FOUNDRY — build guide: belt maths, machine counts and the order to build them

FOUNDRY (Channel 3 Entertainment, published by Paradox, Early Access since 2 May 2024) is a first-person voxel factory game: mine ore rubble out of a procedurally generated moon, crush and smelt it, automate the chain with belts, loaders and machines, and spend the science packs on a research tree that runs from hand tools to a molten-metal blast furnace and a train network.

This guide is the build order plus the numbers behind it: what fills a belt, how many machines a line needs, what each stage of ore processing buys you, and where the traps are. It is written for FOUNDRY 4.0 "Rails & Reactors" (released 28 April 2026), which as of 30 September 2026 is the live build — the latest patch is Update 4 Hotfix #2 (4 May 2026). Update 4 is the one that added trains, the Xeno Power Plant, the Info Overlay, the construction drone and the modular Casting Machine.

Read the numbers with this caveat. The game's official wiki (wiki.foundry-game.com) was unreachable while this was written — the whole domain returns 404, and the Internet Archive was offline — so its pages could only be read through a search index that still serves them. Where a wiki page and an independent community tool agree, that is stated. Where they disagree, the disagreement is printed rather than resolved. Player-written Steam guides and a community spreadsheet are used for the rest and are labelled as such in each table.

The four numbers everything else follows from

Belt throughput. Belts are the hard ceiling on every build, and the tier decides the line.

Loaders move 1800 items/min — faster than any belt in the game — and a Freight Elevator IV moves 2560 items/min. Both the wiki's own hotfix notes ("Increased loader speed to 1800 items per minute so that they now support the t4 belt speed") and a player's measured test of elevators and loaders agree on those figures. Practically: with matching class IV components you need two loaders at each end of an elevator to reach its throughput, and adding more does nothing.

Machine speed. Assembler II is 1.5× an Assembler I and Assembler III is 2×, on the same recipe. The wiki states it as time per craft: Machinery Parts take 1.5 s / 1 s / 0.75 s, Conveyor I takes 3 s / 2 s / 1.5 s, Science Pack I takes 30 s / 20 s / 15 s. The Advanced Smelter runs 1.5× the Smelter (Small) (Xenoferrite Plates T1: 3 s vs 2 s).

The ore ladder: 1 → 1.5 → 3. This is the single most useful ratio in the game, and it is stated outright on the wiki's Blast Furnace Base page: at T1, one ore rubble becomes one plate (1:1); at T2, crushing the rubble into ore and using the T2 smelting recipe improves it to 1:1.5; at T3, ore goes through a blast furnace and is cast in a Casting Machine for 1:3 — the best conversion the game offers.

Rated rates are per minute at full speed, and power is per building. Real examples: Smelter (Small) 100 kW, Drone Miner I 200 kW, Assembler III 250 kW, Steam Turbine 3.6 MW max generated, Hot Air Stove 10 MW, Radio Tower Base 10 MW, Solar Panel (Small) 100 kW peak, Solar Panel (Large) 650 kW peak.

Stage 1 — the first hour, in order

You start with the Drone Miner I already known (the wiki is explicit: "The player starts the game with the knowledge of how to build this machine"), and the first research you should finish costs nothing at all.

The first tier of research, with its real cost in Science Pack I (wiki Research page):

The first production line. Four Drone Miners on one ore patch, one Conveyor I, and eight Smelters. The arithmetic: a Smelter (Small) turns 1 Xenoferrite Ore Rubble into 1 Xenoferrite Plate in 3 s, which is 20 plates/min, so 8 smelters = 160/min = exactly one Mk1 belt. A Drone Miner's output depends on how far its four drones have to fly (the wiki: recharge and extraction times are fixed, travel time is not), which is why 4 miners per Mk1 belt is the long-standing rule of thumb.

