Crafting

In the beginning of the game, it is easy to make everything manually, but as the time advances manual crafting is less and less sufficient way to create stuff.

Basic

Crafting of Items can be automated. Place the needed building, select the recipe and whenever all ingredients are stored in the building the recipe will be produced one after one. To keep up continous production ingredients have to be provided via belts and Inserters. The manufactured Items can also be extracted by Inserters are available for further usage.

Items

Key structures in automated crafting are:

File:Electric-mining-drill.png Mining drill	Collecting resources from the map to provide them to the Transport network.
File:Stone-furnace.png Furnaces	Smelting resources to intermediate products.
File:Assembling-machine-1.png Assembling machines	Assemble intermediate products to Items.

Advanced

http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1935

Factory chains

A factory chain producing Smart inserters.

Some times an assembling machine uses this much input that there is more than one machine needed to supply enough material. In this case you may loose some efficiency when extracting the intermediate products, put in on a belt transport them only a few squares to insert them again into the final assembling machine. When using Inserters from machine to machine the Inserter item stack size bonus applies, saving power and time.

This method can also be used when some products are not needed anywhere else.

Expert

Beacons

File:Factorio-beacon.png

A set of Furnaces affected by a beacon. Applies to Assembling machines too.

To maximize the output or efficiency of assembling machines Beacons provide an additional source for applying module effects.

See also

• Electric network
• Transport network
• Inserters
• Assembling machine
• Furnace
• Modules
• Beacon