Factorio Forums

https://wiki.factorio.com/Research

How does Research Time effect the amount of labs you need?
If I increase the Research Time by a factor of 10 it says I now need 10 labs.
From what this says the consumption of the lab decreases with increased research times. I would not have thought such a variable would matter as a lab consuming a Science Pack should take the same time to consume irregardless of the number of packs needed to complete the research, or is this assumption wrong?

A research lab at crafting speed 1.0 completes one cycle of the current research in the time that the tech screen says one cycle of that research takes.

Therefor steel needs 50 cycles of 5 seconds each. Thus 50 speed 1.0 labs will complete the research in 5.0 seconds, etcpp. Thus researches with larger cycle times consume less "bottles per second per lab".

eradicator wrote: Sat Feb 15, 2020 9:32 pm A research lab at crafting speed 1.0 completes one cycle of the current research in the time that the tech screen says one cycle of that research takes.

Therefor steel needs 50 cycles of 5 seconds each. Thus 50 speed 1.0 labs will complete the research in 5.0 seconds, etcpp. Thus researches with larger cycle times consume less "bottles per second per lab".

0K thanks that makes sense. So reading the prototype files the longest time in vanilla is 60s per pack for consumption rate, and the lowest value is 5. The range is 5, 10, 30, 35, 45, 60 for research outside the scope of demo research. The Median is 30 for consumption rate.

So plug in that metric:
Then you can use an AM2 (for green), and 3 labs and you'll have a buffer if any of those shorter ones pop up.