How does Schall Machine Scaling and this mod actually help to allow mass production with less entities on map? Below is a case study, involving in-depth mathematics to show how things will work.

Case Study: Iron Plate from Electric Furnace

Here we go with one of the first and the most important recipe: the production of iron plates from iron ore in electric furnace.

On the left is the vanilla recipe. (Recipe time (RT) = 3.2 s) I believe everyone here knows this a lot, so I can save some explanation. The only thing to note is that machines not included in options "Machines using scaled recipes" (under "Options" → "Mod settings" → "Startup" tab) are also using this recipe, like the +1 and +2 overtiers.
On the right is the scaled recipe, introduced by this mod. This is equivalent to exactly 50 times of the vanilla recipe, in terms of crafting time, ingredients, and products. (RT = 160 s) This recipe is automatically applied to machines included in the above-mentioned option. Overtiers +3 or above are using this.
Note that the right recipe is normally not visible, since this is a machine-only recipe, and this mod chose to hide them from player crafting menu to avoid confusing the players.

Below we picked 5 setups, ranging from pure vanilla, “Schall Machine Scaling” (MS) only, to “Schall Machine Scaling” + “Schall Recipe Scaling” (MS+RS). All machines are filled with 2× Productivity Module 3 (+20% productivity, -30% speed) in module slots. For demonstration, no beacons are used. But the idea behind should be the same when modules are applied.

Legend:
CS rating: The marked crafting speed on each machine.
Speed: Crafting rate for the recipe on each machine, in number of craftings per second (c/s).

c/s = CS / RT
Output rate = Recipe output amount × c/s × (1 + productivity bonus)

Here we used 2150 /s of iron plates as the goal for different setups.
- In pure vanilla game, a total of 4096 electric furnaces would be required. Together with all the logistics supporting them (inserters/loaders, belts, etc.), the number of entities is easily over tens of thousands, just for this iron smelting part of the megabase!
- With “Schall Machine Scaling”, it is optimal to use electric furnace +3, only needing 64 of them. The total entity count (including the supporting logistics) would be greatly cut down to the range of hundreds. Obviously this will cut down the CPU update load, improving UPS a lot.
- With “Schall Machine Scaling”, using electric furnace +4 would only cut down the above count by half (in theory should be 1/4), because of the 60 c/s limit. So not an efficient way for iron smelting.
- With “Schall Machine Scaling” and “Schall Recipe Scaling” together, the same electric furnace +4 would run at full performance, thus reducing the furnace requirement to 16.
- Even better, a single electric furnace +6 under “Schall Recipe Scaling” is enough to produce this tremendous 2150 /s = 129k /min of iron plates! You may need several tens of loaders (from Schall Belt Configuration) to load iron ores and unload iron plates at this rate. But still, the total entity count would be less than fifty. Compare this number to what you ever needed if not having the above-mentioned mods!!!