Are you confused on how to play Factory Grinder? Fear not, it's confusing and the earlygame will be refined as time goes on. Until that happens, this short tutorial will help you get started.
When you click New Game, you will be teleported into a 4km^2 world to gather resources and sell them for massive profits. Most of the world is covered in a forest, with some mountains dotted across. You spawn on a stone deposit, a low value resource that is easy to mine. A stone miner and conveyor belt is already provided, which provides money at a very slow pace. If you right click, you can place down a new stone miner. Position your cursor next to the conveyor belt and place a miner to allow the mined resources to get to the resource seller, the green machine. Note that stone miners can be placed anywhere, but will only produce stone when on top of a stone deposit. If you misplace the miner, you can hit X to remove the miner and get back the money. If you would like to remove the trees found around the map, press C while near a tree 5 times to cut it down.
Now that you can place down miners, you will eventually run out of space to place new miners. You can place down your own conveyor belts to automate stuff even further. Hit left mouse button to create a conveyor. If you hit left mouse button when you hover over a conveyor, you will extend that conveyor instead of making a new one. You can also use the conveyor menu (accessed by pressing tab) to choose which conveyor you would like to place. NOTE: Destroying a conveyor will *NOT* give your money back! This is a bug and being worked on.
Now that you have basic stone automated, you can now focus on more rare ores, such as iron. Iron is a basic resource used by many machines and is found in large brown deposits. Press E to open the building selection menu and choose iron miner. Note that iron miners cost $100 while stone miners cost $20. If you are struggling to produce money, build more stone miners to create a constant supply of money. When you have the money, use iron miners and conveyors to bring the iron to a resource seller (the green buildings). Iron ore is worth $5 while stone is only worth $1. Once you have a nice sum of money, you can start attempting to build more complex machinery, such as smelters. Smelters turn iron ore into steel, and double it's value. Smelters have one input and two outputs. The green area is the input and the blue areas are the outputs. The output on the opposite side is the steel output, where the steel ingots come out. The output directly adjacent to the input is the excess inventory output, where raw iron ore is ejected if the smelter does not have enough space in it's inventory. The smelter's inventory size is 10 iron ore. Steel can be used as input for many machines.
Are you wondering where some of the resources mentioned in the building select menu are? Try exploring the map, many resources are hidden in hard to reach locations or locations that are completely isolated from any resource sellers. If you do find some of the resources, some of the other conveyor belts can come in handy. Ramp conveyor belts are great for moving things up mountains and above other machinery. Walled conveyor belts are useful for moving resources quickly, or for moving resources with meshes that tend to fall off of normal conveyor belts. Wide conveyors are the biggest and baddest conveyors, being twice as wide as normal belts and moving items 3 times as fast. Use these if you need to move things across the map quickly.
Multiplayer *should* work, but there are no guarantees. Multiplayer only works on LAN at the moment, where the computers must be on the same wifi network. Using tools such as Hamachi may or may not work, as that's not been tested yet.