I found the best "Nutrient from Spoilage" Setup
Posted: Sat Jan 24, 2026 8:21 pm
Hello fellow factorio engineers
This topic is about the "Nutrient from Spoilage" recipe which turns spoilage into 50% spoiled Nutrients.
This recipe can either be crafted in an assembling machine or in a biochamber.
The caveat is that the biochamber has an innate productivity boost, but it also consumes Nutrients during the craft (instead of electricity)
I don't care about electricity or the amount of Nutrients gained per second.
I don't care about anything else but the amount of Nutrients gained per recipe.
So the question is: to biochamber or not to biochamber? And which modules to choose?
This does not seem like a "generalizable" problem to solve, i don't think there is any other way other than to brute-force it, so i wrote some code for it:
There are following general questions to consider:
I will share the full list now, don't get triggered by the "woth" spelling mistake please
Full List without using Efficiency modules in beacons:
Full List with using Efficiency modules in beacons:
This topic is about the "Nutrient from Spoilage" recipe which turns spoilage into 50% spoiled Nutrients.
This recipe can either be crafted in an assembling machine or in a biochamber.
The caveat is that the biochamber has an innate productivity boost, but it also consumes Nutrients during the craft (instead of electricity)
I don't care about electricity or the amount of Nutrients gained per second.
I don't care about anything else but the amount of Nutrients gained per recipe.
So the question is: to biochamber or not to biochamber? And which modules to choose?
This does not seem like a "generalizable" problem to solve, i don't think there is any other way other than to brute-force it, so i wrote some code for it:
Open or Close
There are following general questions to consider:
- Nutrients energy capacity does not depend on its spoiledness. So do we consider half spoiled Nutrients worth 1 Nutrient or 0.5 Nutrients?
- Do we want to put efficiency modules into beacons?
- Which tier modules do we want to use?
- Which quality are our modules and buildings? (Assuming they have the same quality. I did not run the code ot check for any for mixed quality setups)
- if we don't use any modules, it is better to use assembling machines than biochambers
- if we don't want to put efficiency modules into beacons, then:
- it sometimes matters how much we consider half spoiled Nutrients worth
- we will always have worse gain than with efficiency modules in beacons
- the difference is noticeable using low quality setups, but it gets really small for high quality setups. Interestingly quality matters way more than tiers here, even though the difference shrinks with the tiers as well.
- if we want to put efficiency modules into beacons, then:
- we always want to use biochambers with full productivity modules
- it does not matter how much worth we consider half spoiled Nutrients, the most efficient layout is always the same per tier and quality
- using rare quality tier 3 modules is the most interesting edge case, as it is the only place where using 11 beacons is the most efficient setup. I have no idea why that is the case

I will share the full list now, don't get triggered by the "woth" spelling mistake please
Full List without using Efficiency modules in beacons:
Open or Close
Full List with using Efficiency modules in beacons:
Open or Close