Factorio Forums

Hello

What I like in this game is building production lines with exactly the good number of mines, furnaces and assembly modules required. I've had a feeling for a long time that crafting times and/or crafting speed are not reliable in the game, because in spite of all my calculations, I never end up satisfied with my factories. I'm always short on intermediate products somewhere for unknown reasons.

I made some tests to measure verify the crafting times of some products. These tests are done with the character (not with an assembly machine) so we can assume a crafting speed of 1. I repeated every test thrice and I kept the average value, rounded up to the decimal. I play with the patch 0.10.0

test 1 : clock in hand, I launch the manual production of 10 SP2. The crafting time is 6 so 10x6=60 seconds should be enough to craft them. I've made the test several times, and unfortunately I always measure 61"80, so an error of +3% to the theoretical outcome.

test 2 : same experiment with 20 storage tanks, crafting time is 3s. Normally I should have finished in 60s, but I measure 62". Error of +3.3%.

test 3 : 120 pipes, 0.5 crafting time, 63". Error of +5%

These tests show two things :

1)The game clock is slightly slower than the real world clock. Actually this doesn't really matter, because the slowdown is global. (It may be that the error is due to my computer running the game slower than intended, or maybe my mobile phone clock is broken; but I doubt it.)
2)The error seems bigger when you produce big quantities of items, as opposed to small quantities of time-consuming items. This is a real issue, maybe caused by a tiny "buffer time" every time an item is produced.

Thanks for reading, I hope I'm not alone with this issue!

Hi, what you noticed is probably the effect of star and stop of a production.

For ease of reference I imagine it like starting and stopping a car or conveyor belt. These starts and stops happen with each unit produced, for one I just say you need to grab stuff for making something (items in your inventory) and the other is dropping those items back after they have been manufactured. This adds up the more items you produce and therefore creates the inconsistency.

Speaking code wise I guess that the system does a check for the resources, draws them out, produces, and each produced item (not the whole batch at once) is dropped into your inventory, where then again its checked if it goes to your quickbar.

Probably something like nanoseconds or miliseconds, combined with the update for the graphics display you end up with a second at loss.