Alchemy Factory Fertilizer: Early Game Design & Ratios
Quick answer
Fertilizer is what keeps Alchemy Factory nurseries running, and a nursery that has none simply stops producing. One well-built module outputs about 20 fertilizer per minute, while a nursery uses fertilizer every 12 seconds — roughly 5 per minute. That leaves each module feeding four consumers minus itself, so the working planning rule is one fertilizer module per three nurseries. The one hard requirement is a fuel-efficiency upgrade: the module's wood-to-charcoal-powder loop cannot feed itself without at least one level, and two is safer.
Why fertilizer is the key early design
A nursery does nothing until it has fertilizer, so the whole farming side of the factory hangs off this one item. Manual fertilizing does work, but it eats the limited hours in a day and keeps you standing at the farms instead of building.
The community let's-play this page is built from calls fertilizer "the most important early game design" for exactly that reason: automate it once and the recurring chore disappears, the farms keep producing on their own, and the same stable base later carries you into advanced fertilizer, which is worth far more per unit.
Unlock order: nursery first, then basic fertilizer
The research tree is the guiding principle here rather than a shopping list. The nursery does nothing without fertilizer, so basic fertilizer is the first thing worth unlocking — not the greenhouse, and not the advanced crops.
One caution from the same playthrough: researching an item changes what your customers expect. Unlock glass, for example, and shoppers start turning up asking for glass and get annoyed when the shelves are empty. Research in the order you can actually supply, and hold off on an item until the production line behind it exists.
The fertilizer chain
Fertilizer is a two-input recipe, and each input has its own short chain. Conveniently, the steps run at the same speed:
| Step | Input | Machine | Craft time | Output |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plant ash | Sage — and sage only | Crucible | Not stated in the source — 待确认 | Plant Ash |
| Quicklime | Stone | Grinder | ~9 seconds | Quicklime |
| Quicklime powder | Quicklime | Crucible | ~9 seconds | Quicklime Powder |
Plant ash comes from sage and nothing else, burned in a crucible. Quicklime powder comes from quicklime, and quicklime in turn comes from stone — so the stone line is two steps deep: grind the stone, then burn the result. That consistent build speed across the chain is what makes the module's output predictable, which is the property the whole ratio calculation depends on.
The fertilizer chain breakdown covers the same steps with the nursery maths spelled out.
What one module contains
The documented module is small and repeatable: three crucibles and three grinders, plus the furnaces that supply their heat, and a fuel line that turns wood into charcoal powder to keep the build running. The finished design is compact enough to be treated as a single block and repeated along a wall.
Built this way it produces about 20 fertilizer per minute — three crucible-equivalents running at roughly 6.7 per minute each. Output does not need hand-collecting: it goes back onto the main belt through a launcher.
The fertilizer blueprint page walks the same module through its two input chains.
Ratios: how many nurseries one module feeds
This is where the less cheerful half of the design shows up.
| Quantity | Value |
|---|---|
| Fertilizer produced by one module | ~20 per minute |
| Fertilizer used by one nursery | ~5 per minute (one item every 12 seconds) |
| Raw consumers supported | 4 |
| Consumers actually supported | 3 nurseries — one of the four is the module feeding itself |
| Net output per module once self-fed | ~15 per minute |
| Four modules on one belt | ~60 per minute, enough for 12 nurseries |
For every fertilizer module you build you can only feed three nurseries, which is less than it sounds when a single farm block already wants several. The answer is to build the module in bulk: four of them put 60 fertilizer per minute onto one belt, and at a 5-per-minute draw that is exactly enough for 12 nurseries.
That belt figure is also the reason to plan the farming floor and the fertilizer line together, instead of bolting on one module at a time.
Fuel efficiency is mandatory for the self-fuel loop
The single most important caveat about this design: it does not work without at least one fuel-efficiency upgrade, and two is preferable for a smooth line.
Without it, the amount of wood converted into charcoal powder is not enough to feed the build itself. The module stutters, and as it stutters it spills its output instead of delivering it. If your fertilizer line keeps dumping product, check this first rather than the belt layout.
The fuel and heat reference explains how the heat draw behind that loop is calculated, the fuel tier comparison ranks the alternatives, and the charcoal powder blueprint covers the conversion side.
Kickstarting the loop by hand
The chain has a bootstrapping problem. The sage that becomes plant ash has to be grown, and the nursery growing it needs fertilizer that the module has not produced yet. Nothing in the design can start itself.
The fix in the source playthrough is to seed it by hand: take a stack of fertilizer out of storage and feed it in before the loop takes over. About 100 units was enough to get that particular build running. Treat the figure as an illustration rather than a rule — how much you need depends on how long your sage nursery takes to come online. 待确认.
Scaling up: advanced fertilizer and flax
Once the basic loop is stable, the intended upgrade is to convert fertilizer into advanced fertilizer, described in the source as far more valuable per unit. Better fertilizer also makes the nurseries themselves produce faster — the improvement is described as a large jump rather than an incremental one.
Flax is one of the crops those nurseries drive. The playthrough quotes the flax fields at around 30 per minute, against the 20 per minute a fertilizer module produces — which is why the module count, not the crop count, ends up limiting a farming floor. The exact flax rate and its unit are read off on-screen footage and stay 待确认.
What fertilizer unlocks next: glass, then a vitality potion
The documented path onward runs through glass. Glass is sand fired in a kiln at roughly 6 seconds per item, so it is a simple build — but a copper casting recipe already wants 60 glass, which makes glass the next real bottleneck rather than fertilizer.
Glass then feeds a blender, and the blender is what a vitality potion needs: a longer, more complex build than anything in the fertilizer line, but one that starts from the same stable base. The recipes hub explains where each of those steps sits in the wider Inputs–Device–Outputs structure.
Plan fertilizer with the production planner
Fertilizer demand scales with the number of nurseries, so it pays to plan both together. The production planner and calculator lets you set skill levels, production targets and available resources, then works out the machines, heat, inputs and outputs a plan needs. The fertilizer calculator page covers the ratio arithmetic on its own, and the wiki overview covers the surrounding systems.
What stays unconfirmed
The craft time for the fertilizer step itself, the plant-ash craft time, and the exact sage-to-plant-ash yield were not stated in the source and are 待确认. The fertilizer step's machine is likewise unnamed in the source. The flax output rate is quoted from let's-play footage without a clear unit and is also 待确认, as are advanced-fertilizer bonus values, machine footprints, and the belt routing of a published blueprint.
The 20-per-minute module output, the 20-to-5 nursery ratio, the 1:3 planning rule and the fuel-efficiency requirement all come from the same community playthrough and are worth re-checking against your own build before you commit to a large farming floor.