Rise of Industry — Build Guide: Chains, Costs and the Traps

Rise of Industry is not a logistics sim with a factory bolted on. It is a demand game: the towns set a demand, the shops pay for what they consume and discount what you flood them with, and every building bills you upkeep for every day it is switched on whether or not it produced anything. This guide is the numbers side of that — what each chain consumes and yields, what each building and vehicle costs, the order things unlock, and the specific mistakes that end a run in the first ten hours.

What this guide was built from, and how far to trust it

The last content patch Rise of Industry ever received was Industrious 2.3, 7 January 2021 — it is the most recent update post on the game's news feed, and no further update for it has been announced since (the feed's later posts are sales, a thank-you and the Rise of Industry 2 sequel). The IP was sold in early 2022 and Dapper Penguin Studios closed in 2024, so 2.3 is the final state of the game. Written with that patch in mind.

Every number below comes from the game's community wiki (riseofindustry.fandom.com) read as raw wikitext, never from a video or a memory. The wiki's own pages are of very different ages, and that matters:

Nothing here was verified inside a running copy of the game. Where two wiki pages disagree I show both figures and say so rather than picking one silently.

Five rules that decide whether you survive

1. Upkeep is a fixed fraction of build cost. Daily upkeep = (build cost × 1/60) ÷ 30, so monthly

upkeep = build cost ÷ 60. A $400,000 Carpentry building costs $222.22/day, $6,666.67/month. This one formula lets you price any unlisted building's upkeep from its build cost.

1. Upkeep is charged for days the building is active, not for what it makes. A factory starved of

inputs still bills you. Turning efficiency down turns the bill down with it.

1. Shops pay when they consume, not when they receive. Over-supply goes into their storage and you

are paid later, if at all — while the price drifts down. Under-supply keeps prices high but earns less.

1. Dispatch is charged per trip and per tile. A destination truck is $250 + $10 per tile for a single

unit of cargo. Distance is a running cost, not a one-off.

1. Going negative mid-month is fine; ending the month negative is not. Upkeep and loan instalments

land on the 1st, and that is the only moment bankruptcy can hit.

Starting money, loans and the bankruptcy line

Starting budget varies with difficulty, and on two of the three settings it is a loan to be repaid at zero interest rather than free money.

Two more loan types exist:

• Settlement loan — taken through the HQ. Amount is ceil(population / 100,000) × $5,000,000, base

interest 25%. Influence with that settlement can cut the rate, change the amount and change the term.

• Bankruptcy loan — $5,000,000 over 60 months at 25%, no influence allowed. Offered only when you

finish a month unable to pay everything due on the 1st. If you already hold three loans you cannot take a fourth and the run is over. You can repay any loan early, without penalty, to stop the interest.

Because the interest is charged on the whole balance, the bankruptcy loan is the single most expensive thing in the game. A shortfall you fix in the same month can be repaid immediately at zero interest.

The map: regions, permits and where the HQ goes

• Buildings need a permit for the region they sit in, bought from the region's Town Centre or Regional

Office. Placing your HQ grants that region a full build permit for free — so put the HQ in the region with the most expensive permit.

• Every settlement has a No Build zone (shown as an orange disc). Anything other than roads and

logistics buildings inside it damages your relationship with that town, which limits your ability to sell to it.

• Settlements start with a Farmer's Market and a Hardware Store, and gain a third shop once

population passes 100,000 (the wiki's Shops page instead says a new random shop every 50k population — the two pages disagree). Sell high-tier goods in the bigger towns; those shops are the only buyers for them.

Gatherers: the raw layer, and what it costs

Every gatherer is a hub plus harvesters placed on or beside the node. Water and Sand are the only infinite nodes; Coal, Copper, Iron, Gas and Oil are finite pools that vanish when drained; Trees and Fish are renewable (trees can be replanted, fish respawn 5–15 tiles away after 3–6 months).

The cycle-time column is from the Raw Resource page. The separate Gatherer Recipes page lists 10 days for every one of these, so the two disagree; treat 10–15 days as the range and expect a harvester to deliver roughly 1 unit per 10–15 days.

Node sizes (Resources page, "subject to change"): Coal/Iron/Copper nodes hold 1,000–6,000 units depending on the map's resource setting, Oil/Gas 1,000–5,000, Fish 750–2,500, a Tree 6–18 units. Every mineral node spawns with exactly 5 tiles and they all drain the same pool, so harvester placement on a node does not matter. When a finite node runs dry, its harvester keeps working at 25% rate off whatever remains.

Costs and upkeep:

Terraforming is often the cheapest way to make a bad site good, but it is charged per tile: the wiki's own beginner walkthrough spent $650,000 flattening a hill and filling a pond, and $225,000 digging a 10-tile water trench.

