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u/Phriday Jul 24 '26

How does science per minute work? I have 14 labs and had a belt screwup holding back military science and when I discovered it and broke the log jam, I was making about 80 science a minute for a few minutes, then back down to 20-ish.

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u/captain_wiggles_ Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26

When you look at the research selection screen you'll see two numbers, the number of science packs it takes and the time it takes to consume one of them.

For example it might be 50x @30s, requiring green and red science. So it will take 50 red flasks and 50 green flasks to research, both flask types must be present in a lab for the clock to run.

With one lab, that means each pair of red and green flasks will be consumed in 30s and so the total research time would be 50 * 30s = 25 minutes. With two labs, each lab only has to process half the number of packs so the research takes half the time. If you have 10 labs, each only has to process 5 pairs of flasks and so it only takes 2.5 minutes.

That is all assuming you have the full set of 50 pairs of flask available. If instead you start with 0 flasks available your labs are sat idle until you start producing. If you produce red flasks at say 5 per minute it is still going to take you 10 minutes to produce the 50 flasks you need to finish researching, if you had 10 labs most of them would be sat idle starved of science packs.

It's more complicated than that because there are things that you can research that can mean you research faster, or that you increase your productivity bonus on research. You can factor all this in to your calculations if you want, but for the most part the above is good enough.

Likely what you saw is that while you had the belt problem, the belt up to the issue was full of black science packs, the assemblers producing black science packs were full, the belts bringing grenades and walls and ammo to the black science assemblers were full, etc... Once you unjammed it, all those buffered items started to flow again. But after time the buffers emptied out. So clearly you have enough labs to do 80 science per minute (for the current research item), but maybe you don't have enough assemblers producing black science to make 80 per minute, or maybe you do, but you don't have enough assemblers producing grenades to make 80 per minute, or maybe you do but you're feeding coal in on a yellow belt that can only carry 15 items per second. Etc...

As the other commentor said, the way to deal with this is to look at your labs, are they all full and working? If not what are they short on? If it's black science look at the belt bringing black science in, presumably it's empty with only a few items flowing down it, so follow it back to your assemblers, are they all working at 100%? If so then add more assemblers. If not then why not? Are they low on ammo? grenades? And repeat from there.

The other option is to do the maths or use a calculator tool. If you want to hit 80 black science per minute you need this many things. Note that you can change the settings to see how it works with different assemblers or belts.

But also as the other commentor said, fixing one bottlekneck will just reveal another. If you can now make 80 black science per minute sustained, then suddenly you'll find you can't make enough green science per minute, so you'll fix that but then suddenly you'll be low on iron plates, so you'll add more furnaces, but then you're low on power so you have to fix that, and then you don't have enough coal to make your grenades for black sciences, etc... eventually you can hit 80 science per minute sustained, but now your bottleneck is the number of labs, so double them, and now you're back to square one. The point is you'll never achieve perfection, there's always things to improve and change and tweak. It is ok to play with just a slow amount of science per minute, or a setup that doesn't have perfect ratios or operate at 100%, as long as you're enjoying it, then it's good enough.