Offshore Pump

Lore & Background

In the shattered world of Factorio, the player arrives on a desolate alien shore with nothing but a backpack and a handful of raw materials. The first liquid they need is not oil, not petroleum, but something far more elemental: water. The Offshore Pump is the technology that bridges the gap between the planet's abundant surface water and the factory's insatiable thirst. It is a simple, almost archaic device compared to the towering assemblers and roaring furnaces that will later dominate the landscape, yet it never becomes obsolete. Fans often note the poetic contrast: the most complex, sprawling megafactories in the game—circuit boards, processing units, rail networks—all trace their liquid lineage back to a single little pump half-submerged in a quiet bay. The pump itself never upgrades, never gains a speed module, never changes. It simply keeps doing its one quiet job, a constant in a world of ever-escalating industrial ambition. In the game's visual language, its small pipe dipping into the water is a reminder that even the most advanced civilization still depends on the most basic resource. The Offshore Pump also carries a subtle narrative weight. It is one of the very few machines that requires no power, no fuel, no electricity. In a game where nearly every other process demands energy, the pump is a small nod to the idea that some things—clean water, the flow of a river—need no human engineering to exist. You merely have to build a pipe to reach them.

In Their Own Story

The shore was quiet. Not the silence of emptiness, but the silence of a world holding its breath, waiting for the first machine to be placed. She knelt in the wet sand, the Offshore Pump warm in her hands, and set it down where the shallows lapped at the edge of the beach. The little pipe extended into the brine, and within a heartbeat the flow indicator flickered to life. A thin ribbon of water threaded through the pipe and into the small storage tank she'd already built. She watched it for a long moment, the alien sun painting the water in shades of amber and violet. Someday, she knew, there would be hundreds of these pumps, thousands of furnaces, a skyline of smoke and steam stretching to every horizon. But right now, in this first quiet evening, there was just one pump, one pipe, and the steady, patient pulse of water filling a tank. The factory had its first heartbeat.

Reader's Guide

Recipe: Water (from adjacent water tile) → 1.5 liquid water/s. Machine: Offshore Pump (crafting machine, 1×1). No other inputs, no power, no fuel. The only requirement is that a water tile sits within the pump's adjacent range. Downstream consumers of liquid water: • Concrete – 1 sand + 1 water → 1 concrete (produced in a Stone Furnace or Steel Furnace). Concrete feeds into walls, foundations, and later, the physical structure of every factory expansion. • Plastic Bars – 1 petroleum + 1 water → 1 plastic bar (produced in a Chemical Plant). Plastic bars feed into pipes, circuit boards, and processing units. Upstream: There is no upstream crafting chain. Water is a free, ambient resource drawn directly from the environment. The only "input" is the geographic requirement of being near a water body. Bottleneck: The Offshore Pump itself is almost always the limiting factor. At 1.5 water/s, a single pump can only sustain roughly one furnace's worth of concrete production or a fraction of a chemical plant's plastic bar output. Players typically need to build multiple pumps in parallel, and the number scales linearly with the number of concrete-producing furnaces and plastic-producing chemical plants. Scaling: Early game, one or two pumps suffice. Mid-game, as plastic bar demand spikes for pipes and circuits, you may need a small row of pumps. Late-game, with massive concrete output for walls and foundations plus heavy plastic bar consumption, a dedicated "water farm" of dozens of pumps becomes standard. Because pumps are cheap, require no power, and have no fuel cost, the only real constraint is physical space and the availability of adjacent water tiles.

Did You Know?

• The Offshore Pump is one of the very few machines in Factorio that requires absolutely no power or fuel to operate—it simply needs a nearby water tile and a pipe connection.
• Despite being a crafting machine, it does not appear in the 'Crafting' subcategory the way assemblers do; it is listed under 'Production' alongside furnaces and other utility machines.
• A single Offshore Pump at its default speed can only supply water for roughly one Stone Furnace's concrete output, meaning even modest factories quickly need multiple pumps running in parallel.
• The pump's output is liquid water, which must be transported via pipes—meaning the player must also craft pipe segments and a storage tank before the water is actually usable by a furnace or chemical plant.