Factorio Ratio Calculator 2026: Machines, Belts, Raw Feed Rates

This Factorio ratio calculator answers the only question that actually matters when you’re scaling a base: how many machines for X items per second. Pick a target item, set a rate, and you get the full recursive production tree, machine counts at every step, raw resource feed rates, and how many transport belts the output needs.

How to read the output

The calculator returns a tree, indented from your target item down to raw ores and chemicals. Each row shows:

• Item: the recipe being calculated. Indentation = how many steps removed from your target.
• Items / sec: how much of this item the upstream machines need to produce per second to sustain your target.
• Machines: how many machines (assemblers, furnaces, chemical plants) you need running to produce that rate.
• Machine type: which machine the recipe uses, with the tier you’ve selected.

Raw resources (Iron Ore, Copper Ore, Coal, Stone, Water, Petroleum) are the leaf nodes in green italic. They have no machine count because they come from miners, pumps, and refineries that the calculator doesn’t model directly. The number is what your mining + pipeline output needs to deliver.

Worked example: 60 SPM red + green science

Pick the “60 SPM red+green” preset and you’ll see something like:

• Automation Science Pack: 1/sec → ~5 Assembling Machine 2
• Iron Gear Wheel: 1/sec → ~0.7 assemblers
• Iron Plate: 2.4/sec → ~3.8 Steel Furnaces (assuming Steel Furnace selected)
• Copper Plate: 1/sec → ~1.6 Steel Furnaces
• Iron Ore: 2.4/sec (raw)
• Copper Ore: 1/sec (raw)

That’s a 60 SPM Automation Science setup in vanilla 2.0. Building this in your save means dropping ~5 assemblers on red science, feeding them gears and copper plate via belts, and ensuring your iron + copper smelting outputs at least 3.4 plates/sec combined.

Belt sizing matters more than machine count

The calculator’s belt-requirement panel is one of the most-used outputs. A common mistake is computing machine counts correctly but undersizing the belt feeding the output. If you produce 30 green circuits per second and try to ship them out on a single yellow belt (15/sec capacity), the belt backs up and your factory throttles itself.

The four belt tiers in vanilla 2.0:

• Yellow Transport Belt: 15 items/sec on a saturated belt.
• Red (Fast) Transport Belt: 30 items/sec.
• Blue (Express) Transport Belt: 45 items/sec.
• Turbo Transport Belt (Space Age): 60 items/sec.

If your target is 30 items/sec, one Red belt does it; one Yellow belt does NOT. The calculator surfaces this directly so you can pick the belt tier before laying the belt run.

Why machine tier matters more than people think

The calculator lets you pick assembler tier (1, 2, or 3) and furnace tier (Stone, Steel, Electric). Switching from Assembler 1 to Assembler 3 doesn’t reduce ingredient needs, but it cuts machine count significantly:

• Assembler 1 is 0.5x speed: takes 2x machines for the same output rate.
• Assembler 2 is 0.75x speed: the standard mid-game choice.
• Assembler 3 is 1.25x speed: 1.67x faster than Assembler 2, accepts 4 module slots.

For megabases, Assembler 3 + productivity modules is the standard build. The calculator doesn’t model modules directly (the math gets complicated with productivity bonuses, beacon stacking, and prod-only-on-intermediates rules), but the machine-count output gives you the unmodified baseline. Multiply by your module efficiency separately.

What the calculator doesn’t model (yet)

A few things the calculator simplifies for clarity:

Productivity modules and beacons. Production-tier setups use Productivity 3 modules in Assembler 3s with rings of beacons. Realistic productivity bonuses range from 1.4x (vanilla intermediate item) to 4x+ (heavy beacon stack). For exact Productivity-aware ratios, run the unmodified math here, then multiply machine counts by `(1 / productivity_multiplier)`.

Oil refining loops. Crude Oil refines into Heavy + Light + Petroleum, and you can crack the higher fractions into Petroleum if you only need gas. The calculator treats Petroleum as a raw input rather than modeling the full refinery + cracker chain. If you need a refinery sizing tool, the canonical kirkmcdonald.github.io / FactorioLab tools handle the full oil chain.

Recipe alts (kovarex enrichment, advanced oil processing tweaks). The calculator uses standard recipe paths. Advanced players using the Kovarex enrichment process for uranium or routing different oil products will see different actual ratios.

Space Age planet-specific recipes. The base game and Space Age share many recipes but Space Age adds planet-specific recipe variants. The calculator uses base-game recipes; Vulcanus, Fulgora, and Gleba production trees need their own tooling.

How to use this when planning a base expansion

Three patterns:

1. Target a science rate first, then scope sub-factories. Pick “60 SPM” (or 100, or 1k) for whatever science you’re building. Read off the per-component rates. Build sub-factories sized to those rates, not arbitrary “round numbers”. The calculator output literally tells you “you need 14 assemblers running engine units”: drop 14 assemblers, feed them, done.

2. Use the belt requirement to pick belt tier in advance. Before you lay the bus for a 1k green-circuit/sec setup, look at the belt requirement (~22 yellow, ~11 red, ~7 blue). Decide whether you commit to the bus dimensions for 1 blue or 2 red belts of throughput. Lay accordingly.

3. Calculate inputs to size your mining outposts. The raw resource lines at the bottom of the tree tell you ore-per-second needs. A 1k green-circuit/sec setup wants ~250 iron ore/sec and ~750 copper ore/sec. That tells you exactly how many mining outposts (or how big a single train run) you need to feed it.

Hosting your megabase

Once your base scales past about 1k SPM, the bottleneck stops being your factory design and starts being your hosting. Factorio runs simulation single-threaded, so CPU clock speed dominates UPS performance more than core count. Our managed Factorio hosting uses high-clock modern CPUs with NVMe SSD. For more on what hardware actually matters past the megabase threshold, see our companion guide: Factorio Megabase Server Specs 2026.

Bottom line

Factorio is a game of ratios. Get them wrong and your factory bottlenecks itself. Get them right and your science line runs at the rate you sized it for, indefinitely. This calculator is the fastest way to get the math right before you commit to belt runs and machine placements.