Farms: what one field actually yields

A farm is a hub plus fields placed inside its radius. Recipe figures are per field-cycle, which is how the wiki's header ("Output per field") reads.

Two things the table hides:

• Cows and sheep produce three goods at once. The Milk and Leather pages describe the cow cycle as

producing milk, leather and beef together; the Farm table splits them into three rows that each consume 2 wheat + 1 water per 45 days. Read them as one cycle with three simultaneous outputs — which is also why cattle are the classic first trap, below.

• Livestock need wheat, so they are a second-order chain. Wheat is 2 units per field-cycle of 45 days

from 1 water, and cows eat 2 of it per cycle. A cow field is really a wheat field plus a cow field.

Farm build costs and upkeep (Crop Farm, Orchard, Plantation are all the same):

The Livestock row is worth a sceptical eye: its listed upkeep is identical to the cheaper farms, which does not match the ÷60 rule (a $150,000 hub should be $2,500/month, a $100,000 field $1,667/month). It looks like a copy-paste on the wiki; budget the ÷60 numbers.

Farm produce base prices are flat across all the farm crops on the Farm Produce page: $8,988.28 per unit for oranges, apples, grapes, raw rubber, olives, wheat, hops, potatoes, vegetables, berries, cotton, sugar and cocoa.

Does a building pay? The two-minute calculation

Revenue per day = (output per cycle ÷ days per cycle) × price. Cost per day = (build cost ÷ 60) ÷ 30. Run both before you place anything.

Worked example — one Orchard with one field, growing apples, sold at the wiki's base price:

• Revenue: 2 apples ÷ 35 days = 0.0571 apples/day × $8,988.28 = $513.60/day
• Upkeep: ($125,000 ÷ 60) ÷ 30 = $69.44/day for the hub, ($75,000 ÷ 60) ÷ 30 = $41.67/day for the field —

$111.11/day

• Gap before trucking and any price discount: about $400/day per field

Then subtract dispatch: a destination truck costs $250 + $10/tile per unit carried, so a 30-tile run is $550 for one apple. Selling apples 30 tiles away eats most of a day's margin; selling water 30 tiles away at $3,046.88 a unit is worse. This is why the wiki's own guidance is to build tight.

Factories: every documented recipe

Recipe rows read as: the building consumes the listed inputs and produces the listed output once every Days column value. One building works one selected product at a time.

Automotive Factory

Carpentry

Distillery and Brewery

Drink Factory

Food Factory

Glass & Metallurgy Factory

Home Goods Factory

Papermill

Petrochemical Factory

Preservation Factory

Prototype Facility

Textile Factory

The recipe table has two holes worth knowing about before you plan a late-game build: the First Computer needs Punch Card Reader ×6, and no Punch Card Reader recipe is documented anywhere on the wiki; and the older product pages' Paper and Cartons do not appear in the recipe table at all. Treat those as unknown rather than guessing.

What things sell for

Prices below are the wiki's base selling prices. What a shop actually pays depends on its demand state — each shop lists 8 products, with one at 125% of base, three at 100%, and the rest at 80%. The market-wide drift is base × (1 + √(global demand − (global stored + global sold)) ÷ 50), so a product you flood loses value across the whole map.

Tier 1 products - raw resources turned into first-stage goods

Tier 2 products

Tier 3 products

Component products (intermediates for the prototypes)

Prototype products (end of the game)

Worked build: one Pizza line and everything it eats

Pizza is the cleanest example of a chain that looks small and is not: four separate Food Factory recipes feed it, and each factory building works one selected product at a time.

Per 1 Pizza (one 30-day cycle), the recipe tree unwinds as:

Sizing one continuous Pizza line (one Food Factory set to Pizza, which yields 0.0333 pizza/day) by rate:

So the minimum viable pizza operation is 5 Food Factories — one each for Pizza, Dough and Flour, two for Cheese — at $800,000 build and $13,333/month upkeep each, one Crop Farm with 6 wheat fields, one Crop Farm with 2 vegetable fields, one Livestock Farm with 3 cow fields, and a Water Siphon hub with 5 harvesters — before you have sold a single pizza. Idling factories still pay upkeep, which is why the cheese building running at two-thirds duty is normal but not free.

The same arithmetic applies in reverse: if a feeder is short, the whole line below it runs starved, and starved buildings bill you the same as busy ones.

Logistics: what each vehicle really costs

Dispatch is charged per vehicle per trip, plus a per-tile distance charge. Capacity is per vehicle.

Cost per tile per unit of cargo, which is the number that actually decides your mode:

Trains and boats are the cheap way to move bulk long distances, but only once the volume justifies laying track or water routes. Zeppelins need no infrastructure at all — no track, no road, no connection between the two fields — which is why they cost the most per unit moved.

Warehouses and trade depots

• A warehouse automatically links to buildings inside its radius: their output is pulled in, and inputs

are pushed back out (up to 2 cycles' worth by default). It can also deliver straight to shops, so one near a town is doing real work.

