Resonurgy — your first factory, and the five things that stall it

Resonurgy is a factory builder where the factory has two kinds of plumbing. Ordinary items move on belts and through inserters; the principles you dissolve out of matter move through a separate network of conduits, and the advanced chains need both at once. On top of that, running the plant leaves Dissonance in the ground around it, so growing the factory is also a containment problem.

It entered Early Access on 13 October 2026 — one week old at the time of writing — which is why there is almost nothing published about it. This page is the first-factory guide: the order to build things in, and the five mechanics that stop a new player's line dead.

What Resonurgy is

The loop the store page describes is literal: you start with nothing, pick ore up by hand, and the first machines you raise are fed by hand too. Nothing is given to you at the start — no starting production, no stocked chests.

The five systems that decide your first hours

Everything else in the game is logistics on top of these.

Build order: from hand-gathered ore to a fed line

1. Gather ore by hand. Resist the urge to explore far on the first trip; you are looking for the deposits you will build on, not for a scenic view.
2. Scan what you find with the resonator. Scanning reveals composition and adds codex entries — and codex knowledge is what tells you which properties can be extracted from which objects. A deposit you never scanned is a deposit you cannot research from.
3. Build the Nexus. This is the transition point from workshop to factory.
4. Place drills on deposits, then conveyors and inserters. Items physically travel, so direction matters: an inserter or a belt facing the wrong way is indistinguishable from a broken recipe.
5. Smelt and assemble. Smelters and assembly machines are where the first real product chains come from. The Assembler is also where components are made — the Ferrite Press included, along with its parts.
6. Feed a research bench — with power. Research media are items. They have to be produced and delivered, and the bench has to be inside power coverage. This is the single most common stall.
7. Build the first production line you can leave alone, then a second one, and only then expand outward. A wide factory with hungry machines is slower than a small one that runs.
8. Contain Dissonance before you scale the unstable recipes, not after.

Power reaches only as far as its coverage

Power in Resonurgy is coverage-based, and coverage does not follow your belts. When players report a machine that will not run despite being visibly connected, the answer from the developer is the same each time: you need a Resonance Pylon to expand the power coverage area for the base.

Treat pylons as part of the production line, not as decoration you add later:

• Place the pylon first when you open a new production pocket, and put the machines inside it.
• A pylon that barely reaches the far end of a line is a line that browns out as you add machines.
• The audio cue for trouble is in the game's own asset set — a brownout sound — so if you hear a power dip, something is on the edge of coverage.

Research is a product, not a menu

Three separate things have to be true before a technology unlocks:

1. The right materials were studied. Scanning feeds the codex; the codex feeds research.
2. Research media exist as items and were delivered to the bench. If your media line is stalled, the bench is idle, however much you researched on paper.
3. The bench has power. An unpowered bench accepts nothing.

Then comes the part that surprises people: research is assembled as a resonance circuit. The connections are directed — an edge pointing the wrong way is a wrong answer — and each node has a specific role. When you think the circuit is complete you fire a calibration pulse and correct whatever it flags.

Two keys worth learning on day one: T opens the technology tree, C opens the codex. The codex is the in-game reference for every mechanism, item and principle, and several machines ship without a description in the inventory — the developer's own answer to that complaint is that the codex is where the description lives.

Two logistics networks, not one

This is the difference between Resonurgy and a straight belt game, and it is worth designing for from the first hour:

• Items move on conveyors and through inserters and belt loaders. They are physical and visible; you can follow a single item through the whole factory.
• Principles are extracted by dissolving objects, then purified, stored in specialised vessels, and transported through a separate network of conduits.

Ordinary resources carry an object's physical form. Principles carry its unusual properties. Advanced production needs both systems fed at the same machine, which means the two networks have to arrive at the same place — plan the junction deliberately, because retrofitting conduits into a dense belt block is the expensive version of that decision.

Practical rules:

• Keep the conduit run on the outside of a production block and the belts on the inside.
• Build the principle storage next to the machine that consumes it, not next to the machines that extract it.
• When a chain stalls, check which of the two networks is empty before touching recipes.

