Glossary

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!

Assembly

crafts a new item from refined items. Currently up to 4 types of inserted items can result into one output item. A receipt tells the assembly which items are used, how long it takes, how much energy is used and what comes out.

Belt

see Transport belt

Entity

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.

Item

is an moveable entity, everything on the belts, in chests, in your inventory, transported by Logistic bots/Locomotive, inside turrets, assemblies, furnaces are items. A stack can contain only one sort of items. Items can also lay on the ground, you can grep 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 distincted into resource-items and refined items. Don't mix items up with resources.

Refined item

items which have beed smelted by a furnace. Note, that the player is not able to create refined items out of resource-items, this can only be done in a furnace.

Resource-item

items which come directly out of mines. Iron-ore, copper-ore, coal, stone.

Tick

The smallest measurable amount of time in Factorio. There are 60 ticks per second. Game time is normally identical with real time. But it can be faster or slower. For example when the update for a tick takes too long, the game slows down, or 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 have not 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.