How do you guys make complex calculations on late game products?

[beardoof]

I'm trying to create a battery factory, but I can't seem to get around the right math to do it. There's always some water left, or alumina, or sulfur... I find it really hard to grasp the right amount of buildings for each stage.

It's fairly simple to calculate when you're doing screws, I've noticed that to calculate how many buildings I need I should to the LCM (least common multiple) on consumption and production, so if I produce 15 iron bars and consume 10 for screws, I need to produce 30 bars and split into 3x10 (30 is the LCM of 15 and 10). But I really don't know how to scale these calculations when there are 2+ inputs, 2+ outputs, and multiple stages of production. How do you guys do it?

I know there are sites with calculators that do the math for me but I have a lot of fun doing it myself and I wanted to learn how to do it :)

[Zara]

Spreadsheets, time, and under/overclocking. I start by figuring how much raw material I have to work with, I then map out how much 1 end-product takes in raw resources. I then use that to figure how many productions of the end-product I can make, including under/overclocking for the remainder, and then I work out any recycled water or anything else I need to account for.

In the end, the later stuff takes more time, especially in the case of Aluminum where there is generally recycled water from the production line to deal with. As long as you enjoy the process, doing it by hand is rewarding imo. Of course, as you said there are calculators if you don't want to spend the time on it, and that's fine too.

As for liquid byproducts, there is always the option to package and sink it until you have something to do with it

[beardoof]

Originally posted by Zara:

Spreadsheets, time, and under/overclocking. I start by figuring how much raw material I have to work with, I then map out how much 1 end-product takes in raw resources. I then use that to figure how many productions of the end-product I can make, including under/overclocking for the remainder, and then I work out any recycled water or anything else I need to account for.

Would you mind sharing an example spreadsheet so I can learn from it? I'm having a really hard time figuring it out right now. Even a simple example like reinforced plates could help me a lot!

[Zara]

https://imgur.com/a/8FGbPV5
A simple example. I started with knowing I had 180 Iron Ore, and I listed out the recipes all the way down, starting at Reinforced Iron Plates (only base recipes for simplicity). I then calculated how many of each machine I'd need to make the recipe once, and added the base materials together.

In the end, I could make 15 Reinforced Iron Plates per minute with the Iron I have. I would then decide whether I would need all of that, and then make as much as I need.

[God of Snacks]

I don't make any calculations, I just produce as hard and as fast as I can.

[LostME]

I am using a calculator. Easy, understandable, remembers calculations. There are both for u5 and u6.
https://www.satisfactorytools.com/

[Mochan]

The calculations are simple enough, you just need to look twice for the input and output now because there are two inputs and outputs.

You can go the spreadsheet route other people do, but eyeballing is not hard.

[XistenZ]

A common tip is to "work backwards", decide how much of the end product you need and then add production to match it.
When it comes to excess silica, water etc., yeah that's a headache. Solid materials can be sinked right away (use a smart splitter to only sink the overflow). For water, either do the math by subtracting what your factories will produce in excess from the total need and pipe this water back to the factories.

Personally I usually just math it out in notepad before hand. The new notes-thing in U6 can be helpful for this depending on the scale.

And there's of course the "oh f*** it"-route where you just plop down factories as you go and see where the bottle necks are until you produce what you need

[kLuns]

Originally posted by LostME:

I am using a calculator. Easy, understandable, remembers calculations. There are both for u5 and u6.
https://www.satisfactorytools.com/

This is a great way to calculate any production line, no administration needed.

[The Big Brzezinski]

Originally posted by kLuns:

Originally posted by LostME:

I am using a calculator. Easy, understandable, remembers calculations. There are both for u5 and u6.
https://www.satisfactorytools.com/

This is a great way to calculate any production line, no administration needed.

Unfortunately, it does all the thinking for you. Tell it how many of a thing you want, and it invents a whole factory for you to build. Not terribly useful if you prefer to do the math yourself.

[DaBa]

Isn't it all still just simple calculations? You can go for perfect ratios sure, and usually you can achieve those with underclocking, but baseline you just make sure you have enough buildings to produce every product required, it doesn't matter if you slightly overproduce something.

And since you know exactly how much and how fast every machine makes things, it's really down to simple math, can even do it without a calculator, just a single sheet of paper an a pen. I don't really understand how is this any different with multiple stages of production, the math remains the same. To me it sounds like you're severely overcomplicating it or thinking about it in a really weird way.

[DaBa]

Originally posted by The Big Brzezinski:

Originally posted by kLuns:

This is a great way to calculate any production line, no administration needed.

Unfortunately, it does all the thinking for you. Tell it how many of a thing you want, and it invents a whole factory for you to build. Not terribly useful if you prefer to do the math yourself.

This is a fantastic tool if you've already played through the game, solved all those problems yourself and know how everything works, and you just cannot be bothered to calculate the same thing, AGAIN, for the 10th time, and for a large supply line.

If's a horrible tool if you're just starting out. It is as you said, it prevents you from learning things and figuring stuff out on your own. Which is a huge part and source of fun of these games. By using this as a new player you're basically robbing yourself of fun.

[Wolfgang]

Generally with pen and paper. Get the output I need (or get with one building at 100%) and calculate my way backwards until I am either at the raw resources or at resources I already make and have available. In that fashion I calculated my way back from the Turbomotor to the motor and that down to the raw resources for them. It workes though it can be a bit of a calculation where you can do quite some stuff wrong.

But for batteries I recommend using the alt recipe "Classic Battery" as it eliminates all the liquid components and any by-product.

[kLuns]

Originally posted by The Big Brzezinski:

Unfortunately, it does all the thinking for you. Tell it how many of a thing you want, and it invents a whole factory for you to build. Not terribly useful if you prefer to do the math yourself.

It doesn't mention how much nodes/miners you need, how much belts/pipes of what item you will make or how to divide the clock speed over all the machines on a production line.
There is still enough math left to do.
In time I learn production lines by heart and set them up very quickly for more complex items.

And where will I build this factory and where do the goodies come from? Or is it a series of modular builds?

There is enough to do next to the information provided by this online calculator.

[QWARZ]

for industries that have water or any other liquid resources at the outlet, I think I found the optimal scheme: at the outlet you put a pump that pumps waste water to the input of the production, and the lack of water is compensated through a tee by a water intake from a lake or river, usually the pump has a higher priority therefore, the waste liquid is consumed first of all, but sometimes such a scheme may have problems, then you can add an additional feature, place the production 8 meters above the water intake, this is easy to do using 2 walls of 4 meters each, then between the tee connecting the sump pump with production we put an ordinary tank, the trick is that the water collector can raise water by a maximum of 10 meters, and due to the fact that our production is 8 meters higher, the water collector cannot pump more than half of the water into the tank, as a result, for waste water there will always be at least half of the cistern of free space and our production will work work indefinitely, in this scheme we also do not forget to put the pump at the outlet of the water from the production

it’s even easier to get rid of excess solid waste, you can send it to the utilizer, and if some of it is needed somewhere else, then get rid of it using a smart splitter, for this we put the label “overabundance” at the exit to the utilizer

[H. Guderian]

I take a guess, set it up, but leave some room. Then if there's not enough or a backlog I come back to it. Machines backing up is not a problem