Craftbot Upgrades, Slots and Crafting Time Explained

The five accepted Craftbot profiles expose 2, 4, 6, 8, and 8 slots. Their speed values are 1, 1, 1, 1, and 2. The final upgrade therefore improves speed without adding a ninth or tenth queue position. Looking only at visible slot count misses the main level-five benefit.

A slot is a place to hold work. Speed changes timed execution. Parallel behavior determines whether more than one active slot advances at once. These three properties must be compared separately before estimating the return on an upgrade.

For accepted timed crafter data, batch time is ceiling(recipe craft time ÷ crafter speed) × 40 ticks. The ceiling is applied before conversion to ticks. If the source craft time is odd and speed is 2, the result rounds up to the next whole time unit rather than producing a fractional step.

This formula estimates station execution, not the entire player journey. Ingredient transport, fuel or power constraints, manual loading, collection, and movement between facilities can dominate a small recipe. Use calculated batch time as a production baseline, then add the operational work your layout requires.

Craftbot and Sawtable profiles can advance multiple active jobs in parallel. Other audited timed stations use their first active slot for execution even when they expose additional queue capacity. The Dressbot has one slot. A full queue is therefore not universal evidence of simultaneous production.

This distinction changes factory sizing. If a station is serial, adding queued jobs improves convenience but not current-batch throughput. If it is parallel, loading several independent jobs can reduce wall-clock completion time. Compare the station profile before multiplying throughput by slot count.

At speed 2, the timed formula can nearly halve a long batch, but ceiling makes short or odd-duration recipes deviate from a perfect ratio. Real production can improve even less when inputs arrive slowly, outputs back up, or the player cannot keep all useful slots supplied.

Measure the bottleneck before upgrading. If the Craftbot is continuously busy with materials waiting, speed is valuable. If it frequently idles because a refinery or harvest process cannot feed it, improving the upstream constraint may deliver more output per minute.

Convert every required output to whole batches, apply the station's speed formula, and group work by station profile. For parallel stations, model simultaneously active jobs; for serial stations, sum executed batches in queue order. Keep transport and manual tasks as a separate allowance rather than hiding them inside recipe time.

The resulting estimate is useful for comparing layouts, not predicting an exact finish second under every condition. Use the crafting planner for deterministic batches and station time, then keep physics load, player behavior, shared inputs, and collection delays as explicit live variables.

• Slots measure queued capacity.
• Speed changes the timed batch formula.
• Parallel execution is station-specific.
• Utilization reveals whether the crafter is the real bottleneck.