One of the common questions new Satisfactory players ask is, “How much of [name an item] should I make?” Is one per minute enough? Five? Fifty? Five hundred?

This is also one of the common questions that veteran Satisfactory players wrestle with.

You can ask in Discord servers or YouTube comment sections or Reddit or whatever, and you’ll probably get a variety of answers ranging from “just do whatever, man” to “if you’re not hyper-optimizing to get the most out of every node via power shards and alt recipes why are you even here?” to any number of hard or soft numbers in between. It doesn’t help that you can get blindsided partway through the game’s stage progress when something you thought you wouldn’t need much of suddenly becomes a highly-valuable piece of a massive project. (The opposite, of course, is also true… albeit far less often.)

Look at Encased Industrial Beams, for instance. Mostly they’re just a building material. Mark 4 conveyor belts and a bunch of “buildables” (factory machines and such) need them and not much else, though Heavy Modular Frames are a notable exception. You can get by with a handful per minute of output, and most of that can go directly into depotspace. Great, job’s done, moving right along. And you’re glad to be moving along, because “EIB” production is surprisingly annoying and expensive for how little you get, especially for a mid-stage core buildable material, particularly if you don’t have a specific collection of key alternate recipes.

And that handful of EIB output is just fine. Until you decide it’s time for nuclear power. While you can get around the EIB requirement for Uranium Fuel Rods with an alternate recipe, that recipe is… not great. (Rotors are cheap. Crystal Oscillators much less so.) Okay, fine, but each Uranium Fuel Rod manufacturer needs a skosh more than one EIB per minute… and if you’re building a nuclear power plant you’re probably cranking out more than just oh-point-four per minute of fuel rods. What to do, what to do?

This is just one example, and it’s not even a particularly nasty example. My point is that the game is full of these “whoops, turns out you need more of this, that, and some other thing” situations. A player can feel the temptation to build to the extreme.

Do you need to, though?

For anything outside of power generation, the game takes as much time as it takes. (Ah, tautology. It’s so fun.) The more you make of whatever-it-is the faster you’ll be able to meet the milestone goal, or send up that Space Elevator phase shipment. But… if you don’t make very much per minute of the thing, it’ll just… take longer. It’s all additive. You’re stockpiling materials to meet goals. Some processes don’t work terribly well below a certain minimum, it’s true, especially if fluids are involved. The performance floor can be surprisingly low, though.

It’s a sliding scale: Production Speed versus Time To Complete. More of one reduces the other. That’s it. The only clock you’re working to is the one in your head.

And the choice is yours which to prioritize. Maybe for you the point of the game is to see how quickly you can reach the finish line. Maybe for you the point of the game is to set up a bit of machinery and let it run while you do other things, such as decoration and exploration and puttering with Hypertube cannons, or whatever. I’m not here to tell you which to prioritize, and nobody else should be dictating your priorities either. Just have fun!

Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t do any planning. Use the Tools site and the official wiki to get a feel for which items need how much of what components, then build factories according to how much stuff you want to be making.

Also: Consider bringing a friend or two along. Many hands make lighter work, or so I’m told.