Factory Town — build guide: the numbers behind every layout

Factory Town hides a simple economy under a very busy build menu. Almost every layout decision follows from four numbers: how much work a recipe costs, how fast a building turns work into items, how many items per second your transport can move, and how fast the houses you are feeding eat. This guide gives those numbers, the chain ratios and building costs that follow from them, and the traps that cost new players their first ten hours.

Every figure below is sourced from the game's official wiki or the developer's own patch notes; arithmetic I did myself is marked derived and shows its working.

What version this is written for

Factory Town 2.5, released 29 September 2026. Steam's own news feed gives 2.4 on 23 September 2026 and 2.3 on 21 September 2026.

The wiki's data pages were last written in August 2024, i.e. after 2.2 (17 July 2024). I read the patch notes for 2.2, 2.2.1 through 2.2.10, 2.3, 2.4 and 2.5: none of them contains a recipe, cost or balance change to the chains below. 2.2's balance changes were confined to Campaign 1 rules (infinite consumption disabled, goods consumption raised to 150%) and the Air Shrine boost radius (4 → 7 tiles); 2.3 to 2.5 are pathing, performance, window and bug-fix updates. The recipe and cost data therefore still stands for 2.5.

Two wiki pages to distrust:

• Version History stops at 1.7 (December 2021). Use Steam's news feed to check the current version, not that page.
• Production Speed Bonuses was last edited in February 2021 and still describes the percentage-multiplier system that developer patch .188 replaced in April 2021. The work-units model below is the current one.

Work units: the one production number

Every recipe is priced in Work Units (WU). A building producing 1 WU/s finishes a 3 WU recipe in 3 seconds. The baseline is 1 WU/s with no workers and no boosts.

Workers, with the building's own worker limit (5 for most 3×3 production buildings, 10 for Farm, Forester, Fishery and Mine):

• The first worker adds +1.0 WU/s. Workers 2–5 add +0.5 each. Workers 6 and above add +0.4 each.
• Farm, Forester, Fishery and Mine were reverted to +1.0 per worker in patch .189, because resource buildings are hard to connect to a town for the happiness bonus.
• Happiness and global production bonuses are applied per worker, not to the building's baseline.

Additive boosts:

The consequence worth internalising: a 5-worker Lumber Mill on the Planks recipe (3 WU) makes 4 ÷ 3 = 1.33 planks per second (derived). A wooden belt moves 0.738 items/second. One fully-staffed mill therefore outruns the wooden belt you are most likely feeding it into, by nearly two to one. Staffing a mill to the maximum and then capping its output with the cheapest belt is the most common early-game mistake in the game.

Happiness caps at 5,000 and is worth up to +300% production. Reaching it needs the level-10 house matrix (100 houses × 50 goods) plus infinite Omni research, so treat happiness as a late-game multiplier rather than an early one.

Throughput: what can actually move items

A second wiki measurement, on the Basic Logistics Guide page, gives slightly different belt figures: Chute 3.004, Wood 0.747, Cloth 1.2306, Metal 1.9394, Magic 3.763 items/s. Both sets are player measurements taken in-game and they disagree by around 1%. Use the per-page values above, but do not plan a layout around the second decimal place.

Chutes deserve their own paragraph. They cost one plank, they are faster than a Metal belt on level ground, and items accelerate downhill to a maximum travel speed of 10 blocks per second. In exchange they carry Loose Bulk only — raw resources, Flour, Animal Feed, Fertilizer and the mining stones — and they run only on flat ground or downhill. On a hilly map a chute run costs almost nothing and beats everything up to Magic belts.

The worker arithmetic that tells you when to automate. A worker's round trip is 1 second of handling plus two one-way journeys. On foot paths at 5 tiles/s: (derived)

A single Magic belt (221 items/minute) moves as much as about 48 workers doing 30-tile round trips, and it does not sleep, path around obstacles or queue at a door. Even a Wood belt (44 items/minute) beats nine of them. Conversely, a fully-staffed Lumber Mill making 80 planks a minute needs at least a Cloth belt and realistically a Metal one to clear its output.

