Military 23

Lore & Background

In the official Factorio world, the military research tree is a carefully bounded ladder: gun turret, flamethrower, tank, laser turret, artillery wagon, and finally the railgun. Six steps, each one a meaningful escalation in defensive firepower. The biters, the spitters, the behemoths—they all fall within the envelope of what those six technologies can handle. There is no seventh rung, no hidden unlock, no secret military tier waiting past the railgun. And yet the community keeps counting upward. 'Military 23' surfaces in forum posts, Reddit threads, and mod descriptions as a kind of aspirational placeholder: the hypothetical technology a player would need if the biter hordes scaled to thousands, if a single save stretched past three years, if the factory's perimeter wall had to repel something no longer merely a group of spitters but an entire ecosystem. It is less a technology and more a feeling—the quiet dread of a player staring at a biter swarm that has outgrown their railgun battery and wondering, 'What would tier seven even be?'

In mod packs that extend the military tree, the numbers climb past six, and 'Military 23' can appear as a late-game unlock in a 50+ tier research chain. In those contexts it is a real, functional technology within that mod's own rules, but it carries no weight in the base game's canon. The fan encyclopedia records it here because the community treats it as a shared myth: the tier beyond the tier, the defense that should exist but doesn't, the final answer to a problem the base game simply does not pose.

In Their Own Story

The save was four thousand hours old. Mara had long since stopped counting the turrets—there were too many, arranged in concentric rings around the factory like the growth rings of a dead tree. Railguns hummed in the outermost ring, their plasma bolts stitching the sky with violet threads every time a behemoth crested the ridge. Inside, laser turrets painted the air with red. Inside that, gun turrets clicked and spat. And at the very center, the flamethrower, almost a joke now, a relic from the first week when a single spitter had nearly killed her. She opened the research menu one more time, scrolling down the military column. Military 1. Military 2. Military 3. Military 4. Military 5. Military 6. The list ended. A clean, finite list. She stared at the empty space below Military 6, at the grey void where a seventh row should have been, and felt the familiar, irrational itch. *What would they have put there? A cannon that fires other cannons? A turret that builds turrets? A wall that thinks?*

She closed the menu. The railguns sang. The biter swarm thinned by one, then two, then a dozen. The factory breathed. There was no Military 23. There never would be. And somehow, in the humming silence between plasma bolts, that was enough.

Reader's Guide

There is no 'Military 23' to research in the base game. The military research tree is a fixed, six-entry chain: Military 1 (Gun Turret) → Military 2 (Flamethrower) → Military 3 (Tank) → Military 4 (Laser Turret) → Military 5 (Artillery Wagon) → Military 6 (Railgun). Each tier requires the previous one, and the chain typically sits in the mid-to-late game, after the player has secured a stable iron, steel, and plastic supply. If you encounter 'Military 23' in a mod pack or a shared blueprint, it is a mod-defined technology with its own cost, prerequisites, and unlock. The blueprint system in Factorio lets players save any layout—factory, rail network, defense perimeter—and share it via code or file. A blueprint referencing a mod technology will only load if the recipient has that mod installed; otherwise the entities simply will not appear. This is how community designs that include extended military tiers circulate: they are mod-dependent, and the '23' is just the mod author's numbering. For base-game players, the practical advice is straightforward: build your defense in layers. Gun turrets for small biter swarms, laser turrets for spitters and medium groups, tanks for mobile response, artillery for area denial, and railguns as your final, expensive, high-impact answer. Six tiers is the whole story. The rest is imagination.

Did You Know?

• Factorio's base-game military research tree contains exactly six technologies, from Gun Turret to Railgun. There is no seventh entry, hidden or otherwise.
• The Railgun, the final military tier, fires a single high-damage plasma bolt and is one of the most expensive single-entity constructions in the game, requiring advanced circuits and plastic in addition to steel.
• In the base game, the military tree is the only research chain that is strictly linear with no branching—each tier is a direct prerequisite for the next, with no parallel military paths.
• The community phrase 'military 23' (or similar high numbers) is a recurring joke in Factorio forums, expressing the wish for an ever-deeper defense tier that the game's design intentionally does not provide.