Glossary

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Note: some of the pages aren't created yet. Instead the information is gathered together here, and when the page is created it should be moved to that page. Note2: try to keep links/pages in singular! Not Belts but Belt!

Assembling machine

Crafts a new item from intermediate products. Currently up to 4 types of inserted items can result into one output item. A recipe tells the assembly which items are used, how long it takes, how much energy is used and what comes out. See Crafting network

Assembly

See Assembling machine and Crafting network

Basic accumulator

Stores electrical energy. Most commonly used for providing electricity at night when solar panels produce none

Belt

See Transport belt.

Enemies

Enemies are the aliens that attack you and your factory. They come in Biter and Spitter forms, as well as small, medium, large, and gargantuan sizes. They are attracted to pollution sources.

Chest

Placeable item that is used to store other items.

Entity

Anything that can be manipulated in-game. Nearly everything in factorio is an entity. Tiles, Items, any device, trees... Even the player is just an entity

Inserter

An automatic robot arm, which transports Items from a source to a destination.

Intermediate products

Items which can not be placed on planet or be used by player, their only purpose is as raw material for other recipes.

Item

Is a moveable entity. Everything on the belts, in chests, in your inventory, transported by Logistic bots/Locomotive, inside turrets, assemblies, furnaces is an item. A stack can contain only one sort of item. Items can also lay on the ground, you can grab them up normally with key F and drop them down with key Z. Every item has a physical dimension (see bounding boxes), which limits the density the can have on the map. Items are subcategorized into resources, intermediate products, equipment and placeable items.

Lab

A type of assembly machine which produces no output and only accepts science packs as input. Used to research new technologies.

Laser turret

Advanced defensive structure which uses electricity instead of bullets.

Mines

Shorthand term for any kind of mining building: Mining drills, electric mining drills, and pumpjacks are all considered mines.

Mining drill

Placeable item to automate mining. See also Electric Mining Drill.

Module

One of three types of item that can be placed in buildings to change the effects of the building.

Pax

Player access station; in addition to the scheduled trains in a train network, one may want to add extra stations and trains for maintenance.

Pollution

Created by burning coal/wood and running mines, pumpjacks, and assembly machines

Resource

Entities that did not need to be assembled. Iron-ore, copper-ore, coal, stone, water, crude oil, raw wood, alien artifacts, and raw fish are all resources.

Scenario

A map that has been saved via the Map editor

Tick

The smallest measurable amount of time in Factorio. There are 60 ticks per second.

Time

Game time is normally identical with real time, one second in the game is one second in reality, but it can be faster or slower. For example, when the calculations for an update takes longer than a tick, the game slows down. Alternatively, a mod can provide ways to let the game run faster.

Tile

A piece of map. It is not really known how big it is, but for simplifying things we can assume, that a tile is a quadrate with side of 1 meter (like Minecraft). Please consider that the entities do not have sizes which can be compared to real life; gameplay goes here over reality.

Transport belt

A belt is used to transport items to any point of the map to satisfy logistic needs. A belt is a little bit wider than two items, so you can transport items in two rows of the belt. The players task is to handle this two sides with the limited elements he has. This is one of the core game elements of factorio.

Tree

Item that produces wood when mined

Turret

Stationary defense weapon. There are gun & laser turrets. With some upgrades turrets get really powerful.