Factorio All-Color Science Production Line Ratios and Design

In Factorio, science production often runs smoothly through red and green packs, but crashes as soon as blue arrives due to simultaneous shortages in oil, steel, and circuit boards. This guide covers all seven science colors in Vanilla 2.0—red, green, black, blue, purple, yellow, and white—with practical production ratios anchored at 45 items/minute and design approaches that scale from low-SPM startup to full expansion.

This article is for beginners wanting to build a complete color line all at once, and intermediate players unsure how much to fit on the main bus versus split into local production. I hit the same wall: red and green ran smoothly, then blue choked hard. I only stabilized once I built a separate advanced circuit line. Rather than claiming one "correct answer," I'll outline concrete design principles that lead to factories that stop less often.

Prerequisites for a Complete Factorio All-Color Science Line

Scope of This Article

This guide covers how to make all seven vanilla 2.0 sciences—red, green, black, blue, purple, yellow, and white—work as a single research pipeline. Specific pack names and research roles are detailed in the Factorio Wiki, but this article focuses on bottleneck points rather than catalog introductions.

Specifically, I address each color's role, primary materials, where it tends to choke, rough machine count ratios, and layout philosophy. Red and green extend from early game naturally, black introduces military ingredients alongside, and blue suddenly pulls in oil, steel, advanced circuits, and engines all at once. Purple and yellow then pile on advanced circuit and low-density structure demand, plus lubrication pressure. White shifts from assembler-based production to rocket-launch logistics. Looking at the ratios tells the story: the full-color line isn't about "lining up science packs"—it's about how far upstream you prepare the intermediate supply chain.

The foundation you should stabilize first is iron plates, copper plates, steel, electronic circuits (green circuits), and oil products. Oil includes sulfur, plastic, solid fuel, and lubricant (critical from yellow onward). I once entered blue with weak base refining and crashed on both oil and iron plates. Switching iron to red belts stabilized me, but the real culprit was miscalculating upstream capacity back at red-green. Factories that choke at blue almost always have a narrow bottleneck in the foundation.

As a transport planning standard, thinking in terms of yellow belt at 15 items/second makes things clearer. If you're doing a main bus, use that to decide "how many iron plate lanes" and "should green circuits get their own dedicated line?" Early red-green might flow by luck, but once you're eyeing blue, yellow, and purple together, splitting electronic circuits into an independent upstream line earlier pays off in stability. This approach is common in main bus design because green circuits get eaten from every direction.

For machine counts, assuming Assembler 2 (crafting speed = 0.75), a ratio of red 5 : green 6 : black 5 : blue 12 : yellow 7 : purple 7 works as a practical reference for each ≈45 items/min. Note: this is an "operational guideline" assuming Assembler 2 without modules. If running Assembler 3 (crafting speed = 1.25), multiply machine counts by roughly 0.6 (= 0.75/1.25). Always recalculate based on the target recipe's craft time and your chosen assembler's speed value before final build.

White is different. Red through yellow-purple are assembler-line designs, but white comes from rocket launch cadence, not per-second production. One satellite launch yields 1000 space science at once, so think in terms of launch frequency design rather than continuous flow. Rocket equipment demands massive low-density structure quantities—1000 units per rocket, each taking 20 seconds to craft, totaling about 5.5 hours solo. At that scale, white isn't a standalone line; it's an entire late-game factory resource allocation problem.

On Space Age: the same "full-color line" concept is fundamentally different in design premise. Added science packs, per-planet equipment differences, space logistics, and quality mechanics mean vanilla 2.0 main-bus intuition doesn't map directly. This article handles them separately; here I cover vanilla 2.0 all-color lines exclusively. Space Age's modular and quality-focused designs are a separate optimization domain.

When organizing official pack names and research roles, the Factorio Wiki science pack page is the reference. This article builds on that foundation and drills into line-by-line design bottlenecks.

