My initial plans are documented in this reddit topic. However, the amount of filming, editing, and writing I've been doing is far more than I expected. I'm going to be forced to cut down on my original plans.

I am still writing the combinator guide. Please contribute comments, questions on this Reddit topic or this topic on the official Factorio forums.

Forward

Combinators are among Factorio's most complicated features available. In fact combinators have been shown to have a property called Turing Completeness, which means they are equivalent to a full blown computer.

As such, it has been difficult to write a guide for combinators. Many newbies ask "What can combinators do?" and the most honest response is "Everything". I don't think this is too useful an answer however.

This guide takes a focused approach. Instead of talking in the abstract or academic, this guide first introduces a SINGLE problem that can be solved with combinators. Everything in this guide will focus on backpressure and how to add backpressure to more things in the Factorio universe.

I will first walkthrough the basics of Factorio backpressure and why it is a good thing. Then, I will introduce combinators. I will then demonstrate simple combinator circuits (no more than one or two combinators at a time) that can add or modify backpressure in various Factorio systems.

Combinators can do so much more than what is explored in this guide but newbies have to start somewhere. Starting at backpressure is ideal, because backpressure is a very strong strategy in Factorio even without any combinator usage.