Plan B: Terraform — the production chain, every ratio, and the order to build it

Plan B: Terraform is one long materials problem: four ores go in one end, a million citizens come out the other, and nothing moves anywhere without a Depot. This guide is the numbers side of that problem — what each building converts, how fast, what each building costs to make, what a city demands at each population tier, and the order that keeps the chain from starving.

What version this is written for

The guide was written on 1 October 2026 against v1.1.1 build 1367 (28 September 2026). Update 1.1.0 (build 1347, 23 September 2026) shipped alongside the Worlds of Fire and Water DLC and replaced the old level ladder with a tech tree, so the level numbers you will find on the wiki are history, not instructions.

The ratios and building costs below come from the wiki's copy of the game's own data export (Module:Item recipes data), which was last updated 17 November 2025 — i.e. the 1.0.x line. Every place update 1.1.0 or 1.1.1 changed one of those recipes is marked in the tables and collected in "## What update 1.1 changed". Numbers that the export does not contain — the tech tree's node costs, and the ratios of 1.1's new buildings (Water Farm, Rocket, GHG neutralisation, Drone Extractor, Hovercraft, Airship, Water Filter) — are not in this guide. I could not source them, so I have not guessed them.

Rates: the 300-second year

One simulation year is 300 seconds (the wiki's Cities page states this, and every rate table in the game's export is consistent with it: units per year = 300 ÷ seconds per unit). All rates below are per year.

Flat rates are the single most useful thing to internalise: a Factory is exactly twice as fast as an Extractor and six times as fast as a Tree Greenhouse. Everything that follows is arithmetic on those few numbers.

One caveat on the Atmospheric Extractor, because the wiki argues with itself: the export lists separate 15/yr rows for Carbon and for Oxygen (20/yr since 1.1.1), the 2023 Carbon and Oxygen pages say one extractor makes "15 Carbons or 15 Oxygens" a year, and the 2023 Atmospheric Extractor page says it makes "Oxygen and Carbon at a rate of 12 each annually" and keeps producing while one output is full. Count 15 (now 20) per gas per year, and confirm on the building's own info panel in game which reading your build uses.

The opening chain

1. An Extractor mines only the ore tile it stands on, at 15/yr regardless of ore type, and stacks a

maximum of 3 units on its own tile until a Depot collects them. When the deposit is exhausted the Extractor stops.

1. 3 Iron Ore → 1 Steel Bar in a Factory at 30 batches/yr = 90 Iron Ore per year for 30 Steel Bars.

That is six Extractors per steel Factory.

1. 1 Steel Bar → 1 Mechanical Parts at the same 30 batches/yr = one mechanical-parts Factory eats one

steel Factory's entire output.

So the minimum viable industrial block is 6 iron Extractors → 1 steel Factory → 1 mechanical-parts Factory, and everything you build costs something from the right-hand end of that. Extractors cost 3 Steel Bars each, Factories cost 3 Mechanical Parts each, Depots cost 3 Steel Bars each — all from an Assembly Plant at 10/yr, so early building production is the bottleneck, not ore.

Depots are not optional and not decoration: they are the only way any resource moves into or out of any building or vehicle. An Extractor with no Depot in range is a hole in the ground.

Every Factory recipe

All twelve Factory recipes from the game's export, with the per-year figures that let you size the feed lines. Rows marked 1.1.1 are the ones update 1.1.1 changed — the "per year" column in those rows shows the current value.

Read down that table and the shape of the game appears: Steel Bar is the spine (Iron Ore, Tempered Steel, Reinforced Concrete, Dam Elements, Rails, Greenhouses and Depots MK1–2 all route through it), Carbon is the second spine (Polymer → High-Tech Parts, Compost, and the tree greenhouses), and Nitrogen and Fluorite are the two rare throttles (Tempered Steel, Compost, NF3, SF6).

What the buildings cost

Everything here is made in an Assembly Plant, 10 batches/yr, straight from the game's export:

Two of these are worth staring at. A Defense Shield costs 800 Superconductor and 50 Nano Composite — by far the most expensive single item in the game — and the wiki's own advice is to start stockpiling before you need it. A Container Ship costs 10 High-Tech Parts and 20 Tempered Steel, which is a reasonable trade for what is the only transport that crosses oceans at volume.

Research Centers are not built from an Assembly Plant: a Construction Site converts 200 Reinforced Concrete + 200 High-Tech Parts into one Nano, Botanical or Energy Research Center. The Space Elevator Base needs 1,000 Space Elevator Cable.

Waste, recycling and compost

Waste begins at 300 population and is collected by a Waste Disposal (5 Concrete) that must sit adjacent to a city tile — the Recycling Center does not need to be adjacent, so waste can be railed away and processed on an industrial site.