How much a house actually eats

A house consumes one item per supply category at a time, then waits out a consumption timer set by the item's quality tier:

Planks is the documented exception, at 30 s.

Steady-state demand follows directly, because one house consumes one item per timer: (derived)

The 100-house column is a cross-check, not an invention. The wiki's own supply table is headed 5 pcs/s; 20 s; 10 s — 4 pcs/s; 25 s; 25 s — 3.3 pcs/s; 30 s; 50 s — 2.5 pcs/s; 40 s; 100 s — 2 pcs/s; 50 s; 150 s. Its timer column matches the tier table exactly and its rate column is exactly 100 ÷ timer, which is good evidence the table is sized for a 100-house town. (That page is flagged by the wiki itself as a rough translation, so I am citing the timers from the item table rather than the prose.)

The practical reading: sustaining a 100-house town needs about 12 items per minute per satisfied house, and about 1 item per second of a tier-1 good per 20 houses. Size the buildings from that, using the work-unit tables below.

Which goods go where, and what they pay:

Higher tiers are worth spending work on because they fill a house's meter for far longer per delivery: a tier-1 good buys 10 seconds of happiness, a tier-5 good buys 150.

The first hour, in order

Straight from the in-game tutorial, with the costs it omits:

1. Gather 15 Wood. Select a worker, click a tree. The worker chops, carries the log to the nearest building and repeats.
2. Build your first House. Houses raise the population limit and are the only source of worker capacity. Place the first houses near food — Grain especially.
3. Place 2 more Workers near the house.
4. Supply the house. Drag from Grain onto the House. Each delivered item pays a coin and adds happiness, which feeds production speed back into your buildings.
5. Draw Foot Paths along worker routes. Workers move 5 tiles/s on paths against 3.0 on bare ground — the single cheapest upgrade in the game at 1 Wood per tile.
6. Build a Lumber Mill — 1 Worker + 5 Stone + 20 Wood, 3×3. Production buildings consume spare population capacity, so if you are at the population limit you must build houses first.
7. Select the Planks recipe on the mill, then bring wood to it. Planks are the gate on almost every early building.
8. Carry the plank to your Town Center to put it in shared inventory: Town Center, Barn and Crate storage is what lets you place buildings and workers.

Then, from the research tree, in this order (the dependencies make it nearly linear):

Note the cost colours: Chute and Basic Logistics are priced in Red coins, which are earned by selling General Goods (Planks, Stone Brick) at a General Store. If you only ever sell food you will be stuck at tech 2 with 40 unspent General research points.

Production chains and ratios

Raw extraction

Farms, Foresters and Mines run at +1.0 WU/s per worker (10 workers, so 11 WU/s fully staffed), so a fully-staffed Mine digs 11 ÷ 4 × 2 = 5.5 stone per second (derived) and a fully-staffed Farm grows 5.5 Grain per second. A Mine with 10 workers and a Supply Pickaxes delivery also mines faster; the Supply Water, Supply Fertilizer and Supply Pickaxe recipes themselves cost just 1 work unit each.

Processing

Two ratios fall out of that table and they are the ones people get wrong.

Grain to Bread, in work units. 3 Grain is 6 WU at the Farm and sells for 3 Yellow Coins — exactly 0.5 coins per work unit. Milled into 1 Flour it takes 3 × 2 + 4 = 10 WU and sells for 4 coins, or 0.4 coins per work unit. Baked into Bread it takes 2 × 10 + 1 (coal fuel) + 4 = 25 WU and sells for 12 coins, or 0.48 coins per work unit. (derived)

So the chain does not make you richer per unit of work — it makes each house visit worth 12 coins instead of 2 and fills the Grains meter for 50 seconds instead of 10. Build the chain for happiness tier and coin throughput per house, not for coins per work unit. If you want coins per work unit, sell the raw Grain and put the work units into another mill instead.