Science pack - Factorio Wiki

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Starting Decision: Target Production Rate—45 Items/Min Suffices for Most

Advantages and Caveats of Low SPM (~0.75 items/sec)

The first decision isn't "how high can we theoretically push it" but rather which speed lets us avoid stalls. I once designed for 1/sec+ and increased labs before the supply chain was ready. By blue I was short on oil; by yellow-purple, advanced circuits and power were simultaneously choking. Everything crumbled. Then I switched mindset: even 0.75 items/sec is ample for research progress. After that shift, the whole factory stabilized dramatically.

The advantage of this speed tier is that upstream demands drop sharply. Red-green might look safe, but when black adds military demands, blue pulls in engines and sulfur, and yellow-purple hits advanced circuits and low-density structure, even a fast research pace doesn't help if intermediate supply can't follow. Science packs feed research so progress advances as long as they arrive—but if the supply chain is thin, pulsing it throttles the apparent rate, making the design needlessly painful.

Low-SPM operation prioritizes resistance to stalling and expansion room over raw speed. Since yellow belt caps at 15 items/sec, you can build before saturating—"can I add a second line later?" is a better question than "can I cram it all now?" This mindset especially helps with electronic circuits, steel, and oil: early modest production leaves headroom for scaling without redesign. Intermediate players often reach blue-yellow-purple with a stable small line, then double or triple select tiers without touching the rest.

Standard 45 Items/Min Design Friendliness

Once comfortable at low SPM, a natural next benchmark is each color at roughly 45 items/min. This avoids chasing arbitrary high numbers; it aligns with ratio guides and main bus design intuitively. The target ratio of red 5 : green 6 : black 5 : blue 12 : yellow 7 : purple 7 (Assembler 2) fits this speed nicely and is an excellent launchpad for parallel production.

This configuration is ergonomic because differences become obvious. The ratio shows red and green are still light, blue is clearly heavy, so the factory's character shift stands out. Yellow and purple look equivalent in ratio but demand advanced circuits and steel harder than expected—the gap between design and reality becomes apparent. At 45 items/min, you experience that "blue is the first wall, yellow-purple squeeze bottlenecks" progression naturally.

I recommend this tier because design mistakes don't become catastrophic. If you chase 1+ items/sec from the start, simultaneously scaling engines, sulfur, lubrication, and advanced circuits becomes overwhelming fast. At 45 items/min, research still progresses well, you can isolate and expand one bottleneck at a time. The official overview is on the Factorio Wiki science pack page, but this mid-tier speed is where hands-on learning sticks best.

Prerequisites for Jumping to High SPM / Synchronized Multi-Color

Move to high SPM or true synchronized ratios only after all colors flow at roughly equal cadence. Skip this and labs alone will swell with demand while science input stays mismatched—red and green excess, blue-yellow-purple shortfall. Research speed means little if production is unbalanced; science consumes the slowest color.

High SPM especially surfaces the 15 items/sec yellow belt ceiling. A single belt carrying iron and copper over distance works at 45 items/min but buckles under scaling. You'll need either more belt lanes per material or delegation to local production and train resupply. Blue-onward materials gain especially from this approach; distant supply lines for advanced circuits or low-density structure strain more than feeding them locally. Feeding close to demand beats feeding from far away, especially under expansion.

I currently follow: launch at 0.75/sec, stabilize to 45 items/min with all colors, then scale toward 2 items/sec in later phases. This sequence makes visible which tier first demands iron, when oil tightens, and when to switch to train logistics. High SPM is seductive as a goal, but stable all-color flow beats fast-research labs in actual gameplay.

Snapshot: Red, Green, Black, Blue, Purple, Yellow, White

Stall risk is not evenly distributed across colors. Red and green are "doable" in isolation; blue triggers the first major wall (oil handling plus advanced circuits); yellow and purple deepen the crunch (advanced circuits and steel tighten); white is a separate class of burden (rocket-scale low-density structures). Empirically, initial stalls hit blue → yellow/purple → white in that order. Black is distinct machinery rather than a pure linear step. Thinking of it as "solid-goods phase → oil chemistry phase → high-tier materials phase → rocket phase" clarifies the structure.

