Tools / Recipes
Alternate Recipe Comparator
Pick an item and see every recipe that makes it, ranked on the three things that actually decide the answer: raw ore per unit, power per unit, and throughput per machine. The ore column is computed here by expanding each ingredient all the way down to mined resources.
| Recipe | Output | Raw ore / unit | Power / unit | Made in | Inputs |
|---|
How the ore column is calculated
Every ingredient is expanded recursively until it reaches a mined resource (ore, oil, water, nitrogen). A Reinforced Iron Plate is not counted as one ingredient; it is counted as the iron ore and coal that eventually went into it. That is what makes two recipes with completely different inputs comparable.
Worked example, Iron Plate. The standard recipe takes 3 Iron Ingot and makes
2 Iron Plate, and one Iron Ingot is one Iron Ore. So each plate costs
3 / 2 = 1.5 ore. Coated Iron Plate costs
0.65 per plate instead — 0.5 iron ore plus 0.15 crude oil.
That is a 57% cut in iron ore, and no other calculator surfaces it.
Baseline rules, so the numbers stay comparable
- Intermediates always expand through base recipes, never through other alternates. If we picked the best alternate at every step, each row's ore figure would silently depend on which other alternates you happen to have unlocked, and the columns would not be comparable to each other.
- Byproducts are credited at their own raw-ore value and subtracted. A recipe that also spits out something useful is not charged for it.
- A few items have no non-alternate recipe at all — the game only produces them via an alternate or as a byproduct. For those we use the first alternate as the baseline and say so.
What has no ore figure, and why
68 of 255 recipes cannot be reduced to ore. These depend on inputs with no mining path: petroleum coke and heavy oil residue only appear as byproducts, wood and mycelia are foraged from the world, and the late-game quantum chain has no base recipe. Those rows show throughput and power but leave the ore column empty rather than printing a made-up number.
A second group is left empty on purpose: recipes where this item is the byproduct, not the main product. Rocket Fuel happens to emit Compacted Coal, but charging Rocket Fuel's ore against that coal would make the coal look free, or even negative. When the byproduct credit swallows the whole input cost, the accounting has stopped being meaningful and we say so instead of printing a number.
Sources
- Recipes, buildings and items: game data for 1.2.3.1, build 23855724, stable branch — MIT (SatisfactoryTools/ToolsApi).
- Ore expansion, byproduct crediting and all figures in the table: computed on this site from that dataset.