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I'm designing a research pack factory, and I realized that I have no clue as to how research labs consume science packs. I mean - some research consumes more advanced science packs than others, that much is obvious. But how, is my question.

So, does anyone know? Given a particular thing to research, how often does each research lab consume a science pack? Is it dependent on the thing being researched? What's the maximum rate?

For that matter - given a certain rate of input science packs, and full power, how long will something take to research given a certain number of research labs?

The number in the icon is how many seconds a tech takes to research.

DaveMcW wrote:The number in the icon is how many seconds a tech takes to research.

Elaborate please.

Say I'm researching flight. The research screen says 30 time, 1 red science, 1 green science, x200. What does that mean, exactly? Flight doesn't take 30 seconds to research... And it doesn't take 1 of each science pack either. I'm missing something here.

It takes 30 x 200 seconds, if you only have one lab.

For the bulk of your question we're gonna look at the cost.
First you've got the little clock, this is the time it takes per cycle in seconds. In this case 30 seconds.
Next will be the science packs required per cycle. In this case 1 red science pack and 1 green science pack.
This will vary from tech to tech, main difference will be what science packs it requires. Most of the time it will only requrie one pack of each type but some require more.
Lastly there is the number of cycles required. In this case 50.
So as a prac app. With this tech if I used 1 lab and kept it fully supplied with none of the research speed upgrades, it would take 25 minutes, 50 cycles at 30 seconds a cycle.
If we instead used 10 fully supplied labs it would take 2 minutes and 30 seconds, with each lab doing 5 cycles at 30 seconds.
If we used 20 labs it would take 1 minute and 30 seconds with 10 wasted cycles. Each lab would be doing 3 cycles, and labs will try to do a cycle if it has the supplies and research still needs to be done on the tech.
Early game 10 labs is a good number, later on when the techs get into the hundred and then thousands of cycles you'll want to expand.

The Lone Wolfling wrote:Say I'm researching flight. The research screen says 30 time, 1 red science, 1 green science, x200. What does that mean, exactly? Flight doesn't take 30 seconds to research... And it doesn't take 1 of each science pack either. I'm missing something here.

And there is also Lab efficiency, which increase speed of laboratories. So this is maybe reason why it is not 30 sec for each step.

Ah, it's per cycle and without upgrades. That makes more sense.

So then the question becomes: what is the average consumption rate of a lab, averaged over all techs that use that science pack?

Hmm... I went through, using this spreadsheet, and got ~0.027 science pack 1s / lab / second, on average.

(Full data: 36.5 labs / (science pack 1 / sec), 36.9 labs / (science pack 2 / sec), 38.1 labs / (science pack 3 / sec), 37.6 labs / (alien pack / sec).

This is just by taking (sum of times for tech using a specific pack ) / (sum of science packs). As such, I suspect it is weighted overly-heavily by the slower techs.

Note that this is without upgrades.

Also, good to know about wasted cycles.

Yes now they are wasted cycles, but probably they won't be in a future. Because it is considered as minor bug https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 1&start=10