Productivity
Productivity is a percentage based modifier that can be applied to assembling machine, mining drill, and lab type buildings. It causes the machine in question to output some percent more items or science relative to its inputs. A machine with 20% productivity will output 20% more items over time for the same inputs.
Some buildings have inate productivity bonuses. Technologies can give productivity bonuses to particular recipes or processes. For buildings and recipes which support them, productivity modules can also increase productivity.
Functionality
The productivity bonuses from all applicable sources are first added together to get the overall productivity for that process. When a building or recipe provides productivity, a purple bar appears below the normal bar.
As the machine operates, the productivity bar increases at a rate relative to the crafting bar, scaled by the productivity percentage. If the productivity is 20%, then the productivity bar fills up at a rate 20% that of the crafting bar. If the productivity bar is 150%, then it will fill up one and a half times every time the crafting bar fills up.
When the productivity bar completely fills up, a new output is generated, in accord with whichever recipe or mining is currently being performed. If the recipe produces multiple outputs, the productivity output will be the same number of outputs. If quality modules are being used on the machine, the productivity output will be of the same quality as that of the output currently being crafted. That is, the random roll is made when the crafting starts, and the result is duplicated whenever the productivity bar completes.
This means that a machine with 50% productivity will produce 50% more items for the same input.
Represented as a simple formula:
If the machine's recipe changes (either manually or via the circuit network), the productivity bar is reset to zero.
Lab productivity
When productivity is applied to labs (or biolabs
), the productivity bonus is directly calculated and applied each tick. The productivity bar itself is simply cosmetic. Changing the current research resets the productivity bar in labs, but since the bar for labs is just a visual indicator, no actual productivity is lost.
Built-in productivity
Some buildings have a built-in productivity bonus regardless of modules and researched technologies:
Technologies
Certain technologies will increase the productivity of various processes and recipes:
- Mining productivity: applies to all mining drill types
- Steel plate productivity : applies to all non-recycler recipes that generate steel plate.
- Low density structure productivity : applies to all non-recycler recipes that generate low density structure.
- Scrap recycling productivity : applies to Scrap recycling in a recycler, but not to hand-"crafted" scrap recycling.
- Processing unit productivity : applies to all non-recycler recipes that generate processing units.
- Plastic bar productivity : applies to all non-recycler recipes that generate plastic bars.
- Rocket fuel productivity : applies to all non-recycler recipes that generate rocket fuel.
- Asteroid productivity : applies to standard and advanced asteroid crushing recipes, but not to asteroid reprocessing recipes.
- Rocket part productivity : applies to producing rocket parts in a rocket silo.
- Research productivity : applies to all lab-type buildings
Limits
All recipes have a maximum productivity of 300%. This was primarily done to prevent infinite resource exploits involving the recycler and its 25% return of input items. This cap puts a hard limit on the effectiveness of infinite productivity researches. You can research past level 30 of these technologies, but it will have no practical effects.
Note that miners are not crafting machines that execute recipes, nor are labs. As such, mining productivity (research) and research productivity (research) have no limit.