Examples here are vanilla 2.0 snapshot; precise numbers matter less than recognizing which color pulls from which upstream. In my builds, admitting blue drained engines and sulfur so heavily that refinery cracking ran near-constant made placement choices obvious.

Red (Automation): Material = copper plates, gears. Bottleneck = gear locality

Official: Automation science pack. Primary materials are copper plates and gears; the recipe looks trivial. Red is indeed simple—but gears cluster in specific spots more often than raw totals fail.

Gears appear in red packs, green inserters and belts, and countless downstream machines. Place gear production only near red and you'll watch red-only gears vanish while red packs sit starved. It's not global iron scarcity—gears disperse unevenly, creating local starvation. Decide early where gears concentrate (a dedicated hub?), and green integration goes far smoother.

Green (Logistics): Material = inserters, transport belts. Bottleneck = gear and circuit board supply

Official: Logistic science pack. Materials are inserters and belts, superficially red's continuation. Internally, gears are consumed heavily, and inserters pull electronic circuits, making green's upstream tighter than red.

Green's stalls stem from inserter and belt competing for shared upstream, not the pack itself. Gears collide between red and green; circuits collide between research and plain machinery. Early symptoms: "inserters alone are slow" or "belts stop alone." Formally, it's the logistics pack, but functionally, it teaches gear distribution. Master that, and red-green stabilize.

Black (Military): Material = piercing rounds, grenades, walls. Bottleneck = coal, iron, sulfur-based explosives

Official: Military science pack. Materials are piercing ammunition, grenades, and walls—branched military-purpose items absent in red-green.

Stalls arise from lumped supply: coal, iron, and sulfur-compound fire packages. Piercing rounds pull hard on iron; grenades show coal demand; walls expose stone-chain thinness. Black isn't as structurally heavy as blue, but you'll need a dedicated military production sidetrack feeding research, not borrowed from the main line. When black chokes, it's usually because ammo and explosives aren't in separate lines—they spill onto the general flow and create noise.

Blue (Chemical): Material = engine units, sulfur, advanced circuits. Bottleneck = oil, steel, advanced circuits

Official: Chemical science pack. Materials are engine units, sulfur, and advanced circuits—the first major leap.

Blue is scary because all three demands live on different upstream tiers, and all are heavy. Earlier colors stayed solid; blue brings refinery complexity, fluids, and base electronics collision. Engine units drag iron-steel; sulfur demands oil-stream refinement; advanced circuits consume vast plastic and circuits. You face simultaneous solid and fluid logistics maturation for the first time.

In practice, blue entry crashes oil processing and steels instantly. My refinery nearly never coasted once blue ran. A naive reading assumes the bottleneck is "blue packs aren't assembling fast enough," but the real limits are oil refining, steel output, and circuit supply—three separate upstream problems manifesting as one slow pack stream. Blue obsession blinds you to prep work that actually matters: advanced circuits, steel, and oil handling grow first; blue packs flow as a result. This is the classic progression—rush blue, blame blue, miss the upstream gap.

Chemical science pack - Factorio Wiki

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Purple (Production): Material = electric furnaces, productivity modules, rails. Bottleneck = advanced circuits, steel

Official: Production science pack. Materials are electric furnaces, productivity modules, and rails—manufacturing equipment fed into research itself. Rails appear heavy, but modules and furnaces are where the crunch lives.

Purple's trap is mixing high-volume simple items (rails) with high-tier intermediates (modules). Rails demand volume but telegraph need clearly; productivity modules spike advanced circuit draw. Electric furnaces also hungrily consume steel. After blue feels stable, purple piles dual load on advanced circuits and steel, and many factories suddenly struggle. Blue survived on blue-specific prep; purple demands circuit and steel infrastructure expansion again. It's less a new color and more a "module hunger chokes the factory" tier. Factories already tight at blue will hurt more here than at yellow, counter-intuitively.

