Productivity

Productivity is a percentage based modifier that can be applied to assembling machine, mining drill, and lab type buildings. It can be increased by inserting productivity modules and by researching certain technologies.

Functionality

Progress made by productivity bonuses can be observed by opening the interface of a building that has a bonus. It will be shown as an additional progress bar in purple. For each time this bar fills up, the machine creates an additional product. How fast this bar progresses is determined by the amount of productivity bonus.

The purple bar represents the productivity bonus progress.

A productivity of 100 % will create an extra product at the same rate the machine works at. A productivity of 50 % will create additional product on every second cycle. A productivity of 1 % will create an additional product on every 100th cycle, and so on.

Represented as a simple forumla:

Additional product per cycle = productivity % / 100

Lab productivity

When productivity is applied to labs (or biolabs), the productivity bonus is directly calculated and applied each tick so the productivity bar is simply cosmetic. This means that it does not matter that the productivity bar resets when the research is changed; no productivity bonus is lost.

Built-in productivity

Some buildings have a built-in productivity bonus regardless of modules and researched technologies:

• Biochamber
• Electromagnetic plant
• Foundry

Technologies

Certain technologies will increase the productivity of some buildings and/or recipes:

• Mining productivity
• Steel plate productivity
• Low density structure productivity
• Scrap recycling productivity
• Processing unit productivity
• Plastic bar productivity
• Rocket fuel productivity
• Asteroid productivity
• Rocket part productivity
• Research productivity

Limits

All recipes has 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.

Note that miners are not crafting machines that execute recipes, nor are labs. As such, mining productivity (research) and research productivity (research) have no upper limit.