and beside, de-assemble them took too much time so just left them there.

Now after that your current goal is getting though the science tutorial, which is the whole pre red-science phase:

1. Crushed stiratite.
2. Farm brown algae.
3. Craft brown circuit.
4. Craft 1 lab.

At step 1, start by **craft a T1 crystallizer, 2 flare stack, 4 T1 electrolyser, 3 T0 ore crusher, 1 offshore pump, 1 T1 liquefier and 2 filtering furnace (the blue furnace)**. Set your machine up by electrolyser with TI water electrosis, connect electrolyser hydrogen (white gas) and oxygen (red gas) output with the flare stacks, get the slags out and put it on the burner ore crusher (which set to make 2 crushed stones), put cellulose fibers into ore crusher as fuel, take the crushed stones and put them to the liquefier (set to create mineralized water), connect the output of it to the input of the crystallizer (which set to mineralized water crystallization) *(note: the center of one the sides of the machine is the input slot, which only show when you set a recipe)*, place 2 burner ore crushers to crush stiratite and shaphirite and 2 furnace to smelt them into copper plate and iron plate, you could place like the image on the side as you see, or place in a way you want to. So you got your starter factory, now collect slags, put slags on stone crusher, take crushed stone out and put it in liquefier, the mineralized water should automatically go to the crystallizer, repeat until you get stiratite as crystallizer's product, and when you got it, you take it and crushed it, then you automatically researched the first thing in the tutorial research tree, now with the crushed stiratite and saphirite, put it in the furnace with cellulose fibers as the furnace's fuel to make copper plate and iron plate (also don't forget to take the crushed stone byproduct out of the ore crusher as if it's full the crusher will stopped working).

At step 2, you unlocked the algae farm, and a way to produce basic circuit board, craft 1 algae farm, place down the algae farm somewhere that you could pipe a water source in it, chose Green algae I and you're done, you researched step 2 of the tutorial tree.

At step 3, for now don't care about the green algae, it will be used later as automate wood board and automate fuel source, and with the brown algae, copper plates from the smeltings and the available cellulose fiber that i told you to craft when not craft anything important, you will craft your first basic circiuit.

**(Some note: It's recommend to only use stone pipe during the early phases of the game, unless you got too much coppers in hand, which is a regular occurrence in the early game, then you could use copper pipe, which unlocked after step 3 above)**

Step 4 and final, craft a lab, because you already have all the materials in the rock so you just have to simply click on the lab recipe and you're pretty much done, now the red science stage has begun.

## Start of automation (Red science stage)

When you finished step 3 of the previous stage, you unlocked the foundation of logistics, which include yellow inserter (we also unlocked burner inserter but idk why we even have burner inserter, it just doesn't make sense if yellow inserter is unlocked at the same time, but you could challenge yourself by try to launch a rocket and only use burner inserter in the playthough, worth alot of internet points), belts, and other intermediate products along side with iron and copper pipes/underground pipes. Unlike the vanilla Factorio, this variant of inserters are now more versatile in term of direction and have longer range when you researched the upgrade for inserters. Along with that, when you finished step 4 you unlocked boiler and steam engine, first tiers of power production.

### Red science production, basics researchs and goal

This isn't pie baking, so your basic red science is rather simple. three assembling machines (or 1 player), some iron and copper plates, and we are done. Your goal at this stage is to get some proper power, upgrade ore production, and reach green science (in roughly that order). You can ignore belts for now as your first few hours will likely involve alot of hand-feeding (optional: get even distribution mod). The main part of the technology tree order will look something like this:

1. Automation (electrical ore crushers are very nice, and assembling machines are vital in Factorio)
2. Wood processing 2 (any bonuses on fuel are good)
3. Green algae processing (this is what we were looking for! **Milestone!**)
4. Washing, Basic chemistry, sulfur processing (you can get your first sulfur prepped at this point)
5. Fluid control, water treatment, slag processing (this is your actual ore generation. Still just the start, but already 2x better than what you have right now. **Milestone!**)
6. Fluid control, steel, mechanical refining, coal processing, basic solder casting, electronics, basic logistics, logistics, long inserters (QoL), near inserters (QoL), electrochemics lab, single-use ATMOS set (green science... **Milestone!**)

