Big Ambitions Factory Guide

The four people a factory needs

None of them stand at a machine by choice; each one closes a gap that will otherwise stall the building.

• A purchasing agent at headquarters. Import contracts are set up by an agent, and each agent can be assigned to one importer at a time. Making cupcakes and beer means two agents: the sugar and milk come from Lunar Tide, the barley and hops from Aquatic Bay.
• Factory workers on the floor. Since the 0.10 overhaul their skill level changes how fast the line runs — Hovgaard’s words were that worker skill “now has a noticeable impact on production”.
• A logistics manager at a headquarters desk. One manager per warehouse or factory. They are assigned to the factory but sit at a desk in your headquarters, not in the factory itself. Without the HQ desk the deliveries do not get scheduled.
• A delivery driver on a vehicle parked in the factory. Factory freight goes to a warehouse, not straight to a shop: only warehouses deliver to shops. The driver’s skill decides which vehicles they can take out, and the Freight Truck T1, the biggest, needs a driver at 95% skill or higher.

Importing raw material

Importers work on contracts, not shopping trips. You visit the importer on the piers once to sign a contract that links it to one of your purchasing agents, and from then on the agent places the orders. Three things decide what arrives:

• Delivery day. Import orders arrive once a week, on Monday at 08:00. An urgent order arrives the next morning instead, for an extra fee that Hovgaard ties to the difficulty setting.
• Weekly limits. Every item has a weekly cap at each importer, and urgent orders count toward it. There is no minimum order any more — Hovgaard dropped it in Early Access 0.9.
• Smart Delivery. A repeating order re-sends the same amount every week. Switch Smart Delivery on and the number becomes a target stock level instead: set 500 while the factory holds 200, and the agent orders 300. This is the mode a running line wants.

Deliveries go onto pallet shelves, so a factory with no free pallet space receives nothing.

If imports stopped arriving in the first days after 1.0, that was a bug rather than your setup. Build 3674 fixed employees getting stuck when they tried to quit, which Hovgaard says was making training, imports and deliveries fail.

Two facts about the piers worth knowing before you sign anything. The importers specialise, and many products can only be bought from one of them — the wiki’s Warehouse page keeps a table of which importer carries each kind of goods, and the item finder lists the catalogues the wiki has recorded. And since 1.0, exporting moves the import index: sell too much of a product abroad and its import and export price drops for the rest of that week. Overproducing is now visible on the invoice.

What the 0.10 overhaul changed

Factories were rebuilt in Early Access 0.10, in March 2026, and the announcement is specific about what changed. Layouts no longer let belts block walkways; workers stop walking back and forth; lines no longer hoard every ingredient in one input station; production speeds went up; worker skill started to matter; and, in Hovgaard’s words, “every product can be produced by factories”.

That last line matters for the table below. The community’s recipe pages were written before the overhaul, for 0.9. The chains they describe — which machine, fed by which ingredients — are the structure the planner works from, and the lines below are the ones the wiki has fully mapped. Products that became factory-producible in 0.10 without a wiki recipe are not in it yet.

Every product line the community has mapped

Grouped by the machine that finishes the product. Click through to the planner for the machine count and shopping list.

Related

• Factory planner — machines, ratios and the shopping list for any line above
• Item finder — where the Factory Supply Depot and the seven importers are
• Blueprints — warehouse layouts (H, I, P and Q buildings) other players have saved