Compost has a second route: 3 Carbon + 1 Nitrogen → 1 Compost in a Factory at 30/yr (2 Carbon before 1.1.1). Both routes are worth keeping; the Factory route is the only one that does not depend on a city being big enough to produce Organic Waste.

Recycling is not a closed loop. Waste is produced at 1.5× the city's supply demand, and the recipes above return 0.4 units per unit of waste — which works out to exactly 60% of a mid-game city's Steel, Aluminum and Polymer demand (a 1,000-population city wants 67.5/yr of each good, throws off 101 Metal and 101 Plastic waste a year, and gets 40.5 Steel, 20.2 Aluminum and 40.5 Polymer back). The long-standing community shorthand rounds this to "recycling is 66% renewable", which was measured on an earlier version. Either way, expect to feed every city a top-up from primary production forever.

Food, seeds and the forest chain

The 1.1.0 change to the Tree Greenhouse is the one to plan around: forests now want Compost, not Carbon, which means a foresting programme now depends on a Compost line (Factory or Recycling Center) before it can start. Compost is also what the Greenhouse eats for Food, so Compost is a shared dependency of both the Food and the forest chains.

Seeds come from the Space Elevator early (free, then at a Nano Composite cost), and from the Botanical Research Center later — 4 Various Seeds per 100 s batch, 12/yr per center at the export's base rate, and the center must be built adjacent to city tiles. The wiki page for research centers adds that the city's size sets the actual production speed, so treat 12/yr as the floor, not the ceiling.

One gap worth stating plainly: the export contains no rate for the Farm's Harvest output. Field fertility is computed from field water level, seasonal temperatures and atmospheric Oxygen — the wiki gives the formula max(0, min((water−0.001)/0.009, (40−highTemp)/10, (LowTemp+5)/15, O₂)) with a field flooding to zero fertility at 1.00 m — but how much Harvest a field yields per year is not published anywhere I could read. Size your farm area by watching the field's own status readout, not by a number here.

City supply: the ladder and the formula

A city requests one unit of every good it needs, at a fixed interval. The interval shrinks as the city grows:

> request interval = 120 × population^(log₁₀(1/3)) seconds, floored at 10 requests/year below 20 population.

Annual demand is 300 ÷ interval. Waste is produced at 1.5× that demand. Both columns below are computed from that formula; they match the tier table in the community's Steam guide "City sizes & resource requirements" (Pizzajon) to the rounding.

Everything else about city growth follows from three rules:

• Meeting 100% of both supply and waste disposal grows the city; 50% or less shrinks it; in between it

holds.

• Demand is per good per request — a 100,000-population city wants ~607 of each of its four goods a year,

so an unbalanced supply chain stalls the whole city, not just one line.

• You cannot oversupply: the city takes its request and ignores the rest, so surplus production sits in your

Depots looking (misleadingly) like it is working.

Multiply that out and the endgame bill for one city at 1,000,000 population — 1,823 of each of Robotics, Nano Composite, Quality Food and Oxygen per year — looks like this (my arithmetic, from the export's rates):

Read the third column again: the single largest cost of a million-person city is Carbon, and it is needed for four separate things at once (Polymer for High-Tech Parts, Compost twice). That, not ore, is the line to build redundantly.

Terraforming: the numbers that gate everything after the mid-game

• Emitting SF6 (1 Sulfur + 1 Fluorite per unit) or NF3 (1 Nitrogen + 1 Fluorite per unit) in a

Greenhouse Gas Generator raises the global temperature. NF3 is the stronger gas, both gases have logarithmic diminishing returns and both are limited by Fluorite, one of the four ores. The export rates: 30 gas/yr per generator, consuming 30 Sulfur or 30 Nitrogen plus 30 Fluorite per year.

• −20 °C: wet ground starts to appear, water begins to pool. Pumping Stations can only be built on wet

ground, so no Wet-ground → no Water → no Greenhouse Food, no Tree Greenhouse, no farms.

• 10 °C: water stops rising. That is the target to hold, because anything above it is Fluorite spent for

nothing.

• The wiki's temperature formula: T = −100 + TempGain − (2/300)·Altitude − (2/300)·Water + 60·|cos(Latitude + 20·cos(dayOfYear))|^1.5,

with greenhouse gases contributing at most about +70 °C and the day-of-year term making latitude matter more than any single generator.

• Plants have temperature windows, and they matter more than the map: **Pine −30 °C min, grows at 0 °C, 20 °C max;

Eucalyptus −20 °C min, 3 °C, 30 °C max.** Trees are the Oxygen supply, and city Oxygen demand falls as atmospheric Oxygen rises — the wiki states cities eventually stop needing Oxygen delivered at all. That is the payoff for a forest programme and the reason to start trees as soon as water allows.