Two things changed in 4.0 that affect this opening: drone miner output is now a fixed rate per minute and drone miners are connected to the entire ore patch instead of only the voxels within range — so the old advice about re-positioning miners as they eat a patch is obsolete. And loaders no longer require power or foundations, so the old "loaders need a powered foundation" rule no longer applies.

Stage 2 — crush, or don't: the ratios tier by tier

Tier 1 — rubble straight into the smelter (1 : 1)

This is what the early game is: mine rubble, smelt rubble, belting plates and rods. Eight smelters fill a Mk1 belt and nothing is wasted.

Tier 2 — crush the rubble first (1 : 1.5)

Crushing is researched as Ore Refinement; the Crusher itself comes with Basic Steelmaking. The 1.5× gain is real and the ratio arithmetic that follows from it is simple: two belts of ore rubble become three belts of plates. Falk's math guide builds exactly that layout — rows of 8 smelters, each row eating 160/min of crushed ore and putting out 240/min, with three balancers condensing four 240/min belts into three 320/min belts.

Per row of 8 smelters at Tier 2 you need:

• 8 Smelter (Small) → 240 plates/min
• 4 Crusher I (or 2 Crusher II) → 160 ore/min
• 160 rubble/min, so ~4 Drone Miners at Mk1
• belts: ore in at 160/min (any tier), product out at 240/min (needs Conveyor II or better)

A note on belt discipline from the same guide: the plate belt is the one that throttles an early base. It is worth upgrading the plate and machinery-parts belts to Conveyor II the moment the research lands and leaving everything else on Conveyor I.

Tier 3 — blast furnace and casting machine (1 : 3)

Covered in the endgame section below, because it costs a modular building the size of a small town. The short version: 1,280 ore/min plus Coked Ignium, Mineral Rocks and 324,000 L/min of hot air becomes 11,520 L/min of molten metal, which casts into 3,840 items/min — three items per ore, the best rate in the game.

The intermediate chain

These are the recipes that turn plates and rods into everything else. Rows marked [wiki] were read from the wiki and match the community calculator exactly; rows marked [calc] come from the community spreadsheet only and should be re-checked in game (its version predates Update 2, and Update 2 is known to have changed at least one of them — see the notes under the table).

Two things to know about Advanced Machinery Parts, because both the calculator and the wiki's own wording are traps here: it outputs 2 per cycle, not 1 — the wiki page shows "Machinery Parts 2 + Steel Beams 1 → Advanced Machinery Parts 2", and the calculator's author notes on his own guide that "advanced machinery parts is still wrong since Update 2 buffed the output by a factor of 2". If a layout was built from the pre-Update-2 number it is feeding twice what it needs.

Stage 3 — power

Three routes, in the order you meet them.

Burners and boilers. Early power is burners. The Burner Generator is unlocked by a 20-Science-Pack-I research and is the first generator worth automating — the wiki describes it as a larger low-voltage generator that can be automated and is slightly more efficient, and advises feeding it Ignium ore mined by Drone Miners rather than hauling biomass by hand. Steam comes next: the Boiler burns fuel (biomass at 5 MJ, or Ignium Ore Rubble) with water to make steam, and a Steam Turbine turns it into up to 3.6 MW; the turbine wants a foundation and a high-voltage grid. One Pipe Intake supplies 30,000 L/min of water, which is enough for 25 Boilers.

Solar. The Solar Panel (Small) generates 100 kW at peak and begins producing at 08:00; the Solar Panel (Large) peaks at 650 kW, tracks the sun, runs 08:00–19:00 and makes roughly 550 MJ a day. Batteries are how you survive the night: a Small Battery (250 MJ) averages out two small panels, a Large Battery (1000 MJ) about eight. The player rules of thumb that come out of that, from jztemple's guide, are workable build targets (his words: "off by <10%, over capacity"):

Geothermal and the Xeno Power Plant. Update 2.1 added geothermal vents in the lava caves: a Geothermal Boiler on a vent, fed ignium-enriched water, makes steam. The player who documented it built the whole thing out and concluded it is not worth it for power — his 162-hour factory ran 57 ordinary steam turbines and the vents fed six — so treat geothermal as an interesting build rather than a power plan. Update 4 added the Xeno Power Plant, a plant assembled from multiple large buildings, which is the modern answer to a big factory's demand.

