Shotgun

Lore & Background

In the sparse lore fragments scattered through Factorio's item descriptions and update notes, the Shotgun is presented as a practical field weapon designed for a colonist who expects to face not a single threat but a tide of them. Where the rifle is a surgeon's tool—precise, long-reaching, one target at a time—the Shotgun is the colonist's answer to the moment the spiky things come in dozens. Its design philosophy is blunt: if you cannot pick them off one by one, stop trying. Saturate the area and move on. The weapon's recipe tells a small story of industrial maturation. Iron and copper are the raw bones of any factory; steel adds the structural backbone; electronic circuits whisper that the colony has learned to think in logic gates. But it is the plastic bars that truly mark the threshold. Plastic means oil, and oil means the colonist has stopped merely mining the surface and started cracking the planet's deeper resources. By the time a Shotgun sits in the player's hand, the factory is no longer a lonely smelter in the grass—it is a sprawling, humming ecosystem, and the colonist is no longer a lone survivor but the operator of a machine that out-thinks the enemy. Fans often describe the first Shotgun as a quiet rite of passage. The click of the trigger, the satisfying *thwack-thwack-thwack* of pellets punching through a wall of spiky creatures, the way the kill counter jumps in a single breath—it is the moment the game stops feeling like a survival struggle and starts feeling like a production triumph. The enemy is no longer the obstacle; the enemy is the reason the factory exists, and the Shotgun is the factory's voice saying *not today*.

In Their Own Story

The night the spiky ones came in threes, Maren did not reach for the rifle. She'd learned that lesson the hard way, three weeks ago, when a single long-range shot had bought her two seconds and then the swarm had simply… continued. The rifle was a conversation. The Shotgun was a verdict. She crouched behind the stack of iron plates at the edge of the smelter yard, the plastic bars still warm from the chemical plant's output line, and watched the green shapes pour over the ridge. Dozens. Maybe a hundred. Their spines caught the dim amber glow of the furnace and turned them into a bristling, advancing forest. Maren raised the Shotgun. The cone spread was tight at this range—fifty tiles, maybe sixty. Enough. She pulled the trigger and the pellets fanned out in a flat, killing arc. The front row simply… stopped. Then the row behind them. The sound was not a single crack but a stuttering, percussive *thwack-thwack-thwack* that rolled across the flat terrain and made the distant assembler's gears seem to flinch. She reloaded. Pulled again. The forest thinned. Behind her, the oil refinery hummed its low, oily hymn, and the chemical plant dripped its steady rhythm of plastic bars onto the conveyor. The factory did not notice the battle. It never did. It simply kept making, kept feeding the line, kept turning the planet's raw bones into the tools that let one small colonist stand in the yard and say, with the full weight of a hundred machines behind her: *you will not take this place.*

The last spiky one fell in the grass. Maren lowered the Shotgun, listened to the factory breathe, and walked back to the crafting table to make another.

Reader's Guide

The Shotgun recipe calls for 10 iron plates, 5 copper plates, 5 steel, 5 electronic circuits, and 10 plastic bars, all combined at a crafting table. Breaking down the upstream chain: iron ore feeds an iron smelter for plates; copper ore feeds a copper smelter; iron plates feed a steel furnace for the 5 steel; copper and iron plates feed an assembler for the 5 circuits; and crude oil feeds an oil refinery to produce light oil, which then combines with water in a chemical plant to yield the 10 plastic bars. The critical bottleneck for most players is the plastic bar line. It requires a full oil extraction and refining setup—pumpjack, oil refinery, chemical plant, plus a water source—making it the most infrastructure-heavy ingredient. The steel furnace is a secondary bottleneck since it processes at a slower rate than a regular smelter, so running it on a dedicated input of iron plates is essential. Optimal ratio per Shotgun: 20 iron plates (10 direct + 5 for steel + 5 for circuits), 10 copper plates (5 direct + 5 for circuits), 5 steel, 5 circuits, 10 plastic bars. If you are batch-crafting, aim for a 2:1 iron-to-copper smelting ratio and ensure your oil refinery output matches your chemical plant demand at roughly 1 light oil per plastic bar. As the factory scales, the Shotgun itself becomes trivial to craft; the real scaling challenge is keeping the oil and steel pipelines running at the throughput needed for other mid- and late-game items that share those same inputs. Treat the Shotgun as a checkpoint: once you can craft it casually, your mid-game infrastructure is healthy.

Did You Know?

• The Shotgun is one of the few weapons in Factorio that requires BOTH electronic circuits and plastic bars, placing it at the crossroads of the assembler and petrochemical production trees.
• Because it fires multiple pellets in a cone spread, the Shotgun is significantly more effective against dense enemy groups at close range than the rifle, which deals damage to a single target per shot.
• The Shotgun is crafted at a standard crafting table, not at a machine or assembler, meaning it is a one-time craft with no ongoing production line required.
• Plastic bars, a key Shotgun ingredient, require a chemical plant and a water source in addition to refined oil, making them the most infrastructure-intensive component of the recipe.