Factorio Forums

I'm sure everyone has noticed that 1.0k ore doesn't cost a single dollar. So what is the cost of producing ore, copper plates, green circuits, laser turrets? Power production seems to be the answer I came to. For ever resource, you can figure out the amount of power it took to produce it. You start with ore and work your way up to the most complex items.
This only works if you condition the resource cost of your energy unit. Producing energy using Solar would have a different cost than wood/coal/solid fuel boilers. Modules would have to be considered too but when it was all said an done, you could get a production cost for every unit type produced. There is a lot of math involved and the numbers would vary with players build style and base sizes but you could come up with a general cost of production with a STDev. I'm not saying this would be particularly useful to have, I just wanted to discuss it here.

Don't forget that for a given energy, you can't know how much oil you can get (unless you only have depleted wells only).

And costs are not only the energy, but also the initial costs (included the time the player needs to set this up and all his derived costs, like cutting wood, laying belts or railway) and the costs, which the pollution creates (dead trees, killing biters and nests).

Time is the most basic resource.

"Energy per time" (power) and "ore per time" are the standard units for measuring how productive your factory is. You can convert between them using the formula: 1 coal/s = 4MW.

"Time to regain investment" is useful for calculating the value of modules and solar panels. To calculate it, divide "ore invested" by "ore per time gained/saved".

Well, energy within some time can be also called "work". Costs are dependent on the work you put in.

Energy is also called work (the first law of thermodynamics). There is no time component.

Oh, I mixed it up. Wrote such big wiki pages and still mix energy with power.