Shotgun Shell

Lore & Background

In the sprawling, rust-streaked world of Factorio, the Shotgun Shell represents the moment a lone engineer stops fending off spitters with a pistol and starts putting down genuine suppressive fire. The recipe is deceptively simple on the surface—iron, copper, plastic—but that plastic bar quietly drags the entire petroleum pipeline into the picture. A furnace that once only turned ore into plate now sits beside a Chemical Plant belching grey vapour, and the factory's character shifts from artisanal workshop to genuine industry. Fictionally, the shotgun itself feels like a relic of a pre-industrial world: a pump-action, wide-bore tool that predates the sleek energy weapons and railguns that will eventually line the player's inventory. The shell it fires is a crude cartridge, a cylinder of iron and copper wrapped around a plastic propellant, and the way it sprays a fan of pellets across a cluster of biters gives it a satisfying, almost theatrical violence that no laser beam can quite replicate. For the player, the Shotgun Shell is also a teaching tool. Crafting it forces you to understand that plastic is not a free resource, that water must be pumped, that crude oil must be refined, and that every extra processing stage multiplies your factory's footprint. It is the recipe that whispers: the factory is no longer just about iron and copper.

In Their Own Story

The spitters came in a wave, three dozen of them, their mouths open in that wet, clicking hiss. Mara didn't panic. She'd been watching the conveyor for six minutes, counting the pellets she'd fed into the shotgun's magazine from a neat little stack of shells, each one a tiny cylinder of iron and copper with a plastic core that smelled faintly of petroleum. She racked the bolt. The action felt heavy, oiled, reliable—nothing like the humming energy rifle she'd built last week and already found too fussy. The shotgun was honest. You pointed it, you pulled the trigger, and a fan of lead tore through the air with a crack that made the nearby assembler shudder on its rails. The first spitter hit by the spray simply stopped existing, reduced to a puff of green ichor. The second and third went down in the same burst. Mara racked the bolt again, fed another shell from the stack, and watched the remaining spitters scatter back into the dirt. Behind her, the Chemical Plant exhaled a long grey plume into the orange sky, and the oil refinery hummed its low, endless hum. The factory was alive, and it was feeding her.

Reader's Guide

Shotgun Shell: 1 Iron Plate + 1 Copper Plate + 1 Plastic Bar → 1 Shotgun Shell, crafted in any Furnace. The 1:1:1 input ratio is straightforward, but the Plastic Bar is the chain's complexity anchor. Upstream for Plastic Bar: 1 Plastic → 2 Plastic Bars (Assembling Machine). Plastic itself comes from 2 Petroleum + 1 Water → 4 Plastic (Chemical Plant). Petroleum is a byproduct of the Oil Refinery (Crude Oil in, Light Oil + Heavy Oil + Petroleum out), and Water is drawn from a Water Pump at a water source. Iron and Copper plates are simple: ore → plate in a Furnace. Downstream: Shotgun Shells feed the Shotgun, which is crafted from 1 Iron Plate, 2 Copper Plate, 1 Plastic Bar, and 1 Electronic Circuit at a Crafting Table or Assembling Machine. The Shotgun then serves as a weapon for the player or can be used in defensive setups. The typical bottleneck is the Petroleum/Plastic pipeline, since it introduces the Oil Refinery, Chemical Plant, and Water Pump—three machines that have no other early purpose. Iron and Copper smelting is rarely the limiting factor. As the factory scales, you will likely already be producing Plastic for other recipes (storage, circuits, etc.), so the marginal cost of shells drops. Aim to keep a small buffer of shells in a chest near your crafting station; a ratio of roughly 10 shells per shotgun in inventory is a comfortable safety margin for early raids.

Did You Know?

• The Shotgun Shell is one of the few early-game recipes that forces the player to build a Chemical Plant and Oil Refinery, effectively introducing the petroleum chain before any fuel or advanced plastic products are neede
• Because the shell is crafted in a Furnace rather than an Assembling Machine, it can be produced even in a factory that has not yet built a single assembler, making it accessible very early in the game.
• The Shotgun's wide pellet spread means a single shell can hit multiple enemies simultaneously, giving it a per-shell kill efficiency that no other early weapon matches in dense biter clusters.
• The 1:1:1 iron-copper-plastic ratio means that if you are already producing Plastic Bars for other recipes, the marginal resource cost of each additional shell is essentially just one iron plate and one copper plate.