The three Plastic recipes, side by side
Plastic is a Refinery product, and the cached recipe table gives three different ways to make the same item. Two are unlocked with the tier and one comes from Hard Drive research:
| Recipe | Machine | Cycle | Solid input (per min) | Output (per craft) | Output (per min) | Unlock |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plastic | Refinery | 6 s | oil feed (fluid, see note) | 2 | 20/min | Tier 5 - Oil Processing |
| Residual Plastic | Refinery | 6 s | Polymer Resin 6 (60/min) | 2 | 20/min | Tier 5 - Oil Processing |
| Recycled Plastic | Refinery | 12 s | Rubber 6 (30/min) | 12 | 60/min | Hard Drive after Tier 5 |
“Plastic: 2 per craft, 6 s cycle, Refinery, 20 per minute” — the row mirrored from the satisfactory.wiki.gg recipe table into
src/data/satisfactory-recipes.json.
The single most useful number on this page is 20 per minute per Refinery. Every plastic plan you build is a multiple of it: 3 Refineries for 60/min, 6 for 120/min, 12 for 240/min. A Refinery is a big, power-hungry building, so machine count is what usually decides whether a plastic line is affordable — not the oil itself.
One transparency note about the data: the cached rows list solid item inputs and outputs. Crude oil and water are fluids, so they are handled by the game’s fluid system and are not broken out as per-minute item columns here. Everything else in this guide — craft counts, cycle times, output rates, resin ratios, machine counts and downstream consumption — comes straight from the recipe rows.
How many Refineries you need
Because every standard plastic recipe lands on the same 20/min output, scaling is a division problem. The alternate column is the interesting one, because Recycled Plastic produces 60/min from a single machine:
| Target plastic | Default Refineries (20/min each) | Recycled Refineries (60/min each) | Rubber feed if recycled |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60/min | 3 | 1 | 30/min |
| 120/min | 6 | 2 | 60/min |
| 240/min | 12 | 4 | 120/min |
| 480/min | 24 | 8 | 240/min |
The Recycled column looks like a straight upgrade, and in machine count it is: one Refinery replaces three. But look at the feed column. Four Recycled Refineries making 240 plastic per minute demand 120 Rubber per minute, which is six Refineries’ worth of rubber production at the standard 20/min rate. You have not removed the oil base; you have moved the burden onto the rubber side of the same oil base.
That is the core decision on every oil block in Satisfactory. Plastic and rubber compete for the same refineries, and the alternates let you shift the balance in either direction instead of building more machines.
Residual Plastic: the byproduct exit
Residual Plastic is the recipe that saves oil bases from jamming. It takes 6 Polymer Resin per craft at 60 Polymer Resin per minute and returns 2 Plastic per craft, 20 per minute — a clean 3 resin to 1 plastic conversion at exactly the same 20/min output rate as the default recipe.
The value is not the rate, it is the input. Polymer Resin is what the oil chain produces alongside its main outputs, and a resin line with no consumer backs up and stops the refineries feeding it. One Residual Plastic Refinery swallows 60 resin per minute and hands you 20 plastic per minute that you did not have to allocate crude oil for. If your oil block is producing resin as a byproduct, this is almost always the first place to send it — and the plastic it makes goes straight into the Circuit Board line two buildings over.
Three Residual Plastic Refineries convert 180 resin per minute into 60 plastic per minute, which is exactly one standard Circuit Board Assembler’s worth of plastic plus spare for a packaging line.
Recycled Plastic and the rubber loop
Recycled Plastic is the highest-yield recipe in the set: 12 Plastic per 12-second craft from 6 Rubber, which is 60 Plastic per minute from 30 Rubber per minute. Per unit of input that is two plastic for every one rubber, and three times the output rate of the default recipe per machine.
The mirror recipe exists too. Recycled Rubber turns 6 Plastic (30/min) into 12 Rubber (60/min). Put one of each side by side and the pair converts 30 rubber into 60 plastic and 30 plastic into 60 rubber every minute, netting +30 plastic and +30 rubber per minute from the same two machines. That amplification is real, and it is why the recycled pair is the standard late-game oil layout — but it costs power for two Refineries and it produces two item streams you now have to route.
The practical limit is downstream appetite, not machine count. If nothing on your map consumes the rubber half, the loop stalls on a full belt just like any other byproduct line. Build the loop when you have both a plastic sink (Circuit Boards, Computers) and a rubber sink (Cooling Systems, Heavy Flexible Frames) already running — see the rubber guide for the other half of the math.
Who actually eats the plastic
Plastic is not a building material, it is an electronics input. The heaviest consumers in the cached consumption table:
| Consumer recipe | Plastic per min | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Supercomputer (standard) | 52.5 | 28 per craft, 32 s Manufacturer cycle |
| Computer (standard) | 40 | 16 per craft, 24 s cycle |
| Circuit Board (standard) | 30 | 4 per craft, 8 s cycle |
| Empty Canister | 30 | packaging line |
| Hazmat Suit | 25 | equipment |
| Classic Battery (alternate) | 60 | 30/min output, 8 plastic per craft |
| Plastic AI Limiter (alternate) | 28 | Quickwire-heavy alternate |
| Caterium Circuit Board (alternate) | 12.5 | swaps copper sheet for Quickwire |
Read that table as a refinery count and the design falls out. A single standard Circuit Board Assembler runs at 7.5 boards per minute and drinks 30 plastic per minute — one and a half default Refineries. A Computer Manufacturer at 2.5 computers per minute drinks 40 plastic per minute, so two refineries per Manufacturer is the right mental model before you add overclocking.
If you are building toward Supercomputers, budget 52.5 plastic per minute for every single Manufacturer running the standard recipe. That is just over two and a half refineries per machine, and the Supercomputer chain also wants Computers underneath it, so the true figure is far higher once you count the Computer Manufacturers feeding it. This is the point where most players abandon the default recipe and switch the oil block to Recycled Plastic.
Building the oil block so the numbers hold
Three habits keep a plastic line at its rated 20/min instead of drifting down:
- Group refineries in threes. 3 Refineries = 60 plastic per minute, 6 = 120, 12 = 240. Wiring the block in fixed groups of three means a starved line is obvious at a glance instead of hiding inside a mixed bank.
- Give plastic its own belt to the electronics block. One Circuit Board Assembler pulls 30/min; two pull 60/min, which is three refineries. Splitting plastic between three consumers with ordinary splitters is how boards end up running at two thirds efficiency.
- Never let the residual outlet fill. Any oil recipe that produces a byproduct stops the moment that byproduct has nowhere to go. Send it to Residual Plastic, or void it deliberately — but decide, do not discover.
If your oil base is already struggling, the oil and byproducts guide covers the fluid routing, and the production ratio walkthrough shows how to scale all of these numbers to a target without hand-multiplying.