**HINT:** Once you have warehouses (or silos) researched (a bit of a side project in terms of technology), you will be able to set up some really compact direct insertion assembling chains where you can drop the base metals into the silo, and the ring of assemblers around it will pick what they need, craft the intermediates, and pass them on to the next assembler (that uses said intermediate), with the final product being dropped back in the silo. This leads to a compact 0 belt design which works perfectly for those first few hours.

### Power Generation for Red

In the beginning, your only power options are 1: the windmills, and 2: foraging for cellulose fiber. You should place all your windmills, and always be foraging for cellulose fiber. Your first few assembler machines can be used to refine the fiber into wood pellets, which can be burned to charcoal as soon as you have researched wood processing 2 (aka: quite early). The only time your buildings should be burning cellulose is in the beginning when you dont have a crafting machine to refine the fiber into pellets (dont bother refining it by hand - you get more energy per second just hand-crafting the fiber).

Now - on to actual fuel production that doesnt involve hand crafting: green algae. You have 2 options:

1. Tier 1 green algae (with brown algae byproducts)
2. Tier 2 green algae (without brown algae byproducts, but with mineralized water requirement)

Interestingly enough both require roughly the same amount of power, though this includes the 3 electrolysers for crushed stone in case of T2. Once you move into green science and basic chemistry 2 and start producing mineralized water as a byproduct, T2 becomes the uncontested winner (at least within the algae power).

Optionally, you could wait a bit and go straight into T2 green algae. It just makes things easier. Plus the fact that T2 green algae requires ~3x less algae plants (which are huge), means that you spend less time crafting more landfill and more time progressing through the tech tree.

You could also try to aim for 4 - 6 T2 algae plants for the power generation. This requires 4-6 boilers & 8-12 steam engines, and is enough to power 12-16 electrolysers with necessary overhead.

**NOTE:** in terms of storage and transportation, it's recommended to store your fuel and transporting it in wooden blocks (and burning them to charcoal on site). This just makes sense as 1 wooden brick makes 5 charcoal, so you require 5x as much space and belt speed to store/transfer the same amount of fuel power.

### Ore generation for Red

Your first ore generation methods will be extremely inefficient, and as such it is highly recommended to get away from them as soon as possible. Don't bother with building a large production facility until you are well into green science territory, and don't go full mega scale until late-game unless you know what you are doing.

The absolutely first ore generation will be through mineralized water, and as much of the metal production as you can should go towards research. From the three charts above you can see that direct smelting of stiratite and saphirite is the way to go. Sorting them to iron and copper ores will actually produce LESS plates, so should be avoided. The only reason to sort at this stage of the game would be to sort stiratite in order to get just a tiny bit more iron production, since copper isn't quite useful in the early game and you will likely stockpile quite a bit.

**NOTE:** crushers -> you will quite early on be able to upgrade to electrical crushers (instead of burner ones). Make that upgrade and don't look back. The graphs show how much of your hand-crafting time (30%) will be spent making cellulose fiber for fuel in the beginning (so again - if you aren't crafting anything, craft cellulose fiber), but the moment you can switch to electrical you should.

After setting up your ore generation and have crafted the first 10 red science, as mentioned above, put it in the lab and research Automation.

### Landfill options for Red

To expand your island you need landfill. In the beginning your only option for more landfill is to divert some of the slag away from the ores and into producing landfill. Keep in mind that you end up with 0.2 landfill per second from 4 electrolysers, which is enough to make 0.12 metal plates through mineralized water or 0.24 metal plates from slag slurry. So if you require 1k landfill to expand, that is roughly 270 to 530 red science packs worth of research that you could have done instead. It is for this reason that it's recommended to expand only after you have a stable initial base + alternate landfill options available (aka: once you are in green science).

