Production Mastery

Recipes gain productivity bonuses based on how many you've produced. The more iron plates you've ever made, the more you get per craft going forward.

Why this exists

I previously had a different mod that did something similar. When updating some of the other mods I had, that mod broke and I lost the bonuses. At that point I had some perfectly timed factory sections that relied on the productivity bonus that had accumulated, so I needed to replace it. I really like the result, this mod functions completely different and was made from scratch with a different formula that feels to me like it's more balanced. I thought some others might want it, so I decided to publish it.

How it works

Each recipe's bonus comes from your lifetime production of that item:

bonus = cap × (1 − e^(−count / scale))

Default settings (cap = 2.0, scale = 50000) produce these milestones:

The curve is asymptotic. It approaches the cap without ever reaching it, so there's always a reason to keep producing more. Well, until Factorio rounds up, that is...

Additive by design

This mod tracks its own contribution per recipe and adds it on top of whatever else is contributing. Vanilla productivity research, infinite tech, productivity modules, and other productivity mods all keep working alongside it. The engine's 300% total ceiling is respected on this mod's side.

If your modset includes crafting buildings that don't accept productivity (assemblers, furnaces, mining drills from other mods that forgot to include "productivity" in allowed_effects), turn on the optional patch toggle in startup settings. But please note that it doesn't force the productivity to be enabled if specifically disabled.

Settings

• Progression speed (scale): items needed to reach roughly 63% of cap. Default 50000. Higher values stretch progression out; lower values speed it up. This is not a "get this many items to reach the cap", it's just a way to control the actual scale of the growth.
• Maximum bonus from production (cap): the most this mod contributes to any single recipe. Default 2.0 (+200%). Range 0.0 to 3.0. Values above 1.0 enable crafting loops that produce more material than they consume; values above 2.0 approach the recycling-exploit boundary.
• Patch modded buildings: off by default. When enabled, adds productivity to the allowed effects of every assembling machine, furnace, rocket silo, and mining drill from any mod that doesn't already permit it. This likely won't break anything, it worked with the mods I used, but I can't guarantee all things will be the same if you toggle it on, especially precise calculations on some production chains.

Known limitations

• Hand-crafted items are not counted. Factorio's production statistics only track machine output. Items you craft by hand do not contribute to the lifetime count.
• Bonuses below 1% are invisible. The engine quantizes productivity_bonus to whole percent steps; values below 0.01 store as exactly 0. This mod rounds up so every non-zero contribution shows. It should not take too long before you actually get some production bonuses, but having high bonuses will take a while.
• Recycling recipes are excluded. Bonuses on recycling categories would enable infinite resources.