Crafting
Crafting means the production of new entities out of others by using a Recipe. The player or Assembling machines can craft. Smelting is achieved by using Furnaces. Since smelting cannot be done by the player, it is impossible to craft some items directly from raw resources.
In the beginning of the game, it is easy to make everything manually, but as the game advances manual crafting is less and less efficient of a way to create. Products that require liquids and a few others (such as engine units) cannot be manually crafted. This is to encourage automation.
Manual crafting
Manual crafting is the most basic form of crafting. To manually craft an object, open the player's inventory (Default keybind "E"), and select an object to manually craft on the right. Left click for one, right click for five, and shift click to make as many as possible. Ensure you have the materials necessary to craft the object. If you lack a resource, it will be shown highlighted in red text if you mouseover the product. Materials that you don't have but you can craft will be highlighted in orange text, and will be chain-crafted to reach the product you selected. Common candidates being copper cable or Electronic circuits.
To cancel a manual crafting operation from the queue at the bottom left of the screen, left click (to cancel one operation), right click (to cancel five operations), or shift-left click to cancel all crafts of that item. This is useful if you accidentally queue the wrong product. All the materials taken to craft the item will be returned to your inventory.
Automated crafting
Automated crafting is done outside of the player's inventory, allowing for multiple products to be produced at once, in synchronous harmony. This is where most crafting should take place.
Key structures in automated crafting are:
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Collecting resources to provide them to the Transport network. |
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Smelting raw resources to intermediate products. |
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Assemble intermediate products to needed items. |
Basic
Task: create Iron plates.
- Place a Burner mining drill onto an Iron ore resource field.
- Place a Furnace directly in front of the output, so that the miner outputs the ore into the furnace.
- Fill both the miner and the furnace with Fuel.
- Wait. After a few seconds, the first piece of Iron plate is smelted and available for collection. Either collect it manually, or pull it out with an inserter.
Advanced
Crafting of Items can be automated. To automatically craft items, place a Assembling machine, and select the recipe. Note that if the recipe is complicated enough, higher tiers of assembling machines may be necessary. Then, place all requested ingredients into the input slots, and the assembling machine should craft the item. Note that unlike manual crafting, each step of the craft requires another assembly machine. For example, crafting a lamp requires a machine to make copper cable, a machine to make iron sticks, a machine to make electronic circuits, etc. Assembly machines cannot automatically chain-craft like the player.
To keep up continuous production ingredients must be provided via belts and Inserters. The manufactured items can also be extracted by Inserters and are then available for further usage elsewhere in the factory.