StarRupture Smelter & Fabricator Ratios: How To Balance Production
Wrong machine ratios waste hours of production. Here's how to calculate smelter-to-fabricator balance and find your bottlenecks fast.
The Production Pipeline (And Where It Breaks)
Ore flows: Extractor → Smelter → Fabricator → Assembler. Each stage has different throughput limits.
Bottlenecks happen when one stage can't keep up. I wasted 3 hours with idle fabricators before realizing my smelters were the problem.
How Ore Quality Affects Smelter Output
This blew my mind: ore quality multiplies smelter output. Same machine, same time, but 4x more bars from Pure ore vs Impure.
Use our Export ROI Calculator to see exactly how ore quality impacts your effective production rate.
- Impure ore: x2 output multiplier
- Pure ore: x4 output multiplier
- Super Pure ore: x8 output multiplier (!)
How To Calculate Fabricator Balance
Fabricators consume bars at different rates per recipe. Some need 2 bars, others need 4. Count your smelter output first.
My rule: 1 fabricator per 2 smelters for most recipes. Idle fabricators waste power; starved fabricators waste time.
How To Find Your Bottleneck Fast
Check machine queues. Full output queue = downstream too slow. Empty input queue = upstream too slow.
Our ROI Optimizer uses your machine counts to identify bottlenecks. Update your numbers for accurate recommendations.
Related guides
StarRupture Ore Quality: Impure vs Pure vs Super Pure Explained
Ore quality multiplies your smelter output by up to 4x. Here's where to find each tier and when it's worth the trip.