Astro Colony — build guide: the production chains, the belt math and the traps

Astro Colony is a first-person space factory game: you fly a station through a voxel universe, catch asteroids with harpoons, dock planetoids to your station and automate the whole thing with belts, pipes and logic blocks. This guide is the build order that works in 1.0, the recipe and throughput numbers behind it, and the specific things that eat a new player's first ten hours.

Every number below is labelled with where it came from. Astro Colony's wiki is only partly updated for 1.0, so recipes, costs and rates carry a last-edited date — anything edited after the 1.0 launch (June 2026) is current-era, anything from 2022–2025 predates at least one balance pass. Where the wiki and the developer's own patch notes disagree, the patch notes win and the guide says so.

What this guide is written for

The 1.0 release notes themselves call the 1.0 experimental period "over eight years in development", and the changes since launch are mostly balance and multiplayer — but three of them (4 July, 9 July, and the 1.0 launch itself) invalidate a lot of older guides, so they get their own section at the end.

The 1.0 progression order

The 1.0 patch notes describe the redesigned tech tree directly: it "allows for a longer initial phase where players can mainly focus on conquering surrounding planetoids and cosmic harpoons. After completing the first phase and getting into engineering science, water is discovered. Only then is it possible to build the first thrusters and move to find planets." The 12 June 2026 patch then reorganised the tree into sections, "each corresponding to a specific chapter of the game: planetoids, water, automation, planet exploration, astronauts, research – specialists."

In practice, in order:

1. Hand mining. Walk or fly to an asteroid and hold left mouse to mine; the game pulls the pickaxe

automatically. Iron Ore, Copper Ore, Carbon Ore and Ice Cube are the four you need first.

1. Hand crafting into a base. The Iron Bar page records hand-crafting Iron Ore ×2 → Iron Bar ×1 in

4 s; hand-crafted bars become Iron Plates and Wire, which are the floor, foundation and cable materials.

1. Oxygen. The Oxygen Generator page calls it "the first building unlocked in the tech tree" — build

one early, and see the oxygen trap below before you burn ice on it.

1. Electricity. The Carbon Reactor sits under the Electricity tech and is the first real generator:

10 MW from 1 Carbon Ore per 30 s, built for Iron Bar ×3.

1. Smelting. The Smelter turns ore into bars and, with Iron Plate + Carbon Ore, into Iron Rods —

which is the gate to almost every building cost in the game.

1. Asteroid Catching / Automated Catching. The Asteroid Catcher lets you shoot asteroids down

manually; the Auto Asteroid Catcher is the milestone that makes ore arrive by itself.

1. Water. Ice Breaker → Water Cells → Oxygen Generator / Oxygen Barrier, and later Hydrotonic (food

for astronauts) and hydrogen (bot fuel). Water is the branch that unlocks planet expansion.

1. Automation / Logistics Blocks. Belts, pipes, splitters, filters, pushers, blockers, inventory

sensors and deciders. This is what makes an automated base hold together.

1. Construction / Manufacturing. Constructor → Advanced Constructor, Manufacturer → Advanced

Manufacturer: plates, wires, screws, gears, motherboards, metal frames, computers.

1. Planetoids. Harpoon connectors and docking stations let you attach planetoids, which is the only

source of Aluminium, Titanium and Uranium, and the branch the 1.0 tree puts first.

1. Drills and Mines. The Drill (2 MW, 3×3, digs vertically through floors) and the Giant Drill

(8 MW, 7×7) mine planetoids in bulk; the Mine automates ore collection with miner drones.

1. Engines and scanning. Engines → thrusters (Electric first) → Radar / Navigation. The 8 June

changes mean Autopilot is no longer a separate technology.

1. Astronauts. Laboratory science, food, Canteen, Dining Stand, Hibernation Chamber: humans need

all four, and untrained humans are just mouths.

1. Later game. Robotics and advanced logistics, Energy Transmission, Nuclear, then Universe II:

Fusion, Gas Extraction, the Expert machines, and Stargate II / III behind a crossed Stargate I.

