Factorio Forums

There are lots of calculators around on the web, and the wiki has a lot of information, but even with all of that information, I don't really see how to calculate rates of production properly. Just as an example, how would I calculate some of the basic mining / smelting rates?

The electric mining drill is quoted on the wiki as having a "Power" of 3, and a "Speed" of 0.5. But I don't see how I'd translate that into a rate of production (something like N units of copper/iron ore per second). Similarly, a normal belt is quoted as moving 1.875 tiles per second, but how many items can reside on a single tile? And a stone furnace is quoted as a "speed" of 1, but one what? Unit of ore per second? Also, inserter speeds are 1 or 2.4. Again, is that units per second?

I've seen rules of thumb, like a normal belt can accommodate up to 8 drills per side, or an electric furnace can process exactly one drill's worth of output. But I don't know where those values come from.

I understand that lack of power can slow things down, as can modules and technology such as inserter stack size. For now, I'm happy to ignore those factors - I'd just like to know how to do the basic calculations for a starting factory.

Can anyone help clarify? Also, if there are better places to get the data I need than from the wiki values I quoted above, I'd appreciate knowing that - but preferably not from in-game, as I tend to do my planning "off-line" - when I have access to actually play the game, I usually do that, rather than planning (I don't mind digging into the game files, though - I can usually get a copy of them even if I can't run the game).

In case it's not obvious, if there's something I missed on the wiki or similar that explains all of this, then a pointer to the information would be fine

Paul

Assemblers/furnaces:

tralala wrote: As for the production numbers. For assmblers/furnaces it's quite transparent:

Every item has a base production time and every assembler has a base speed. To calculate the seconds per item you just divide the base production time with the base speed or for items per second you do the opposite.
So for iron plates the base production time is 3.5 and the base speed of stone furnaces is 1 meaning 3.5 s production time per item or 0.2857 itmes/s. If you use steel or electric furnaces the production time is halved since both furnaces have a base speed of 2. 3.5/2 = 1.75 seconds /item (and 0.5333 items/s which is very close to your calculation of 0.54).

[...]

You can change this with the use of modules. These act as a mutiplier to the base speed of the assember/furnace but don't change the base production time (can't be changed afaik).

Mining:

tralala wrote: Speed * (Power - Hardness) / Mining time.

An electric drill has a power of 3 and speed of 0.5. Stone has hardness 0.4 and iron 0.9, both have mining time of 2.

So this gives:

Stone: 0.5 * (3-0.4) / 2 = 0.65 / s
Iron: 0.5 * (3-0.9) / 2 = 0.525 / s

If power is high hardness doesn't matter too much. But if your power is, say, 1, iron will be 6 times harder to mine than stone. Power is like damage per hit, speed is hits per second, hardness is armor, time is health.

If you mod the power to be below the hardness, you'll get a negative mining rate I checked.

Both quotes are taken from https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =18&t=4059

Transport belt throughput: https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... ts/Physics

No clue about inserters. I'd like to know how many items the different types move per second, too.

Both quotes are taken from viewtopic.php?f=18&t=4059

Thanks for that. I searched the wiki, but I'm not so good at searching forums

EDIT: I moved this into gameplay-help.

------------------------------
For the inserters: They have different counts for rotation (what you mean) and extentsion (used to put things into wagons).

burner inserter:
rotation_speed: 0.01 (0.6) {1.667 sec}
extension_speed: 0.02 (1.2) {0.833 sec}

basic inserter:
rotation_speed: 0.014 (0.84) {1.191 sec}
extension_speed: 0.028 (1.68) {0.595 sec}

long handed inserter:
rotation_speed: 0.02 (1.2) {0.833 sec}
extension_speed: 0.04 (2.4) {0.416 sec}

fast and smart:
rotation_speed: 0.035 (2.1) {0.476 sec}
extension_speed: 0.07 (4.2) {0.238 sec}

The numbers are defined for one tick (1/60 seconds). So I calculated the numbers in brackets on the base of one second. They are the "turn or length per second" (x / sec).
This means: A smart inserter needs for a full turn 1 divided by 2.1 seconds or 0.476 seconds per full turn. And for the extension it needs 1 / 4.2 per tile = 0.238 seconds per tile.

I calculated the results into the curly brackets. I hope I calculated correct.

BTW: The number for the long handed inserter means also: This is the fastest way to transport anything


Off-topic:
The various values come from looking into the core and base mods and are somehow complicated to interpret, cause it is nothing else than an interpreted lua-program, which creates the configuration of that.

I make currently a project ( https://github.com/alexaulbach/Factorio ... iGenerator ), which interprets the config and creates correct wiki-pages out of that.
If interested, take a look into the modding-section: https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... le=Modding

Currently I'm a bit stuck again, cause too many things happen at once and if I need to choose between moderating and programming I choose currently moderating, cause programming I do the whole day.