Building Plans

Once a plan exists, refine it until it matches the factory you want to build.

Desired outputs

Open the Outputs panel to add or remove target items and change their amounts. The whole plan recalculates automatically.

Recipes & alternates

Each step shows the recipe and building it uses. Open Summary → Plan validation → Recipe routes to inspect up to ten complete routes for each produced item. The planner selects the best route for your current strategy, but you can choose another route or return to Automatic (best route). Each option compares route depth, raw-input score, and byproducts.

Two recipes can share one item. Select both and set their output weights from 1% to 99%; changing one adjusts the other so the shares always total 100%. The planner holds that mix in its material balance, which is what lets one route consume a co-product the other one makes. If a mix has no feasible balance the planner says so and keeps the previous selection.

Compare Alternatives puts the complete routes side by side with their machine count, power and depth, so a route can be judged before it is applied.

Catalogs & availability

The creation wizard and the in-planner Settings panel use searchable catalog dialogs instead of long select lists:

The Recipe Catalog filters by name, input, output, building, category, base/alternate recipe, unlock state, and availability. Use compact or detailed rows, enable recipes individually, or apply All, None, Base only, or Unlocked only in one action. Detailed rows also expose a recipe contribution cap when you need to limit how much of an item that route may produce.
The Building Catalog shows each supported producer with its image and recipe count. Search the list or enable and disable producers individually or in bulk.
The Raw Resource Catalog in the creation wizard groups genuine mineable/extractable resources by kind. Disabling one removes every route that depends on it; ordinary producerless items are never silently treated as raw resources.

Catalog rows explain why an option is unavailable. A recipe explicitly chosen as a target or final route is marked Required and cannot itself be disabled. The Review step still warns when its required building or raw input has been disabled, so the effect is visible before calculation.

In Settings → Availability & unlocks, import a Satisfactory save to limit recipes and buildings to what that save has unlocked. No account is needed, and the save is parsed and discarded rather than stored. The import summary shows what was detected; you can clear it without changing the save file.

Recipes you can only craft by hand never appear at all. Anything whose only producer is the build gun, a workbench, a workshop or the automated workbench is left out of the catalogs and out of the solve, because the planner plans automated production. A recipe that a machine can also make keeps that machine and simply loses the by-hand option.

If no permitted dependency route remains, the planner reports the unresolved item instead of silently using an excluded resource or invalid fallback.

The resolver only accepts a mineable resource or an item tagged KMods.PlannerResource as a final external input. A normal item with no producer is never silently treated as raw: calculation marks the plan invalid and explains the unresolved item or cycle instead.

The recipe catalog is stored as a versioned item/recipe graph. Candidate routes are only offered when their complete dependency chain reaches an allowed raw resource or one of your Available Inputs. Calculating and balancing those routes runs in a bounded backend worker pool, so a large plan does not block unrelated API requests.

Extractors

Open the Extractors panel to decide how every raw resource reaches the plan. Search the resource, and the panel says whether it is already configured and whether the plan currently needs it at all.

Each resource is supplied one of four ways:

Automatic lets the planner pick the extraction route from the catalog.
External supply treats the resource as delivered from outside, so no extractor is built for it.
Standard extractor uses an ordinary extractor recipe for that resource, such as a pump or a collector, and lets you pick which one.
Modular Miner configures the miner in full.

A Modular Miner takes a mining head (Mk.1, Mk.2 or Mk.3, worth one, two and four times the ore amount), the node purity you are building on, a processing module and a fluid module, and three booster slots that are each empty, half (+50%) or full (+100%).

Both modules are picked from a searchable catalog that shows what each one consumes and produces, its bonus and its malus, so you can see what a Crusher or a Smelter does to the output before choosing it. Some resources force a choice: one may only be extracted with a fluid module attached, another needs at least one booster, and another has a mining head it cannot go below.

The panel shows the arithmetic under Extraction formula. The rate one miner reaches at full clock is its base output times the head multiplier times an efficiency, and that efficiency is the purity plus the fluid and booster bonuses, with the processing module’s malus applied to those bonuses. It never falls below 0.5.

You do not set an overclock here. The solver decides how many miners to build and gives them a clock between 0 and 100%, and the panel projects the resulting buildings, clock, power draw, required inputs and produced outputs before you apply it.

A resource deposit is treated as the miner’s extraction source, not as a material that the miner consumes and reproduces. This matters for fluid modules whose output is still the same resource: their required Water or other fluid remains part of the material balance instead of being optimized away. Processing module outputs and byproducts likewise remain real outputs and can feed another recipe or appear as surplus.

Notes

Drop a sticky note anywhere to label parts of your factory. Double-click a note to edit it, and recolor it if you like.

Sub-assemblies

Select a few related blocks and right-click to group them into one tidy block. You can collapse or expand this block, which keeps large plans readable.

Planning strategies

Under Settings → Optimization & byproducts you can control alternate recipes, overclocking, compact recipes, circular-route avoidance, and what to do with surplus. Route priorities include depth, raw resources, power, balance, and byproducts; select up to two in the creation wizard. Automatic selection ranks the complete dependency route, not just the final recipe, and remains deterministic when scores tie. A manually selected route stays selected while the other ranked options remain available. Identical recipe executions are aggregated only after their complete material flows have been resolved. Settings → Logistics & display contains game multipliers, rate precision, and connection layout. Some advanced strategies are Patreon features. See the Patreon page for details.

Surplus and the AWESOME Sink

Under Settings → Optimization & byproducts, choose what the planner does after it has satisfied every desired output:

Preserve keeps every unused output in the plan.
Sink surplus sends all eligible sinkable surplus to the AWESOME Sink.
Maximize Sink Points prefers production bypasses that turn otherwise unused capacity into valuable sinkable items. It does not increase raw resource inputs merely to manufacture points; the requested factory’s raw input budget remains the limit.

Open Configure items to search the sinkable item catalog. Enable only the items the sink may accept, give preferred items a higher priority, or reserve a rate per minute that must remain available instead of being sunk.

Every sunk item is represented by its own AWESOME Sink building card, flow, and incoming amount in both Flow and Text views. Different items are never merged into one sink card. Fluids and gases cannot enter the AWESOME Sink; when the catalog provides a real disposal recipe with no output (or only a None placeholder output), the planner uses that recipe as a required terminal step instead of leaving the material as free surplus.

Raw resources resolve through real extraction routes where the catalog provides them. Ores use the Modular Miner, while Oil, Air, and similar resources use their matching extractor or collector. These extraction rates are included in the Text view and exported text’s Raw resources section, not just raw materials imported as external inputs.