• Update 1.1 made ice caps dynamic and snow seasonal, and the wiki's note that "raising the temperature has

no apparent effect on the planet's Ice caps" is now wrong. On the classic planet this mostly means the water level keeps moving; on the Water World it is the core mechanic.

• Flooding is not cosmetic: a flooded building stops working and must be demolished, a flooded city tile becomes

an abandoned city district and the city loses population. Dam Elements (3 Reinforced Concrete) are the mitigation, and 1.1.1 added the reverse trick for the terrain tool: raising terrain under water now removes the water into the clouds instead of flooding the area.

Transport rules that decide your layout

• Depots are the only interface. No Depot in range, no input, no output — for buildings, for trucks, for

trains, for ships.

• Depot MK1 has 1 drone and serves neighbouring tiles. MK2 has 2 drones and 2 tiles of range. MK3 has

4 drones and 3 tiles of range. Drone count, not cargo, is usually the throughput limit on a busy stop.

• Depots chain and equalise. Two Depots of the same type in range of each other split their contents evenly.

That is useful for storage and for widening effective range, and actively harmful as a long supply line: the cargo piles up in the middle of the chain and shuttles back and forth instead of arriving. Use a real road or rail line for distance.

• Drones prioritise transports first, then buildings, then Depots. A Depot next to a stop that never stops

receiving can occupy every drone and starve a Factory on the same Depot — intentional prioritisation is possible, accidental starvation is common.

• Trucks carry 1 container (2 after the 1.1 upgrade), **a train is an engine plus 15 cars at 2 resources

each = 30 cargo** (upgraded to 2 per wagon, and a "Fat Train" upgrade to 4 per wagon on a new train), and a Container Ship carries bulk across water at the cost of 10 High-Tech Parts + 20 Tempered Steel. Trains are the workhorse: they beat trucks on distance and cargo.

• A road stop or rail stop is useless on its own — each stop needs Depots in range to load and unload, each

stop can belong to only one line, and trains only go forward: every rail line must loop back into itself or run a circuit, or the stop shows a red warning and nothing moves.

• Roads are cheap (1 Concrete makes 4 Road), rails are cheap (1 Concrete + 1 Steel Bar makes 8 Rail).

Neither is the cost of expansion — the Depots and their drones are.

The traps that eat a first run

1. Building a chain with no Depot in it. The most common wasted hour: a perfect Extractor–Factory pair that

has never produced anything because there is no Depot within range.

1. Chaining ten Depots instead of laying a road. Depot equalisation looks like a conveyor belt and behaves

like a warehouse with a nervous tic.

1. Ignoring the waste back-up. Growth needs 100% of both supply and waste disposal. A full Waste Disposal

or a full Recycling Center silently freezes city growth, and the city can even shrink if supply and waste handling both fall below 50% — usually exactly when your ore has run out.

1. Waiting for Water. Nothing in the Food chain — Greenhouse, Tree Greenhouse, Farms — works before −20 °C,

and Pumping Stations need wet ground. Temperature work is on the critical path to Food, not a side project.

1. Over-building the wrong end. Six iron Extractors per steel Factory is the ratio; ten Extractors and one

Factory is ten Extractors you could have spent on Assembly Plant output. The early bottleneck is building production (10/yr from an Assembly Plant), not ore.

1. Leaving one ore deposit to die. An Extractor stops when its deposit is exhausted, and the deposit is gone

for good. Keep a second iron field mapped before the first runs out, because Steel Bar is in almost everything.

1. Assuming the wiki's hand-written pages are current. Several of them contradict the game's own export on

ratios (see below), and the wiki's news page has not been updated since March 2023.

1. Starting a 1.1 game from an old save and expecting it to behave. The developer's own advice with 1.1.0 was

to start a new world: dynamic ice caps and rebalanced SF6/NF3 "will break a lot of things and require some heavy repairs". Old saves do auto-unlock techs matching the levels you had reached.

What update 1.1 changed

Verbatim from the developer's Steam announcements, with the ratio changes spelled out:

1.1.0 (23 September 2026, build 1347), balance:

The first three are structural: seeds cost 2.5× more, foresting now needs Compost, and the Dam Pump no longer competes with your High-Tech Parts line. The last three are unquantified in every source I could read, so no number for them appears anywhere in this guide.

1.1.0 also added: the tech tree (replacing levels), transportation upgrades (trucks ×2, trains ×2, trains ×4, drones ×2, floating depots, train acceleration, extractor efficiency, drone speed), dynamic ice cap and seasonal snow, Water Filters, geysers, water plants and plankton, hovercrafts, a Greenhouse Gas Neutralisation building, Water Farms, a Rocket with three payloads (mirrors to warm, shade to cool, ice comets to add water), Drone Extractors (range 60), Airships, sea plants, and per-planet music.