Fruit into Juice and Jam. 2 fruit = 2–4 WU at the Farm or Forester; Juice is 3 WU for 6 coins, Jam is 5 WU for 12 coins plus a Sugar (4 WU) and a Fuel. Juice is the best coins-per-work-unit food conversion in the early game; Jam is a tier-5 meter-filler.

Fuel: get this right early

Buildings that need fuel: Forge, Magic Forge, Kitchen, Medicine Hut, Steam Generator, Steam Locomotive. Fuel values differ per source:

Coal costs 4 work units at the Mine for 4 fuel units — 1.0 fuel unit per work unit. Wood costs 4 work units at the Forester for 2 fuel units — 0.5 fuel unit per work unit (derived). Coal is twice as fuel-efficient as wood, and burning wood is burning Planks, since 1 Wood is 1 Planks after 3 more work units.

Fertilizer is the trap. One Fertilizer is 1 Animal Feed + 1 Water at the Pasture; Animal Feed is 2 Grain, which is 4 WU at the Farm plus 2 WU at the Food Mill. That is roughly 9 work units of chain for a single fuel unit — and Fertilizer is also your crop-yield booster. Feed it to Farm Tiles, never to a Forge.

Tech level: exactly what to produce to advance

Tech level requirements count when the item is produced, not when it is sold or stored, and reaching a higher level skips the lower requirement — one more reason not to bank surplus.

Each campaign supports two consecutive tech levels: campaign N covers tech N+1 and N+2. Campaign 8 is the only map that reaches tech 9 and 10.

The level gates are resource sinks and should be planned as such. Tech 4 wants 25 Cloth Conveyor Belts and 25 Wooden Rails, tech 5 wants 40 Metal Rail and 40 Iron Wheel, tech 6 wants 50 Antidote and 50 Metal Conveyor Belt. Every one of those is a usable item, so build them into the layout rather than scrapping them afterwards — but you need the Workshops, Machine Shop and Forge capacity to make that many before you can advance, and tech 6 in particular assumes you can already run a Medicine Hut at scale.

The research spine

Research requires both research points and coins. Points come from Knowledge Tomes and Magical Knowledge Tomes, which you deliver to a School or Mage Tower. Point types are General (G), Industrial (I), Natural (N), Magical (M), Fire, Water, Earth, Air, and Star; coin costs are Yellow, Red, Blue and Purple.

Knowledge Tomes are worth 1 research point at level 1, 10 at level 2 and 50 at level 3 for the same delivery trip. Once you can make level-3 tomes, stop shipping level-1 books to the School.

Infinite research opens after an OmniTemple exists and each upgrade costs the base points and coins again plus escalating Star Coins: 100 for the first upgrade, then 200, 400, 700, 1,000, 1,400, 1,800, 2,200, 2,600, 3,000, rising by roughly 500 per upgrade after the tenth. Production Speed adds a multiplicative +25% per level to all worker-occupied production buildings; OmniUpgrade Power adds +0.1 WU/s per upgrade level, which is how you keep a late-game town fed.

Buildings and what they cost

Most building costs below are taken from the Planks page's "Used to Build" table, which is a single coherent list. A handful of individual building pages disagree with it and I have marked those, because the disagreement matters when you are counting materials.

Also worth knowing: a Mine's 10 Pickaxe requirement means the Mine is gated behind 10 × 12 = 120 work units of Pickaxes plus 10 Reinforced Planks at 6 WU each (plus the Planks, Iron Plate and Nails under them), so plan the Workshop and Forge capacity before you go mining.

Houses, markets and the layout rules

A market reaches a house when:

• the house is at or within 4 grid units of the market in either direction, or
• the house is at or within a circular radius of 28 grid units, provided the market and house are joined by a contiguous network of Foot Paths or Roads,

and in both cases the house is within 12 height units of the market. There is no maximum path distance otherwise. A Town Center's range extends every market connected to it, so markets inside a town serve far more houses than their own radius suggests.

