Episode 2 picks up on the victory window where Episode 1 stopped, and Basket clicks Next level. The First steps campaign moves on to electricity. Five minutes of hints come first, then an offshore pump, pipes into the boilers and a working steam engine. The rest of the video goes into collecting enough iron for electric mining drills, and it ends with three of them standing on the iron patch, still waiting for a belt.
A page of hints at a time
Before the new level starts, the game's hints window walks through one page at a time: a furnace can smelt stone bricks and steel ("the steel recipe needs to be researched"), the two sides of a belt carry items separately, shift and control move whole stacks, and copy and paste works between buildings. The commentary reads them out loud and starts to flag: "I wonder if this is gonna ever stop." Finally: "That's a lot of reading."
Water to the boilers
The new map is grass beside a lake, with a steam engine and boilers already standing near the water and a drill on a coal patch. The game's text says "I could really use some equipment from our crashed ship. If I had enough electricity I could build a radar to locate the crash site."
The first objective is an offshore pump on the shoreline. The next is pipes to carry the water into the boilers. The first pipes go down in a bad spot ("where I built this isn't going to work out real great"), so Basket picks them up and lays them again. Night falls partway through. "It's dark. Oh, no. I should build lamps." Once the pipes connect, the commentary reads the result: "steam engine is now producing electricity."
Poles to the drill
Next the electric mining drill has to be connected to the steam engine with small electric poles, which take wood, so a few trees come down first. With the poles up, the drill starts. "Aha, it does!" The game's text agrees: "Alright, it is all working. That was a piece of cake."
Iron, the slow way
The last objective reads Get resources: 75 iron plates and 30 copper plates. Basket mines iron ore by hand and smelts it in a stone furnace. One craft turns out to be a burner inserter: "That's not what I thought I was making." The electric mining drill recipe needs iron gear wheels and iron plates, and the plates run short. "This game is becoming harder, faster than I am good at this game."
The iron count climbs to 26, then drops to 3 and later to 0 while the drills are crafted. Three electric drills go down on the iron patch, poles carry power out to them, and inserters go in next to them. One will not place until the commentary works it out: "it has to go into a conveyor belt."
Where it ends
The three drills are standing on the iron with a stone furnace nearby. The objective still reads 0 of 75 iron plates and 0 of 30 copper. "I need to make some... belts, we're almost there." A "To be continued..." comes up over the game, and the video ends there.
