long term quantities of items

[Nekochan]

Just wondering as I finish up tier 3/4 what the definition of "need" is going forward when it comes to crafting items. At this point I'm smelting or creating ingots as close to the resource nodes as possible and only bringing ingots in to my mega factory. Each item has it's own dedicated line so I'm not siphoning say bolts off to other stuff. I'm also using merge/splitter pattern I made to make sure that if one line caps out ingots get siphoned to other lines.

[vinster7]

It all depends on your playstyle and how fast you want things to progress. A decent pace for me has my factory taking 120 copper/m, 120 steel/m and around 300 iron/m. (This is with alternate recipes, a lot of my iron is going into iron wire so you may need more copper if you don't have that) This lets me produce all basic materials fast enough that I don't run out while expand. This is like 5 frames/m, 10 reinforced plates/m, and 10 rotors/m, and about 5/m for all the space elevator parts. Which means a little less than 2 hours to get to the next phase. This also left me enough room to get motors and industrial beams going aswell. I'd recommend 16 coal generators (1200MW), once you get to computers and heavy frames you'll probably wanna double that.

[Trehek]

Well, going into the endgame you can make things as ridiculously large as you want, but as an example, here's the resource board of my phase 3 factory (I build one in each factory's lobby). The factory was built to provide my central storage with a single machine's worth of tier 6 products (heavy frames, circuit boards, computers) and provide the project parts to finish project phase 3 within a reasonable time (100 minutes, with versatile frameworks already produced in the phase 2 factory) and unlock tiers 7-8.

The upper part of the resource board lists all input resources and the lower part lists the output products of the factory. All smart plating and some auto wiring (this factory produces an additional 5/m) are transported from the phase 1 and 2 factories and are listed as inputs. If you include them, raw iron and copper amounts are somewhat higher.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2911056054

This is just an example. It all comes down to which recipes you use, what you're using your factories for and how much volume you're willing to produce.

To give you a different kind of idea, the most you can mine from an impure node with full overclocking and a Mk.3 miner is 300 items per minute. A normal node can mine 600 per minute. Pure nodes are capped by the fastest conveyor belt, which is currently the tier 5, which moves 780 items per minute. With late game alt recipes, such as Pure Iron Ingot and Pure Copper Ingot, ore can be converted into ingots at a really favorable ratio. A single pure copper node producing 780 ore can be refined into ingots at a x2.5 ratio, which produces 1950 copper ingots per minute. The recipes involved have a vastly higher power consumption than basic smelting, though.