Tile

A tile is the smallest piece of the world map. The whole Factorio world is made out of them.

Tiles are used as a unit for measuring area and distance.

A Chunk (32x32 tiles) is the next largest unit for area/distance.

How to see tiles and chunks?

You can either

• pause the game (by default with Shift-Space) or
• you can use the Debug mode to turn the tile-layer on.

Examples

• Area covered by Radar: about 100 tiles diameter (100 tiles in each direction, bounded to the matching Chunk, read about Radar to understand this)
• Speed of a basic Transport belt: about 1.8 tiles/sec.
• It takes about 1 minutes and 52 seconds to run 1000 tiles without speed up. ^[1] (As a side note, this would mean that the character is a very healthy person.)

Real size of tiles

1 tile is generally assumed to be 1 square meter in size (like Minecraft). According to this discussion, this assumption seems to be true.

Length or area?

If you want to make it clear whether you are referring to a tile as length or area please use something like "tile length", "square tiles", "tile^2" or similar, but in most cases it should be clear.