Oddsparks: An Automation Adventure — build guide: costs, ratios and the order to unlock them

Oddsparks has no conveyor belts and no power grid. Its economy runs on two things: Sparks, which carry items along paths and do the work inside buildings, and temperature, which decides whether those buildings run well or badly. Those two systems are what every layout decision follows from, and the official wiki on wiki.gg carries the real numbers for both — in machine-readable form, through its own API.

This guide gives the build costs and unlock order, the recipe ratios that follow from them, and the placement rules and wiki disagreements that will otherwise cost you your first ten hours. Every figure is taken from the wiki's raw wikitext or from Steam's news feed; arithmetic I did myself is marked derived and shows its working.

What version this is written for

Oddsparks 1.0, current patch v1.0.S31387 (12 May 2026). That is the newest announcement on Steam's news API for app 1817800; the patch before it was 1.0.S31386 (18 November 2025) and 1.0 itself released on 27 May 2025. The version history is readable straight from https://api.steampowered.com/ISteamNews/GetNewsForApp/v2/?appid=1817800.

A note on the queue that produced this guide: the Steam link it carried, steamcommunity.com/app/1909380/guides, is not Oddsparks. Steam app 1909380 is a different game entirely; Oddsparks is app 1817800.

The wiki's building pages are read here through api.php?action=parse&page=<Page>&prop=wikitext, because the rendered pages show icons rather than quantities. Durations, ingredient counts and build costs are all in the wikitext.

Sparks are the machine: work units and cycle time

Every recipe on the wiki carries a duration in seconds, and that duration is the time with one Stumpy Spark working the building. The wiki's recipe card has a row of crew buttons, and the arithmetic behind them is public in MediaWiki:Common.js:

duration shown = listed duration / work units
rate per minute = (60 / listed duration) * work units

The work each crew contributes:

So the Sawbench's Sawn Timber recipe, listed at 16 s, is 16 s with one Stumpy, 10.67 s with one Crafty, 6.4 s with one Handy, and 8 s with the player working it. Derived: a lone Stumpy's 16 s cycle is 3.75 crafts/min, so 7.5 Wooden Logs eaten per minute.

Two consequences worth designing around:

• Sparks are a throughput resource, not just carriers. The number of Sparks you can afford to park in a building sets its speed, and the same Sparks have to walk the paths.
• Every ratio in this guide assumes equal crews. Put a Handy in one building and a Stumpy in the next and the balance breaks — a Handy is worth two and a half Stumpies.

Temperature: the second thing that throttles a building

Every recipe names a temperature band: -5 (freezing), -3 (cool), 3 (warm), 5 (hot), or Insulated (harvesters only). Recipes taken off their band run suboptimally — the Scientist's Temperature Control - 1 quest exists precisely because "many will be working suboptimally". The Village Monument's Temperature Overlay unlock is what shows you the area temperature and the per-workstation efficiency it produces.

The controls, and the exact limits:

Both the Heater and the Cooler are built from one Tier 8/9 material — Heater: 5 Fireshroom Cluster + 1 Lava Shellhorse Comb; Cooler: 5 Stellar Leaves + 1 Icehorn Ram Horn; Regulator: 3 Lava Shellhorse Comb + 3 Icehorn Ram Horn + 10 Copper Ingot. Two Heaters do not stack: one Heater with two Sparks and two Heaters both hold the area at +2. Because the Regulator burns fuel and the Heater and Cooler do not, the wiki's own advice is to use the free pair wherever ±2 is enough.

Overclocked harvester recipes (Tier 8, Harvester Overclocking) move a harvester's band from Insulated to −3 (Logger, Drill) or 5 (Ore Miner), and they are strictly faster: the Logger's 2 s Log Harvesting becomes a 1.33 s cycle, and the Ore Miner's 10 s Copper Ore cycle becomes 4 s. The quest requires reaching 150% efficiency in any building first.