Washing becomes available rather early on, and is much better energy wise (each washing plant requires 1/3 the power that an electrolyser does), while being roughly comparable in terms of space. It should also be relatively simple to set up a few lines of 5 plants with a clarifier shared between every 2 lines and a dedicated landfill assembler per line. It's recommended to get at least 4 lines set up somewhere, and just leaving them running. Landfill is something you will be needing more of for quite a while.

There is also geodes and stuff but we'll cover that at green science.

## Preface:

This will be a long guide, so lets get some things out of the way:

* ~~This is a guide to Seablock. The mod can be found on the mod page here, a 'pack' mod can be found here. For the best experience it is **highly** recommended to download it directly as a zip pack with all the correct mods from the homepage here.~~ [[See: Guides:Installation instead]]
* The basis of Seablock is a modified Bob & Angel pack, so expect around 10x the amount of items, recipes, and buildings as you would in base Factorio. The key difference between a regular B&A playthough and Seablock being that there are no ore patches and even land itself is at a premium - you start on a single block of land that you must expand. Nearly everything comes from water, and that includes the ores. On the positive note, there is very little interaction with biters, exclusively in the form of worms that you must snipe from afar and no actual nests. This make the game more like peaceful mode, where the only worry you have is to expand the factory.
* Any talk of tiers will most often be about recipe tiers, not building tiers. For example T1 and T2 green algae is for algae from water recipe and algae from mineralized water and carbon dioxide recipe; NOT! about T1 algae farm building and T2 algae farm building.
* I will specifically not be giving any blueprints or actual in-game screenshots so as to allow for a more interesting game. What I will be providing is a general flow through the technology tree that I recommend, along with some recipe charts that you can use as a basis for your builds.
* The images were getting a bit big, so I downscaled them so as to keep reddit from crashing (too much). To get the full images plus the original graph file go here. You can either have them as an image collection to use as a guide during play, or open up the graph and edit the flow values so as to better design your factory. The graph was made in Foreman 2.0 (which is what I spent the last 2 months working on instead of doing a seablock run as I originally planned). The app is still in its development phase, so there may (and are) be bugs in it (not of the biter variety - I removed those quite early on).

## First steps

Managing to crash-land on a single block of land takes some skill, diving for the wreckage of your spaceship to recover at least some materials before depositing them on a rock and promptly forgetting how to swim takes a bit more. Or did you know how to swim in the first place? Perhaps it was the adrenaline...

Well - time to get started. Grab the extra resources from the rock, place some land around you, attach some windmills, and think to yourself - what now?

**Step 0**: if you are still not at green science and arent hand-crafting something important (such as buildings), queue up a few hundred cellulose fiber forage crafts. These are your fuel, and until you get some stable power generation going you will effectively be the fuel provider for your factory. If you feel like setting 1k of these to craft and just AFKing until thats done... thats all up to you.

In terms of starting power, place **all** your windmills! these are basically free power without worrying about providing fuel, so until you are into green science and have automated (with a sufficient safety margin) charcoal power dont even think about removing them.

**Start by following the science tutorial**. It should be pretty simple - open up the research tree and see that your only option is to get your hands on some crushed stiratite. This is done simply by building 1 electrolyser, 2 flare stacks (to get rid of oxygen and hydrogen), 1 water pump, 1 ore crusher, 1 liquefier and 1 crystallizer. Set your electrolyser to dirty water electrolysis, connect the flare stacks to the outputs, water pump to the input, get some power, and watch your first slag be produced.

You have enough materials to set up 4 electrolysers right from the start, so once you know how to connect your 1st electrolyser just add in 3 more (do remember to connect the outputs together so you can use just the 2 flare stacks for all 4 electrolysers). This should speed things up for the first few hours of seablock which can get a bit repetitive (as you wait for ores to accumulate).

Slag is one of those pre-pre-ore ores - you start from it (or from crystals, we will get to that), convert it to the 6 pre-ores (stiratite is one of them), which can later be converted to actual ores (such as iron), which will be converted into various metals.