Machine input limits — the fix that tells you what the old problem was

Through 0.1.8 and 0.1.9 the developer rebuilt how machines accept input, and the patch notes describe the trap exactly.

0.1.8 (14 Oct) added a Limit button under the input slots of recipe machines: choose how many crafts' worth of ingredients inserters and belt loaders may load — 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 or 20. The example in the notes: a recipe that takes 4 plates set to ×5 holds at most 20 plates, and the rest stays available for other machines. Hand-loading still bypasses the limit, and the setting is carried when you copy a machine's settings.

0.1.9 (17 Oct) went further: inserters, belt loaders, drills and golems now stop once a machine holds a sensible stock, so one machine can no longer hoard a whole belt while the next one starves. Under the input slots you choose Auto (the default), your own level, or No limit. It applies to recipe machines, research benches, generators, turrets and rift machines; existing machines switch to Auto on load and keep what they already hold.

The consequence for a new player: if you are on 0.1.9, a starving line is far more likely to be a routing or power problem than an input-limit problem. If you are on an older build, set the limit on any machine that sits early on a shared belt.

Dissonance: the bill for fast production

Unstable processes generate Dissonance, and it spreads across the surrounding land and changes it. Sources can be located, isolated and purified. The design tension the store page states plainly is that the fastest production method is not always the safest one — so plan the purification capacity as part of the factory, and place anything unstable where you can afford to quarantine it.

Controls and settings worth knowing on day one

Two quality-of-life facts from the patches: recipe search boxes no longer move your character when you type (0.1.8), and the first steps guide now points at the map's own markers and named places (also 0.1.8). If you are lost early, follow the guide's markers rather than wandering.

Known rough edges in 0.1.9

Named here because a new player will hit them and think they are doing something wrong:

• Tutorial progression stalls have been reported on the Steam forum. If the first steps guide stops advancing, check the codex and the tech tree rather than rebuilding your base.
• Several machines have no inventory description. The developer's answer is the codex (C), and they have said they will add descriptions where the UI allows.
• The research tree is restrictive early — a complaint that drew multi-post threads in the first week.
• Startup crashes on some AMD systems were acknowledged by the developer. 0.1.8 added a safe start: if the game crashes or hangs at startup, the next launch drops the graphics preset one step and pauses the animated menu background, and the menu tells you it did.
• The demo is 20–30 minutes by design — it exists to check whether the game runs acceptably on your machine, not to be a slice you can play indefinitely.
• Co-op needs both players on the same build. After 0.1.9, a 0.1.8 client cannot join.

What this guide does not have yet

Resonurgy is a week old and the game ships its data in packed archives that standard tools cannot read, so the numbers that make a guide like this site's other build guides useful are not yet published anywhere — including here. Specifically missing:

• building and machine costs, and build times
• ratios for the early chains (ore → ingot → component)
• belt, inserter and drill rates, and the power draw of each machine
• the tech tree order and what each research actually unlocks
• building footprints and power coverage radius in tiles

Everything above this section is drawn from the store page, the 0.1.8 and 0.1.9 patch notes and the developer's own replies on the Steam forum. Where a number was not stated by a source, this page does not state one.

Sources

• https://store.steampowered.com/app/5011960/Resonurgy/ — description, feature list, EA FAQ, price, languages (read 20 Oct 2026)
• https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/5011960 — Resonurgy — Update 0.1.8 (14 Oct 2026) and Update 0.1.9 (17 Oct 2026), via the Steam News API for app 5011960
• Steam Community, Resonurgy General Discussions — developer replies on power coverage and the Resonance Pylon; on golems and the Golem Station; on the Ferrite Press being made in the Assembler; on missing machine descriptions and the Codex; on demo length; on combat being optional and still in development
• https://steamdb.info/app/5102460/info — demo app 5102460 (parent 5011960): same developer, Windows, Godot; demo store release 3 Sep 2026, record last updated 8 Oct 2026. It lists no build version, so the 0.1.9 build referenced here comes from the patch notes above

Written for Resonurgy 0.1.9 (Early Access), 20 October 2026.