Fuel, and why the Furnace has two of everything

Fuel is a per-unit burn time, not a rate you set. The wiki's Fuel table:

Coal is 3 Wooden Logs → 1 Coal in a Furnace (8 s, cool band) and the wiki calls it the most efficient fuel source as of 1.0 — its own item page also gives the burn rate as 2/min, the same thing as 30 s per unit. The Furnace's unlock quest hands you two variants of each recipe, wood-fired and coal-fired, so the earlier recipes in the list are the cheap ones and the coal-fired ones are the fast ones.

The first ten hours, in the order the quests force

The quest chain is the tech tree; there is no separate research screen. The opening order matters because three of the first buildings need a specific spot in the world.

1. Village Monument, Machine Range 0 — costs 1 Aether Shard and spawns the Stumpy Spark Shrine, which makes Stumpy Sparks for free at 1 per 32 s. Do this before anything else: Sparks are the labour.
2. Quartermaster, Path Logistics — deliver 3 Stumpy Sparks to unlock the Dirt Path, then Your First Production Line walks you through the actual first build: one Logger, connected to the Stumpy Spark Shrine, 3 Sparks thrown onto the path, 20 Wooden Logs moved, 10 Stumpy Sparks crafted.
3. Woodsman, Wood Harvesting - Tier 1 — deliver 10 Wooden Log, 5 Stone, 2 Stumpy Spark to unlock the Logger. The Logger itself costs 10 Wooden Log + 5 Stone + 1 Beelephant Carapace and must be placed on top of a Giant Tree, so you need a Beelephant kill before your first production line.
4. Woodsman, Woodcraft - 1 — deliver 100 Wooden Logs to unlock the Sawbench (20 Wooden Log). This is where Wooden Log becomes Sawn Timber.
5. Village Expansion - Tier 1 (Mayor) — 80 Wooden Log + 40 Sawn Timber brings the Merchant to the village, which is what opens the Tier 3-6 economy.
6. Divine Researcher, Woodland Spark Creation - Tier 1 — 1 Stumpy Spark + 20 Aether Shard + 100 Wooden Log unlocks the Spark Workbench, which must sit on an Ancient Base (procedurally generated in the world). This is the machine that lets you make Sparks instead of catching them, and every Spark in the game is a recipe on it or its two successors.

What unlocks what (the whole ladder)

Straight from the wiki's Quests page. Tier is the quest tier, not the item tier.

The Monument's Machine Range quests run alongside this and are what give you free Sparks. Each costs a single item and unlocks the shrines at that range — except Range 3 and Range 6, which each ask for three:

Shrine output at the card's default crew: Stumpy 1 per 32 s, Crafty 1 per 48 s, Carry 1 per 32 s, Loamy 5 per 32 s, Choppy 1 per 64 s, Rocky 1 per 32 s, Arty 1 per 32 s, Scouty 1 per 32 s, Hauling 1 per 64 s, Puffy 1 per 32 s, Boomy 3 per 48 s, Slashy 1 per 64 s, Crashy 1 per 64 s. They list no ingredient.

Recipe ratios by chain

Everything below is the wiki's own ingredient counts and durations; the last column is derived at the default crew (one Stumpy, one work unit) and equals product × 60 ÷ seconds per minute. The point of the numbers is the ratio between the columns.

Wood, from Tier 1

Derived ratios. One Logger at 30 Wooden Log/min feeds exactly 4 Sawbenches eating 2 logs per 16 s (7.5 logs/min each). The wiki's Logger page says the same thing in words — "a logger will feed four Sawbenches with logs for Sawn Timber exactly, or three Cutters with leaves for Fertiliser exactly" — which is a useful cross-check, because 30 leaves/min against the Cutter's 10 leaves/min is also exactly 3.

