Big Ambitions Factory Planner
Pick a product and get the machines to buy, how many of each to keep the line balanced, the full chain, and which importer sells every raw material.
Community sourcesCurrent for 1.0 Build 3672Data from Early Access 0.9
GamePrimer EditorialUpdated Verified
Choose what you want to make. The planner returns the machines and how many of each you need so the last step never waits on the one before it, the full chain from imported material to finished product, and a shopping list grouped by importer. It works on ratios, so the answer holds whatever the day length turns out to be.
Machines on the last step set the pace; everything upstream is sized to keep them busy. Quantity only changes the shopping list and the time.
Recipes, machines, yields and minutes as recorded on the community wiki's machine pages for Early Access 0.9. Nothing here is a price.
How the machine count is worked out
Every row on the wiki’s machine pages gives four things: what a machine makes, how many it makes per run, what it consumes, and how many minutes the run takes. The last step’s machine sets the pace of the whole line; any earlier machine whose work per finished unit takes longer has to be duplicated, or the final machine sits idle waiting for it.
Take a cupcake. Assembly takes 3 minutes and yields one. Baking the plain cupcake takes 12 minutes for one. Batter takes 3 minutes but yields six, so each cupcake needs only half a minute of blending for batter; frosting takes 4 minutes for one. Per cupcake, that is 3 minutes of assembly, 12 of baking, 4.5 of blending. With one assembly machine you need four ovens and two blenders — the smallest set with no queue in front of the last step. Add a second assembly machine and everything doubles.
Yields change the shopping list the same way. A burger run makes two burgers from one bun, one patty and one slice of cheese, and a cheese-slicing run cuts four slices — so a hundred burgers need fifty buns and thirteen blocks of cheese, not a hundred of each.
Where the same machine does two jobs the planner adds them up. A croissant’s blender makes both the butter and the laminated dough, so its load is the sum of both before the ratio is taken.
The time figure under the machine table is the one absolute number the data supports: minutes are the wiki’s own unit for a run, so “a hundred burgers keep one assembly machine busy for 300 minutes” is arithmetic, not an estimate. What the wiki does not say is how long a game day is or how many hours a factory works, which is why there is no “per day” anywhere on this page.
The minutes themselves are the community’s Early Access 0.9 measurements, and Hovgaard’s 0.10 factory overhaul said production speeds were “ramped up” without publishing new figures. A uniform speed-up leaves every ratio on this page unchanged and shortens the minutes; an uneven one would move the ratios too. Nobody has re-measured the machines since, which is why the chip at the top of the page says where the numbers come from.
What it deliberately does not tell you
- Profit. The wiki’s product pages carry a placeholder where the retail price should be, so no sale price exists to set against the import cost. A number here would be invented.
- Ingredient quantities beyond one per run. The machine tables list what a run consumes, one of each. Where a run yields several units the planner divides accordingly; it cannot know if a run ever consumes more than one of an input, because the wiki does not record it.
- Workers. Hovgaard’s 0.10 factory overhaul made Factory Worker skill matter to output, and no public source has measured by how much.
Related
- Factory guide — importers, purchasing agents, the 0.10 overhaul, and every product line at a glance
- Item finder — where the Factory Supply Depot is and what it stocks
- Blueprints — warehouse and factory layouts other players have saved
