Crank Up the Heat!

Time for another quick guide to Little Rocket Lab’s early game! Today, we’re diving into Level 2 Furnaces and how to keep them fueled with coal and ore like a pro.

Don’t forget, you can play Little Rocket Lab right now by joining the Playtest!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2451100/Little_Rocket_Lab/

No More Shoveling!

With your small motor line chugging away, it’s time to upgrade your factory and kick your automation game into high gear. And how do we do that?

Say hello to Level 2 Furnaces! These beauties let you feed in both ore and coal via conveyor belts, which means no more running around manually inputting coal.

You’ll want at least three furnaces each for both iron and copper bar production. And unless you fancy setting up mini-factories all over town, that means grouping them together in one sleek, central spot.

All that in one place?!

We get it. Lining up multiple furnaces with ore and coal inputs can look a bit... intense. You’re imagining criss-crossing belts, overlapping lines, chaos at every turn. But don’t panic! We’ve got a simple setup to get you going without the headache.

You’ve already met your new best friend, the underpass, but now it’s time to add splitters to your repertoire (aka robot arms for the old-school crowd).

First up: coal. Bring it on separate lines, and use underpasses to leave a gap in your layout, trust us, you’ll need it.

Pro tip: underpasses can’t feed machines directly, so leave room for at least one conveyor to drop off the goods.

Next, run your copper belt through that lovely gap. Nice and tidy. But wait! It’s only feeding the last furnace in the row. Not ideal.

Enter: Splitters

Add two splitters to pull from the copper belt and distribute the goods evenly to all three furnaces. One belt, three machines, no problem.

Just remember: like underpasses, splitters also need a bit of room —they drop items onto a belt, which then carries them into the furnace. So don’t cram them too close!

To ensure that our splitters aren’t stealing too many of the resources, we need to configure them!

Start by setting the first splitter to grab every third item, this lets two copper ore cruise past it on the main belt. Then, set the second splitter to grab every second item. That way, one copper ore gets through each time for the final furnace.

With that setup, your ore gets split evenly between all three furnaces, no bottlenecks, and no sudden lack of copper on one of your production lines.

From here, go wild. See how far you can push your setup, add more furnaces, spin off extra production lines, or go push yourself to limit and optimise every machine down the line.

Here’s a little extra set up we made earlier!

Most importantly: have fun, and don’t forget to share your creations with us! We love seeing your factory masterpieces and mad hat creations!

Teenage Astronauts and No More Robots xoxo