Captain of Industry — Progression Guide

Written against Update 4.2 / game version v0.8.7d (latest official changelog entry: 2026-09-15). Iron, concrete, construction parts, coal and diesel power, copper and electronics, steel and glass, then the lab and settlement ladder, in the order the game actually gates them — with the ratios and building costs the wiki carries, and the traps that eat a new player's first ten hours.

Recipe ratios below come from the Captain of Industry wiki's game-file import (Special:CargoTables/RecipesImport, imported at game version 0.8.1.0). Building costs, worker counts, power draw and research prerequisites come from the individual wiki building pages. Every stage lists what unlocks it and what it costs to build.

How to read the numbers

A recipe line reads inputs → outputs per cycle (cycle time). Where a per-minute rate is given, it is arithmetic on the wiki's cycle time (60 ÷ cycle seconds × quantity) and is marked as such, so you can check it.

Both the wiki's tables and this guide use the game's own units. A "per 60" figure in the wiki's recipe tables is per minute.

Stage 0 — The tutorial goal list is the real progression spine

The game ships a live goal list that activates in dependency order and pays out resources on completion. It is the most reliable progression order available, because it is generated from the game's own tutorial logic — the wiki page transcribing it was last built from a 2026-08-19 dependencies diagram.

The early sequence the game itself asks for:

Note what is not in the goal list: ore mining does not come until goal 7, after maintenance and trading. The first iron is made from scrap, not ore.

Stage 1 — Wood, charcoal and the first iron

Buildings

Ratios

The furnace-to-caster ratio is 1:2. A Blast Furnace puts out 24 Molten Iron per minute and one Metal Caster only turns over 12 per minute. That is exactly what tutorial goal 1 asks you to build — one Smelting Furnace and two Metal Casters — and it is why the goal's reward tiers are sized the way they are.

Molten products cannot be moved by truck. Blast Furnace output goes into a Molten Channel (see the trap list). Early on, put the casters directly on the furnace.

Traps in this stage

• Exhaust has nowhere to go by default. The furnace emits 8 Exhaust per 20 s cycle and a Smoke Stack costs 10 Construction Parts. The tutorial makes the Smoke Stack part of goal 1 for a reason: without a vent, the exhaust buffer fills and the furnace stops.
• The Charcoal Maker is a stopgap, not a plan. It burns 18 Wood a minute to make 7.5 Coal a minute, and the wiki's own page calls it "a very inefficient way to create Coal" that "can use your supply of Wood which can be detrimental to the later-game experience." Tutorial goal 20 later asks you to pause your Charcoal Makers once you are mining coal.
• One furnace running on ore needs 12 Coal a minute — more than one Charcoal Maker can supply (7.5/min). Either accept the wood burn, or get to coal mining early.

Stage 2 — Concrete and Construction Parts

Concrete is the gate on everything else: Construction Parts need it, and Construction Parts are the cost of nearly every building.

Buildings

Ratios

The Kiln route (Basic Concrete research) is the cheap start and needs no power. The Rotary Kiln + Concrete Mixer route costs more Construction Parts II upfront but the mixer is a per-minute machine: one Rotary Kiln makes 3 Cement a minute and two Concrete Mixers eat 1.5 each, so the settled ratio on the mid-game concrete line is 1 kiln : 2 mixers, plus a Crusher for Gravel and Sand.

Traps in this stage

• Bricks are gone. Bricks and the Brickworks were removed in version 0.8.1: "Removed Bricks and replaced with simpler concrete recipe made in Kiln." Older guides — including the wiki's own Walkthrough v3, which is based on game version 0.4.13 — still tell you to smelt 3 Iron + 4 Wood + 4 Bricks into Construction Parts. The current Assembly recipe is 3 Iron + 3 Wood + 4 Concrete Slab. If a guide mentions Bricks, it predates 0.8.1. (The research node name "Bricks Production" survives in places, which is why it still appears on the Rainwater Harvester page.)
• Water is scarce before the Groundwater Pump. The only pre-research source is the Rainwater Harvester, which stores 40 units internally and produces 0.5 Water during rain, 1 during heavy rain, averaging 35–40 units of water per year by the wiki's figures. Farms run on rainfall alone and can lose a crop to a dry spell.
• Limestone is mined, not built. You need excavators on a limestone designation; there is no Limestone Mine building on the home island.