For now, drop your slag into a crusher to convert it to crushed stone, then put down a liquefier (with water input) and set it to produce mineralized water, which will go into the crystallizer to generate pre-ores like stiratite. Once you get a few of those, you can crush them in the crusher and get your first tech researched!

Step 2 for research (brown algae) is super quick now, as you can just craft an algae farm, connect water, set T1 green algae generation, and you are done.

Step 3... your base T1 (brown) circuits. Not as difficult as it may seem at first - just take it one step at a time. Iron and copper can now be smelted from crushed saphirite and stiratite (the generation of which you have already accomplished), copper coils is just a single step away from copper, and wooden boards can be made through the T1 paper recipe (brown algae => alginic acid => cellulose pulp (with added cellulose fiber) => paper => wooden boards). We will get to full circuit building later on, so if you skip ahead you will find some graphs for it.

Finally Step 4 will require you to build your first lab - once again, take it step by step. Pretty standard iron + copper conversions, just got to have some T1 circuits, which you should have on hand anyway.

And finally we get to red science! What to do? Tell you what - lets make a list:

1. get some ores.
2. get some science.
3. make a rocket.

For now, lets focus on the first 2.

## Ore generation

[[TODO: Fandom image here]] https://i.redd.it/6wulhw2i67x71.png link text= Direct smelting (left), sorting (middle), stiratite only sorting (right)

Your first ore generation methods will be extremely inefficient, and as such it is highly recommended to get away from them as soon as possible. Dont bother with building a large production facility until you are well into green science territory, and dont go full mega scale until late-game unless you know what you are doing.

The absolutely first ore generation will be through mineralized water, and as much of the metal production as you can should go towards research. From the three charts above you can see that direct smelting of stiratite and saphirite is the way to go. Sorting them to iron and copper ores will actually produce LESS plates, so should be avoided. The only reason to sort at this stage of the game would be to sort stiratite in order to get just a tiny bit more iron production, since copper isnt quite useful in the early game and you will likely stockpile quite a bit.

**NOTE:** crushers -> you will quite early on be able to upgrade to electrical crushers (instead of burner ones). Make that upgrade and dont look back. I set up the graphs to show how much of your hand-crafting time (30%) will be spent making cellulose fiber for fuel in the beginning (so yea - if you arent crafting anything, craft cellulose fiber), but the moment you can switch to electrical you should.

**NOTE:** pipe options -> you really only have 2; copper pipes or stone pipes. Copper pipes are popular due to the stockpiles of copper you tend to get in the beginning, while stone pipes (my personal preference) are more efficient. In fact based on slag used, stone pipes come out to be around 5x cheaper than copper pipes.

## Advanced Ore generation

[[TODO: Fandom image here]] https://i.redd.it/gt8i5qjx67x71.png link text=First sulfur (1), T1 electrolyser mineral sludge (2), T2 electrolyser mineral sludge (3), geode mineral sludge (4).

You will start by getting some sulfur through washing (see science below for progression), after which your ore production will be sulfur positive as long as you stick to coal filters and crush all geodes (4). As soon as you have the science (and buildings) for it, you should switch from mineralized water (1) to mineral sludge (2), as it will double your production. Then once you have T2 unlocked (green science, see progression), you should switch to the electrode based mineral sludge production (3). This will once again double your production (per electrolyser).

**Key note** here: initial power will most likely depend on mineralized water, which you will struggle with in red science due to having to balance between slag that goes towards metal plates, or slag that goes towards mineralized water (for power). Once you get your first green science, that will be a thing of the past due to excess production of mineralized sludge. As you can see from the chart 4 electrolysers produce enough mineralized water to run almost 6 T2 green algae plants (see power), which produce enough power to power 16 electrolysers + all the extra buildings with some left over.

