Choosing a First Room

Considerations

The first room is pretty easy to choose. Let's start with a shard. At time of writing this, Shard 3 is best for newbies, as it has a CPU cap at 20, meaning players are generally on the same level when it comes to how many creeps and rooms they can run. Shard 1 is probably the worst place you can go, as there are many players in an alliance called Ypsilon Pact that generally kills non-alliance neighbours - Geir and Likeafox especially. Shard 2 has some pretty advanced and aggressive players, most notably Tigga, who tries and nearly always succeeds in killing anything that is remotely close to its rooms.

Now that you've chosen a shard, we can look around the map and identify some good and bad places to spawn in. First are respawn and novice zones, AKA death traps. These zones, while intended for noobs and people respawning hoping to establish themselves, are almost always placed in graveyards, for space in Screeps World often doesn't come without someone dying. Unless you want to test your early game code or defence code, you should avoid these zones, or really any large open space, as you'll probably end up 6 feet underground.

Alright, we know now to avoid large open areas, respawn zones and novice zones. Next we need an actual room. Make sure there are two energy sources, little or no swampland, and ensure the distance between sources and the controller is minimal. If your code can harvest minerals or think it'll be able to soon, consider rooms with minerals that are very valuable on the market - often X is best as it's needed for high-tier boosts.

Lastly we need to place our spawn. Try to ensure all adjacent positions to be plains, and put it where you can cut off chokepoints easily while still reducing the potential travel times to sources and the controller. Additionally, you'll want some space around where you can put containers, storing structures, extensions, towers, and other structures you'll unlock as you progress in Room Control Level.

Rooms Come and Go, Code Lasts Forever

It's likely that you'll die from code bugs or murder the first time you spawn in. It's fine though; the main resource in this game is code, not rooms, energy, credits, etc., and code lasts forever. Your progression in this game is defined by what your bot can do, and given you put enough love, care, and code into it, you'll get the rooms, energy, boosts, structures and empire that you want.

Next, head to Resources to learn about awesome tools you can use to develop your bot better and faster