Budget for progression. Before you push into tier 4, add about 14 MW of power beyond what the factory currently draws — that is roughly five more steam turbines, or the solar equivalent.

Stage 4 — research: servers, packs and what a tech costs

The Research Server is the building that eats science packs. It costs 20 Xenoferrite Plates + 10 Electronic Components + 20 Technum Rods (4 s in an Assembler I), and it has an awkward build constraint: it holds only three packs of a type, which is deliberate (so a manifold line of servers doesn't starve the ones behind it) and means you should feed it one pack type per belt and allow buffer room in the assemblers feeding it.

Pack consumption is per technology, not one global rate — the wiki's research table lists a "seconds per item" figure for every entry, and players report some techs consuming packs at 6/min per server. That is why a factory making exactly 8 packs/min can still idle half its research buildings.

Science pack recipes (costs in packs of each type; "s per item" is the wiki's research speed):

Notes on the ones that are not clean. Science Pack III: the calculator says Pipes, but the guide author who tracked the Update 2 changes reports that "Research 3 obviously now takes Firmarlite instead of pipes" — check the in-game recipe frame before you build a pipe line for it. Science Pack IV: the wiki serves two different renderings of its own page — Circuit Board 12 / Energy Cell 12 / Firmarlite Bar 4 in one, Circuit Board 4 / Energy Cell 4 / Firmarlite Sheet 4 in the other — and the calculator says 12/12/4 Bars. The chain (Circuit Boards + Energy Cells + Firmarlite out of the station) is not in doubt; the exact counts are unverified.

Sample research costs, all from the wiki's research table:

How fast to run research: 8 packs/min is the rate experienced players aim for. As Falk puts it, more than that and you are building infrastructure for the next pack while the labs sit idle, less and you wait for research to finish; 4/min or even 2/min is plenty for a first run. His bootstrap layout makes Science Packs I–III from a single plate-and-rod feed and relies on two early unlocks being prioritised: Loader (2nd Lane) and Conveyor II.

Stage 5 — steel, concrete and the fluid chain

Steel is the gate to the mid-game. The Xenoferrite-Ignium Ore Blend is made in a Crusher (4 Xenoferrite Ore Rubble + 2 Ignium Ore Rubble → 1, 3 s, 20/min): smelted directly it gives 1 Steel Beam per blend in 6 s (10/min) at Tier 1, but through the Advanced Smelter with the Advanced Blend (4 Xenoferrite Ore + 2 Ignium Ore → 1) you get 2 Steel Beams in 4 s = 30/min per machine. Steel is in Pipes, Steam Turbines, Hot Air Stoves and the Blast Furnace itself, so a steel line is never wasted.

Concrete wants Gravel (2 Mineral Rocks → 6 in 12 s), Cement (1 Xenoferrite Ore Rubble + 2 Mineral Rocks → 2 in 12 s) and Water (a Water Pump is rated at 100 units per cycle in the community calculator, i.e. 6,000/min) combined in a Casting Machine. Cement also comes out of the other end of a blast furnace, which is the late-game way to keep concrete running without dedicating mineral-rock mining to it.

Olumite is the one resource that runs out. Crude Olumite comes from Pumpjacks and is distilled into Low Density Olumite (jetpack fuel and Hydraulic Pistons), Olumite Gas and Liquid Polymir (which casts into the Polymir Boards that Circuit Boards and CPUs need). It does not regenerate and fracking towers do not work on a spent olumite reservoir — the practical answers, from jztemple's guide and the comments on it, are to tap every reservoir you find, pull them all into Modular Storage Tanks (which chain into one tank with 6,000 L/s of pipeline throughput, and therefore one reserve), and to blast new reservoirs open with high-explosive dynamite when you need more.