**Geodes:** Once you are well into green science geodes becomes available and is (at least personally) the preferred way of generating mineral sludge. It is also quite easy to set up generation of crystal sludge which is necessary for later ore production, so at least some geode processing is necessary no matter what. There are many different ways to set this up, though care must be taken to ensure the design can in fact handle the 6 (random) geode outputs of the washing process. My personal recommendation would be to have long inserters & more inserters researched, which would enable you to fit 5 or 6 washing plants around a single warehouse, with enough space to put 6 ore crushers and 2 liquifiers around it as well. With careful placement of inserters you can have all the geodes from washing plants go into the warehouse, out to the crushers, back to the warehouse, and out to the liquefiers without a single belt being necessary. Alternatively you can do the same with 2 warehouses (washing plants into warehouse 1, inserters move from warehouse 1 to warehouse 2, and then the crushers + liquefiers are positioned around warehouse 2).

**Direct ore sorting:** Direct ore sorting is the best (and some say only) option for metallic ore production once past the early stage of seablock. Due to not having to juggle multiple outputs as you would with regular sorting, the minor 'waste' of materials to make catalysts is just not worth thinking about (besides planning where to get said extra materials). Once geodes have been conquered, catalysts (both mineral and crystal) can be made. In the green science phase you are mostly interested in mineral catalysts (as those are necessary to directly sort for the base 4 metals - namely iron, copper, tin and lead), though once aluminum becomes a necessity you will need to produce crystal catalysts. Filtering for crystal slurry requires purified water instead of mineralized, so you will need to place extra hydro plants plants and expect more crushed stone production. Other than that, its quite similar to mineralized sludge filtering you would already be doing.

**Chunks (washing):** aluminum (and higher tier metals) start to require further processing of base ores, such as using flotation cells to turn them from crushed ores to chunks. This produces geodes (though unfortunately not enough to produce the required crystal catalysts) which can be belted back to the geode processing facilities, along with waste water that can be filtered or just voided (for now). The recommendation is to filter them - its really not that difficult (just throw in a hydro plant to process the waste water, use/void the mineralized water/purified water/salt water, and store the resulting items in a chest).

## Science

[[TODO: Fandom image here]] https://.redd.it/1bpz0s86a7x71.png link text=Basic red science (left), and green science (right)

This isnt pie baking, so your basic red science is rather simple. three assemblers (or 1 player), some iron and copper plates, and we are done. Your goal at this stage is to get some proper power, upgrade ore production, and reach green science (in roughly that order). You can ignore belts for now as your first few hours will likely involve alot of hand-feeding (hint: get even distribution mod). The technology order will look something like this:

1. Automation (electrical ore crushers are very nice, and assemblers are vital in factorio)
2. Wood processing 2 (any bonuses on fuel are good)
3. Green algae processing (this is what we were looking for! **Milestone!**)
4. Washing, Basic chemistry, sulfur processing (you can get your first sulfur prepped at this point)
5. Fluid control, water treatment, slag processing (this is your actual ore generation. Still just the start, but already 2x better than what you have right now. **Milestone!**)
6. Fluid control, steel, mechanical refining, coal processing, basic solder casting, electronics, basic logistics, logistics, long inserters (QoL), near inserters (QoL), electrochemics lab, single-use ATMOS set (green science... **Milestone!**)
7. Basic chemistry 2 (fast dirty water electrolysis means 2x slag production from your electrolysers, AND enough mineralized water production for T2 green algae without having to take slag away from your ore production. **Milestone!**)
8. After this? you can aim towards geodes, push forward in metallurgy, or expand your factory to at least 20 electrolysers. All up to you!

Green science (step 7 and above) requires a bit more than red science, including all 4 base metals and the T1 circuits. Mechanical refining (step 6) would have given you the recipes to make the metal plates, and you have already learned to make T1 circuits.

**HINT:** Once you have warehouses (or silos) researched (a bit of a side project in terms of technology), you will be able to set up some really compact direct insertion assembling chains where you can drop the base metals into the silo, and the ring of assemblers around it will pick what they need, craft the intermediates, and pass them on to the next assembler (that uses said intermediate), with the final product being dropped back in the silo. This leads to a compact 0 belt design which works perfectly for those first few hours.