The panel chain is where the timber goes. 4 Sawn Timber Sawbenches : 1 Wooden Panel Sawbench (the panel sawbench eats 15 Sawn Timber/min, which is four timber sawbenches at 3.75/min each), and that panel sawbench's 7.5 panels/min covers 3 Wooden Blade workshops — which each also want 1.25 Sawn Timber/min, so the complete chain is 5 timber Sawbench → 1 panel Sawbench → 3 Wooden Blade workshops.

Stone and coral, from Tier 4

The upgraded workshop tiers are not faster per cycle — they multiply the output of the same cycle. Stone Workshop makes 5 Path Tiles where the Stonecutter's equivalent makes 1, so a workshop is worth its build cost in throughput per cycle; the limit is that you can only build one per Stone Plate pair, and each still needs Sparks and the right temperature (3, warm).

Copper, from Tier 7

Derived: one Ore Miner at 6 Copper Ore/min feeds 2.1 Furnaces smelting 2.81 ore/min each; overclocked, it feeds 5.3. A drill-bit Furnace wants 3.75 Copper Ingot/min (2 Copper Ingot per 32 s cycle), so a single smelting Furnace covers about a quarter of one Drill Bit Furnace.

Aetheric, from Tier 6

The Cutter-to-Shard chain is the one that matters early: 1 Aetheric Clump → 6 Aetheric Pellet (128 s) → 6 Aetheric Pellet becomes 36 Aether Shards through the Aetheric Distiller. Choose the Refined route only once Alchemy Lab is running, because it costs two Alchemy steps to reach and returns 30 shards from 1 Refined Aether.

Sparks

Sparks are a production chain like any other, and the costs are real. All of these run on the Spark Workbench except the last group.

Derived: a Stumpy Spark eats 1 Aether Shard and 5 Wooden Logs per 32 s, so one Spark Workbench running flat out wants 1.875 Aether Shards/min — 0.3125 Aetheric Pellet/min, since each pellet distils into 6 shards — and 9.375 Wooden Logs/min, about a third of one Logger. So one Cutter on Clump Dividing (2.81 pellets/min) supplies nine Spark Workbenches, and one Aetheric Distiller turning pellets into shards (7.5 shards/min) supplies four. Loamy Sparks are the exception: 5 per 32 s from 5 shards and 3 Fertiliser, i.e. 9.375 Sparks/min for 9.375 shards/min.

Placement rules that bite

These are all build rules from the wiki's building pages, and they are the reason a build you planned in your head will not place:

• Logger — must be built on top of a Giant Tree.
• Drill — on top of a Giant Rock. Learns Stone at Tier 4, Quartz and Limestone only at Tier 5.
• Ore Miner — on a Giant Ore Deposit, and it degrades: the wiki's Copper Ore page says Ore Miners lose efficiency over time, cannot be restored, and can fall from 15/min to 3/min.
• Miasma Collector — on top of a Noxious Coral.
• Spark Workbench — on an Ancient Base; Spark Workstation — on an Ancient Support; Spark Workshop — on an Ancient Foundation. The first two spawn procedurally in the world; Tier 9's Aetheric Construction quest gives you Ancient Base, Supports and Foundations Replica buildings so you can place them anywhere.
• Cannon, Elevator, Zipline — all need a cliffside or elevation difference. Zipline start on a cliff, end on flat ground 5-15 tiles away and at least two levels lower. Ramp needs a one-tile cliff, Ladder a two-tile cliff.
• Path add-ons (Splitter, Crossing, One Way, Blocker, Item Filter, Spark Filter, Amount Filter, Counter, Wait Gate, Spark Gate) all require a flat path under them.

