Wire and Cable in Satisfactory: Which Recipe to Use

Wire and cable are consumed in enormous quantities and almost nobody thinks about them after the first hour. That is a mistake, because this chain has the clearest example in the game of two good measures disagreeing.

Wire

Recipe	Output	Ore per unit	Inputs
Wire	30/min	0.50	15 Copper Ingot
Alternate: Iron Wire	22.5/min	0.56	12 Iron Ingot
Alternate: Caterium Wire	120/min	0.375	15 Caterium Ingot
Alternate: Fused Wire	90/min	0.233	12 Copper Ingot + 3 Caterium Ingot

Here the two measures agree, which makes it easy. Fused Wire is both the most ore-efficient and near the highest throughput — 0.233 ore per wire against the base recipe’s 0.5, at three times the output per machine. It costs 15 MW against the base recipe’s 4 MW, which is nothing against what it saves.

Caterium Wire is the throughput champion at 120/min per Constructor and it needs no copper at all, which makes it the answer when copper is contested and caterium is not.

Iron Wire is the odd one: slightly worse on ore, lower throughput. Its only use is a site with iron and no copper.

Cable, where the measures disagree

Recipe	Output	Ore per unit	Inputs
Cable	30/min	1.00	60 Wire
Alternate: Quickwire Cable	27.5/min	1.25	8 Quickwire + 5 Rubber
Alternate: Insulated Cable	100/min	2.03	45 Wire + 30 Rubber
Alternate: Coated Cable	67.5/min	not resolvable	38 Wire + 15 Heavy Oil Residue

Insulated Cable produces 3.3 times as much per machine and costs twice the raw ore per cable. Both statements are true, and which one matters depends entirely on your constraint.

If ore is tight, the base recipe wins. If you have ore and need volume — and cable demand does spike hard when you reach Computers — Insulated wins comfortably.

Coated Cable’s ore figure is not shown because Heavy Oil Residue only exists as a byproduct and has no path back to mined resources. It is not that it is free; it is that the accounting has no honest answer. In practice, if your oil setup is already producing residue that needs consuming, Coated Cable turns a disposal problem into cable.

Reading these tables without fooling yourself

This chain is the clearest place in the game to learn one habit: check what the number is divided by.

“Insulated Cable uses 45 wire where the base recipe uses 60” is technically true and completely useless, because Insulated produces 100 cables per minute against the base recipe’s 30. Per cable produced, Insulated uses considerably more.

Any comparison between recipes has to normalise on output. The comparator on this site does this by default — every figure is per unit produced — precisely because raw per-minute input rates mislead in both directions.

Where cable actually goes

Cable feels trivial until three things happen at once:

Power poles and connections. Every pole and every power line connection consumes cable. A large factory’s power grid is a substantial cable sink that never shows up as a production line.

Computers. 20 cable per computer at the base recipe, and computers are consumed in quantity from the mid-game onward.

Heavy Modular Frames and the tier above. Cable is buried in most of the assembled parts above steel.

The practical consequence is that a cable line sized for early needs will quietly throttle your entire mid-game, and because the shortage manifests three chains downstream it is rarely diagnosed as a cable problem.

Caterium is worth unlocking for this alone

Caterium appears optional for a long time and then turns out to be the key to several chains at once. In this one it gives you the two best wire recipes.

Caterium Ore smelts into Caterium Ingot and from there into Quickwire, which feeds the best circuit board alternate as well. If you have been putting off building a caterium outpost, the wire and electronics chains are the argument for doing it.

A sensible progression

Early: base Wire and base Cable. Nothing wrong with them, and the alternates need resources you probably do not have.

Once you have caterium: switch wire to Fused Wire if you have it, Caterium Wire otherwise. This is the single largest efficiency gain available in the chain.

Once cable demand spikes: decide on ore versus throughput deliberately. If you are building computers in quantity, Insulated Cable is usually right despite the ore cost, because the alternative is a very wide base-recipe cable farm.

If you run oil: consider Coated Cable specifically as residue disposal rather than as a cable optimisation.

Copper Sheet, the quiet third product

Copper ingots split three ways: wire, copper sheet, and a small number of direct uses. Copper Sheet feeds circuit boards and several assembled parts, and it competes with wire for the same ingots.

This matters when you switch wire recipes. Moving to Caterium Wire frees your entire copper supply for sheet, which is often the real benefit rather than the wire throughput itself. A factory short on circuit boards sometimes fixes it by changing a wire recipe two steps upstream.

The general habit: when a recipe change frees an input, ask what else wanted that input. The gain is frequently somewhere other than the chain you changed.

Building the wire line where it belongs

Wire is a good candidate for producing at the copper node rather than at your main factory. One copper ingot becomes two wire at the base recipe, so shipping wire moves half the items that shipping ingots would.

With Caterium Wire the ratio is more extreme: 15 caterium ingots become 120 wire, so transporting wire instead of ingots cuts the item count by a factor of eight. On a remote caterium outpost that difference decides whether one belt is enough.

Cable does not follow the same logic — 60 wire becomes 30 cable at the base recipe, so making cable at the source halves the count again. If the destination needs cable rather than wire, make it at the source.

Common mistakes

Comparing input rates between recipes. Normalise per unit produced or the comparison is meaningless.

Sizing cable for early demand. Power poles, computers and frames all draw on it, and the shortage appears downstream where you will not look for it.

Skipping caterium. It holds the two best wire recipes and feeds the best circuit board alternate.

Assuming Insulated Cable is strictly better. It is 3.3x throughput at 2x the ore. Which matters depends on which you are short of.

Reading Coated Cable’s missing ore figure as zero. It means the input has no mining path, not that it is free.