Production Guide & Frequently Asked Questions
Ratios & Production Math
Factorio relies on clean crafting speeds and inputs to keep belts compressed and assembly lines running without bottlenecking:
- Belt Capacities: Yellow belts carry 15 items/s, Red belts carry 30 items/s, and Blue belts carry 45 items/s. Match your stage throughput rates to these numbers.
- Direct Insertion: For fast-crafting intermediates like Copper Cables (0.5s craft time) feeding Electronic Circuits (0.5s craft time), insert directly from machine to machine to avoid belt bottlenecks.
- Raw Demands: Productivity modules at later stages compound backward, drastically reducing the total miners and furnaces required for end-products.
Modules & Beacon Calculations
Beacons let you share speed module buffs across multiple adjacent assembly lines:
- Transmission Penalty: Beacons only transmit 50% of the module's effect. However, a single beacon can cover multiple machines, and a single machine can be hit by multiple beacons.
- Productivity Restriction: Productivity modules cannot be placed inside beacons. They can only be placed directly inside crafting machines, furnaces, or labs.
- Speed Stacking: Speed modules stacked in beacons offset the speed penalties of productivity modules, creating fast, ultra-efficient factories.
Frequently Asked Questions
Machine counts are computed using the formula: Machines Required = (Desired Output Rate per second × Recipe Time in seconds) / (Recipe Yield × Crafting Speed × Speed Multiplier). For instance, if you want 1 Automation Science Pack per second (5s craft time, yield 1) using an Assembling Machine 3 (crafting speed 1.25x), you need (1 × 5) / (1 × 1.25) = 4 assembly machines.
Productivity Modules increase recipe yield by a percentage (e.g., +10% per Prod 3 module) but reduce crafting speed and increase energy usage. Crucially, productivity modules create 'free items' without consuming input materials, reducing raw ingredient demands across the entire production chain. Speed Modules increase speed at the cost of power, helping you reduce the physical machine count needed for high throughput.
A common late-game setup is the '8-beacon alignment' where each assembly machine is within the range of 8 beacons, and each beacon contains two Speed Module 3s. Since beacons transmit half of their modules' effect, 8 beacons provide a +400% speed buff (+50% per beacon). This allows a single machine to produce at 5x speed, drastically saving space and UPS (updates per second) performance.
Oil refining yields multiple byproducts: Heavy Oil, Light Oil, and Petroleum. In a real Factorio factory, if any fluid tank fills up, the entire refinery halts. To prevent this, you must set up cracking chemical plants (converting Heavy Oil to Light Oil, and Light Oil to Petroleum) using circuit networks. The planner assumes optimal cracking and shows the net raw petroleum/coal/water demands for your final plastic, sulfur, or solid fuel needs.