Yellow (Utility): Material = advanced circuits, flying robot frames, low-density structures. Bottleneck = advanced circuits, lubricant, steel

Official: Utility science pack. Materials are advanced circuits, flying robot frames, and low-density structures (LDS).

Yellow pairs with purple as the endgame wall, but its squeeze is different. Where purple strangles on circuits, yellow adds fluid lubricant demand to the mix. Flying robot frames surface lubricant scarcity—a heavy-oil derived product—suddenly making oil routing a design choice: "which product takes priority?" LDS heaps copper, steel, and plastic simultaneously, so "copper is abundant" vanishes the moment yellow starts. Both yellow and purple strangle circuits, but yellow's oil and plastic entanglement adds design complexity.

Intermediate players choke at yellow when ロボットフレーム supply alone can't absorb the lubrication burden, or when LDS sourcing pulls copper-steel-plastic so hard other production stalls. Formally a science pack; functionally, blue recurs across wider material tiers. Stability at yellow depends less on the pack itself and more on whether advanced circuits, lubricant, and LDS supplies are independently robust.

White (Space): Material = rocket launch (satellite payload). Bottleneck = low-density structures, rocket fuel, processing units

Official: Space science pack. White isn't made in assemblers; it arrives from rocket launch events. Firing a satellite-laden rocket yields 1000 space packs in bulk.

The constraint isn't the pack recipe but rocket equipment mass production. Three pillars: low-density structures, rocket fuel, and processing units. Bottleneck any one and the silo freezes. LDS is notoriously heavy (steel, copper, plastic each feeding it, 20-second craft time), and the rocket devours LDS in enormous quantities. Solo-streaming LDS bottlenecks white and yellow's LDS demand—late-game premium materials seize.

Experientially, white feels less like "an extended yellow line" and more like bolting an entire factory onto the existing one. Bulk satellite payloads make supply rhythm different: batch production rather than continuous. So when white approaches, the shift from "balanced steady production" to "rocket-tier independent upstream" becomes necessary. white is a distinct production mode, not a color in the usual sense.

Initial stall order: blue is wall one, yellow-purple squeeze mid-game, white is late-game integration test. Red, green, black can be locally fixed; blue onward demands specialized upstream. What matters isn't surface appearance but where advanced circuits, steel, oil, and LDS multiply—that's where trouble concentrates.

Space science pack - Factorio Wiki

wiki.factorio.com

Assembler Count Targets and Ratio Rundown

Standard 45 Items/Min (Assembler 2 Baseline) Machine Counts

A reproducible benchmark is Assembler 2 (speed = 0.75), aiming for roughly 45 items/min per color. Practical targets: red 5 : green 6 : black 5 : blue 12 : yellow 7 : purple 7. Note: example machine instances (e.g., "blue at 10 Assembler 2 = 2 per second estimate") derive from modules-off, Assembler 2 baseline. Running Assembler 3 means multiply by ~0.6; modules and beacons require separate math. Ratios are starting points; verify recipe craft-time against your chosen assembler before building.

At this tier, iron consumption calcs tempt you, but local delivery matters more than global total. Matching ratios on paper, you'll often see gears vanish while green lingers, or belt materials dry up solo. My experience: gears thrive near green, fed short-haul, far better than from a distant main bus. Numbers look adequate until distance breaks them. Factorio's lesson: logistics beats arithmetic.

Yellow belt's foundational limit also governs this tier. Yellow belts cap at 15 items/sec, so pushing multiple colors' upstreams down one belt invites blue-tier squeezes visibly. Trying to unify circuits, steel, and oil byproducts on one line and scale is a recipe for creep-climbing stalls. The ratio itself is clean; the physical flow often isn't.

Low-SPM Variant (~0.75 items/sec) Downsizing

If jumping straight to the standard feels heavy, ~0.75 items/sec scaling of the target ratio is stable and keeps the same proportional structure without full burden. Research slows; initial farms reveal design cracks faster than production shortfalls, so lighter density teaches fundamentals more clearly.