Stage 3 — Coal mining, trucks, and your first power

Buildings

Vehicles

Ratios

Oil Pumps: three per Basic Distiller. The wiki states it directly: three Oil Pumps are required to keep one Basic Distiller at full throughput, and only two to keep a Distillation (Stage I) tower running continuously.

Traps in this stage

• Trucks cannot deliver mixed loads. An excavator loading ore out of a designation can pick up more than one material, and a mixed load cannot go into storage or a building. The Ore Sorting Plant exists for exactly this — it processes up to 240 units per 60 s and has four outputs. Under default difficulty you can turn the requirement off, but the tutorial's goal 7 walks you into the building anyway.
• Diesel is a chain, not a building. Diesel Generator → needs Electronics (20 per generator) → Electronics need Rubber, which needs the Rubber Maker and its own research. Meanwhile your only pre-refinery diesel is what the game hands you. Plan the diesel loop before you scale vehicles: the wiki's fuel-consumption figures (0.44 for a Pickup, 1.1 for a Truck) apply whether the vehicle is driving or idling.
• Crude oil deposits deplete. The Oil Pump page warns the extraction speed drops greatly when the deposit runs low, and there is a warning in the machine's UI ("Reserve Status"). Oil rigs on the world map are the long-term supply — cargo ship fuel for a size-2 ship is 210 Diesel per trip standard, 147 on the Save Fuel setting.
• Waste Water from the distiller is 5 per cycle. You need a Liquid Dump (built on a shore) with the waste-water recipe, or the distiller backs up and stops.
• Maintenance is not optional and not interchangeable. Below 75% maintenance a machine rolls a breakdown chance each month, rising to 50% at 0%. Idled machines and vehicles still burn 33% of working maintenance; paused ones burn none. The three tiers (I/II/III) cannot substitute for each other, so you will run parallel depot types in the late game.

Stage 4 — Copper, rubber, electronics, vehicle parts

This is where the vehicle and belt economy actually opens, because everything with a circuit board needs copper and rubber.

Buildings

Ratios

Flat Conveyor and U-shape Conveyor cost 28 Construction Parts II + 28 Rubber per 100 tiles (rounded up), carry 60 units, and draw 1 kW plus 0.2 kW per tile for tier I. Paying 28 Rubber for a hundred tiles is why the Rubber Maker is a hard prerequisite for a serious belt network — and the Rubber Maker needs 4 Diesel per cycle to run.

Traps in this stage

• The acid question has a wrong answer for a while. Copper Electrolysis with Water yields 13 Copper from 16 Impure Copper against 16 with Acid. Acid is Mixer chemistry (Sulfur + Water) and, before Acid is plumbed, most players run the water recipe and quietly lose a fifth of their copper.
• Copper Electrolysis is 400 kW and 5 workers per building — this is where your first real power plant stops being optional.
• Everything electronic is a chain of three: Copper (electrolysis) → Rubber (Diesel + Sulfur) → Electronics (assembly). A stall in any of the three stops vehicles, belts and laboratories simultaneously.

Stage 5 — The lab and settlement ladder

Research gates everything above, and unlocks are gated behind the lab you can afford to keep fed.

Buildings

Ratios

A Research Lab I eats 6 Lab Equipment a minute. One Assembly II running the Lab Equipment recipe makes 12/m, so a single assembly feeds two labs. Build the Lab Equipment line before the lab upgrade, or you will build a lab that sits idle and still draws 200 kW and 0.25 Unity/month.

Settlement facts worth knowing

• Two Housing units and a Food Market module are pre-built on arrival; Housing itself needs no research and holds 80 people.
• Unity comes from settlement services — roughly 1–2 Unity per month per satisfied service — and is spent by research labs, edicts, quick trades, boosts, outposts and instant construction. Edicts generally cost 1 Unity per month per level, and the tiers stack.
• Population feeds research efficiency: since Update 3, research efficiency scales with population size. Starving or stalling the settlement slows the research tree, not just the food bar.

Traps in this stage

• A beacon is a population brake and a population tap. It costs 1 Unity/month and pulls in refugees and adoptions by design; tutorial goal 31 exists purely to tell players to pause it once they have more free workers than they can house.
• High-tier labs need specific maintenance tiers (Lab III and IV are Maintenance II/III consumers), so the depot ladder and the lab ladder must be climbed together.

Stage 6 — Steel, glass and Construction Parts III

Steel is not on the critical path until you want Construction Parts III, tier-2 vehicles, cargo-ship repair and the whole late game. It is, however, entirely gated behind Oxygen.

