How to Use Factorio Calculator

There are a few calculators for the construction and management simulation game called Factorio. One of the most popular is the one made by Kirk McDonald. If you want to know more about this calculator, including how to use it, keep reading.

About the Factorio calculator made by Kirk McDonald

Kirk McDonald made a ratio calculator for this game. This calculator is the tool that will help you to design a factory. It works by telling you about the prerequisites for anything that you want to make. While it is true that this game is able to be played totally on the fly by adding more parts to the factory that you own every time you observe that something is running short. However, the creator of this calculator has found that it is much faster and more efficient to calculate how large the factory that you have will need to be, even prior to making it.

How to Use Factorio Calculator

The special thing about the Factorio calculator made by Kirk McDonald

The Factorio calculator created by Kirk McDonald is special because it is more than just ratio calculator. Usually, the issue of calculating the ratios includes the implement. Basically, you are able to find any number of implementations that can give the useful numbers for the first 90% or so of the issue.

In fact, the issue could turn into a complicated one when you begin to pay attention to the small details. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of Factorio calculators that want to solve the issue after the point where solving it becomes more difficult.

Some notable features of the Factorio calculator made by Kirk McDonald

There are some notable features include in the Factorio calculator by Kirk McDonald, such as:

    • Oil processing calculations: The oil processing recipes of Factorio are the first thing where most calculators begin to have issues giving a solution. This calculator is best to calculate and to get the best result for these recipes.
    • Modules and beacons: Both items allow you to modify the cost of recipes. Besides, it can also gives great impact to the designs of the late game factories.
    • Unlimited numerical precision: This calculator calculates everything suing bignum rationals. It is done to avoid any of the loss of precision that using ordinary floating point values that might happen.
    • Etc.

What should you do if you want to use the Factorio calculator made by Kirk McDonald?

Here is step by step to use it:

    1. In order to use the Factorio calculator by Kirk McDonald, the first thing that you need to do is to go to the setting tab and set the game version, types of belts, beacons, and so on.
    2. Then, go to the factory tab and at the top of the tab, enter the thing that you want to produce.
    3. After that, you can look at the chart below to see the amount of furnaces that you need.

If you follow each step well, you should be able to use the Factorio calculator made by Kirk McDonald. In case you have a hard time and you have some questions to ask, do not hesitate to hit the creator of the calculator on Patreon. Before reaching him out, it is better for you to check out the FAQ about this calculator below.

    1. Question: Do the numbers shown in the beacons column represent the number of modules or the number of beacons?

Answer: These numbers represent the number of modules.

    1. Question: What does clicking on the icon of an item in the Factory tab do?

Answer: It deletes the dependencies of the dependencies of that item’s recipe from the solution. The purpose of this feature is to model the case of building a factory when you are shipping in one or more ingredients from elsewhere. For instance, when 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 is effective to restore its dependencies.

However, it is worth noting that this feature is not compatible with certain items, namely those that have no dependencies, and the ones that do not map one-to-one with a recipe.

    1. Question: What should you do to interpret the pipe numbers on the factory tab?

Answer: Apparently, the pipe throughput is inversely proportional to the length of the pipe. In the other words, the longer a pipe is, the more parallel lanes of pipes will be required. For example, the solution calls for 7500 units of heavy oil per second. If the default minimum pipe length setting is used, the calculator will show a value of [pipe] × 7 ≤ 47, which can be interpreted that you will need seven parallel lanes of pipes, each has a maximum length of 47 segments.

The minimum pipe length setting is the one that has a rule to control the minimum number of segments that a pipe will be allowed before the calculator uses multiple lanes of pipes. The default number is 17, corresponding a fluid rate of 1200/s, which is the output rate of an offshore pump.

In case there is only one pipe that is required, the number of pipes will be deleted.

The other calculators for Factorio

The Factorio calculator created by Kirk McDonald is not the only one made for this game. Aside from that, there are more of them. Here are some other recommended calculators for Factorio:

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