Power: what each generator actually gives you

Notes and caveats:

• Generators are described in "energy", consumers in MW (Drill 2 MW, Giant Drill 8 MW, Auto Asteroid

Catcher 4 MW, Circular Saw 20). The wiki uses them interchangeably and does not document the conversion, so treat the two columns as the same scale, which is how players read them (the base-design guide below plans a power plant in MW and buys Auto Asteroid Catchers at 4 MW each).

• Solar Panels do not lose output in shade or in large groups — the Solar Panel page says explicitly there

is currently no penalty. That is why players carpet a floor in them.

• The Battery page notes an in-game UI bug: it displays a water requirement it does not have.

Smelting: the first chain

The Smelter page was rewritten on 3 July 2026, so its numbers are current-era. Rates are derived from quantity ÷ time × 60.

Build cost: Iron Bar ×3. The page's infobox lists 4 MW draw while its own cost table says "3"; that contradiction is on the wiki, not resolved here.

The Advanced Smelter (page last edited 2025-01-11 — pre-1.0) adds the "+" metal recipes, aluminium, uranium, titanium, glass and concrete. Build cost Iron Bar ×12 + Gold Plate ×10, 3 MW on its own table. Its Iron Bar+ recipe — 4 Iron Ore → 3 Iron Bar in 5 s — is independently corroborated by a 2025 player guide ("The Advanced Smelter makes 3 Iron Bars from 4 Iron Ores every 5 seconds"), which is the single most useful ratio in the game:

The Expert Smelter (2025-03-18) is the Universe II machine: build cost Iron Bar ×12 + Gold Plate ×10 + Aluminium Plate ×10, 25 MW, and it adds the two gas-fed rods — Mercury Rod (Mercury ×4 + Gas ×10 → 1 in 14 s) and Cobalt Rod (Cobalt ×6 + Gas ×20 → 1 in 18 s) — on top of the Advanced Smelter's list.

Plates, wires and parts: Constructor and Manufacturer

Both pages are pre-1.0 (Sept 2023 and June 2024), so treat their costs as indicative; the recipes are consistent with their upgraded versions, which is a good sign.

Constructor — build cost Copper Bar ×3 + Wire ×2, 4 MW. Upgrades into the Advanced Constructor.

The base Constructor page lists Steel Screws as ×1 per Iron Rod and Carbon Fiber as ×10 ore in 30 s; the Advanced Constructor page (2024-06-22) says ×3 screws and ×8 ore in 14 s, and the Carbon Ore page agrees with the latter. Use the newer figures and expect the base page to be stale.

Advanced Constructor — build cost Copper Bar ×12 + Aluminium Bar ×8, 4 MW. Adds Aluminium Plate (1 bar → 1 in 26 s), Metal Frame (Titanium Rod ×2 + Wire ×4 → 1 in 22 s) and Computer (Motherboard ×4 → 1 in 36 s).

Manufacturer — build cost Iron Plate ×8, 5 MW. Advanced Manufacturer — Iron Plate ×24 + Metal Frame ×12, 12 MW.

Water chemistry: Hydro Generator and Circular Saw

Hydro Generator (page 2023-09-30) — build cost Copper Bar ×5 + Wire ×2, 2 MW.

The wiki page still lists 50 water for stone. The official 4 July 2026 patch notes cut it: "stone consumes only 20 water (instead of 50)". The patch value is the one to plan with.

Circular Saw (2024-06-22) — build cost Glass ×3 + Titanium Rod ×12, 20 MW. Cuts stone, dirt and wood.

Again the wiki says Dirt ×20 for quartz; the same 4 July patch says "quartz requires 10 Earth (instead of 20)". At 20 dirt the recipe needed 150 dirt/min, which the Circular Saw page itself flags as impossible — "the input rate is almost half again the speed of the fastest available belt" (150 vs 135/min). At the current 10 dirt it needs 75/min, which a single Pro belt (100/min) can feed. That is a real, checkable change in what the machine can do, and it is why the quartz line stops being hand-loaded after the patch.