Buildings

Ratios

Ratios that line up: one Oxygen Furnace makes 12 Steel a minute and one Cooled Caster casts 12 a minute — 1:1, unlike the 1:2 iron furnace-to-caster ratio. One Air Separator makes 36 Oxygen a minute and one Oxygen Furnace needs 18, so one separator feeds two steel furnaces.

Glass loss is real. The Glass Maker only converts half its molten glass into Glass, the rest into Broken Glass, of which two thirds can be re-smelted — roughly a 25% material loss versus the Glass Maker II, which converts everything. The 0.8.1 patch notes also record that two Glass Maker IIs are needed per Blast Furnace II, i.e. the tier-2 glass line is deliberately paired.

Traps in this stage

• Steel needs oxygen, oxygen needs a separate building. Air Separator is 100 Construction Parts II and 250 kW, and its research comes from either Steel Smelting or Biofuel. Skip it and the Oxygen Furnace is a dead building.
• The Advanced Shipyard is the single most expensive early build at 600 Construction Parts + 800 Concrete Slab, and it is tutorial goal 15. If you are plateaued on construction parts, that is the reason.
• Cargo ships are repaired, not bought. Four damaged ships exist on the world map; repair costs run 240 Iron, 240 Iron, 300 Steel + 200 Copper, 300 Steel + 200 Copper for the four (cheapest nearest the home island). One village sells additional ships for Construction Parts III, repeatedly.

Stage 7 — What the late game gates on

• Nuclear Reactor: 400 Construction Parts IV, 24 Maintenance II, no external electricity draw. It converts Water + Uranium Rod into Steam (High) plus Spent Fuel, and you turn that into power with High-Pressure Turbines, Low-Pressure Turbines and Power Generators — typically the tier-2 variants. Water is largely recovered with a Cooling Tower (Large).
• Overheating is not warned about. If water supply or steam consumption stalls, Reactor Heat climbs; at maximum the reactor goes critical and releases a very large amount of radiation, "likely resulting in the deaths of many citizens". The wiki is explicit that the machine does not alert you until critical overheating.
• Infinite research exists. Update 3 added 18 repeatable research nodes that "allow to overclock your industry"; the advanced ones additionally require space points from an operational space station. Repeatable nodes get more demanding each level, making them the intended end-game resource sink.
• Recycling closes the loop. The Waste Sorting Plant (400 Construction Parts III, 32 workers, 300 kW, research Recycling) splits Recyclables back into scraps such as Iron Scrap and Copper Scrap, which feed straight back into any furnace — the same furnaces you used for scrap in Stage 1.

Ten traps that cost the first ten hours

1. Molten metal cannot be trucked. Blast Furnace and Oxygen Furnace output must go through Molten Channels (0.4 Construction Parts per tile, rounded up; throughput 120; cannot be built sloped). There is no storage building for molten products — long channels are the storage.
2. Your first furnace produces nothing until exhaust is vented. Smoke Stack: 10 Construction Parts, and it is part of tutorial goal 1, not an afterthought.
3. Mixed ore loads cannot be delivered. Excavators fill trucks with whatever the designation holds; the Ore Sorting Plant (80 Construction Parts I, 100 kW, 240 units/60 s, four outputs) is the only way to split it under default difficulty.
4. Maintenance below 75% starts rolling breakdowns (up to 50% chance per month at zero), and the three maintenance tiers do not substitute for each other. Paused buildings cost nothing — pause what you are not using rather than leaving it idle at 33%.
5. Bricks no longer exist (removed in 0.8.1, replaced by a Kiln concrete recipe). Any guide that tells you to build a Brickworks or smelt Bricks into Construction Parts predates that change — including the wiki's own Walkthrough v3, written for version 0.4.13.
6. Diesel runs out before the refinery exists. Basic Distiller needs Crude Oil and Coal, three Oil Pumps per distiller, a Liquid Dump for the 5 Waste Water per cycle, and Fluid Storage for the output. Vehicles burn fuel around the clock — a Pickup at 0.44/min adds up across a fleet.
7. Water comes from rain only until the Groundwater Pump (40 Construction Parts II, 120 kW). A Farm is rain-fed and can lose the crop; the Rainwater Harvester averages 35–40 Water per year, so water is the real early-game constraint on concrete.
8. Research Labs consume their lab equipment continuously — 6 Lab Equipment a minute for a Lab I, 12 Lab Equipment II a minute for a Lab II. The lab is a factory consumer, not a one-time build.
9. Research speed depends on population, because research efficiency scales with population size. A small or unhappy settlement quietly taxes the entire tech tree.
10. The wiki has stale pages as well as good ones. Its Walkthrough v3 is based on version 0.4.13 and its hand-written recipe blocks sometimes disagree with the game-file import (the Rubber Maker page lists 6 Rubber per cycle where the import lists 8). This guide uses the imported game data for ratios and the current pages for costs.

