Item Production Complexity

To assist in factory planning and logistics, it is helpful to know how many stages each finished item passes through before becoming a finished good.

For example, if your goal is to make screws using the standard recipe, you need miners (iron ore), smelters (iron ingots), and two ranks of constructors (rods, then screws) to reach the finished product. If you imagine organizing your factory so that each stage is handled by a row of machines, you would require 4 rows, each taking in output from the former, to go from ore to screws.

For more complex parts, each subcomponent that comprises them may have a different number of stages of production. For example, in order to produce an Adaptive Control Unit, four different subcomponents are supplied to a manufacturer having different numbers of stages for the subcomponents. One of those four subcomponents, Automated Wiring, is Assembled from Stators and Cable. Stators are Assembled from Wire and Steel Pipe, Steel Pipe is Constructed using Steel Ingots, Steel Ingots are made in the Foundry from Coal and Iron extracted as Ores.

So, this production path for Automated Wiring requires 5 stages (as well as the shorter 4-stage ore-ingot-wire-cable path):


 * 1) Mining makes Ores
 * 2) Foundry makes Steel Ingots
 * 3) Constructor makes Steel Pipe
 * 4) Assembler makes Stators
 * 5) Assembler makes Automated Wiring

The longest path of any of the Adaptive Control Unit subcomponents, Heavy Modular Frames, requires 7 stages:


 * 1) Mining makes Iron Ore
 * 2) Smelter makes Iron Ingots from Ore
 * 3) Constructors make Rods from Iron Ingots
 * 4) Constructors make Screws from Rods
 * 5) Assemblers make Reinforced Iron Plates using Screws
 * 6) Assemblers make Modular Frames using Reinforced Iron Plates
 * 7) Manufacturers make Heavy Modular Frames using the Modular Frames

The final Manufacturing of the Adaptive Control Unit is an 8th Stage of production, meaning if you arranged machines from ore to Adaptive Control Units, the longest path is through 8 machines.

This table shows the number of production phases to reach an item based on the subcomponent path, and each of those subcomponents' paths and so on down to ore. Keep in mind this is

In addition, the items are categorized and tagged to indicate if they are something that is valuable enough to warehouse, and if they are hazardous. This helps in logistics and warehouse planning. This is NOT a list of how many materials go into making the item but the number of processes.

Table of Items and their Production Complexity Using Standard Recipes
Footnotes:

1) Stages for hand-picked, chainsawed, or hand-made items like power shards is 0 because the factory production machines are not used in their formation.

2) Warehouse-Worthy is subjective, but based on the following criteria:


 * not a raw ore or unpackaged fluid
 * not a low-value organic material like leaves
 * not a food item like paleberries or beryl nuts
 * not a tool needed in small quantities