Factorio Forums

Hello,

When opening the inventory, in the Creation tab, when hovering the mouse over an item to see the tooltip, there is usually a section called "Total raw material" (I have the game in spanish, I don't know if this is the precise translation).

For example, for the solar panel, total raw materials yield 15 iron plates, 27.5 copper plates and 5 steel bars. This is true for almost every item, but for the accumulators and the steel furnaces, this section is not showing. The steel furnace is directly built from raw materials, but that's not the case of the accumulator, where batteries are needed.

What's considered a raw material is whatever you can't craft by hand, or can't be crafted by the machine you're currently interacting with. This is why it shows steel bars as raw material for a solar panel, despite those being made by iron plates.

Batteries can't be made by hand because they require sulfuric acid, thus they're considered a raw material if you're in your inventory crafting menu.

Things like cheat mode/editor mode change what can be hand crafted so the raw materials also changes.