The following guide, except the Speed bonus calculation and the last sections, was written before the Dec 4th 2023 game update. As a result, it does not cover all the new content now available. Check the last section of the guide for some very partial information. However, after playing a game, I'm confident that this guide is not obsolete. All that it covers should still be relevant. I do plan on updating this guide to cover everything the update added to the game. This guide should be accurate within a 5% error margin, at worst. If something is off by a lot, then please leave a comment, I'll make corrections. I already corrected myself multiple times while making this guide.

SPOILERS: the existence of many items and buildings I mention in this guide is not a spoiler, since the tech and skill trees mention them from the start of the game. Some items and/or buildings I'll mention are not found in the tech tree. However, I won't write about how you're supposed to get them or at what stage of the game. If possibly learning about the existence of an item or a building by reading this guide sounds like a spoiler to you, then don't read past this point and come back when you've finished the game. I hate spoilers, so I fully understand.

Purpose of this guide
This guide is mainly for one thing. To provide easy to read item crafting times. That's it. Using those, it should be easy for you to balance your factory's production. Which, of course, is not needed at all to finish the game.

I'm not crazy about ratios, truth be told. It's just that I got to the endgame, where items take a while to produce. I was under producing some items, so I made more of them. Then I was low on something else because of that. And it never ended. I started taking notes about crafting times to know what was going on. This here guide is just that, me sharing my notes. I then kept adding more info to the guide.

Should you try to balance everything perfectly? No.
A growing factory requires building materials. By definition, you can't balance those building materials perfectly, you have to produce a surplus.

What is that time unit I'm using?
Using seconds or minutes would have been silly. Instead I decided to take an item that is crafted pretty fast, at least compared to most items, and use its crafting time as my basic time measure unit. That item is Plastic. Plastic crafting time will vary through the game, based on many things. Namely: overclocking, lubricant, skills. But overall, all crafting speeds end up being boosted equally, or near equally. For example, overclocking something at +50% while the rest is at +0% should not happen. The same way, if you start using lubricant, all refineries and assemblers should be using it. Eventually, you'll also have all production related skills unlocked. So, the fact that Plastic gets a speed boost or not is not a big deal. Simply because everything (well, almost everything) will get the same speed boost, sooner or later. In terms of ratios, producing Plastic three or six times faster changes nothing if everything else is also produced three or six times faster.

So, the amount of time it takes to produce one Plastic is my time unit. That time unit needs a name. I'll call it a "tic". How convenient, wait one tic, get one Plastic.

In some cases, a tic won't be good enough to measure time and we'll need a time unit that always has the same length, no matter what. And here it is:

a THICC is defined by the time a refinery takes to craft 1 Plastic, when that refinery only benefits from one speed boost, the +25% to speed skill. No lubricant, no overclocking.

(Next paragraph is just me yapping and you can skip reading it)
You may wonder, why keep that +25% bonus and not go with the longest of tics? Mostly laziness on my part. I need to run my tests in a world where I have access to everything. So I started using my first game world, in which all skills are unlocked including all +25% speed skills. At one point I thought about starting over with a fresh world, but I also realised that since almost everything is getting a +25% speed boost, it was not a huge deal. If I wanted to test let's say Barns, I could always adjust my numbers knowing that Barns don't benefit of a speed boost. But as I kept testing, some very odd observations started happening. Why is it that when testing for how long lubricant lasts, only because of the +25% speed the results are nice numbers like 3 and 6? If it was not for the +25%, the results would be 2.4 and 4.8, which are awfully tough to measure with my methods. Same for Nuclear Plants, a battery fuels one for exactly 3 THICCs. At this point, I'm starting to believe that the game devs themselves established some game ratios and items durability using the +25% speed as default. End of my little story. Back to the guide.

The charts you'll find at the top of a section give the duration of a production cycle for an item, measured in tics.

What do you need to know about speed bonus calculations?

1) All bonuses are additive
2) Lubricant bonuses as given by the game are wrong

What does that mean?
There are 3 layers of possible bonuses:

Skills and purchases (regrouped in the same category for simplicity)
Overclocking
Lubricant.

Skills and purchases give a % bonus. If you look at the skill tree, you'll see that all furnaces, refineries and assemblers can gain a 25% speed bonus. As expected, it means that a machine with this bonus will produce 125 items during the same time a machine without that bonus will produce 100 items. Purchases work the same way. Particle accelerators can get a 25% speed bonus. Mega furnaces, on top of the 25% skill bonus, can get an additional 100% bonus from purchases. So a mega furnace with both bonuses would produce 225 items while one without any bonus would produce 100, over the same time period.