Stage 6 — the space station: what you build, what it hands back

The station is where the mid-game turns: you sell manufactured goods to it and it hands back Firmarlite, the material Science Packs IV and V need.

• Radio Tower Base — 200 Xenoferrite Plates + 100 Steel Beams + 25 Advanced Machinery Parts + 25 Circuit Boards, 11×11 footprint, 10 MW draw, 84 units tall with a base level up to 170, and it takes a while to build after you configure it. It is the interface to the station (use the Orbital Uplink tool) and it is required to progress into Science Pack IV and V.
• Build your spaceport near the origin. The station sits above (0,0); transport ships have to fly there and back, so a base grown far from the origin should have a satellite site near 0,0 with belts to and from it.
• Warehouses and ports, with footprints worth knowing before you pick a flat spot: Construction Ship Port (11×17, high voltage), Transport Ship Port (31×21, high voltage), Construction Warehouse (21×31, low voltage), Sales Warehouse (31×21, low voltage, near origin), Space Station Requester Warehouse (31×21, low voltage, near origin).
• Shipping pads. Pads at high altitude are meaningfully more efficient than surface ones because the ship's vertical travel is shorter; and since 4.0 a pad cannot move the same item type in both directions at once (you can turn this off for an old save).
• Cargo ships are unlocked by the Cargo Ships tech after Science Pack IV. Start Pad: 200 Steel Beams + 100 Advanced Machinery Parts + 50 Circuit Boards + 20 Glass. Target Pad: 100 Steel Beams + 10 Advanced Machinery Parts + 10 Circuit Boards. Measured throughput of a one-way cargo run, with Mk3 belts and every port on the receiving pad in use, is roughly 850 items/min at 1 km, 500 at 2 km, 350 at 3 km, 270 at 4 km and 220 at 5 km, with a target pad accepting about 4,800/min in total — those are the numbers from Danger Nudle's 2024 testing, and 4.0 reduced shuttle capacity while increasing speed, so treat them as the shape of the curve rather than current figures.
• Firmarlite. Maintenance Drones shipped to the station come back as Firmarlite Bars (the community calculator's row: 1 Maintenance Drone → 5 Firmarlite Bars, on a 75 s station cycle, and 1 Robot → 200). The route to Science Pack IV documented by jztemple is: automate Circuit Boards and Maintenance Drones, build the Radio Tower, then a Sales Warehouse near the origin to ship the drones up and a Space Station Requester Warehouse beside it to receive the Firmarlite back.

Stage 7 — the endgame: blast furnace, casting machine, trains

The Blast Furnace Base is a 26×26 modular building that needs a foundation and, at full modules, 3 Hot Air Stove Bases and 2 Air Intake Bases to run. Per minute it consumes 1,280 ore, 640 Coked Ignium, 256 Mineral Rocks and 324,000 L of hot air, and produces 11,520 L of molten metal, which is 3,840 items/min when cast — through 96 Casting Machines. Both the wiki page and the community spreadsheet agree on the air figures (108,000 L/min per stove, 162,000 L/min per intake, 324,000 L/min consumed), and the player guide that documented it arrived at the same 3 stoves / 2 intakes conclusion independently.