The market then delivers in a strict order: first to houses unhappy in a category the market holds stock in, then to houses that are hungry (happy, but not currently consuming), then to houses with spare capacity. Two consequences: a market with a mixed inventory will not starve a house of the good it needs, but a market whose stock is spread over many categories will visit each house less often.

House levels are automatic once enough experience has accumulated:

House level also sets how many items of each category a house will hold. That table is the real reason to level houses: a level-1 house takes 3 Basic Food, 1 Hardware, 1 Clothing and 1 Basic Medicine; a level-10 house takes 6 Basic Food, 4 Hardware, 3 Clothing, 3 Basic Medicine, 3 Education, 6 Gourmet, 6 Magical Medicine, 6 Magical Knowledge, 8 Magic Supplies and 6 Luxury.

Town Centers upgrade on connected house levels, not resources:

A level-1 Town Center could be upgraded by 8 level-1 houses, 4 level-2 houses or a single level-8 house. Town Centers cannot be connected to each other, a building can only belong to one town, and the maximum is 6 Town Centers (the initial one plus five Civics researches, at tech 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10).

Town specialties

Each Town Center can take one specialty, giving a 20% chance per Town Center tier to double the output of the listed recipes. That makes them a multiplier on your best chain, not a rounding error.

Specialties reinforce the case for dedicated towns: one Forestry town feeding Planks into one Industry town beats two mixed towns, because the specialty bonus applies per Town Center tier and you can only pick one per town.

Storage, layout and the shared inventory

Only shared-inventory storage counts towards building and upgrading. A Silo full of Planks does not let you place a Workshop; you need those Planks in a Barn, Crate or Town Center. Conversely a Silo is the only cheap storage that feeds a belt directly.

Barn, Crate and other storage slots can each be set to Input & Output, Input only, Output only or Disabled. The useful trick from the 2.1 notes: route a production chain through a Barn and set its top slots to Input only so they fill first and hold construction materials that workers and belts cannot empty, while additional output spills into the slots that can be drawn from.

Logistics blocks: a Grabber pulls a single item out of any side of a building, including houses, and can be item-filtered. Pushers force an item in a chosen direction regardless of belt facing, and double as an overflow outlet. Sorters, Filters and Blockers gate and route single item types. Mergers combine up to three belt inputs, and Splitters split one belt up to three ways, each with a settable unit ratio — that ratio is how you turn one over-supplied belt into three correctly-fed buildings.

Traps that waste the first ten hours

1. Buildings do not push items out the way they face. That was removed in .207. To get items out of a production building you need a Grabber, or a belt or chute ending at the building's centre forward block. Layouts copied from pre-2021 videos will silently fill up and stop. As of 2.5, dragging a belt path that ends next to exactly one suitable building now adds the Grabber (start) or Pusher (end) automatically.
2. Chutes carry Loose Bulk only, and only flat or downhill. No planks, no tools, no mana crystals.
3. Planting crops or trees on rock or sand gives zero yield. Trees and crops planted on incompatible terrain produce nothing and cannot be harvested — the 1.7 patch deletes offending plants on load.
4. A full output stops production. Since 2.0 the blocked output is flagged in red, but the building simply stops. The Pasture is the one documented exception for its internal Fertilizer store.
5. One item per category per house at a time. Flooding houses with tier-1 Grain cannot push the Grains meter past its cap; you need a higher-tier good in the same category, or a different category entirely.
6. Tech-level requirements count production, not delivery, and reaching a higher level skips the lower ones. There is no reason to warehouse your tech items — and no reason to overproduce them either.
7. The tech gates are large deliberate builds (25 Cloth Belts + 25 Wooden Rails at tech 4, 40 Metal Rail + 40 Iron Wheel at tech 5, 50 Antidote + 50 Metal Conveyor Belt at tech 6). Budget the buildings before you promise yourself an upgrade.
8. Wood fuel is planks. Coal gives twice the fuel per work unit, and a Forge fed on Wood is competing with your construction materials.
9. Research needs research points and coins, and points come in colours. Chute and Basic Logistics cost Red coins from General Store sales; the tech-4 industrial researches cost 500+ Red; tech-6 mana research costs Blue. Sell goods in all four coin colours early or your research tree stalls.
10. Level-1 tomes are a waste of a delivery. Knowledge Tomes are worth 1 / 10 / 50 points at level 1 / 2 / 3.
11. A worker standing still caps at 1 item/second. Upgrading paths cannot fix a long haul. At 30 tiles a worker delivers 4.6 items per minute; a Wood belt delivers 44. Move the building or build the belt.
12. Water is a placement bonus, not a resource you can ignore. A building adjacent to water gets a trickle; a Well or Lumber Mill needs 40 or more connected water tiles for its full 1 water/second draw, and gets proportionally less below that (20 tiles = 0.5/s). Farm Tiles can only be watered from a genuinely adjacent source, and the game's own 2.2 patch notes record a placement preview that lied about it.
13. Fisheries changed in 2.0. A Fishery now needs Fish tiles inside its harvesting radius, like a Farm needs crops. Fish tiles deplete and regenerate slowly. Planting a Fish tile costs 100 Red Coins, so build next to natural fish.
14. Town Centers are the only thing that ties a market to extra houses. A market placed outside town range serves only its own 4-tile and 28-tile radials, no matter how good your belts are.

Sources

All numbers above were read from these pages and posts, and from the game's own patch notes:

• Official Factory Town wiki (Fandom), data pages last edited August 2024: Research, Market demand and happiness, Goods Consumption Rates, House Supply Logic, House, Town Center, Production Speed Bonuses, Item Transport, Work Units, Time, Item Sell Efficiency, Basic Logistics Guide, Getting Started / How to Play, Tutorial, Town Specialty, Happiness Categories, Reference Data, and the building and item pages for Lumber Mill, Workshop, Stone Mason, Food Mill, Forge, Machine Shop, Pasture, Kitchen, Tailor, Laboratory, Mine, Farm, Forester, Well, Barn, Silo, Crate, Train Station, Rail Cars, Chute, Wood/Cloth/Metal/Magic Conveyor Belt, Fluid Pipe, Mana Pipe, Grabber, Pusher, Sorter, Merger, Splitter, Filter, Blocker, Priority Sorter, Loose Bulk, School, Apothecary, Medicine Hut, Food Market, General Store, Tavern, Market Buildings, Planks, Wooden Rail, Foot Path, Road, Steam Engine, Steam Generator, Elemental Refinery, Enchanter, Fire/Water/Earth/Air Temple, OmniTemple, Map Challenges.
• Developer patch notes (Steam), read directly: Update 2.5 (29 Sep 2026), Update 2.4 (23 Sep 2026), Update 2.3 (21 Sep 2026), 2.2 Patch Notes (17 Jul 2024), 2.1 Patch Notes (7 Jul 2022), 2.0 Update! (22 Jun 2022), Town Centers & Town Specialties, plus Campaign Map #7! (24 Apr 2021, the .188 worker-scaling and boost rules), .189 Patch Notes (26 Apr 2021), Happiness & Goals Overhaul (24 Sep 2021), Rail/airship transfer rates (10 Dec 2020, the .180 notes).

Game version written for: Factory Town 2.5 (public branch, released 29 September 2026).

Not verified: the wiki's Version History page stops at 1.7, so I could not confirm from the wiki that no recipe changed between 2.2 and 2.5 — I checked the developer's own patch notes for that window instead. The wiki's farm-sizing table (how many Farm Tiles a crop needs) is a 2021 player measurement that the wiki itself flags as unchecked and pre-version-113, so I have not restated its numbers. A Chinese-language community page I found during research gave the Planks recipe as 2 Wood for 1 Planks; the English wiki states 1 Wood in the Lumber Mill recipe table, the Planks page and the Lumber Mill's own page, so I have used 1 Wood — but that one ratio is the only number in this guide I could not reconcile across sources. Finally, belt and chute rates are player measurements and two wiki pages disagree with each other by about 1%.