Furnace

Furnaces are used to smelt resources into usable products for further usage. This makes them a key building for development and automation. Starting with very basic stone furnaces the player can advance through research and replace them with more efficient and faster furnaces later in the game.

Furnaces can be affected by Beacons.

Overview

Furnace	Total raw	Speed	Max energy	Module slots	Size
File:Stone-furnace.png Stone furnace	5	1	180 kW (burner)	0	2 x 2
File:Steel-furnace.png Steel furnace	File:Steel-bar.png 8 File:Stone-brick.png 10	2	180 kW (burner)	0	2 x 2
File:Electric-furnace.png Electric furnace	File:Copper-plate.png 40 File:Iron-plate.png 20 File:Steel-bar.png 15 File:Stone-brick.png 10	2	180 kW (electric)	2	3 x 3

Burner or electric?

There are several discussions about what is better: steel furnace or electric furnace.

http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=6657

Todo: more links

Multitask furnaces

The furnace chooses the used recipe by itself (it uses the recipe with the right input item). This behavior can be used to furnace, depending on what is currently needed/coming in.

See http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5930&start=10#p47008 and ff.

Note, that this strategy is quite advanced, cause the inserters will fill normally the furnace up to 5 items, so especially when the output is blocked (cause too much produced) you cannot input (the more needed) item.

Examples

File:Furnace-example-1.png

An advanced smelter in late gameplay. Furnaces energy consumption reduced to minimum of 20% with 2 Effictivity modules consuming only 36 kW each.

File:Factorio-beacon.png

12 Electric furnaces affected by a single Basic beacon (this number can't be improved as of 7.1).