I tried playing a vanilla game with some QoL mods and editor extensions and found that the duck cannot be crafted in assemblers, only by hand or by launching a rocket from the sweatshop (this is also strange as I had understood that the sweatshop would only be available if the total items was too high for an assembler).

Another thing: if the spirit of the mod is to be a fun new benchmark for bases (RDPM) it seems strange that it isn't actually possible to fully automate rubber duckies because it requires wood, a wood box, and a wooden power pole. Should these not be removed?

You are right, when I added the sweatshop, I removed assembler crafting. The sweatshop is the same 3x3 footprint, though, so it should be pretty much the same. The silo prototype gave me some options to add a neat ducky animation when you finish one.

Maybe I'll include a setting to remove wood items. Those 3 items require a total of 4 wood per ducky, which didn't seem like too much of a stretch for anyone to acquire manually.

I added a setting for wood in the latest version I'll upload in a bit.