Factorio Calculator — Production Chain & Machine Count

1. Pick the item you want to produce. The list covers the base game's intermediate products — circuits, gears, cables, plates, science packs and the buildings that go into them.
2. Set the target rate in items per minute. A yellow belt moves about 900 items per minute, a red belt 1,800, a blue belt 2,700 — so 900 is a good starting point if you are planning around a single belt.
3. Choose your assembling machine tier. Tier 1 runs at 0.5× speed, tier 2 at 0.75×, tier 3 at 1.25×. Furnaces and chemical plants are not affected by this setting — they always use their own base speed.

The table updates as you change anything. There is no calculate button because there is nothing to wait for.

Each row in the production chain is one recipe. The per minute column is total demand across the whole chain, not the amount one machine makes — if iron plates are needed by three different branches, you see the sum of all three.

The machines column is how many of that machine you need to hit that rate. It is deliberately not rounded up: 6.4 furnaces is shown as 6.4, not 7. That way you can decide yourself whether to run 6 furnaces slightly overclocked or build 7 and let one idle.

Raw materials are everything at the bottom of the tree — iron ore, copper ore, coal, stone, water and petroleum gas. These are what your mining outposts and pumpjacks have to supply.

Different machines craft at different speeds, and the game's numbers are easy to mix up. These are the base speeds used here:

The numbers here are the theoretical minimum. Three things usually eat the difference in a real factory:

• Belt throughput. A yellow belt carries 15 items per second, and that is the hard ceiling for any single lane feeding a machine block.
• Inserter speed. A basic inserter swings about 0.83 times per second. Fast and stack inserters exist for a reason — a line of basic inserters can bottleneck a perfectly sized furnace array.
• Modules and beacons. Productivity modules change the effective ratio between input and output, and speed modules change machine counts. This calculator uses bare machines, so add 5-10% headroom if you plan to run modules.

Does this Factorio calculator include Space Age recipes?

Not yet. The recipe set here is the base game, which covers everything up to the first rocket launch. Space Age adds new planets, new intermediates and quality tiers — those are on the roadmap but not in the current data.

Why do machine counts have decimals?

Because a machine is a continuous resource, not a discrete one. If a step needs 6.4 furnaces, running 6 will be slightly short and running 7 slightly over. Most players round up and let the extra machine idle part of the time.

Can I calculate byproducts or oil processing chains?

Multi-output recipes (basic oil processing produces heavy oil, light oil and petroleum gas at the same time) cannot be expanded like a simple tree, so this calculator treats petroleum gas, light oil and heavy oil as inputs. Pick the item you want to build, and you will see how much of each oil product it consumes per minute — that number is what your refinery block has to supply.

Where does the recipe data come from?

Every one of the 180 recipes is generated from the game's own recipe prototypes (Factorio 2.0.55, base game), not typed in by hand. Machine counts are then derived from the crafting speed of each machine — so if a number looks wrong, the recipe data and the speed table on this page are the two places to check.

Is this an official Factorio tool?

No. It is a fan-made calculator built from publicly documented base-game recipe data. It is not affiliated with Wube Software.

Every craftable item has its own page with a pre-filled calculator, its recipe, machine counts and the raw materials behind it: