FluxWerks Data Reference - v0.5.17: Recipes, Ratios, Power, Computing & Research

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Start Here What This Guide Is

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This is a data reference for FluxWerks (Early Access, released 23 September 2026 by Metallibitti Oy). Everything in it was pulled out of the game's own data files in a local install, version v0.5.17 (Steam build 25559483), on 25 September 2026. Nothing here is copied from a wiki or guessed from memory, and nothing is carried over from an earlier build.

That matters, because FluxWerks is a week old and its numbers move. When a patch changes a recipe, the recipe in this guide will be wrong until it is rebuilt - the in-game panels are always the final authority.

What is in here

• The rules the numbers obey: speed multipliers, the temperature bands, maintenance, ticks.

• Power and computing: what makes them, what eats them, how the grid rations them.

• Every recipe (81), with inputs, outputs, base time and cycles per minute on each machine.

• Every building (63): cost, build work, and its behaviour summary.

• Every technology (86), with prerequisites, science packs, cycles and unlocks.

• Mining, extraction and farming rates, computed from the game's own tick data.

How to read the tables

• Power - raw game units, exactly as the data stores them. The game never names the unit anywhere in its data or its own manual, so this guide will not invent one. Compare power values to each other, not to kilowatts.

• Thermal power - the fuel-side figure on fuel-burning buildings. It is a different quantity from grid power, not a conversion of it.

• Computing - a shared reserve, charged by Computers and drawn by advanced machines. Shown as + provided or - required.

• Work - the construction work your nanobots must do to finish the building.

• Cycles/min - how many times a machine finishes that recipe per minute, at the best speed available for its recipe type.

• Item names - the game's data stores items as internal identifiers and has no display-name table, so names like Iron Plate are derived by splitting those identifiers apart.

Colour and layout are Steam's; this guide sticks to headings, lists and tables so it stays readable on a phone and survives future editor changes.

The Five Numbers That Drive Everything

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Nearly every question in FluxWerks - how many machines, why is it slow, why did it stop - comes back to five rules. They are the game's own, quoted here in plain terms.

1. Speed multiplier

Every production building carries a speed multiplier. A building at 0.5x speed takes twice as long per recipe as one at 1.0x. That is the whole rule, and it is the one players most often get backwards.

Cycles per minute = 60 x speed / base time (seconds). The tables in this guide already do that arithmetic for the fastest machine that can run each recipe.

Foundry and Boiler burn fuel rather than drawing from the electrical grid; the Power section below explains the two budgets.

2. Temperature - the throttle

• 0-100 C: full speed, no penalty.

• 100-200 C: output scales down linearly. At 150 C a building runs at 50% speed; at 199 C it is nearly stopped.

• 200 C: the heat factor hits zero and the building shuts down.

Heat is simulated per voxel across the world, so a hot neighbour, a lava field or a smothered machine all push a building up that ramp. Hot machines are the single most common cause of a factory that 'just runs slow'.

3. Maintenance - the slow rot

• Machines with a Condition bar (most power and production buildings) wear down only in bad weather and on hostile ground. In calm weather outside hostile biomes they do not wear at all.

• Wear happens whether the machine is running or not - it depends on where it stands and what the sky is doing.

• Above 50% condition there is no penalty at all. Below 50% it slows down, losing speed the lower it gets, and at 0% it stops completely until repaired.

• A worn machine is never destroyed, and repairing always brings it back - so a stalled factory is a repair job, not a loss.

4. Ticks - where every rate comes from

The world runs on a fixed 30 Hz step: the log prints '0.03333334s fixed step (30Hz), 30 subticks, 1s per cycle'. Extraction rates in the data are given in ticks per cycle, so this guide converts them at 30 ticks = 1 second, assuming one unit per extraction cycle.

5. Condition of the ground

Terrain under a building matters. Cold biomes constantly pull temperatures back down, which makes them free cooling for a hot installation; hostile biomes both heat and wear your machines. Xenomass smothers what it covers, and a buried machine cannot shed heat, so an overgrown corner starts throttling itself.

Power Making It Storing It Budgeting It

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Power has two separate budgets in FluxWerks, and confusing them is a classic early mistake.

The electrical grid

Consumers draw grid power; generators produce it. If total demand exceeds supply, the grid does not switch machines off one by one. It rations by priority: the most important consumers are served first, the tier where supply runs out shares what is left at reduced speed, and anything below it stops until supply recovers.

Every tick the grid fills demand in a fixed order: solar and wind first, delivering whatever the sun and weather allow; then batteries; then fuel and steam generators, which burn only for what is still needed. A fuelled generator with nothing to do burns nothing.

That last line is the important one: fuel generators are your load-following layer, so you do not have to match generation to demand by hand. Batteries only cover lulls in renewable output - they are not a reserve for demand peaks.

Generators, in the order the grid uses them

Solar and wind are variable by design - a wind turbine's output rises with wind speed, so calm spells make little power while storms run it flat out. Steam Turbines are the big steady producers, and their output depends on how hot the water you feed them is.

Storage

What the big consumers want

Computing The Second Grid

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Computing is a shared reserve of processing power, read like a battery. Computers charge it, advanced machines draw it down, and the bar in the top panel shows how full it is. Not every machine uses it - a building's card shows a Computing section only if it needs some.

• As long as Computers' income keeps up with everyone's draw, the reserve holds steady and every consumer runs at full speed.

• If draw outpaces income long enough, the reserve empties and every computing consumer slows down. The slowdown scales with how deep the reserve has run dry, and there is no floor: a building whose priority is never reached stops until income recovers.

• In a shortfall, income is shared by priority, set per building in its inspector exactly like power priority. Put priority on what you cannot do without.

• Buildings draw computing only while they are actually working. A machine waiting for inputs, blocked on a full output or paused costs nothing - so an idle factory refills the reserve on its own. Starving machines refill your computers.

• Computers have their own priority. When the reserve is full and the bank has more capacity than the factory needs, the highest-priority Computers do the work and lower ones stand idle. An idle Computer draws no power and makes no heat, so put your best-cooled Computers first.

What charges the reserve

What draws on it

Some recipes also spend computing per craft rather than continuously:

Two rules worth internalising

1. Build Computers before the machines that need them, and keep one priority step in reserve - an empty computing bar does not trip a breaker, it quietly halves your whole factory.

1. Cluster Computers with coolant. A Computer runs fine without it, it just heats the area around it more, and in a dense cluster that self-heating pushes temperatures into the throttle band above 100 C, which cuts computing output - the exact thing you were adding computers to fix.

Heat Cooling and Cold Biomes

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Temperature is simulated per voxel. Every cell has its own temperature that moves with nearby heat sources and the biome, and the numbers that matter are the bands in the mechanics section: full speed to 100 C, linear throttle from 100-200 C, stopped at 200 C.

How heat moves

• Every part of the world has a fixed natural temperature set when the world was generated. That background never changes on its own - only the heat your buildings add moves around.

• Added heat spreads, rises and fades depending on what surrounds it. Insulation keeps it in; open air and water carry it away.

• Left alone, an area eases back toward its natural biome temperature - so a cold biome is working to cool your factory for free, all the time.

• Water carries temperature: a Fluid Extractor draws fluid at the temperature of its surroundings, and pumps and routers move that temperature along the pipe unchanged.

The two tools

A Heat Sink is passive: it absorbs local heat and transfers it into the water it passes through. A Cooler is an active heat pump - it draws power and can force a spot below the surrounding temperature, which the passive sink cannot do. You set a target and it switches on whenever the area drifts above it.

This is mitigation, not an on/off requirement - but in a dense cluster it is the difference between a productive block and a self-throttling one.

Free cooling, and the cheap tricks

• Build hot things in cold biomes. Tundra, arctic and high ground constantly pull temperatures back down; badlands, desert and volcanic ground do the opposite.

• Pre-heat your boiler feedwater. A Boiler only spends fuel on the temperature it has to add, so water that arrives warm burns less fuel and makes less smoke. Water already at or above the boiler's target passes straight through at its own temperature, burning no fuel at all, even with an empty fuel slot.

• Keep boilers and turbines themselves cool. They throttle when their own surroundings get too hot, even while they are handling hot water.

• Clear xenomass. A machine buried under it cannot shed heat, and an overgrown corner throttles itself.

Steam and Water Temperature

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There is no separate steam resource: steam is water heated past its boiling point. Water always carries a temperature, and once it is hot enough a Steam Turbine can pull energy out of it.

• A Boiler takes in water, heats it to its target temperature and pushes it out. It spends fuel only on the temperature it actually has to add.

• A Turbine is not capped at boiler temperature. The hotter the water you feed it, the larger the temperature drop, and the more power each unit makes, up to the turbine's rated limit. Reaching that limit with hotter water means the same power from less water and less fuel - that is the real efficiency gain of hotter feedwater.

• Because a turbine's power comes from the temperature drop, a closed loop that returns cold water is doing useful work twice: cooling your factory and generating on the way out.

Machine Ratios The Formula and a Worked Example

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Machines needed = (target per minute / items per craft) x (base time / machine speed) / 60. The output amount is the term people forget: Steel Plate makes 2 per craft, so 120 a minute is only 60 crafts a minute.

The three numbers that go in

• Items per craft - the output amount in the recipe tables. Plenty of recipes make two or more, and a few make four.

• Base time - the recipe's own time in seconds, straight from the recipe tables.

• Machine speed - Foundry MK 1 at x0.5, Foundry MK 2 at x1.0, Assembler MK 1 at x1.0, Assembler MK 2 at x2.0. The recipe tables list cycles per minute for the fastest machine, which collapses the last two terms: machines = target per minute / items per craft / cycles per minute.

Worked example: 120 Steel Plate per minute

Solved backwards from the game's own recipe data. Every figure below is read or computed, never estimated:

Raw inputs the chain eats: 60 Iron Ore/min, 30 Water/min, 90 Wood/min.

Ore comes from drills, not machines: 60 ore/min is 2.67 Mining Drill MK 1 (22.5 ore/min each, 50 power each) or 1.33 Mining Drill MK 2 (45 ore/min each, 75 power each). Wood comes from harvesting trees; water from a Fluid Extractor.

Alternates exist for intermediates, so you can re-route the chain around the machines you already own - Steel Ingot can also be made in the Arc Furnace by the 'Steel Ingot' recipe (10 s base, 6 cycles/min); Iron Ingot can also be made in the Arc Furnace by the 'Iron Ingot' recipe (12 s base, 5 cycles/min).

Where ratios go wrong

• A faster machine does not need more inputs per craft - it needs them faster. Doubling speed doubles the per-minute draw, so re-check the upstream counts after every upgrade.

• Forgetting the output amount. A recipe that returns two per craft halves the craft rate you should have used, and doubling the machine count is a common and expensive reaction.

• Belts come in three speeds, each roughly double the one before. A line balanced on Basic belts is not automatically balanced after you switch to Fast.

• Pipes and pumps are a separate throughput budget from belts, and a pipe carries one fluid at a time - splitting fluids is a routing problem, not a rate problem.

• Machines only count while running. A ratio that assumes 100% uptime is wrong the moment one input starves, and the computing reserve makes that worse, not better.

Recipes Processing Smelting and Casting

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Processing recipes run in the Foundry (fuel) and the Arc Furnace (electric). Foundry MK 1 is 0.5x, Foundry MK 2 is 1.0x, so a MK 1 takes twice as long per craft.

Recipes Assembly

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Assemblers are the workhorse of the mid-game: MK 1 at 1.0x, MK 2 at 2.0x. Cyc/min is computed for the fastest machine that can run the recipe.

