Factorio Forums

The built-in counters on each machine must consume some memory and CPU cycles. Are they a byproduct of something else that is required or can they be removed for getting the game costume a bit less resources?

without it the game is unplayable

If you never looked at the numbers and found it essential info, you didn't probably design a production line yet.

int_ua wrote: Wed Jul 01, 2026 2:31 pm The built-in counters on each machine must consume some memory and CPU cycles. Are they a byproduct of something else that is required or can they be removed for getting the game costume a bit less resources?

Edit: Let me just clean up this post to avoid confusion.

If you mean the "products finished" counters, yes, they cost a tiny bit of ALU to update.

If you meant the rate calculation tool tips:

They probably consume 0 cycles, on average. That's exactly the kind of thing for which you can use this logic:

1) only when something happens that would change this number, you place a pointer to this machine into a dynamically sized list
2) once every 30 frames or something, you go through that list and update the numbers for any machine then clear the list back out

With the exception of global productivity research, you can check for whether you've affected a machine only when you do something that changes the local game state like place a beacon or insert a module etc. In that moment, you have a little tiny bit of code that checks to see if this machine should be added to the list.

So, for a typical machine that's been sitting there unmodified for 200 hours, it probably costs literally nothing. Not even a few cycles to loop through each machine and check.

The devs read these forums; I'm sure they could explain how it's actually done.

Tooltip contents aren't calculated unless you're actively holding the mouse over something.

Production statistics (the P GUI) are tracked as something happens. They aren't "expensive" but they aren't free. If they were simply disabled/removed it would have some small but non-zero speedup.

The counter of products-finished on a given crafting machine is essentially free and I don't believe you would ever be able to measure it existing vs not.