Overclocking works the same way, except the game displays the bonus as 1.1x or as 1.5x instead of +10% or +50%. This is a bit misleading. When you see "2x", it's natural to think it is multiplicative. But in reality, in the game, it is additive. A machine with +25% from skills and 2x from overclocking is a good example. You could assume that (100% + 25%) x 2 is how to calculate the machine speed, where "100%" is the machine speed without any bonus. That would result in 250% speed. But that's wrong. The "2x" from overclocking is +100% speed, but additive. So the calculation, in reality, is (100% + 25% + 100%) = 225% final speed, where the first 100% is a machine speed without any bonus.

Now, lubricant.

There are 3 types of lubricant. One says "3x faster", one says "4x faster", the last one says "16x faster". As with overclocking, first thing to know, those bonuses are additive, not multiplicative.

What's more, I don't know about you, but when I see "3x faster", what I expect is that a machine using that lubricant will produce at a speed of 100% + 200%, for a 300% total. In other words, a machine without lubricant would produce 1 item while one with lubricant would produce 3 items for the same time period. That's what I have in mind when I see "3x".

However, you can test it easily. If you have no skill related bonus and if you are not overclocking refineries, set 2 refineries to produce plastic. Use the "3x" lubricant oil in one of the two refineries. The refinery using lubricant will produce 4 plastic while the other produces only 1. Note: if you have a skill bonus or overclocking, do NOT expect that exact ratio of 4 to 1.

After testing all types of lubricant, their bonuses are in fact +300%, +400% and +1600%. That is not how you'd expect 3x, 4x, and 16x to work. Those would be +200%, +300% and +1500%.

So say you have a refinery, with a 25% bonus from skills, 1.2x from overclocking and "3x" from lubricant. That refinery will run at
100% + 25% + 20% + 300% = 445% the speed of a refinery without any bonus.

With all the best upgrades possible, the speed calculation is
100% + 25% + 100% + 1600% = 1825%, for a refinery

Yes, that is fast, but it is nowhere near the
(100% + 25%) x 2 x 16 = 4000% you'd possibly expect if you didn't know better.


That being said, often you don't have to care that 1825% is not 4000%, or whatever else the difference between expectation and reality might be. When you calculate ratios between assemblers for electronic parts and computer modules, all your assemblers likely have the same speed bonus. So 1825% or 4000% or 645%, it does not matter as long as all assemblers get the same bonus.

It gets more complicated between some different types of machine. You'll have a link between furnaces and refineries in some production chains, or a link between particle accelerators and assemblers in other chains. Furnaces can't use lubricant while refineries can. Accelerators can't be overclocked while assemblers can. As a result, all those machines will likely not get the same speed bonus. That means that if you calculate the ratios for those machine without any speed bonus, they are not the same ratios when those machines get different speed bonuses.

1x Lubricant oil 0.5 tic
1x Super cooler fluid 0.5 tic
1x Super fertilizer 0.5 tic
1x Biofuel bottle 0.5 tic
1x Superglue 0.5 tic
1x Plastic 1 tic
1x Plasteel 1 tic
1x Super lubricant 1.5 tic (1)
1x Reinforced super metal 2 tics
1x Behemuttium battery 8 tics

(1) Super lubricant takes three times longer to make as lubricant oil does (1.5 tic v. 0.5 tic). However, it also lasts twice as long in all machines. That means that by upgrading to Super lubricant, you are now using half the Cornilia and Glass bottles you were using for your regular lubricant production, since Super lubricant lasts twice as long. Which is a good thing, obviously.
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How many refineries making lubricant do you need?
Short answer:
Go with 1 refinery per 12 machines using lubricant. You will produce more than enough lubricant that way. You can always dismantle some of the refineries making lubricant later if the surplus are piling up.

Long answer:
I need to redo all those calculations. Coming soon.

Refineries making Biofuel to Biofuel generators ratio
With the "Extra fuel" skill that makes biofuel lasts 25% longer in biofuel generators, a biofuel bottle powers a generator for 2.6 THICCs. This gives the following ratios:

(TBD)

Behemuttium batteries and Nuclear Plants
What does it take to keep a Nuclear Plant running at all time? How many refineries producing batteries (I'll use the term battery and drop the Behemuttium part) are needed per Nuclear Plant?

First thing to know, 1 battery fueling a nuclear plant lasts 3 THICCs.

Compare that to the battery 8 tics production time and the ratio we get is 8:3, meaning that 8 refineries producing batteries would feed 3 nuclear plants. Or that 3 refineries are required to power a single nuclear plant. That probably sounds horrible but remember, this 8:3 ratio implies that the refineries are only boosted by one thing, the +25% skill bonus. No lubricant, no overclocking. There are too many possible scenarios to list them all.

(but I'll give a few ones. Coming soon)

1x Electronic parts 3 tics
1x Smart sensor 4 tics
1x Computer modules 4 tics
1x Advanced electronic parts 8 tics
1x Supercomputer module 8 tics
1x Super control unit 8 tics
1x Hypercomputer module 16 tics


Not much to say about assemblers and the items they produce.