• Trade depots (truck depot, train terminal, boat depot, zeppelin field) must sit inside a warehouse's

radius. Networks of the same depot type connect to each other; different types never mix.

• Warehouse-to-warehouse transfers use the Request tab with a quantity, a continuous-or-once flag and a

priority. A higher-priority request pre-empts lower ones, and an infinite request starves every other request for that product. That is the mechanism behind most "why is nothing arriving" reports.

Efficiency, fields and research

• Every production building and the HQ has efficiency buttons: production rate on buildings, research

rate on the HQ. Default is 100%; after research you can step it in 25% increments. The text says the range is 0–150% while the same page's table also carries a 200% column — treat 150% as the documented ceiling. Upkeep scales with the setting, so a slow building costs proportionally less.

• The tech tree is split into Rural (drinks, food, livestock), Light Industry (carpentry, liquor,

papermill, textile), Heavy Industry (glass & metallurgy, home goods, petrochemicals), Auxiliary (efficiency, extra destination slots, more harvesters and fields, warehouses and roads) and Prototype trees. You start a career with a number of free unlocks that depends on difficulty — the wiki's own walkthrough had three on its setting and spent them on Wheat, Cows and Urban Roads.

• More fields and more harvesters are research, not build options. The wiki walkthrough starts capped

and researches up to 5 fields per crop farm and 5 harvesters per water siphon, then expands again. Plan the first year around the caps you have, not the ones you want.

• Monthly research investment is set from the HQ panel in fixed presets — the wiki lists $0, $100k, $250,

$1M, $2.5M and $5M ($250 looks like a typo for $250k, unverified). Early on the wiki walkthrough was sinking $100k/month into research and still profitable.

• HQ model upgrades are documented two different ways: the Headquarters page gives 8/18 unlocks (rural),

7/17 (light) and 4/14 (heavy); the HQ Building page says the model changes at 10 unlocks in a category. Cosmetic either way.

Pollution: the number that quietly halves a farm

Tiles accumulate a blight rating. A production building adds its pollution rating per day to its own tile: Low 0.1, Medium 0.25, High 0.5, Brutal 1.0 per day. At 100% blight a tile starts passing its rating to the neighbouring radius, and the wind doubles the rate in the downwind direction. Water pollutes four times faster than land and ignores wind.

What blight actually does, at 50% or more on the affected tile:

• A settlement building is demolished and its population killed.
• A field loses 16.67% of production per affected tile.
• A water well or water siphon loses 50% of harvester production per polluted tile — on the resource

that every chain in the game drinks.

Difficulty multiplies pollution generation: Easy 50%, Normal 100%, Hard 150%, Insane 200% (and folds into your score: −50, 0, +50, +100). In practice: put the smelters and petrochemical plants downwind of your farms, and never put them upstream of the water you siphon.

Contracts: the numbers

• A settlement offers a contract every 2 to 6 months; each stays available about six months and you

can hold three at a time.

• The objective is in units of a product you have researched, delivered to that settlement's wholesaler:

units = (recipe time in days ÷ 10) × output quantity, and the time limit is 6–12 months.

• The reward scales with how fast you can turn the cycle: ((time to complete ÷ recipe days) × output

quantity) × a random 3–5 multiplier, and it comes as money, extra demand for the product, or a temporary price boost up to three times base. Failure costs about 25% of the reward.

• Easy difficulty gives +25% time and reward and −25% penalty; Hard is the reverse (−25% time and reward,

+25% penalty).

Seasonal events

Events fire on a calendar, not at random, so the winter and summer ones can be planned for. On Normal difficulty:

Effect durations scale 3/6/9 months by Easy/Normal/Hard. Winter halves farm output for six months and summer halves water output for six months: if your plan has no slack, one bad season turns into a starved factory, and a starved factory still bills you.

The traps

1. One full output stops the whole building. A cattle farm making beef, leather and milk stops dead

if the leather bin fills — not throttles, stops. Route or dump every output, even the ones you have no use for.

1. Cattle are a second-order chain. They eat wheat, and they need 2 wheat + 1 water per cycle. Players

who unlock cows before wheat starve them.

1. Destination slots auto-assign three trucks. Default 3 trucks per destination, each with upkeep and

a dispatch charge. On a short hop, cut it to one.

1. Long hauls are billed per tile. $10/tile per unit by truck. Water at $3,046.88 base and wood at

$3,046.88 do not survive a long trip profitably.

1. Flooding a shop kills the price. Each shop buys 8 products: one at 125%, three at 100%, the rest at

80% of base — and the map-wide price falls by square root as stored + sold rises.

1. Over-supply is not paid. Goods a shop doesn't consume sit in its storage, unpaid, until consumed.
2. Building inside a town's No Build zone wrecks your standing with that town, and standing is what

lets you sell there.