The fiddly parts, in order of how much time they cost:

• Hot air stoves have an adjacency bonus: −25% power for each adjacent powered stove, capped at −50%. Build them in a row; at 10 MW each it matters.
• The hot air pipe connection needs a filter set before it will accept hot air — the filter is set from the walkway behind the large pipeline input. This is the single most common reason a finished blast furnace sits cold.
• Slag must be cleared or the furnace stops. 1,280 L/min of Blast Furnace Slag goes into Chemical Processors, which turn it into cement (8 processors eliminate the waste with overhead; the real utilisation is 7.111, producing ~35.6 cement/min), or into an Incinerator if you just want it gone.
• Feed it with belts, not shuttles. At 1,280 ore/min a maxed furnace is two Conveyor IIIs' worth of ore; one player measured that cargo shuttles cannot keep up and that ore veins feeding a blast furnace want about 8 mining machines per Xenoferrite or Technum vein (and 4 on an Ignium vein plus 4 on a mineral rock vein). That is player-measured, not documented.
• Cast in a Casting Machine: 15 molten metal → 5 Plate T3 or Rod T3 in 7.5 s = 40/min per machine, which is where the 96-machine figure comes from.
• Trains (4.0) are the answer to hauling ore from veins far from the factory, and Update 4 also raised high-voltage cable range to 24 for every building that had less, which makes powering distant mining sites cheaper than it used to be. Update 4's modular Casting Machine is designed to sit with the blast furnaces rather than beside a single line.

Traps that cost the first ten hours

1. Smelting rubble forever. Crushing first is a free 50%: 1:1 becomes 1:1.5 for the price of a crusher and a T2 smelter recipe.
2. Building the plate line on Conveyor I. Plates and machinery parts are what the whole early base eats; upgrade those belts to Conveyor II as soon as the research lands. Falk calls this out specifically in his bootstrap layout.
3. Skipping Loader (2nd Lane). A belt feeding a machine from both sides doubles what fits in a lane; without it the first science layout starves. He lists it as the first thing to prioritise.
4. Feeding a Research Server two pack types on one belt. Servers buffer only three packs; they are meant to be fed one item per belt so a row of them fills evenly.
5. Expecting one pack rate to fit every tech. Consumption is per technology — some techs pull packs at several times the rate of others, so a factory sized for the slowest tech will idle.
6. Feeding an assembler from a locked container slot. The game does not consume items from locked slots, so "recycling" old belts through a buffer container does not work.
7. Running out of olumite. It depletes, fracking towers do not work on it, and it gates Circuit Boards, CPUs and Hydraulic Pistons. Tap every reservoir, chain Modular Storage Tanks, and keep dynamite handy.
8. Building a modular structure without its base and modules. A Blast Furnace needs a Blast Furnace Base plus Hot Air Stove Bases plus Air Intake Bases; the Radio Tower needs its base and Construction Material for modules.
9. Power spikes from single buildings. The Radio Tower Base draws 10 MW, each Hot Air Stove 10 MW. Neither is a rounding error on a small grid.
10. Solar without batteries. Panels produce from 08:00 and stop at night; a Small Battery only averages two small panels.
11. Trying to fix a blast furnace by rebuilding it. Check the hot air pipe filter first — it will not accept hot air otherwise.
12. Ignored blast furnace slag. It backs up and stops the furnace.
13. Forgetting the station is at (0,0). A base built far from the origin pays for it in every shipment of Firmarlite and every sale of drones. Build the spaceport near the origin, or move the goods there by pad or by train.
14. Trusting any single table, including this one. Update 2 changed the Science Pack III recipe and doubled Advanced Machinery Parts; Update 3 and 4 added workstations, trains and the Xeno Power Plant. The in-game recipe frame is the only current source.

Quick reference

Sources

Game version: FOUNDRY 4.0 "Rails & Reactors" (28 April 2026), current patch Update 4 Hotfix #2 (4 May 2026); the previous releases referenced above are Update 2.1 (14 July 2025, geothermal vents), Update 2.2 (29 September 2025, drill ships and the Resource Separator) and Update 3 "Xeno-Tech" (21 January 2026, robot workstations and Xeno Logistics).