Just be careful, some recipes use more than one of the same item per cycle.

18x Bricks (N/A)
3x Charcoal 0.29 tic (1)
3x Iron 0.67 tic
3x Copper 0.67 tic
3x Titanium 4 tics

(1) 1 furnace producing charcoal is enough to fuel 3 furnaces producing iron (or copper), with a small coal surplus. 3 furnaces producing charcoal are enough to fuel 10 furnaces producing iron (or copper). A single furnace producing charcoal is enough to fuel 20 furnaces producing titanium.
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Okay, there are many things worth writing about here.

No data about bricks?
No data about bricks. Keep one furnace producing them, go get bricks there when you need some. Bricks have no use except for building in the early game and for something else that I won't spoil. But bricks are not part of any production chain.

Efficiency gain
Tier 2 furnaces produce faster than their Tier 1 versions. By faster, I mean their production cycles are twice as long, but they produce 3 times as many items per cycle. That's more items produced per tic, on average. They are also more efficient. For example, 40 iron ore will make 20 ingots in Tier 1 furnaces and make 30 iron ingots in Tier 2 furnaces. Same thing for fuel. You'll use the same amount of charcoal in both cases, but get more iron ingots out of it.

What's the copper and iron furnaces to steel electric furnaces ratio?
At smaller scales, 1:1:1, it's that simple. If you go up to 8 furnaces producing iron and 8 furnaces producing copper, then you can fully feed 1 extra steel. In other words, 8:8:9. That being said, extra iron is needed to produce lenses at some point. There's also the fact that until you unlock a specific skill, you'll need extra iron and copper for new buildings, to craft robots and some other things. Extra furnaces for iron and copper are a good idea.

Furnaces can't use lubricant.
If you have read the part of the intro that is about tics, you can see where I'm going with this. As long as you are not producing and using lubricant, everything is fine. Once you start using it, you're making assemblers and refineries work faster while furnaces' speed remains unchanged.

Let's say that before you started using Lubricant oil, you had 3 refineries producing Plasteel (which requires steel) and that you were producing enough steel to feed those 3 refineries. When you start using Lubricant oil, which makes your refineries work faster, your production chain balance changes a lot. You're now using more steel than you were using not long ago. That's just common sense, isn't it?

The calculations needed may not be the most intuitive. Refer to the Speed Bonus Calculation section for details. Sometimes "3x faster" is not what one might assume :P

3x Glass 0.67 tic
3x Glass Bottles 0.67 tic (1)
3x Steel 1 tic (2)
3x Lenses 1 tic
3x Behemuttium Cells 4 tics

(1) a Glass bottles production cycle uses 2 Glass

(2) For the iron to copper to steel ratio, see the Items produced in Tier 2 furnaces section.
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Glass to Glass Bottles ratio
That ratio is 2:3
Meaning that 2 furnaces producing Glass can feed exactly 3 furnaces producing Glass bottles. But you should have extra furnaces producing Glass, for construction and/or Lenses production.

Glass bottles to Lubricant ratio
TBD

100x Charcoal 1.62 tic
150x Iron ingots 5.6 tics
150x Copper ingots 5.6 tics
150x Titanium ingots 33.3 tics

The previous chart is not very friendly to work with, one might prefer production per tic instead. Like this:

Charcoal 62 / tic
Iron 26.8 / tic
Copper 26.8 / tic
Titanium 4.5 / tic

To put those numbers in perspective,
62, 26.8 and 4.5 would be
10, 4.5 and 0.75 if we calculated production per tic for Tier 2 furnaces.
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What is the speed difference between Tier 2 and Mega furnaces?
Close to 6x.

What is the efficiency difference between Tier 2 and Mega?
None. Using X raw resources will make the same amount of finished products, Tier 2 or Mega changes nothing. That fact alone does not mean that Mega furnaces aren't worth it.

For Mega furnaces, what is the charcoal to iron/copper ratio?
Short answer: 2:7, so 2 furnaces making charcoal for 7 furnaces making iron (or copper).
Long answer:
2:7 is 2% off what would be an exact ratio. What does that mean? It means that if you use a 2:7 ratio, your 7 furnaces will be out of charcoal 2% of the time. Each of those 7 furnaces will produce 150 ingots, wait for charcoal for a short time (skipping the production of the equivalent of 3 ingots) and then get charcoal again and produce 150 ingots. The decision is yours. Do you prefer 7 furnaces that produce like 6.86 furnaces would, or do you prefer to add an extra charcoal furnace overproducing charcoal by near 50%? Note: a tier 2 furnace as that one extra charcoal furnace would be enough.

