This calculator is copyright 2015-2020 Kirk McDonald. It is licensed under the Apache License 2.0, and its source may be found on github, here.

This calculator is the result of a few years' worth of fooling around, off and on, with performing calculations using Factorio's recipe graph. You may find an essay on the subject, which outlines the techniques used in this calculator, here.

Features of this calculator include:

• Proper handling of oil products. Obtaining numbers for these recipes can be tricky, as several of the items involved may be produced from multiple recipes.
• Support for modules, including beacons.
• Support for the mining productivity bonus, introduced in 0.15.
• Support for "expensive" mode.
• Arbitrary numerical precision. Calculations are performed using bigint rationals, so errors from floating-point calculations should not be an issue.
• Support for multiple simultaneous outputs.
• May display rates per second, minute, or hour.

Do the numbers in the "beacons" column represent the number of modules or the number of beacons?

They represent the number of modules.

What does clicking on an item's icon in the "Factory" tab do?

It omits the dependencies of that item's recipe from the solution. The intent behind this feature is to model the case of building a factory when you are shipping in one or more ingredients from elsewhere. For example, if you are making an advanced circuit factory and want to ship in electronic circuits, and want to see the remaining copper cable requirements on their own.

Clicking on the icon a second time will restore its dependencies.

This feature is not compatible with certain items, namely those that have no dependencies, and those that don't map one-to-one with a recipe.

How do I interpret the pipe numbers on the "Factory" tab?

Pipe throughput is inversely proportional to the length of the pipe. This means that the longer a pipe is, the more parallel lanes of pipes will be required.

Say the solution calls for 7500 units of heavy oil per second. With the default "minimum pipe length" setting, the calculator will display a value of "[pipe] × 7 ≤ 47." This means you will need seven parallel lanes of pipes, each with a maximum length of 47 segments.

The "minimum pipe length" setting controls the minimum number of segments that a pipe will be permitted before the calculator uses multiple lanes of pipes. It defaults to 17, which corresponds to a fluid rate of 1200/s, which is the output rate of an offshore pump.

The number of pipes will be omitted if only one pipe is required.

How can I give you money?

I'm on Patreon. Thanks!