1.1.1 (28 September 2026, build 1367), balance:

• Polymer: 3 Carbon now gives 2 Polymer Bars instead of 1.
• Compost: needs 3 Carbon instead of 2.
• Atmospheric Extractor: produces 20/yr instead of 15.
• Airships: High-Tech Parts 10 → 30 and Hydrogen 20 → 30; 6-container piles instead of 7.
• Extractor Drone: mining speed 2 → 1.5, minimum move duration 5 s.
• Upgrade Efficiency techs now also apply to water pumps, atmospheric extractors, ice extractors, filters and

drone extractors; ice comets on the Fire World spawn geysers 20% of the time; raising terrain under water removes the water instead of flooding.

The Carbon changes all point the same way: Carbon is the intended late-game volume material, which is exactly what the endgame budget above computes.

Where the sources contradict each other

The wiki's hand-written item pages date mostly from March 2023 (early access) while the wiki's game-data export was refreshed in November 2025. Where they disagree I have used the export and flagged the page:

Two further gaps, stated rather than filled: the Farm's Harvest rate is not published anywhere, and the 1.1 tech tree's node costs and prerequisites are not documented in any source I could read. The old level ladder (1.0) is still the correct dependency order — Steel Bar → Mechanical Parts → Concrete/Road/Truck/Supply Center → Aluminum/Carbon/Atmospheric Extractor → Polymer/Reinforced Concrete/Depot MK2 → SF6 → High-Tech Parts → waste and recycling → Rail/Train → Nitrogen/NF3/Ice Extractor → dams → Space Elevator → seeds/Food → forests → Tempered Steel/Nano Composite → Container Ship → farms/Quality Food → Cactus/Tropical Forest → Superconductor/ Robotics/Defense Shield — but in 1.1 you choose the order, and population is what earns the tech points.

Sources

All numbers above come from these, read on 1 October 2026:

• Game data export (the primary ratio source): https://planbterraform.wiki.gg/wiki/Module:Item_recipes_data

— read as raw wikitext via https://planbterraform.wiki.gg/api.php?action=parse&page=Module:Item_recipes_data&prop=wikitext&format=json (last edited 17 November 2025). Every ratio table, building cost, city supply band and waste band above is parsed from this export; the per-year columns and the endgame budget are arithmetic on it.

• Official wiki pages (also via the API, raw wikitext): Cities, Temperature, Water_(terraforming),

Level, Extractor, Factory, Depot, Depot_MK2, Depot_MK3, Drones, Rail, Truck, Road, Road_Stop, Supply_Center, Waste_Disposal, Recycling_Center, Greenhouse_Gas_Generator, Atmospheric_Extractor, Pumping_Station, Space_Elevator, Space_Elevator_Base, Space_Elevator_Cable, Construction_Site, Nano_Research_Center, Botanical_Research_Center, Energy_Research_Center, Farm, Greenhouse, Grain_Silo, Food_Processing_Plant, Tree_Greenhouse, Various_Seeds, Field_Seeds, Harvest, Food, Quality_Food, Compost, Metal_Waste, Plastic_Waste, Organic_Waste, SF6, NF3, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Carbon, Steel_Bar, Mechanical_Parts, Concrete, Aluminum_Bar, Polymer_Bar, Reinforced_Concrete, High-Tech_Parts, Tempered_Steel, Nano_Composite, Carbon_Nano_Tube, Superconductor, Robotics, Pine_Tree, Eucalyptus_Tree, Dam_Element, Dam_Pump, Defense_Shield. Base URL https://planbterraform.wiki.gg/wiki/.

• Developer patch notes: "DLC & Free Major Update live now!" (1.1.0 build 1347, 23 September 2026) —

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1894430/announcements/detail/1844751498219102, and "Plan B - v1.1.1" (build 1367, 28 September 2026) via https://api.steampowered.com/ISteamNews/GetNewsForApp/v2/?appid=1894430.

• Community cross-check: "City sizes & resource requirements (WIP 1.1 update)" by Pizzajon,

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3299283936 — used to confirm the city tier numbers.

• Steam store page (app 1894430) for release history and version context:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1894430/.

Game version this guide was written for: v1.1.1 build 1367 (28 September 2026), with game-data ratios from the 1.0.x-era export (November 2025) corrected wherever the 1.1.0 and 1.1.1 notes change them. Ratios for 1.1's new buildings, the tech tree's costs and the Farm's Harvest rate are not in this guide because no source I could read documents them.