## Power Generation

[[TODO: Fandom image here]] https://i.redd.it/sxbtslc9a7x71.png link text=T1 green algae to charcoal (left) and T2 green algae to charcoal (right)

In the beginning, your only power options are 1: the windmills, and 2: foraging for cellulose fiber. You should place all your windmills, and always be foraging for cellulose fiber. Your first few assembler machines can be used to refine the fiber into wood pellets, which can be burned to charcoal as soon as you have researched wood processing 2 (aka: quite early). The only time your buildings should be burning cellulose is in the beginning when you dont have a crafting machine to refine the fiber into pellets (dont bother refining it by hand - you get more energy per second just hand-crafting the fiber).

Now - on to actual fuel production that doesnt involve hand crafting: green algae. You have 2 options:

1. Tier 1 green algae (with brown algae byproducts)
2. Tier 2 green algae (without brown algae byproducts, but with mineralized water requirement)

Interestingly enough both require roughly the same amount of power, though this includes the 3 electrolysers for crushed stone in case of T2. Once you move into green science and basic chemistry 2 and start producing mineralized water as a byproduct, T2 becomes the uncontested winner (at least within the algae power).

Personally, I wait a bit and go straight into T2 green algae. It just makes things easier. Plus the fact that T2 green algae requires ~3x less algae plants (which are huge), means that you spend less time crafting more landfill and more time progressing through the tech tree.

I try to aim for 4 - 6 T2 algae plants for the power generation. This requires 4-6 boilers & 8-12 steam engines, and is enough to power 12-16 electrolysers with necessary overhead.

**NOTE:** in terms of storage and transportation, I recommend storing your fuel and transporting it in wooden blocks (and burning them to charcoal on site). This just makes sense as 1 wooden brick makes 5 charcoal, so you require 5x as much space and belt speed to store/transfer the same amount of fuel power.

## Power Generation (charcoal processing)

[[TODO: Fandom image here]] https://i.redd.it/uqq3edmaa7x71.png link text=Power production from a single T2 green algae production (in T1 algae farm)

Just to clarify on the power production side of things: Everything here starts from the basis of '1 T2 green algae farm' to see how much power is produced (keep in mind that some power is necessary for the assembling machines, but it is typically 0.1MW/assembler).

1. Using the cellulose fiber directly produces 1.26MW of power
2. Converting to wooden pellets produces 1.71MW of power
3. Burning to charcoal produces 2.07MW of power
4. Converting to charcoal pellets produces 2.43MW of power
5. Processing to solid fuel with hydrogen produces 6.12MW of power (keep in mind that it requires 4.5 electrolysis T2 to keep up with 1 T2 green algae farm, though this does mean that with 20 electrolysers you can get 14.8MW of extra power just from NOT voiding your hydrogen)

**NOTE:** In case you were wondering about the different tiers of boilers & steam engines: you dont actually get more power by using higher tiers, you just require less boilers / steam engines in order to get the same amount of power. So in the end you will still consume the same amount of fuel, just in a smaller footprint.

## Landfill options

[[TODO: Fandom image here]] https://i.redd.it/ho3usoefa7x71.png link text=Electrolysers (left), Washing (middle), Geodes (right)

In the beginning your only option for more landfill is to divert some of the slag away from the ores and into producing landfill. Keep in mind that you end up with 0.2 landfill per second from 4 electrolisers, which is enough to make 0.12 metal plates through mineralized water or 0.24 metal plates from slag slurry. So if you require 1k landfill to expand, that is roughly 270 to 530 red science packs worth of research that you could have done instead. It is for this reason that I recommend expanding only after you have a stable initial base + alternate landfill options available (aka: once you are in green science).

Washing becomes available rather early on, and is much better energy wise (each washing plant requires 1/3 the power that an electrolyser does), while being roughly comparable in terms of space. It should also be relatively simple to set up a few lines of 5 plants with a clarifier shared between every 2 lines and a dedicated landfill assembler per line. Personally I recommend getting at least 4 lines set up somewhere, and just leaving them running. Landfill is something you will be needing more of for quite a while.