Belts, pipes and the throughput wall

The ConveyorBelt and Transport Pipe pages were both rewritten in July 2026, so these are 1.0-era numbers. Belts have three tiers; pipes have three tiers and only connect to Conveyor Joints, not to devices.

The wiki's own Ratios page (last edited 17 July 2026) gives slightly different measurements — 67/min and 100/min for the first two belts, 86/min and 150/min for the first two pipes — and lists no third tier. Both sets are unlabelled player measurements; the ConveyorBelt/Transport Pipe pages are the more detailed and more recent of the two, so this guide uses those. The disagreement is about 1–10%, which matters for "how many machines per belt" only at the margin.

Belts can be upgraded in place: select a belt segment and press U, provided the higher tier is researched and you have the materials. That is also how you upgrade devices.

How many machines fit on one belt — with belt rate R and a recipe consuming n items per t seconds, one machine eats n × 60 / t items per minute, so the belt supports floor(R / (n × 60 / t)) machines. Worked example, using the one number two independent sources agree on:

• Advanced Smelter on Iron Bar+ consumes 4 ore per 5 s = 48 Iron Ore/min.
• One Pro belt carries 100 items/min → floor(100 / 48) = 2 Advanced Smelters per belt.
• Which is exactly what the 2025 base-design guide concluded from the same two figures, and it is why its

iron factory pulls two belts and builds four Advanced Smelters.

Do the same arithmetic before you lay belts for glass (10/min), titanium (8.6/min) or computers (1.7/min) — the slow recipes are usually limited by the machine, not the belt, and the fast ones by the belt, not the machine.

Storage. The Base Warehouse is a 5×5×5 cube with three belt ports on each side at ground level. Its default is 4 ports in and 8 out, switchable to 8 in and 4 out, and filters on the outputs let mixed input be sorted into pure outputs. Everything stored in any Base Warehouse counts as available for construction as if it were in your inventory. The Storage Container is the small version: 1×3×1, one input port, one output port, useful for surge buffering. Practical limit from the base-design guide: do not run more than four belts in or out of a Base Warehouse.

Ore in: catchers, drills and mines

Auto Asteroid Catcher (page rewritten 3 July 2026) — 4 MW, output 2, sits under the automated catching tech. It pulls asteroids in by itself, can be taken over manually with F, and can be focused on Iron, Carbon, Copper or Ice. Two facts worth knowing before you build a wall of them:

• Focusing does not make it pure. The page's measured table (credited on the wiki to a Discord post, so

treat it as a player measurement of unstated date) gives roughly 6.4–6.7/min of the focused ore per catcher over an hour, but also a trickle of everything else: an Iron-focused catcher also produced about 0.55/min coal, 0.23/min copper, 0.22/min ice and 0.08/min gold. Random mode produces about 2.1/min iron, 2.7/min coal, 1.9/min copper, 1.1/min ice and 0.12/min gold. Either way you need filter blocks downstream, not hope.

• It generates Basic Science at 20% of the rate of manual mining or the manual Asteroid Catcher.

Gold is the exception: the Gold Ore page records that golden asteroids are never pure and cannot be targeted automatically by the Auto Asteroid Catcher at all — they come in by chance or by manual targeting. Plan gold supply accordingly; it is needed for Golden Wire (Solar Panels) and Gold Plates.

Drill / Giant Drill — pages touched 2 July 2026. Drill: 2 MW, 3×3 area, digs vertically into the ground for dirt and ores, must sit on a flat surface, and can mine through player-placed floor panels without removing them. Giant Drill: 8 MW, 7×7 tile device, mines a 7×5×8 block, same trick with floors.

Depth is the one number on those pages that is already wrong: the Giant Drill page still says "a depth of 8 blocks", but the 4 July 2026 patch notes increased drill depth "to -12 from -8 for giant drill" and "-8 from -5 regular drill". Use -12 and -8.