For Mega furnaces, what is the charcoal to titanium ratio?
The numbers above translate to 1:20. If you ever get to 14 Mega furnaces producing titanium and you run out of charcoal, then I miscalculated something.

26.8 Iron ingots per tic sounds like a ton of iron
Maybe it does sound like that, yes. However, you are likely to be using Super lubricant in all refineries and assemblers by now. The lubricant speed bonus for refineries and assemblers can't be applied to furnaces.

25x Glass 0.92 tic
150x Glass bottles 5.6 tics
75x Steel 4.2 tics
150x Lenses 8.3 tics
150x Behemuttium cells 33.3 tics


As in the previous section, items produced per tic is another way to say the same thing:

Glass 27 / tic
Glass bottles 27 / tic
Steel 18 / tic
Lenses 18 / tic
Behemuttium cells 4.5 / tic


Glass and Glass Bottles ratio
TBD

Mega iron to Mega copper to Mega Steel ratio
TBD

This section assumes that you have 3 of the same animal in every Barn. The time unit is a THICC, not a tic. See Intro to know what is the difference.

Animal poop 13.5 / THICC
Gold nugget 4 / THICC
Animal scale 24 / THICC
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Animal poop and Gold nugget are produced at a rate of 1 per cycle. Animal scale are produced at a rate of 3 per cycle.

3 Berries ==> 1 poop
10 Stone ==> 1 nugget
1 Nutritious egg ==> 3 scale

Efficiency
The 3 previous ratios hold no matter how many animals are in a barn. Only the production speed is affected by how many animals are in the barn.


Animal poop
As you can see, Animal poop is produced relatively fast. Knowing that one poop fertilises soil for a while, a single Barn making Animal poop can go a long way if you can send its production everywhere it's needed.

13.5 poop per THICC means that if your refineries making Super fertiliser only get a speed bonus from the +25% skill, one Barn is enough for 6.75 refineries. But your refineries are likely to be much faster than that at this point. A much more useful ratio would be:

1 Barn feeds (TBD) maxed out refinery making Super fertiliser



Gold nugget
Making 1 Gold nugget requires 10 stone. That's a lot of Stone. Plan accordingly.

Gold nuggets can have different uses, but in a production chain their only use is to craft Electronic parts. If the assemblers only get the +25% speed bonus from skill, then 1 Barn could feed 16 assemblers. A much more useful ratio is:

1 Barn feeds (TBD) maxed out assemblers making Elect. parts



Animal scale
All things considered, Animal scales are produced quickly. But they are used to craft Plasteel. Plasteel is crafted pretty fast and is used in many recipes, some of which use more than 1 Plasteel per cycle.

If the refineries only get the +25% speed bonus from skill, then 1 Barn could feed 24 refineries making Plasteel. A much more useful ratio is:

1 Barn feeds (TBD) maxed out refineries making Plasteel


Funny and maybe not so useful facts about Barns
When dismantling a Barn with animals in it, the animals are set free and will start roaming the island. This can be funny or annoying, depending on the situation.

If you're in a Barn, you can freely capture the animals that are in it. They won't get aggressive towards you. The captured animals spawn as animal capsules outside the Barn. This can sometimes be useful if, say, you need 6 more animals that are otherwise annoying to capture. And if... well, no spoilers, but you'll know what I have in mind if you reached that point of the game.

I'm seriously considering collecting data about Automated Farms. I am not 100% guaranteeing it.

I'm considering getting data about Seed Extractors. That one sits at a low 25% chance of happening, at least for now.

I'll maybe calculate what is needed for an "utopian factory" that is just big enough to keep 1 assembler making Hypercomputer modules running 24/7. Charcoal, steel, electronic parts, everything. Less than 50% chance of it happening.

If I did all that, then I don't see what more I could add that would be relevant, given the theme of this guide. If you can think of something else that would be on topic, leave a comment.

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If this guide is helping you, great. Consider giving it a thumbs up.

More importantly, have fun playing Nova Lands, exact ratios or not!

I started collecting data about the new buildings and recipes.

All four of the particle accelerator's recipes have the exact same crafting time. (12.8 tics)

The particle accelerators can not be overclocked. In other words, the more you overclock everything else, the more accelerators you'll need to process what you produce.

The new assemblers and refineries have the exact same production cycle time as the old ones. However, for the same amount of ingredients used, they produce more. The difference factor in productivity can be 1.5, but it often is 2. This changes everything, the pressure on the most basic resources (ingots, plastic, gold nuggets) is lowered by a lot, because you save up the 50% of the required ingredients for each step of a production chain. Hypercomputers, for example, are no longer the big resource dump they used to be.

A few more important crafting time:

Quantum computers 16 tic
Qubit Chip 8 tic
Quantum Connectors 4 tic

That's it for now, I'll give more info later and reorganise it. Have fun, that was a good update!