About | PlayerCalc

PlayerCalc is a small collection of calculators for games where the game itself does the arithmetic for you badly — or not at all.

Why these calculators exist

Every game of this kind has a gap between what it tells you and what you actually need to know. Factorio tells you a recipe takes 6 seconds; it does not tell you that 60 advanced circuits per minute means 12 assembling machines, 600 copper cable and 1200 petroleum gas every minute. You can work that out on paper, and plenty of people do, but you should not have to — and when you get it wrong you find out after building the factory.

That gap is what these tools fill. The first one covers Factorio production chains. The next ones are listed on the home page.

Where the numbers come from

Every calculator is generated from the game's own data — recipe prototypes, crafting speeds, machine categories — rather than typed in by hand. This is not a detail. When we hand-entered a subset of 21 Factorio recipes to get started, two of them were wrong: one had the wrong ingredient (sulfur instead of sulfuric acid), one had a misspelled item name. A calculator that is 10% off is worse than no calculator, because you build before you find out.

So the pipeline is: game data in, script transforms it, tests check it, page renders it. When a game patches, the data is regenerated and the tests re-run. If a number on this site disagrees with the game, the site is wrong and we want to know.

Why it is free

The calculators cost nothing to use and there is no account, no email gate, no upsell. The site is funded by display advertising, which is why you may see ads. We do not sell data — there is no account to sell, and the analytics we run are aggregate page-view counts, not profiles.

If an ad ever makes the page unusable, that is a bug worth reporting. See contact.

Who runs it

One person, independently. There is no company behind it and no editorial team. That has a practical consequence you should know about: if a game changes its data, there may be a short window where the calculator is stale. The data pipeline is automated and the tests fail loudly, but patches still have to be pushed.

Not affiliated with any game publisher

PlayerCalc is an independent, fan-made tool site. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Wube Software, Hypergryph, Atlus, or any other game developer or publisher. Game names, item names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to describe what the tools calculate.

Corrections