• Official Steam announcements for app 983870, read in full via https://api.steampowered.com/ISteamNews/GetNewsForApp/v2/?appid=983870 — "Foundry 4.0 'Rails & Reactors' is out now!" (28 April 2026: fixed-rate drone miner output, miners connected to the whole ore patch, loaders no longer need power or foundations, shipping pads cannot move one item type both ways, cable range 24, trains, Xeno Power Plant, info overlay, construction drone, modular casting machine), "Update 4 Hotfix #1" (29 April 2026) and "Update 4 Hotfix #2" (4 May 2026), "Update 3: Xeno-Tech is NOW LIVE!" (21 January 2026), "Update 2.2 is Now Live!" (29 September 2025)
• The game's official wiki, https://wiki.foundry-game.com/ — the site itself was down for the whole run (every path, including /index.php/Recipies, returns an Apache 404, and web.archive.org was offline), so these pages were read through a search index that still serves their text: Research, Science Pack I, Science Pack IV, Xenoferrite Plates, Steel Beams, Glass, Machinery Parts, Advanced Machinery Parts, Conveyor I, Conveyor IV, Recipe/Drone Miner I, Recipe/Research Server, Recipe/Xenoferrite Ore, Smelter (Small), Assembler III, Blast Furnace Base, Hot Air Stove Base, Air Intake Base, Solar Panel (Small), Solar Panel (Large), Steam Turbine, Boiler, Cargo Ship Start Pad, Cargo Ship Target Pad, Radio Tower Base, Hotfix 3 (Early Access), Buildings
• Steam guides (player-written, read in full): "Foundry Compact Layouts and Misc Maths" by Falk — https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3235137136 (bootstrap science layout, 8 packs/min, the crusher belts-2-into-3 ratio, 8-smelter rows at 160 in / 240 out, drone miner counts, Update-2 recipe-change notes); "Blast Furnace 101" by Danger Nudle — https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3248027425 (air and stove ratios, stove adjacency, cargo-ship throughput by distance); jztemple's series — https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3286986014 (Science Pack IV route, warehouse footprints, 14 MW and the solar rules of thumb), https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3532754129 (olumite depletion and modular tank storage), https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3532675031 (geothermal vents and boilers), https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3534073969 (R&D production efficiency on the station); "Foundry Calculator Excel Sheet" by bobSheep — https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3259001575, sheet at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mZjMsoP4sA1IiISqQTfa9ZAj7dwTNA_jI2Ado66nBQw (machine speed table and the per-recipe rates marked [calc]; its recipe list is Update-1 vintage, so treat every [calc] row as unverified — its rows that the wiki also documents matched exactly)
• "Testing Freight Elevators" — https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3536815208 (measured Loader 1800/min, Conveyor IV 1280/min, Freight Elevator IV 2560/min, and the two-loaders-per-end rule)
• Community tool catalog, https://weblayoutlab.com/en/items/ (Update-4-aware item list and the item-to-research unlock mapping used to confirm which items exist in the current version: trains, Xeno Power Plant, modular casting machine, the Assembly Line robots)

What I could not verify

The official wiki was offline, so no number here is a direct read of a live official table — the wiki figures were read from a search index's copy of those pages, which is one step removed, and the community spreadsheet's recipes are Update-1 vintage. Specifically unresolved: the exact Science Pack III recipe (calculator says Pipes, a 2026 player guide says pipes were replaced by Firmarlite) and the exact Science Pack IV recipe (the wiki serves two contradictory versions of its own page, and the calculator matches one of them). Cargo-ship throughput by distance is 2024 testing and predates Update 4's shuttle rebalance. The blast furnace's 8-mining-machines-per-vein figure is one player's measurement in a comment thread. Most of the fluid and robot chains — Energy Cells, Hydraulic Pistons, CPUs, Robot Parts, Firmarlite conversion rates at the station — come only from the community spreadsheet and were not cross-checked against a second source. Every power figure quoted is a per-building rating from a wiki page, not a measured draw, and the drone miner's fixed output rate in 4.0 is not published anywhere I could read it — read it off the machine's own panel.