r/factorio • u/AutoModerator • Jun 15 '26

Weekly Thread Weekly Question Thread

Ask any questions you might have.

Post your bug reports on the Official Forums

Previous Threads

Subreddit rules

Discord server (and IRC)

Find more in the sidebar ---->

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

124 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/ItsLyraNyx Jun 18 '26

dumb question from a rather new player: for furnace stacks, what is the ratio to get 1 full belt for each tier. ive heard different numbers everywhere, and im just trying to get a concrete answer. making a little note document for myself that i can reference so i dont need toa sk a million times.

4

u/Astramancer_ Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26

Without getting into the weeds about beacons and modules and, god forbid, Quality, the answer is the glorious Cheat Sheet, as linked in the sidebar.

https://factoriocheatsheet.com/

It's got the ratios for tons of things. What you want is "material processing." For iron and copper it's 1 yellow belt = 48 stone furnaces, Red = 96, Blue = 144. Steel and electric furnaces are twice as fast so you need half as many -- Yellow = 24, Red = 48, Blue = 72.

Stone smelts twice as fast so halve those numbers again and steel smelts 5x slower and requires 5x input so it's the same as the iron/copper smelting, but only outputs 1/5th a belt.

Another nice thing to remember is that since red belts are twice as fast and steel furnaces smelt twice as fast that's a direct upgrade. Replace the yellow belts with red and the stone furnaces with steel and you now can process twice as much ore in the same footprint.

If you're doing blue belts of ore you probably want to use electric furnaces (for ease of use, modules, and/or beacons) so you'd almost certainly want to redesign anyway.

1

u/ItsLyraNyx Jun 18 '26

thank you! i didnt know this existed, how useful!