Crafting
Crafting means the production of new entities out of others by using a Recipe. The character or Assembling machines craft. Furnaces smelt, which is not really crafting (cause it can't be done by the character/assemblies), even if smelting uses also recipes.
In the beginning of the game, it is easy to make everything manually, but as the time advances manual crafting is less and less sufficient way to create stuff. Products that require liquids and a few others (such as engine units) cannot be manually crafted. Remember always: Factorio is a game about automation: Even if it look to much work, it is in most cases less work to built assemblies for doing the most important and nastiest stuff.
Items
Manual crafting:
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Very useful. |
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More useful. |
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Research how your character feels being like a Requester chest |
Key structures in automated crafting are:
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Collecting resources to provide them to the Transport network. |
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Smelting resources to intermediate products. |
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Assemble intermediate products to needed items. |
Basic
Task: create Iron plates.
- Place a Burner mining drill on a Iron ore resource field.
- Place a Furnace directly in front of the output, so that the miner outputs the ore into the furnace.
- Fill both (burner and furnace) with Fuel
- Wait. After a few seconds, the first piece of Iron plate is smelted and available for collection.
Advanced
Crafting by player: .... Todo ... How many items needed etc better explained as second task?
Crafting of Items can be automated. Place the needed building, select the recipe and whenever all ingredients are stored in the building the recipe will be produced one after one. To keep up continuous production ingredients have to be provided via belts and Inserters. The manufactured Items can also be extracted by Inserters and are then available for further usage.
Tools/Cheatcheets
There is a growing list of Tools and Cheatsheets, to gain more control about the complex crafting processes.
Factory chains
Sometimes an assembling machine requires so much input that there is more than one machine needed to supply enough material. In this case you may lose some efficiency when extracting the intermediate products on to a belt transport for only a few squares to insert them again into the final assembling machine. When using Inserters from machine to machine the Inserter item stack size bonus applies, saving power and time.
This method is best used when the intermediate products are not needed anywhere else.
See also Deciding which items to re-make and which to keep on belts?.
Expert
Beacons
To maximize the output or efficiency of assembling machines Beacons provide an additional source for applying module effects.