In this guide, I’ll show you factory build and how to get the most out of automated production in your factory in Drill Core.
Factory Builds
What is a Factory? And what does it do?
This is a factory. If it is constructed on the first row of your Rig, it costs 4 Iron to build. It will continuously produce resources for you during the day. Without any upgrades, it can only produce Iron. It must be carefully micromanaged in order to maintain its output, since it cannot start producing a new Iron resource until you collect the first one. You can collect the Iron by clicking on the icon that appears over the factory. If the factory is not on your screen, you can click on the icon where it appears at the top of your screen in order to collect the Iron.
Factory Upgrades
Within the upgrade menu lies the opportunity to improve your factories! There are 4 main upgrades that will improve them. The first enables the Factories to produce Swarmlit as well as Iron. The second enables them to continue producing while there are resources remaining to be collected. The 3rd increases the output speed of your Factories by 10%, and the last one increases the amount of daytime you get by 10% (effectively boosting Factory output, among other things).
I tested to see if the upgrade that keeps the factory working with stockpiled resources can stack beyond 1 resource, and confirmed that it can. This upgrade will effectively remove your need to micromanage the factories!
You will have to be careful when switching between producing Swarmlit or Iron. The factory does save its progress on one particular resource, but it does not transfer that progress between them. If you accidentally misclick and start your factories on producing the wrong resource, you can safely switch back.
How much can Factories Produce?
To test the limits of our Factories’ potential, I ran the first day of a contract while installing 1, 2, 3 and then 4 factories and compared their outputs. This is what I found:
A single factory produced a total of 2 Iron during the day, with a slight amount of extra at the end.
Two factories also produced 2 Iron, but were able to push to about 1/3 of the way towards an extra Iron resource.
Three factories still produced only 2 Iron, but were able to push 2/3 of the way towards an extra Iron resource.
Four factories finally broke through, being able to produce 3 Iron per day, with a slight amount of extra production.
I additionally tested the rate of production on Swarmlit, using 4 Factories. The result was close to around 2/3 of a Swarmlit produced in a day. Since this is the same amount of production that would have created 3 Iron, we can conclude that Factories can produce 1 Swarmlit for every 4.5 Iron (In 3 days, we would produce either 9 Iron or 2 Swarmlit).
How many Factories should you Build?
Because it takes 3 additional factories to produce 1 additional Iron each day, we can conclude that each Factory beyond the first produces only 0.33 Iron per day. This, compared to the first Factory’s output of 2 Iron per day means that extra factories are 1/6 as effective as the first one. This is an unfortunate issue. At such a low output per additional factory, there is little incentive to invest into any extra ones beyond the first. Though you can mitigate this by later salvaging the factories (with a loss of 1 Iron in the process for each one), this requires you to have them active for at least 3 days to break even on the salvaging cost. Your resources will be put to better use on hiring more workers or constructing more defenses.
