Captain Of Industry: 8 Beginner Tips

Captain Of Industry starts out fairly simple, but gets exponentially more complex with each new technology added to your growing settlement. In no time at all, you'll find yourself balancing new resource needs, fine-tuning your logistics, and developing new production lines from scratch, all while ensuring that your existing machinery stays well-maintained and your people stay healthy.

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It's a lot to keep track of, and a single thing falling out of place can cause your growth, expansion, and production to come grinding to a halt. Try these tips as you get the hang of the game.

This guide was written for the early access version of Captain Of Industry. The information below is subject to change as the game's development process continues.

Build Plenty Of Storage

One of the first bottlenecks that you'll run into is not having anywhere to put produced resources. Buildings can store a small quantity of the items they produce, but there's no way that your existing fleet of trucks will be able to transport everything before things start getting backed up.

Construct storage buildings for anything that you need to stockpile, ideally right by the buildings that produce or use them. Wood, Iron Ore, and Construction Parts are the big three, and once you start mining for Coal and producing liquid goods like Diesel and Crude Oil, you'll want extra storage for them as well.

Build multiple Food Markets attached to your Settlement to increase food storage, especially once you start building multiple Farms to feed your growing population.

Survival First, Efficiency Later

You're probably going to want to build the most efficient setup possible right from the start of the game, especially if you've played other production chain games like Factorio. That's commendable, and eventually you'll want your island to operate as a well-oiled machine, but you're going to have to work up to that point over the course of several in-game years.

At the start of the game, you won't have access to key features like Conveyor Belts, so you'll have to make do with what you have. Focus on building up your necessary infrastructure and keeping your people alive - you can always tear down and rebuild your designs later to make them better.

The Tools and Blueprints technologies let you create multi-building designs, and copy existing layouts from the map.

Go Bigger Than You Need

Industrialization is about production on an enormous scale; keep that idea in mind as you build. If one Oil Pump is good, three are better, so long as you have the storage and pipelines to make use of them.

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Don't just produce enough of something to meet your current needs - always plan to expand and grow, a lot. Start by focusing heavily on Construction Part production so that you can quickly build other structures, then use those resources to create new production chains and optimize old ones.

Follow Guide Objectives For Free Resources

Captain Of Industry is a sandbox game, meant to be played your way, but even after you've gotten a few starts under your belt it's worth following the guide objectives. Each one you complete earns you some free resources, which is especially useful early in the game when you're still getting all your industries up and running.

You can see your current guide objectives, and claim earned rewards, by clicking the trophy icon in the upper-left corner of the screen.

Pipes Block Trucks

We learned this one the hard way - be careful not to block your trucks' access to shore facilities like the Trading Dock! Diesel and Rubber production both produce Waste Water, which needs to be run off into the sea, and the Diesel then needs to be piped up to your Shipyard. It's likely that the necessary pipes will cut off some portion of the shore, so plan ahead, otherwise you'll have to demolish some pipes, move the Trading Dock, then put the pipes back into place.

Keep Wood Production On Pace

Wood is critical, since it's used in the production of Construction Parts, but it can be easy to let your starting Tree Harvester get to work and then forget about it. Once you've built a Vehicle Depot, it's a good idea to build a second or even third Harvester and trucks to support them, to keep up with your increasing demand for Wood.

If you haven't build a Unit Storage for Wood yet, now is the time.

Having extra Tree Harvesters means you'll be able to produce more Construction Parts, as well as burn more Charcoal while you're setting up your Coal Mines. In the worst-case scenario, you can always trade away the excess Wood.

Start Coal Mining Before You're Prompted

Speaking of Coal, it's a good idea to start mining it as soon as you have the technology to do so, even if the guide objective hasn't appeared yet. Mines produce Coal much more efficiently than Charcoal facilities, and won't burn through your Wood supplies, letting you focus more on Construction Parts production.

Lots of industries use Coal, so a large stockpile isn't a bad thing!

Like the other mineral resources on the map, there's no icon to indicate where to dig; you need to look for rocks of the appropriate color near mountains:

Ore

Color

Iron

Red

Limestone

White

Coal

Black

Copper

Green

Research Ramps And Terrain Leveling To Stay On Track

As you start digging into your map's hills, your Excavators and trucks will probably have a hard time with the rough terrain. To deal with this, you should research Terrain Leveling and Vehicle Ramps as soon as you can.

Designating an area to be leveled allows an Excavator to terraform it, while also mining any minerals there that happen to be in the radius of a Mine Tower. It may still need ramps to reach the areas it's meant to dig out, so if a project seems to be taking a while, it's worth pausing the game and coming up with a plan.

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