The three Rubber recipes, side by side
Rubber shares its building and its oil feed with Plastic, and the cached recipe table gives two standard routes plus one Hard Drive alternate:
| Recipe | Machine | Cycle | Solid input (per min) | Output (per craft) | Output (per min) | Unlock |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rubber | Refinery | 6 s | oil feed (fluid, see note) | 2 | 20/min | Tier 5 - Oil Processing |
| Residual Rubber | Refinery | 6 s | Polymer Resin 4 (40/min) | 2 | 20/min | Tier 5 - Oil Processing |
| Recycled Rubber | Refinery | 12 s | Plastic 6 (30/min) | 12 | 60/min | Hard Drive after Tier 5 |
“Recycled Rubber: 6 Plastic in, 12 Rubber out, 12 s cycle, 30 Plastic per minute in and 60 Rubber per minute out” — the row mirrored from the satisfactory.wiki.gg recipe table into
src/data/satisfactory-recipes.json.
The default figure is 20 Rubber per minute per Refinery, identical to the plastic rate. The recycled alternate is three times that, and the residual recipe is the cheapest way to turn an oil byproduct into a usable item.
As with plastic, a data note: the cached rows carry solid item inputs and outputs, so the crude oil feed on the default recipe and the water feed on the recycled one appear in the game’s fluid system rather than as per-minute item columns. All the item rates, cycle times, ratios and machine counts below are lifted from the recipe rows themselves.
Machine counts for a rubber line
The arithmetic is the same as plastic, so the two lines are easy to size together on one oil block:
| Target rubber | Default Refineries (20/min each) | Recycled Refineries (60/min each) | Plastic feed if recycled |
|---|---|---|---|
| 40/min | 2 | 1 (with 20/min spare) | 30/min |
| 60/min | 3 | 1 | 30/min |
| 120/min | 6 | 2 | 60/min |
| 240/min | 12 | 4 | 120/min |
Note what the last column does to your oil base. Four Recycled Refineries making 240 rubber per minute eat 120 Plastic per minute, which is six standard plastic refineries running flat out. You cannot run a large recycled rubber line and a large recycled plastic line from the same modest oil base — the two recipes compete for the same item.
Residual Rubber is the cheapest resin conversion
Compare the two residual recipes directly, because the difference decides which byproduct outlet to build:
| Recipe | Resin in (per craft) | Resin per min | Output per min | Resin per unit of output |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Residual Rubber | 4 | 40/min | 20 Rubber/min | 2.0 |
| Residual Plastic | 6 | 60/min | 20 Plastic/min | 3.0 |
Sixty Polymer Resin per minute is worth 30 Rubber or 20 Plastic. If your oil block is throwing resin and you need both items, send the resin to rubber first and cover plastic demand from the default crude oil recipe — you get 50% more items per unit of resin that way.
Residual Rubber also has the nicer machine footprint for a small base: two Refineries consume 80 resin per minute and hand back 40 rubber per minute, which is enough to feed a single Heavy Flexible Frame Manufacturer at partial rate or a Heat Exchanger line. Compare that with the default recipe, where the same 40 rubber per minute costs two refineries and a slice of crude oil.
Recycled Rubber and the loop with plastic
Recycled Rubber is the mirror of Recycled Plastic. It takes 6 Plastic per 12-second craft (30 Plastic per minute) and returns 12 Rubber (60 per minute). Run one Recycled Plastic Refinery next to one Recycled Rubber Refinery and the pair nets +30 plastic and +30 rubber per minute while consuming no solid item inputs from outside the loop.
That is why late-game oil blocks are built as loop pairs rather than as long chains of default refineries. The catch is power and routing: two Refineries plus the belts between them, producing two item streams you must keep consumed. A loop with an unconsumed half is worse than no loop at all, because the surplus item backs up and stalls both machines.
The other catch is scale discipline. If your plastic demand is 40/min and your rubber demand is 30/min, you do not need a 60/60 loop — one Recycled Plastic Refinery (60/min) and one default Rubber bank (three refineries at 20/min) is closer to the actual requirement and far cheaper in power.
What actually consumes rubber
Rubber is the flexible half of the oil economy: it goes into frames, motors and cables rather than into electronics. The heaviest entries from the cached consumption table:
| Consumer recipe | Rubber per min | Where it sits |
|---|---|---|
| Heavy Flexible Frame (alternate) | 75 | late-game frame alternate |
| Turbo Motor (standard) | 45 | 24 per craft on a 32 s cycle |
| Radio Control System (alternate) | 45 | 30 per craft, 4.5/min output |
| Heat Exchanger (alternate) | 30 | Cooling System feeder |
| Insulated Cable (alternate) | 30 | 6 per craft, 100 cable/min |
| Flexible Framework (alternate) | 30 | steel-and-rubber frame chain |
| Caterium Computer (alternate) | 22.5 | 6 per craft |
| Electrode Circuit Board (alternate) | 20 | coke-based boards |
| Rubber Concrete (alternate) | 20 | limestone-saving concrete |
| Quickwire Cable (alternate) | 5 | low-volume cable recipe |
Two of those deserve attention because they dominate planning. Turbo Motor at 45 rubber per minute means every Turbo Motor Manufacturer needs two and a quarter default rubber refineries behind it, before you count the Cooling System feeding it. Heavy Flexible Frame at 75 rubber per minute is the single largest rubber sink in the table and the reason many players build a dedicated rubber bank once Tier 4 frames come online — see the Heavy Modular Frame chain for how the alternates reshape that line.
Design rules that follow from these numbers
- Build rubber and plastic as one block, not two. Both recipes run in Refineries at 20/min and both draw from the same oil feed. Planning them together means one shared fluid manifold instead of two half-used ones.
- Send resin to rubber unless plastic is short. Two resin becomes one rubber, three resin becomes one plastic; the 2:1 route stretches a byproduct further.
- Keep a sink for the surplus half of any recycled loop. A loop pair makes 30 plastic and 30 rubber per minute net, and the AWESOME Sink at 60 points per rubber is the safety valve when one half outruns demand.
- Buffer rubber before frame and motor lines. Rubber arrives from a refinery in a steady 20/min but the consumers take 45 and 75 per minute in bursts of craft cycles; a small buffer stops the whole bank from idling.
For the fluid side of the oil base, the oil and byproducts guide covers pipe routing, and the production ratio walkthrough turns these per-minute figures into a machine list for any target output.