Factorio Science Progression — The Blue Wall, the Ratios, and How Many Labs
Last verified: June 12, 2026 against the Factorio 2.0 recipe set. Ratios unchanged in the announced 2.1 plans.
Every Factorio run has the same stall point. Red science: trivial. Green science: a pleasant afternoon. Then blue science arrives and the factory grinds to a halt — a complaint so universal that "the transition to blue is a massive wall" threads still hit the front page of r/factorio in 2026. This page is the reference for getting through it and the stages after: exact recipes, the assembler ratio, lab math, and the order of operations that turns the wall into a ramp.
The recipes that matter (2.0 values)
- Automation (red): 1 copper plate + 1 iron gear wheel → 1 pack (5s). Raw cost ≈ 2 iron + 1 copper per pack.
- Logistic (green): 1 transport belt + 1 inserter → 1 pack (6s). Raw cost ≈ 5.5 iron + 1.5 copper.
- Chemical (blue): 1 sulfur + 3 advanced circuits + 2 engine units → 2 packs (24s). Raw cost per pack ≈ 12 iron + 7.5 copper + 1.5 coal + ~38.5 crude oil.
- Production (purple): 30 rails + 1 electric furnace + 1 productivity module → 3 packs (21s). Raw cost per pack ≈ 52.5 iron + 19 copper + 11.7 stone + 68 oil.
- Utility (yellow): 2 processing units + 1 flying robot frame + 3 low density structures → 3 packs (21s). Raw cost per pack ≈ 33 iron + ~50 copper + 107 oil.
Read the raw-cost column once and the difficulty curve explains itself: blue costs roughly 4x green in iron and introduces oil; purple quadruples it again and introduces stone-at-scale; yellow flips the bottleneck to copper and oil. Each tier is less a recipe and more a new department of the factory.
The assembler ratio: 5 : 6 : 5 : 12 : 7 : 7
For equal packs-per-second from the same assembler tier, the ratio across automation : logistic : military : chemical : production : utility is 5 : 6 : 5 : 12 : 7 : 7. The number that matters is the 12. Blue science's 24-second craft (for 2 packs) is so slow that you need more than twice the assemblers of red science for the same output — under-building blue assembly is the second most common cause of the wall, right after the advanced-circuit drought covered below.
Why the blue wall is really an advanced-circuit wall
When blue science stalls, players stare at the science assemblers. Wrong suspect, almost every time. The real chokepoints, in observed order of frequency:
- Advanced circuits (red circuits). Each needs 2 green circuits + 4 copper cable + 2 plastic, and the copper-cable demand silently doubles your copper consumption. A dedicated red-circuit block with its own cable assemblers — not a corner of the mall — is the single fix that gets most blue lines moving.
- Sulfur and plastic. Both come from oil. If you reached blue without petroleum cracking, your refinery output is mis-balanced within an hour. Basic oil processing → advanced processing + cracking is itself a blue-science-era milestone; plan it first, not last.
- Engine units. Steel + gears + pipes in a 10-second assembler craft. They are not hard, just forgotten — engines are the ingredient most often hand-fed "temporarily" for the first hundred packs.
The order of operations after green science, then: oil first, red circuits second, engines third, science assembly last. Build in that order and the wall mostly fails to materialize.
How many labs?
Labs are the one building with no fixed ratio — the honest answer is a method, not a number:
- Pick a science-per-minute target. 60 SPM is the classic "comfortable mid-game" number; it means producing one of each active pack per second.
- Add labs until packs stop backing up. A lab consumes one set of packs per research cycle, sped up by research-speed technologies; faster research = fewer labs needed for the same pack supply. Early game, 10-20 labs absorbs a yellow belt of mixed packs comfortably.
- Megabase scale is a different sport. 1000+ SPM bases run hundreds of beaconed, moduled labs — at that point lab count is a power-and-beacon question, not a science one.
Multiplayer notes
On a server, the science stages map neatly onto a division of labor: one player owns oil and chemicals, one owns circuits, one owns rails and smelting for the purple ramp. The blue wall that stalls a solo run for an evening dissolves in an hour with three players who each take one ingredient chain. If your group is heading to Space Age afterwards, the same discipline — one production chain, one owner — is exactly what Gleba punishes you for not having. For server sizing as your SPM target grows, see hardware requirements.
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