Chapter 29 ‐ Rocket Construction and the Late Game

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Entering the Late Game

For the sake of this wiki, the late game in Factorio can be considered to begin when you finish researching the rocket silo. Since this research requires 1000 units each of the five main science packs, it puts your production capabilities to the test.

Afterwards, you need to craft the rocket silo, which is fairly expensive, and then assemble the rocket, which is quite expensive. When the rocket is built, you can launch it, either empty or with cargo, and this will count as winning the game. The victory music will play. However, there is more to do if you choose to keep going. This is when you begin the actual late game.

The Rocket Silo

The rocket silo is a large building where you can assemble, load, and launch rockets. It can be built from the crafting menu and held as a single item, like other buildings. It requires several stacks of various items in hand to craft, and so you may need to create space in your inventory.

Once crafted, you can place the rocket silo down and connect power. To begin assembling rockets, you need to fill it with ingredients for rocket parts. A rocket is made up of 100 parts and every single part costs a total of 10 rocket fuel, 10 low density structures, and 10 rocket control units. If you place productivity modules in the silo, the total cost of each rocket can be reduced to as low as 72 parts instead of 100. Rocket part assembly also consumes a fair amount of power.

When the rocket is fully assembled, the silo will play its sirens as its doors open and the rocket rises outward, ready for launch. The rocket has a single inventory slot for cargo. The cargo could be anything but usually satellites are placed there when unlocked.

When you are ready to launch the rocket, be sure to save the game beforehand. You can launch the rocket by facing the silo and pressing SPACE.

Late game: What can you do after launching a rocket?

While the game normally is won when you launch your first rocket, you can keep building and launching more. Researching the rocket silo also allows you to research the space science packs, which involves assembling satellites and launching them in rockets. This returns space science packs to the rocket silo and you are able to use them for further research.

Late game research requires the space science packs in addition to all of the previous ones, and so the factory's production is tested continuously. Meanwhile, the technologies researched are almost exclusively in the form of upgrades rather than new recipes or buildings, and these research goals are infinitely repeatable at increasing costs. One such upgrade is mining productivity, which lets you get extra ore out of the same ore patch.

The main idea of the late game is to explore how much further you can scale up and optimize your factory so that you can maintain continuous science production. The Factorio community likes to measure this in terms of "science per minute", which refers to how many science packs per minute you can produce without interruption. A factory that produces 100 SPM, or 100 of each science pack per minute, is considered to be fairly large, while 1000 SPM or more is said to be a mega factory.

Scaling up comes with new inherent challenges. Mega factories usually take dozens or hundreds of hours to plan and build so that they run without getting stuck. This means you need to get lots of items around efficiently. Meanwhile, individual ore patches run out and so you need to travel further out to reach new ones. The size of the map is practically infinite, so how far you can go is determined by your design abilities. Many people like to aim for 100 SPM or 1000 SPM to see if they can do it, but it is not easy.

When you aim to go larger than a couple thousand SPM, as some mad lads do, your new limiting factor becomes the performance of your actual computer, because the game starts to slow down while trying to run thousands of machines at once. At this scale, the new term to talk about is UPS, or "Updates Per Second", referring to the running speed of the game, which is 60 by default and it ticks down as you scale up.

Megabase building strategies may require features such as automatic multi-train systems or flying robots. Some of these features are currently not supported by Factorio Access, but megabasing with existing tools would be possible.

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