Sources

Game version: v0.8.7d, latest entry in the official changelog (2026-09-15). Update 4.2 = v0.8.6, released 2026-07-20. The official changelog was checked for v0.8.2 through v0.8.7d: no balance or recipe changes affecting the iron, concrete, construction-parts, copper, electronics, steel, glass, diesel or maintenance chains documented here (only the "Balance" list in v0.8.1 touched these, and the recipes used above are from the 0.8.1 import).

Wiki (official, developer-hosted) pages used:

• https://wiki.coigame.com/Recipes and the game-file export at https://wiki.coigame.com/Special:CargoTables/RecipesImport (all recipe ratios; import tagged version 0.8.1.0)
• https://wiki.coigame.com/Tutorial (the live goal list and its dependency order)
• https://wiki.coigame.com/Blast_Furnace · /Blast_Furnace_II · /Oxygen_Furnace · /Arc_Furnace · /Arc_Furnace_II · /Air_Separator · /Metal_Caster · /Metal_Caster_II · /Cooled_Caster
• https://wiki.coigame.com/Kiln · /Rotary_Kiln · /Concrete_Mixer · /Concrete_Mixer_II · /Crusher · /Crusher_(Large) · /Cement · /Bricks
• https://wiki.coigame.com/Assembly_I · /Assembly_II · /Assembly_III · /Assembly_IV · /Assembly_V
• https://wiki.coigame.com/Coal_Maker · /Boiler · /Diesel_Generator · /Diesel_Generator_II · /Power_Generator · /Power_Generator_(Large) · /Basic_Distiller · /Distillation_(Stage_I) · /Oil_Pump · /Rubber_Maker · /Mixer · /Chemical_Plant
• https://wiki.coigame.com/Copper_Electrolysis · /Glass_Maker · /Glass_Maker_II · /Silicon_Reactor · /Settling_Tank · /Waste_Sorting_Plant · /Shredder
• https://wiki.coigame.com/Maintenance · /Maintenance_Depot_(Basic) · /Maintenance_Depot · /Maintenance_II_Depot · /Unity · /Research_Lab_(Basic) · /Research_Lab_I · /Research_Lab_II · /Research_Lab_III · /Research_Lab_IV
• https://wiki.coigame.com/Vehicles · /Pickup · /Truck · /Excavator · /Small_Excavator · /Tree_Harvester · /Vehicles_Depot · /Mine_Control_Tower · /Ore_Sorting_Plant
• https://wiki.coigame.com/Housing · /Settlement · /Beacon · /Water_Facility · /Waste_Collection · /Groundwater_Pump · /Rainwater_Harvester · /Liquid_Dump · /Fluid_Storage · /Fuel_Station · /Captain's_Office_I · /Edicts
• https://wiki.coigame.com/Flat_Conveyor · /U-shape_Conveyor · /Molten_Channel · /Smoke_Stack · /Cargo_Ship · /World_Map · /Nuclear_Reactor · /Beacon

Official site:

• https://www.captain-of-industry.com/recent-changes (version numbers and dates; the v0.8.1 entries on Bricks removal, Kiln concrete, CP I concrete cost, and two Glass Maker II per Blast Furnace II)
• https://coigame.com/Blog/update42-is-out (Update 4.2 contents, released 2026-07-20)
• https://steamdb.info/app/1594320/patchnotes/ (public build dates)
• https://captain-of-industry.com/roadmap (unreleased plans, quoted only where labelled as future work)

Not verified / not included:

• Research point costs. The wiki has no research-cost table — the game shows costs in the tree ("Each research has a fixed numerical cost, visible by looking at it on the research tree"), and the wiki's Research page is a stub. No cost figures are quoted here.
• Starting resources and starting vehicle counts. The tutorial goals say "beyond the starting count" without stating the count.
• Wall-clock timings. The tutorial's own dated walkthrough (Walkthrough v3) is written for game version 0.4.13, so its month-by-month schedule was not used.