Traps, and the places the wiki disagrees with itself

• The Spark crew is the hidden balance knob. Nothing in the build menu tells you a Handy is 2.5 Stumpies. If a production line mysteriously starves, count the work units in it.
• Sparks are consumable labour. Loamy and Choppy Sparks, Wooden Blades and Fertiliser all go into other Sparks. Budget a share of your wood and aether output for the Spark line itself; a Stumpy-heavy base will eat its entire log supply.
• Temperature is per area, not per building. One Heater covers a 10-tile radius, so plan hot recipes together instead of scattering them; and one Heater plus Sparks is enough for +2, so never build a second one for the same spot.
• Tier 5 is where the wood economy stops being enough. Stone Plate is needed in bulk (Supply Chests cost 20 Stone Plate plus 5 Aetheric Clump; Delivery Chests cost 20 Wooden Panel plus 5 Aetheric Pellet) and both Limestone and Quartz come from the Drill, which needs its own quest pair to learn each resource.
• Wiki disagreement — Ore Miner rate. The recipe card gives 1 Copper Ore per 10 s (6/min); the Copper Ore page says rates run "from 15/min down to 3/min". The card is what the in-game recipe shows; treat the page's 15/min as the theoretical full-speed figure until checked in game.
• Wiki disagreement — Stone Block tier. The Stone Workshop page lists Stone Block as a Stonecraft - 2 - Tier 7 recipe, but the Stonecutter page and the Mason Sisters' Stonecraft - 3 - Tier 10 quest unlock treat Stone Block as Tier 10.
• Wiki copy-paste error — Aetheric Collider. Its description says it "breaks open Geodes and reveal one of three random items inside", which is the Geode Breaker's text. The Collider's actual recipes are the Tier 10 corrupted-aether cleansings, and three of its four recipes output randomly (75%/25% splits).
• Wiki error — Ore Miner quest tag. Its Copper Ore recipe is tagged with the Woodsman's Leaves Harvesting - Tier 4 quest rather than the Merchant's Copper Harvesting - Tier 7, which is the quest that actually unlocks it.
• The queue's own Steam link was wrong (see the version section): app 1909380 is a different game.

Sources

Game version: Oddsparks 1.0, patch v1.0.S31387 (12 May 2026); 1.0 released 27 May 2025.

Official wiki (wiki.gg), read through the MediaWiki API as raw wikitext — api.php?action=parse&page=<Page>&prop=wikitext:

• https://oddsparks.wiki.gg/wiki/Buildings and the per-building pages: Logger, Sawbench, Cutter, Stonecutter, Stone Workshop, Wood Workshop, Loom, Drill, Ore Miner, Furnace, Aetheric Distiller, Alchemy Lab, Miasma Collector, Greenhouse, Plant Extractor, Geode Breaker, Aetheric Collider, Spark Workbench, Spark Workstation, Spark Workshop, Heater, Cooler, Temperature Regulator, Compressor, Supply Chest, Spark Itemiser, Spark Activator, Ancient Base, Ancient Base Replica, Ancient Foundation, and the thirteen spark shrines
• https://oddsparks.wiki.gg/wiki/Quests (the full tier ladder) and https://oddsparks.wiki.gg/wiki/Village%20Monument (the Machine Range table)
• https://oddsparks.wiki.gg/wiki/Items and the item pages Coal, Fuel, Stone, Copper Ore, Wooden Blade
• https://oddsparks.wiki.gg/wiki/MediaWiki:Common.js — the recipe-card work multiplier that makes the durations comparable
• https://oddsparks.wiki.gg/wiki/Trains — points at a Steam train-network design guide (steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3319765351), not read for this guide

Version and patch history:

• https://api.steampowered.com/ISteamNews/GetNewsForApp/v2/?appid=1817800 — announcement list and dates
• https://oddsparks.handy-games.com/en/oddspark-patch-notes-v1-0-s31287/ — the publisher's patch notes
• https://store.steampowered.com/api/appdetails?appids=1817800&filters=release_date — the 27 May 2025 release date

Unverified or flagged in the text: the Ore Miner's real throughput floor (the wiki's two figures disagree), the Stone Block tier, and whether the wiki's shrine durations scale with crew in the same way as workstation recipes — they are listed with no ingredients and read here as printed.