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 (32×32 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.