Recipes Chemistry

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Chemical Plant recipes are 1.0x and heavy on both power and waste heat, so plan cooling with the plant, not after it.

Recipes Crushing Arc and Fabrication

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Crushing is the cheap way to break raw material down; Arc Furnace and Fabricator recipes are the late-game tier and both draw computing on top of power.

Recipes Hand Crafting your robot

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These are manual recipes: your robot makes them in the crafting panel, so there is no machine speed to apply. Shift + click queues 10, Ctrl + click queues 100, and Shift + Ctrl + click queues as many as your materials allow.

Buildings Production Machines

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Every production building, with its cost, its construction work and its behaviour summary. The same summary appears in-game on the building's card.

Buildings Power

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Buildings Resources and Extraction

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Drills, extractors and harvesters. Areas are given as min-max footprints because most of these can be resized in place.

Buildings Logistics and Infrastructure

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Belts, inserters, pumps, routers, fluid outputs and elevators. Router clusters: Routers placed against each other join into one larger router - any connected shape works, up to sixteen in one cluster - and every outer face becomes a port with its own priority and filter. A Fluid Router cluster moves fluid at its slowest member's rate times its size.

Buildings Storage Utility and Decoration

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Mining Extraction and Farming Rates

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Extraction times are stored as ticks, converted here at 30 ticks = 1 second (the world's fixed step). The rate column assumes one unit of resource per extraction cycle - the data does not state a per-cycle yield for drills, so treat these as per-cycle rates and confirm the real number on the building's own panel in game.

Deep veins

Farm and harvest

Growth speed comes from the ground's fertility, its moisture and its temperature combined. The map's Fertility layer shows natural potential, the placement preview shows the square you are aiming at, and ground below the halfway point will not take a seed at all.

Research How the Tree Is Priced

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A Research Terminal runs on a fixed cycle and draws on computing capacity while it works, so a computing shortfall slows research down. The building's own behaviour gives the cycle length: 10 seconds per cycle.

The tech data stores four cost knobs and, for each technology, which of them apply:

Read the per-tech table, not a formula. The extracted data lists an explicit pack cost and cycle count for each technology where they apply and leaves the field out where they do not - the game derives the rest. Every value the data does state is reproduced exactly in the tech tables, and a blank cell means the field is absent for that tech rather than zero.

• 25 of 82 technologies carry an explicit cycle count; the rest are derived by the game.

• 27 carry explicit science-pack costs.

• Where a cycle count and the cycle length are both known, research time is cycles x 10 s - that is the number in brackets in the tables.

• Stacks and repeatables exist: the data marks technologies with isStacking, maxLevel and a costScalingFactor, so repeated levels get more expensive.

Research Factory Technologies

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All Factory-category technologies, with prerequisites resolved to names, science packs, cycles (and the time that implies at the terminal's cycle length) and what they unlock.

Research Factory Technologies cont

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Research Player Upgrades

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The other half of the tree: technologies that upgrade you and your swarm rather than your buildings.

Belts Pipes and Transport Costs

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Belts are the workhorse of item transport and come in three speeds, each roughly double the one before. Pipes carry one fluid at a time; a pump between two pipes is a one-way valve that crosses at the pump's speed and never flows back, and it will not push into a pipe holding a different fluid.

Transport buildings

Routing rules worth knowing

• Higher-priority outputs are filled first; items only spill to a lower-priority output when the preferred one is backed up. A priority input is drained first when several belts feed a Router.

• A side's filter and priority belong to the side, not the belt: set them before the belt exists and they apply the moment one connects, and they survive the belt being removed.

• A side with no belt can feed a belt running past it - switch that side's feed on and items slide onto the passing belt, obeying that side's priority and filter.

• Fluid Router clusters move fluid at their slowest member's rate times the cluster size, and a mixed cluster warns you about it.

• Drones: loading and unloading take time per unit and slow down when a port is short on power or computing. A drone that runs dry in the air crawls at a quarter speed; one that lands on an empty depot waits until its tank is full.