Finally you can produce quite insane quantities of landfill once you get to geodes by just converting all crushed stone to landfill and just stockpiling the crystal dust in a warehouse (shooting it once its full), though to be honest just going with washing is a simpler alternative, that although being 2x as slow (based on similar number of buildings & power), doesnt require convoluted planning to handle 6 different outputs as geodes does.

## Circuits

[[TODO: Fandom image here]] https://i.redd.it/x4mvgfwga7x71.png link text=T1 circuits (left) and T2 circuits (right)

The basic T1 circuits are so simple that you are required to make them prior to even getting to red science. Still, the crafting chart can be found above. Note that once growing wood is an option transferring to the wood -> wooden board process (and abandoning algae along with any paper recipes) is the superior approach.

The T2 circuits however up the difficulty by requiring you to have all 4 base metals, along with the T1 circuits. On the positive note however is that you dont really need all that many green circuits until you get further into green science as green science itself only requires basic T1 circuits; so your real sink for T2 circuits is likely to be the various newly researched buildings that you wish to build (filter inserters, T2 assemblers, most T2 buildings).

If you havent already researched electronic assembly machines, it would be a good idea to do so prior to planning your T2 circuits design as 2x2 sized assemblers are much better to work with that 3x3 size.

**NOTE:** Personally I recommend building just a very temporary T1 / T2 circuits factory to make a few stacks of T1/T2 circuits before getting rid of it. Once you have metallurgy researched further you will have much better options for solder along with the other metals (both plates and cables), so once you have T2 metallurgy for iron, copper and tin (along with T1 solder), then you can plan for a more long-term circuits factory.

## Metallurgy

### Metallurgy (Red science)

[[TODO: Fandom image here]] https://i.redd.it/sw8pca9ja7x71.png link text=direct smelting (1), single sorting (2), T1 metallurgy (3), iron-only production (4)

At the very start you will not have many options. As talked about before, there is no point in sorting ores when you are first starting out, with the only 'if-you-must' option being to sort the stiratite so as to get more iron. Once you get to mineral sludge, you get access to a few options.

1. Continue direct smelting. There is nothing particularly wrong with this approach, though you do start loosing out on plates/sec due to the ability to better recycle slag (directly to mineral sludge instead of crushing it for mineralized water).
2. Begin sorting. Due to the extremely low throughput you can get by with just a single sorter that you manually reconfigure whenever you need a specific type of ore. A single sorter can easily handle 12 electrolysis T1 (or 6 electrolysis T2), so until you get a bit of expansion going you should be alright.
3. Research into metallurgy T1, and start upon the molten path. This nets you around 40% more plates, and as a bonus doesnt require as much space as you might fear due to the blast furnace & induction furnace being able to handle quite large loads before you need more than 1 (20 electrolysis T2 can still be handled). You just need to add a couple more casting machines (which are small enough that you can easily fit 2 per furnace).
4. As a final option provided here, you can make use of the ferrous mixing in order to get a full iron output without any copper. Even though it requires three different base ores, you can actually make do with just a single one as long as you are willing to manually change between the three to balance them out (not too bad in the beginning when you are more or less in the the 'pre-automation' zone where any free resources should be spent on tech rather than quality of life).

### Metallurgy (steel)

[[TODO: Fandom image here]] https://i.redd.it/t5tjfuqka7x71.png link text=

Making steel during the red science phase is something that should be avoided at all costs. The amount of ore required to make a single plate of steel is 2x as much as even the minimal metallurgical process, which is available during the green science phase. A slight step up to T2 iron metallurgy decreases the cost by 1.5x more (for a total of 3x efficiency). Any further upgrades are locked behind blue science though.

