Factorio Ratios Explained

While talking to other Factorio players or looking up information online you're likely to see people talking about ratios. At a glance, this can seem confusing but we're here to break it down for you so you understand more about how Factorio ratios work and how to parse this information easier.

Factorio Ratios Explained

While we're not going to get into every single possible ratio in Factorio here, because they are endless, let's talk about what these ratios are and why they are important for maximum efficiency in your factory.

The basic concept of a ratio in Factorio is how much of one item is needed to make another. So for example, if you want to make 1 Red Science you need 1 Copper Plate and 1 Iron Gear. However, to make that Iron gear, you need 2 Iron Plates. So for every 1 Red Science, you actually need 1 Copper Plate and 2 Iron Plates.

This means when you're building production for Red Science, you'll want to have double the input of Iron Plates being produced because, for every 1 Copper Plate, you'll need 2 Iron plates to make the Iron Gear making it a 2:1 ratio. If you are creating Iron and Copper Plates at the same speed, you'll constantly have a deficiency of Iron Plates. To combat this, you want to make sure you're smelting double the amount of Iron than you are Copper.

This then can trickle down into how much Iron Ore you're harvesting from mining, how many belts you have feeding Iron into Stone or Electric Furnaces, crafting speed, etc.

Since we know the basic ratio of 2:1 for Red Science, we can apply that at scale.

For example, if you have 10 Electric Mining Drills pulling up Iron ore at .5 seconds per Ore you'll need 8 Electric Furnaces to smelt that ore into Iron Plates to keep up with 5 Electric Mining Drills pulling up Copper Ore and 4 Electric Furnaces smelting Copper Plates. All we did there was take our 2:1 ratio and scale it up to 10:5 to keep everything in check.

Luckily there are countless community resources to help do the math for you, so you can focus on creating a factory that runs as efficiently as possible. This Factorio cheat sheet created by KirkMcDonald is incredibly helpful with visualizing all of the ratios and getting all of the information you need.

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