Factorio Forums

Productivity modules can only be used on "intermediate products". What's up with that? Is there something about my laser turret assembler that would cause it to break if I added a productivity module?

I guess where this gets me most is: I'm making purple science, and it's expensive. Most of the cost comes from the electric furnaces it takes as input. So I went to put productivity modules on my electric furnace assemblers, but the game told me that electric furnaces aren't an intermediate product. They totally are!

(and likewise for speed modules as an input to gold science)

Intermediate products are all the ones that show up in the 'intermediate products' tab. Just because an item is used in a recipe doesn't mean it counts as an intermediate product.

As to why they didn't make productivity modules universal, well it beats me. I guess they would be rather overpowered for all the items you only need a few of (pumpjacks, trains, chemical plants, etc), but the game doesn't really revolve around the ability to produce those at a high rate either.

Part of the reason, although not a complete answer, is that there are exploits to be had by using productivity modules on certain end-products. Barrelled fluids are an obvious one - if you could get 140% of your input on both the barrelling and/or un-barrelling, you would never need to pump a drop of crude again.

It does feel a little arbitrary, though. Why can I get 40% productivity when making processing units using green and red circuits, but not when making tier 1 modules that use the same ingredients? It is what it is, I suppose.

I think part of the logic is that productivity modules don't create additional outputs "out of thin air", but rather are more efficient with their inputs. For instance, normally when one makes an intermediate, over 28% of the input is wasted (compared to 4xProd3), but adding productivity modules increases energy consumption (more computation to maintain efficiency) and the recipe time (more careful operations) while yielding more output items.

When one produces things like turrets or mining drills, however, there is a defined schematic that needs to be followed; one can't get away with only having two circuits in some of the miners but all three in the others. True, improved design of the output could reduce the amount of material required, but these are end products, not intermediates produced in bulk. There's going to be very little waste in the production of these end products, compared to the intermediates who's "default manufacturing process" prioritizes speed and ease of production over raw efficiency, since one generally would need a lot of them.

Hm. That discussion is now two years old or a bit more and all points here has already been discussed.

The solution which ended that discussion was the current state.

Which doesn't mean that such a discussion is useless, but it should be not discussed in General but as specific suggestion in Suggestions.