Shrink uniformly rather than selectively. Cutting red alone or blue alone breaks the proportional spine; scale all colors down together, then upscan segments as they strain. I often pre-reserve space for blue-purple before committing machinery, since squeezing those zones retroactively always pinches the feedlines.

Shrinking works best by thickening the upstream that matters most. Shrink blue packs, but leave advanced circuits, steel, and sulfur routes generous—undersized upstreams strangle even downsized packs. The rank order of choke points stays the same; only the absolute numbers shift.

Space Age's 1.5/sec-unit modular builds are a later-game pursuit. Start at the low tier, watch where cracks form, then modularize. The bottleneck sequence is constant; only scale shifts.

Intermediate Material Breakdown: Black and Blue

Black and blue resist pure machine-count planning. Black's intermediate layers run deep; 5 core machines leaves ammunition and explosives orphaned if you trust the number alone. Detailed substeps: black 10 main, piercing ammo 12, standard ammo 4, grenades 8, walls 1 is practical. Piercing ammo sub-consumes standard ammo, so ammo lines are the real workload; walls are light, grenades are moderate. When you expand black, the ammo lines grow, not the core packs.

Blue is the textbook example. Science packs pale against engine units and advanced circuits in impact. A working target: 12 blue science assemblers paired with ~10 engine unit assemblers. The official recipe needs 3 advanced circuits, 2 engine units, 1-2 sulfur per blue pack, so rising blue volume = rising engine/chemistry workload. You're not "adding blue"—you're expanding oil chemistry and engine logistics.

Placement amplifies this. If blue and engines sit distant, transport of gears and steel stretches, introducing choke points mid-route. My stable config: engines sit alongside blue, not separate. Blue stalls often trace to weak engine supply, not oil shortage. Watch the actual flow, not the ratio table.

Black-blue insight: true constraints hide in intermediate lines. Black should center on ammo supply; blue should center on engines. Adjust each's locale, and bottleneck clarity follows.

Design Principles: Main Bus vs. Local Production Trade-Offs

What Goes on the Main Bus

Start by asking: which materials survive long-distance distribution without chain failure? My criteria: iron plates, copper plates, and upstream-consolidated electronic circuits (green circuits). Locking these in first scaffolds all science-line designs.

Electronic circuits especially reward dedicated upstream production. Red, green, blue, and downstream intermediates all devour them with few valleys, so centralize production, distribute from one nerve center beats scattered fabrication. Green pack competition, blue's advanced-circuit demand, and end-game processing units all feed there. Distributed sourcing multiplies copper-wire and iron interactions; consolidated circuits ship cleaner.

I've rebuilt enough times to know circuit supply tolerates distance better than most. Dedicated lines expose consumption sites; undersupply points clearly. Fractional local production scatters bottleneck diagnosis. Centralize circuits, ship the finished good. Easier to audit, easier to expand.

Oil logistics follow the same logic. Sulfur, plastic, lubricant over belt + separate pipeline network beats splicing them into the main trunk. Lubricant especially—it's negligible at blue, then explodes at yellow. Plan excess capacity with yellow in mind, not just current demand. I route lubricant pipes ahead of need, pre-staging supply.

What Goes to Local Production

Slamming everything onto the bus tempts you (cleaner-looking design), but overwhelms before breaking evenly. Feed plates globally; make intermediate goods locally is the mindset that stabilizes early factories.

Reason: intermediates are voluminous per use, hyper-local in demand. Gears feed red, green, engines, countless machines—but need surges unpredictably. Pumping gears down a long belt starves the far end mid-transit. I've watched distant gears vanish mid-run while the near section consumes them. Short-haul gears beat main-line gears. Circuits differ—they distribute steadily, rewarding central production.

Green science is the clarity test. Packs need inserters and belts, but gears and circuits hide behind. Centralizing circuits while localizing gears—circuits omnibus, gears where they're eaten—stabilizes the line. Same green, different internal balance.