Mine — 4 MW, one output. A Mine does nothing on its own: it needs miner drones, one or two per Mine, and you select which deposit they work. Requirements per the Mine page: a Robots Assembler with the Miner recipe switched on, the resources for each drone (Iron Rod ×6 + Hydrogen Tank ×4), and a path from the Mine to the deposit. Two drones per Mine is the documented maximum, and it is the only way to get automated ore out of a planetoid at scale.

Robots Assembler (2023-09-21) — the bot factory. Each drone costs materials and time:

The Miner Drone cost matches the Mine page's independent requirement list exactly, which is a good sign for both pages.

Water, oxygen and food

Water is made by the Ice Breaker and stored in Water Cells. The rule that catches everyone: the Water page says water "cannot be used directly from an Ice Breaker. It must be connected to a Water Cell or the ice will be wasted", and the Water Cell page adds that cells "are the only object in the game with any Water storage capacity". One Water Cell holds 100 water; cells placed together or joined by the same pipe pool their capacity.

The Ice Breaker's own rate is contested on the wiki: the Water page (2025-03-18) says 1 Ice Cube → 10 Water in 6 s, the older Ice Cube page (2023-09-23) says 1 → 5 in 10 s. Both are in the same order of magnitude, and both mean a single Ice Breaker can out-produce a basic belt, so buffer it.

Oxygen — the most valuable trick in the early game. The Oxygen Generator can burn ice directly (1 Ice Cube → 10% oxygen, one click) but the Oxygen Generator and Oxygen Barrier pages both state that going through water is 12.5× more ice-efficient: Ice Breaker → Water → Oxygen Tank (Water ×4 → 1 tank, 20 s) → Oxygen Barrier, which consumes one tank per full refill of a dome that is roughly 27 blocks in radius and 25 blocks high, and refills a drained tank at 10% per second inside the bubble. Barriers need power; the generator needs power and water only to make the tanks, not to hand them out.

Food chain. Farm (build cost 3 Steel Bars + 3 Carbon Fiber + 2 Glass; 20 water and 10 power) grows Grain, Wood, Tomato and Sunflower with Farmer drones. The Kitchen (4 Aluminium Bars + 2 Carbon Fiber; 10 power and 10 water) turns them into meals — and it needs a Human Astronaut with the Cook specialisation before it will cook anything: Bread from Grain takes 10 s and a cook. Documented Kitchen recipes from the Water page:

The Barn and Pastures (Barn cost 4 Glass + 8 Steel Plate + 12 Carbon Fiber) convert wheat into animal products: Water ×40 + Wheat ×4 → Meat (160 s), Water ×20 + Wheat ×2 → Eggs (240 s), Water ×80 + Wheat ×6 → Milk (360 s), Water ×120 + Wheat ×4 → Wool (480 s).

Astronauts themselves need a Canteen (14 Copper Plates) to take food from and a Dining Stand to eat at — the Canteen page is explicit that they cannot eat at the canteen itself — plus a Hibernation Chamber to sleep in. A Transport Bot moves food from Kitchen to Canteen by default. Basic food is Hydrotonic (Water + Quartz in the Hydro Generator); better food means astronauts eat less often.

The six logic blocks, and the one pattern you need

Logic blocks are unlocked under Signal (and the Arithmetic block under Arithmetic, the signal transmitter/receiver under Communications). They are what turns a working factory into one that keeps working. From the 1.0-experimental automation guide, plus the wiki's Logic page:

The pattern. Set the machine's input cap first (open the machine with E, click the gear icon, set the max input count), then put a Blocker in front of its input, wire an Inventory Sensor (pointed at that machine, sensing the input resource) to a Decider, and set the Decider to the threshold you want — e.g. <= 10, meaning "switch the pusher/blocker off once the machine holds more than 10 ores". Without this, in a line feeding several machines, "the first resource converter will steal all the input resources for itself" because machines hold unbounded stacks of an item. Then box the whole cell — blocks, wires, cables, belts and machine — with H, register it as a blueprint, and paste it down the line: the logic settings come with it, which is the difference between building a factory once and building it ten times.

Two more 1.0-era habits worth having: press C to copy a device's properties and V to paste them onto another, and remember that since the 12 June 2026 patch every crafting device "pushes resources only for active recipes", which is the sanctioned way to purge unwanted stock from a machine.

