Nauvis: The Starting Planet

The home planet and the only place in the base game. Every base-game ore, crude oil, uranium, and the biters whose attacks your pollution invites.

Nauvis is where every Factorio run begins, and in the base game it is the only place you ever play. You crash-land here with nothing, mine the first ore by hand, and grow a factory that has to feed its own science before it can do anything else. Nauvis holds all four mined solids (iron, copper, coal, and stone), crude oil as a fluid, and uranium for later nuclear power. It also holds the natives: biters, spitters, and worms, whose attacks are not random but a direct response to the pollution your factory pumps out. The whole base game is the problem of learning this one planet well enough to launch a rocket off it. In Space Age, Nauvis stays your industrial home; most players keep their largest factory here and ship other planets’ products back by rocket.

What you mine here

The four mined solids are iron ore, copper ore, coal, and stone. Smelting turns iron ore into iron plates, copper ore into copper plates, and stone into stone bricks. Steel is iron plates smelted a second time. Crude oil is the mined fluid, refined at an oil refinery into the fractions that become plastic, sulfur, lubricant, and fuel. Uranium ore comes later, mined with sulfuric acid, and feeds nuclear power. These raw materials sit at the bottom of every production chain on the planet, which is why the single most common expensive mistake is scaling assemblers while the front of the chain is ore-starved.

The factory itself

Nauvis is really a teacher for the factory. Every item has a recipe, every recipe a chain, and the game is feeding those chains at scale without bottlenecks. The practical structure most players settle on is a loose main bus: a few belts of iron, copper, green circuit, and steel running in one clear direction, branched off for each new build. You do not need a strict bus, but you do need a direction of flow, because the alternative is spaghetti you cannot expand. Leave far more room than you think you need.

Whatever footprint you think the starting base needs, double it. Your first factory grows like a tumor, and a cramped start forces the spaghetti that slows every later expansion.

The biters and your pollution

Nauvis natives come in three forms: biters (melee), spitters (ranged), and worms (stationary ranged turrets at nests). Biters come in four sizes, small to behemoth, and the size that spawns is set by the evolution factor. The crucial link is pollution. Your factory emits a pollution cloud, and biters only muster an aggressive attack when that cloud reaches a nest. Roughly every 1 to 10 minutes a mustered group attacks the source of the pollution. Reduce pollution, with efficiency modules, cleaner power, and the trees that absorb it, and you reduce attacks.

Evolution, which you can only pace

Evolution is a hidden number from 0 to 1 that controls how strong enemies get. It rises from three sources: time, total pollution produced, and spawner kills. The per-kill increase shrinks as evolution climbs, around 0.002 per spawner kill early and dropping to about 0.0005 near evolution 0.5. The takeaway is that pollution and time push evolution up no matter what, and clearing nests adds to it, so you cannot stop evolution, only manage its pace. Do not over-clear nests early. Clear what you must to claim ore and breathing room, not the whole map.

Launching off the planet

The base-game objective is to launch a rocket from a Rocket silo. Carrying a satellite, that launch yields space science packs, which feed only repeating infinite research like mining productivity and weapon damage. Beyond the launch, the base game becomes a sandbox, and the community goal becomes the megabase: science at very large scale, thousands per minute, built on beacons, modules, trains, and bot logistics. In Space Age the same launch becomes the doorway to the other planets, and Nauvis settles into its role as the factory you ship everything home to.