Twelve Mistakes That Cost Hours

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Each of these follows directly from a rule above. They are ordered roughly by how early they bite.

1. Treating speed as a rate. 0.5x speed means twice as long per recipe, not half the output of a 1.0x machine per craft. Fix the arithmetic before adding buildings.

1. Ignoring the temperature ramp. A factory that slows down as it grows is usually hot, not short of machines. Check whether your machines sit above 100 C before building more.

1. Heat-sinking instead of preventing. The passive sink moves local heat into water; only the Cooler can force a spot below ambient. Dense hot clusters need the active one.

1. Building hot industries in hot biomes. Badlands, desert and volcanic ground fight your cooling. Cold biomes cool for free.

1. Starving computers of coolant. Computers heat what surrounds them. Cluster them badly and the heat cuts their output, so you lose the computing you just paid for.

1. Forgetting fuel generators are load-following. They burn only for what renewables and batteries did not cover, so a fuelled generator with nothing to do burns nothing. Size them for peaks, not for nameplate.

1. Expecting batteries to cover demand peaks. They exist to smooth variable solar and wind, not to hold a reserve for your factory's worst moment.

1. Setting every computing consumer to the same priority. In a shortfall the reserve is shared by priority, and a building whose priority is never reached stops. Nominate your critical machines deliberately.

1. Pre-heating nothing. A boiler spends fuel only on the temperature it has to add, so warm feedwater is free efficiency, and water already above the target burns nothing at all.

1. Assuming a worn machine is broken. Condition only matters below 50%, and only bad weather and hostile ground cause wear. It is never destroyed and always repairable.

1. Leaving xenomass where it grows. A smothered machine cannot shed heat, so an overgrown corner quietly throttles itself.

1. Trusting any guide, including this one, after a patch. Every number here is tied to one build (v0.5.17, build 25559483). Recipes and speeds change.

Sources Provenance and What Is Deliberately Miss

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Where these numbers come from

• Extracted on 25 September 2026 from the game's own data files in a local Steam install (app 4436200), data version v0.5.17, Steam build 25559483.

• 64 data documents were read out of the install, covering 63 building definitions, 81 recipes, 82 technologies, 79 items, 18 harvestables and 30 in-game manual articles.

• The counts match the figures the game itself prints while loading, which is how the extraction was verified.

• Rates in units per minute are computed, not quoted: they come from the recipe times and speed multipliers in the data, and from the world's fixed 30 Hz step.

Derived and inferred values, stated plainly

• Item names are derived. The data stores items as internal identifiers (SteelPlate, IronGear) with no display-name table, so the names you see here were produced by splitting those identifiers apart. They match the game closely but are not quoted from it.

• Power has no unit name. The game's data and manual never name the unit for power, thermal power, computing or work. Values are raw and comparable to each other only. One internal field name ends in KW, which is suggestive, but nothing in the data confirms it, so no unit is claimed here.

• Drill yields assume one unit per extraction cycle. The data gives ticks per cycle, not yield per cycle, so excavation rates are upper bounds until you confirm one on a building panel.

• Research costs are read off each technology, not computed from a formula. Where the data omits a field the cell is blank rather than zero.

• Waste heat percentages, pollution rates and maintenance figures are quoted exactly as the data stores them; what they do to a specific factory depends on layout.

What is not here

• No map layouts, seeds or spawn guidance - those depend on your world, and the data's spawn rules are not something to publish as a recipe for success.

• No balance claims. This guide reports the numbers, not which strategy is best; the factory you want decides that.

• No save editing. Save files in this build store their world data in an opaque, high-entropy container, so there is nothing here about altering an existing save - back them up instead.

• No images. Everything is text and tables so it stays searchable and loads instantly.

If a number here disagrees with a panel in your game, believe the panel. Early Access builds move fast, and the fastest way to be wrong about this game is to trust a guide that was true last week.

Generated from the game's own data files. See "Sources, Provenance and What Is Deliberately Missing".