Controls you need before the first hour is over

From the 1.0-era keyboard-controls guide (published 12 June 2026), which exists precisely because older lists were wrong:

If a device seems to be missing from your build bar, press K and look through the categories — the Auto Asteroid Catcher lives under Mining in the full menu, not on the default hotbar.

What changed since 1.0 — and which older advice is now wrong

Anything written before June 2026 — and there is a lot of it — predates the tech-tree redesign, the recipe rework and the July balance pass. Treat its ratios as leads, not as numbers.

Twelve traps, in the order they bite

1. Building the Oxygen Generator and feeding it ice forever. Ice → oxygen directly is 12.5× the ice

cost of ice → water → Oxygen Tank → Oxygen Barrier. Route it through water as soon as you can store water at all.

1. Piping water straight from the Ice Breaker. There is no buffer in a pipe. Without at least one

Water Cell in the network, ice is consumed and the water is lost.

1. Belting ore like it is Factorio. A base Conveyor Belt moves 68/min and an Advanced Smelter on

Iron Bar+ eats 48 ore/min — one smelter per belt, two per Pro belt, and no more. Lay the smelters along the belt with splitters and blockers rather than trying to force throughput.

1. Trusting Transport Bots as your logistics. They work early and stop working once the base grows,

because they block each other. The automation guide's verdict is blunt: avoid them for bulk logistics and use belts plus logic blocks.

1. Assuming machines push what you give them. Machines hold items indefinitely, so the first machine

on a shared line hoovers up every input. Set input caps on every machine and gate them with Inventory Sensor + Decider + Blocker.

1. Expecting an ore-focused catcher to deliver one ore. A focused Auto Asteroid Catcher delivers

about 6.4/min of its target against a background of everything else; filter the output.

1. Waiting for gold to arrive automatically. Golden asteroids cannot be targeted by the Auto Asteroid

Catcher at all, and are never pure. Fly out and catch them yourself, or accept the trickle.

1. Building a Mine and expecting ore. A Mine needs miner drones (Iron Rod ×6 + Hydrogen Tank ×4

each), a Robots Assembler running the Miner recipe, and a clear path to the deposit.

1. Running more than four belts into or out of a Base Warehouse. It has three ports per side,

four in / eight out by default; overload the port and the line stalls invisibly.

1. Forgetting who eats. Astronauts need a Canteen and a separate Dining Stand, a Hibernation

Chamber, and a Cook-trained human before the Kitchen will produce anything.

1. Digging to the old depth. Drills go to -8 and Giant Drills to -12 since 4 July 2026; two-year-old

guides still quote the shallower numbers.

1. Chasing a pre-1.0 tech cost list. The wiki's tech-tree page was last edited in November 2024; the

tree was redesigned at 1.0 and its costs rebalanced twice since. Use the tree for order, not for prices.

What is not verified here

• Science costs and the tech tree layout. The wiki's Technology page (last edited 2024-11-06) lists

the six branches and their science recipes — Basic Science is generated by mining and catching, while Engineering (Iron Bar ×2 + Copper Bar ×2, 12 s), Chemistry (Iron Rod ×2 + Dirt ×8, 24 s), Biology (Carbon Fiber ×4 + Oxygen Tank ×8, 28 s), Space (Motherboard ×2 + Gears ×4, 32 s) and High Tech (Polymer ×4 + Stone Plate ×4, 44 s) are made in the Human Laboratory. That page predates both the 1.0 tree redesign and the June cost rebalance, so no technology price from it is quoted in this guide. The Iron Rod page lists Chemistry science as 4 rods + 8 dirt rather than 2 + 8, an unresolved disagreement between two pre-1.0 pages.

• Belt and pipe rates exist in two slightly different sets on the same wiki (see the table above);

the guide uses the newer, more detailed set and flags the difference. No rate is published by the developer.