Blue nearby works similarly. Running engines as a separate sub-assembly near blue, fed by plate inputs, beats long pipes. Gears and steel scatter en route. Feed material, not finished goods where transport is spotty.

Black ammo mirrors this. Central ammunition lines sprawl faster than main-bus splits.

Combating Long-Line Creep via Segmentation and Buffer Design

Main-bus sprawl's hidden cost isn't distance—it's diagnosis difficulty. One iron-carrying belt 200 tiles long, fed by everything, drains from everywhere, becomes impossible to debug. Upstream starves downstream imperceptibly. Blue's complexity plus yellow's fluids worsens this fast.

Segmenting helps. Carve the bus into red-green-black era, blue's oil chemistry, yellow-purple tier, white's rocket phase. Insert intermediate buffers (chests or storage tanks with circuit logic) at segment seams. This separates upstream from downstream demands; expanding blue doesn't crash red's research.

I often funnel main-bus into a holding zone before sector redistribution. Expanding blue zone doesn't destabilize red. Many small factories chained by trunk beats one giant factory, especially in back half.

Oil demands explicit segmentation. Sulfur, plastic, lubricant route via dedicated pipeline + tank system, not belt extension. Lubricant especially—yellow's spike is sudden. I dimension lubricant capacity at yellow's full draw, not blue's dribble. Ropey narrow lines fail mid-yellow.

Buses look clean at moderate scale. Sectioned, buffered factories take pressure better and adapt faster.

Common Pitfalls and Fixes

Blue's Simultaneous Oil-Steel Shortage (Typical Scenario)

Blue entry often collapses when pushing advanced circuits suddenly starves both oil and iron at once. Official recipe (advanced circuits, engines, sulfur) masks the full footprint: circuits pull plastic (oil-rooted), engines pull steel (iron-dependent). The bottleneck isn't blue—it's the upstream duet failing simultaneously.

Classic pattern: chase sulfur, see supply, assume comfort. Meanwhile plastic runs dry (advanced circuit demand), development boards jam, steel thins (engine demand), and the whole line stops. Belt-view shows blue alone; reality: iron supply per demand, steel conversion lag, crude input, and heavy-light-gas imbalance all cascade.

Fix: don't patch blue—reinforce upstream. Iron: upgrade furnace tier, add throughput anticipating blue's load. Diagnose iron deficit vs. steel conversion separately. Oil: boost input source (more pumpjacks or train import), rebalance cracking flow, ensuring gas and lube don't pool uselessly.

Root cause clarity: blue chokes because crude intake, plastic line, advanced boards, and steel all tighten simultaneously. The science pack assembler count is noise; upstream capacity is the real problem.

Untangling Yellow-Purple Advanced Circuit Gridlock

Yellow and purple both inhale advanced circuits for extended intervals. Yellow's processing units and lubrication demand plus purple's modules and furnaces create simultaneous advanced-circuit famine. Looking at one color stalling, you miss the collision.

Typical fail: resize yellow to lift throughput, but purple's modules now hog circuits meant for yellow's processing units. Both halves starve. The root: shared advanced-circuit bus with unmediated competition.

Untangle by segregating circuit supply first. Purple gets a dedicated circuit input; yellow's processing units (and lubrication) do the same. Separate inputs prevent theft. Next, stabilize lubrication (yellow's weak point) and robot frames. Only then absorb purple's heavy component load.

Purple benefits from independent production zones with their own circuit feeds. Yes, redundant-looking; yes, it breaks the "unified" design. Decentralization prevents cascading failure and makes expansion obvious.

Yellow-purple are stability siblings gone wrong; independent circuit reserves fix them fast.

Research Lab Expansion Timing and Prioritized Splits

Research tempts you to bulk-expand labs early. Bad idea. Labs alone collapse when supply imbalance worsens. Rush labs, starve colors unevenly, and the tube runs dry while looking busy.

Instead: expand labs only after all colors flow at steady cadence. Red-green-black stable? Blue solid? Yellow-purple synchronized? Then grow labs. Feed-side scaling before demand-side scaling.