1. A trade route with one missing product stops entirely. Old community guidance for the trade-route

system: a convoy only departs when every item in the route is present in storage, so a route mixing fast and slow producers stalls itself. Keep routes short, or use several depots.

1. The 1st of the month is the only day you can die. Upkeep for every active building lands then,

with the loan instalment. Negative mid-month is survivable.

1. Effects that cut production do not cut upkeep. Cold Snap halves farm output; the farm's bill is

unchanged.

1. Finite nodes run out. Coal, copper, iron, gas and oil nodes are pools of a few thousand units;

trees are 6–18 units each and need replanting plus three years to mature.

1. Don't open a chain you cannot finish. The wiki's own advice: unlocking the Textile Factory first is

a trap because cotton comes from a Plantation you have not unlocked. Safe first unlocks are the water siphon plus orchard (fruit sells directly), or the lumberyard plus papermill.

1. Raising efficiency is not free. Upkeep moves in step with the setting, so 150% costs 150%.
2. Every building works one recipe at a time, so a pizza chain is four Food Factories, not one with

four buttons.

1. A starved building pays full upkeep. Idle machines are not free; research the inputs or drop its

efficiency instead of letting it spin unfed.

End game

Three prototype products exist, all made in the Prototype Facility over 360 days and sold at a Showroom in a settlement pushed to its maximum size: the Car ($949,406.25), the Premade Dinners ($1,007,906.25) and the First Computer ($4,314,375.00). The computer is the most valuable single product in the game and needs Punch Card Reader ×6, Processor ×6 and Computer Memory ×6 per unit — the Processor alone is 180 days and two Binary Switchers, and Punch Card Reader has no documented recipe. Finishing a prototype ends the game and produces a final score built from the date of completion, your assets, your budget and your loans.

Sources

Wiki pages read as raw wikitext through riseofindustry.fandom.com/api.php?action=parse&prop=wikitext, with the page's own last-edit date in brackets:

• Factory Recipes (2022-03-06) — https://riseofindustry.fandom.com/wiki/Factory_Recipes
• Farm Recipes (2018-11-20) — https://riseofindustry.fandom.com/wiki/Farm_Recipes
• Gatherer Recipes (2026-03-20) — https://riseofindustry.fandom.com/wiki/Gatherer_Recipes
• Raw Resource (2023-03-05) — https://riseofindustry.fandom.com/wiki/Raw_Resource
• Resources (2018-11-21) — https://riseofindustry.fandom.com/wiki/Resources
• Farm Produce (2021-05-01) — https://riseofindustry.fandom.com/wiki/Farm_Produce
• Tier 1 / Tier 2 / Tier 3 Products (2020-01-03 / 2018-11-21 / 2018-11-21)
• Component Products and Prototype Products (2018-11-21)
• Upkeep and Efficiency (2023-03-09) — https://riseofindustry.fandom.com/wiki/Upkeep_and_Efficiency
• Loans (2025-03-22) — https://riseofindustry.fandom.com/wiki/Loans
• Shops (2020-01-26), Global Market (2018-11-21), Settlements (2020-05-01), Contracts (2018-11-21)
• Trucks (2023-03-04), Trains (2022-08-19), Logistic Buildings (2023-04-12), Roads (2019-10-18)
• Pollution (2024-05-07), Events (2018-11-21), Terraforming (2018-11-21), Headquarters (2019-02-05),

HQ Building, Tech Tree (2018-11-21), End Game (2019-05-05)

• Farms, Land-Based Gatherers, Coastal Gatherers, Offshore Gatherers, Light Industry, Heavy Industry
• Crop Farm, Livestock Farm, Orchard, Plantation, Food Factory, Distillery, Textile Factory,

Petrochemical Plant, Preservation Factory (2018-02-15, except Orchard 2023-03-10, Textile Factory 2023-09-17 and Petrochemical Plant 2023-06-26)

• Absolute Beginners Guide to Rise of Industry (2023-03-09) and How to play guide for Rise of Industry

(with its linked Steam guide from 2018)

• Game version: the last announced content update is "Industrious 2.3 Update Launched!", 7 January 2021 —

https://steamcommunity.com/games/671440/announcements/detail/3942305442245734021 ; the Steam news feed for app 671440 carries no patch post after it. The IP was sold in early 2022 and the studio closed in 2024 (Wikipedia, "Rise of Industry").

Figures that could not be sourced and are marked as unverified in the text: the current cost of a harvester (two wiki pages contradict each other), the build cost and upkeep of factories other than the Food Factory, Distillery, Textile Factory and Petrochemical Plant, the older product pages' "Paper" and "Cartons" recipes (they no longer appear in the current recipe table), the Punch Card Reader recipe, and any per-minute throughput figure — the wiki documents cycle times only.