• Building costs for older machines come from pages last edited between 2022 and 2025. The 12 June

2026 patch rebalanced building costs, but the wiki was never updated for it, so treat all costs from those pages as approximate. Only the Carbon Reactor, Smelter, Drill, Giant Drill, Conveyor Belt, Pipe, Auto Asteroid Catcher and Ratios pages carry post-1.0 edits.

• Auto Asteroid Catcher output per hour is a player measurement credited on the wiki to a Discord

post, with no date or method, reproduced here as indicative.

• The energy-versus-MW unit question is not documented anywhere official; the guide presents

generator output and device draw as the wiki states them.

• The game's own version string is not published by the developer; "1.0" plus the patches listed

above, and Steam build 25565536 on 1 October 2026, is the most precise version statement that can be sourced. (One Steam guide for a 1.0-era translation names version 1.0.66, which confirms the 1.0.x pattern but not the current number.)

Sources

Game version: Astro Colony 1.0 (full release 2 June 2026), current through the 26 September 2026 update; Steam build 25565536.

Official / developer:

• https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1614550 — patch notes for 1.0 is OUT (3 June 2026), BIGGEST

BALANCE UPDATE (12 June 2026), Improvements & balance update (18 June 2026), Endless crafting is back, new storages, improved interactions (4 July 2026), Improvements & fixes (9 July 2026), and the September 2026 multiplayer updates (read via https://store.steampowered.com/feeds/news/app/1614550/)

• https://astrocolony.com/ — developer site, game description and the link to the official wiki
• https://steamdb.info/app/1614550/ — release date, developer, app id
• https://api.steamcmd.net/v1/info/1614550 — Steam build id

Wiki (astrocolony.fandom.com, the wiki linked from astrocolony.com; page last-edited dates given in the tables above):

• https://astrocolony.fandom.com/wiki/Technology_(research_tree)
• https://astrocolony.fandom.com/wiki/Ratios
• https://astrocolony.fandom.com/wiki/Smelter · /Advanced_Smelter · /Expert_Smelter
• https://astrocolony.fandom.com/wiki/Constructor · /Advanced_Constructor · /Manufacturer · /Advanced_Manufacturer
• https://astrocolony.fandom.com/wiki/Hydro_Generator · /Circular_Saw · /Robots_Assembler
• https://astrocolony.fandom.com/wiki/ConveyorBelt · /Transport_Pipe · /Paths
• https://astrocolony.fandom.com/wiki/Base_Warehouse · /Storage_Container
• https://astrocolony.fandom.com/wiki/Carbon_Reactor · /Solar_Panel · /Battery · /Nuclear_Reactor · /Fusion_Reactor · /Electric_Thruster
• https://astrocolony.fandom.com/wiki/Water · /Water_Cell · /Ice_Breaker · /Ice_Cube · /Oxygen_Generator · /Oxygen_Barrier
• https://astrocolony.fandom.com/wiki/Farm · /Farming · /Kitchen · /Canteen · /Human_Astronauts
• https://astrocolony.fandom.com/wiki/Drill · /Giant_Drill · /Mine · /Mining · /Auto_Asteroid_Catcher
• https://astrocolony.fandom.com/wiki/Resources · /Planetoid · /Dirt · /Quartz · /Carbon_Ore · /Gold_Ore · /Iron_Bar · /Iron_Rod · /Copper_Bar
• https://astrocolony.fandom.com/wiki/Logic · /Devices · /Buildings · /Utilities

Player guides (used for cross-checks and build practice, not as primary specs):

• "Automation guide." by Kyang, Steam, February 2026 (1.0 experimental) —

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3667470604 — logic block behaviour, input caps, the transport-bot warning, blueprinting

• "How to make a good base" by ph0ne, Steam, November 2025 (pre-1.0) —

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3604548634 — Advanced Smelter ratio corroboration, the machines-per-belt formula, the four-belt warehouse rule

• "Keyboard Controls" by HyzerSoze, Steam, 12 June 2026 —

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3743671493 — 1.0 keybinds

Note: the queue item for this guide listed steamcommunity.com/app/1815920/guides, which is not Astro Colony's community hub; the game's app id is 1614550, and all Steam links above use it.