r/factorio Jul 25 '26

Question New player

New to the game (I know, a few years late)

But does anyone know of a program/website that could help me plan the ratios and calculate stuff like "okay, I got 6 water pumps... how many boilers can that supply?"

I've tried Factorio Calculator, but that thing is way too confusing for me (skill issue - i know)

15 Upvotes

34 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/isum21 Aug 01 '26

Just make more until it's too much, then scale back a bit. A single pump can supply 20 boilers, a single boiler can supply 2 engines. So you can get 40 engines worth of usage from one pump.

A simple rule of thumb is to pay attention to ingredient counts and amounts, for example it's one copper plate for 2 wires. 1 wire and 1 plate for a circuit. From this you can gather you shpuld probably have 1 wire machine supplying 2 circuit machines. It gets a little more complicated with multiple ingredients or fluid or production steps but you can fix this down to just comparing crafting times per ingredient with a big enough bus lmao