Observation: when research slows despite lab count, upstream is the culprit, not lab shortfall. Each color's input belt reveals the truth: continuous fill or stop-start pulsing? If one color flickers, labs can't fix it.

Prioritized splits help. Route research packs through priority splitters—fill science first, overflow to expansions. Modem production and random building projects will steal circuits, modules, advanced boards otherwise. Research crises stem from side-channel theft. Protect the core line.

Careful sequencing: stabilize all six core colors, then stage lab growth incrementally. This rhythm keeps diagnosis clear and prevents design cascade failures.

What Changes in Space Age

Extra Science Types, Planets, and Space Platform Logistics

Space Age doesn't extend vanilla 2.0 design—it replaces it. Planets offer different buildings; spacecraft logistics enters the game; quality mechanics reshape incentives. Vanilla's "main bus" instinct breaks fast.

The shift shows instantly: multi-planet factories + orbital intermediate hubs displace single-world buses. Which intermediates complete locally? Which export? Which import? Decide first or the on-world lines will misalign with orbit. I tried vanilla thinking initially; offline logistics alone cratered.

Space science itself changes character. Vanilla's "satellites launch, packs arrive" simplifies to "space platform as a continuous industrial node." The baseline's staging point–to–staging point thinking doesn't map.

Synchronized All-Color and 1.5/sec Modular Design

Space Age practice favors full color synchronization more urgently. Imbalanced output rates trigger orbital logistics cascades. Vanilla tolerates asymmetric growth; Age does not.

Practical modality: 1.5/sec building blocks, stacked for target throughput. Each module is self-complete, easily duplicated. I spin up modular units now; scaling becomes "clone the working block, feed from orbit, done." Modular sync simplifies dispatch—platform receives "Unit 1, complete; Unit 2, complete"—no fractional balancing.

Advantage: unit-based dispatch against planet-to-orbit shipping aligns neatly. Diffuse color speeds force orbit-side to buffer constantly. Sync blocks mean stable uptake.

Quality Mechanics in Final Assembly

Quality inputs reshape construction. I'd start by feeding quality modules to the final science pack assemblers, not upstream. This sidesteps re-work of intermediate chains.

Reason: scope. Upstreams already juggle asteroid mining, multi-planet supply, and quality mixes. Bolting quality onto intermediates explodes configuration. Stash quality at the endpoint, absorb the yield boost cleanly.

Simpler to verify impact, easier to tune without redesign. Avoid turning the whole factory into a quality-optimization puzzle; confine it.

Build Sequence and Next Steps

Step 1: Stabilize Red-Green-Black

Rushing all seven colors invites blue-stage collapse. Instead, nail red-green-black as one unit. Scale the reference ratio downward; forget precision, chase flow continuity. Iron, copper, stone—don't starve any.

Red is forgiving; green exposes the gear distribution lesson; black introduces the military-split concept. Early stability here telegraphs which materials widen, where middle goods localize. I treat red-green-black as a single block, not three independent lines. Pre-reserve blue-purple space; don't squeeze them in retroactively (pinches feedlines).

This tier teaches the main-bus mindset: which goods distribute; which consolidate locally.

Step 2: Upstream Audit Before Blue

Before turning on blue: inspect oil, steel, and advanced circuits.

Summary

The best starting point is to first get all colors running at a speed you can comfortably sustain, then progressively scale up from whichever upstream bottleneck appears first. Use ratios as a design foundation: give green circuits a dedicated line, and produce gears and other high-throughput intermediates locally to keep transport distances short -- this stabilizes your whole factory. Being particularly mindful of yellow belt throughput limits makes it practical to separate "production shortfall" from "transport shortfall" when diagnosing slow research. Since Space Age fundamentally changes logistics philosophy, start by building the feel for synchronization in vanilla, then restructure as a separate design -- this progression works smoothly and ultimately improves efficiency. There's no single correct factory design, so using stability and expandability as your guiding axes and fine-tuning for your specific map is the strongest approach.