### Metallurgy (green science)

[[TODO: Fandom image here]] https://i.redd.it/pesmcl21hnx71.png link text=3x iron (1), 3x copper (2), 3x tin (3), 3x lead (4), 2x tinned wire (5), 3x solder (6), 1x aluminum (7), 1x silicon (8), 1x silver (9)

Once in green science, your options for metallurgy and getting more for less finally opens up. While T3 is locked far away, T2 for the base 4 metals is rather simple and with little complications. In most cases T1 will offer 33% boost over non-metallurgy alternatives (if any), T2 will offer 50% bonus production, with T3 offering another 50%. Coils add an extra boost as long as you use coolant, but the real reason to use coils over direct casting is the extra productivity modules you can fit in the process. Since green science offers neither coolant nor modules, using coils is not necessary in most cases (#5 being the exception).

Lets go over each metallurgy group individually:

1. Iron, as the most basic metal is the simplest. As with most of the others it is recommended to use T1 metallurgy when you have resources available to craft your first metallurgy buildings, and enough space available to place them.
2. Copper is much like iron, though it does have an additional oxygen requirement at T2. Electrolysers produce enough extra oxygen that this isnt a problem.
3. Tin is the first metal that cant be directly smelted and must be processed through metallurgy (all the others are much the same). Other than that, it is basically identical to iron.
4. Lead is your first true byproduct producing metallurgy process with its sulfur dioxide gas production. This could be converted to sulfuric acid, but due to us getting enough sulfur through the base ore production we can easily just void it in a flare stack and ignore it.
5. Tinned copper wire. This is one of the largest savings by shifting to metallurgy (percent wise - you will likely save more on the slight increase due to iron than here simply due to the amount of iron you will require), and is the only use of the strand casting machine prior to blue science (well, you can make regular copper wire, but it doesnt grant any efficiency bonus, so why bother). As you can see using strand casting will increase the efficiency by 3.6x! That is huge! This is reason #1 why you should hold off on bulk circuit production until metallurgy.
6. Solder. This is the second reason to hold off on circuit production. Shifting to molten solder is a 1.5x boost, while switching to a full molten solder from ingots (instead of plates) is a 3x (overall) boost while being smaller and simpler (one of the rare few cases of this in seablock).
7. Aluminum. Assuming you have started direct sorting for metallic ores, this would be the first need for crystal catalysts along with the chunking of the base ores. The actual metallurgy isnt anything too complicated, though it does require sodium hydroxide which is relatively easy to get. You can either use a desalination plant or the standard hydro plant to get the necessary salt water for the electrolysers, and just void the resultant gases.
8. Silicon. Your primary use for it at this point would be for T2 circuits, which we wont get into in this part of the guide. Your secondary use for it would be the glass and concrete recipes which require silicon powder and which are used for higher tier buildings. Its a relatively simple production chain, just needs some nitrogen.
9. Silver. The only use for silver during the green science era is for T2 circuits. It is also a simple metallurgy process, quite unlike the later silver/gold metallurgy lines.

**Liquids/Gases:** I will cover the typical liquids/gases that you should be transporting around at a later date. Most of them arent too difficult to get.

**NOTE:** It is your choice on how to handle coal + carbon. You can deliver it as wooden bricks to be converted on site, you can burn them to coal prior to entry into your dedicated metallurgy area, you can craft the necessary carbon near the furnaces that need them, or once again create them in bulk at the entrance to your dedicated metallurgy area. Keep in mind that most blast furnaces require fuel (charcoal in this case), but while it will be better to use solid fuel or other alternatives (when they become available) instead of charcoal, the amount of fuel actually used makes it not really worth it. Do be aware that carbon is a fuel, so furnaces will happily grab it instead of charcoal which is in fact inefficient and should be avoided. If you have a 1/2 & 1/2 line of both snaking its way, make sure to prime the furnaces with the fuel type (charcoal) you want them to use and make sure there is always fuel available for them on the line.

## Bio-science and bio-fuel

This part of the guide can be found [[here]](https://www.reddit.com/r/Seablock/comments/qmxsay/seablock\_bioguide/). [[TODO: New Guide page]]

## Liquids & Gasses

This will be the next part of the guide. I will focus on the various liquids & gasses that are required throughout the seablock run (base ones, not the specialized ones like within oil), along with their methods of production. This will include the common ones like oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, chlorine, etc; and also the acids necessary for ore processing.