Cannon

Lore & Background

In the Factorio world, the factory is not merely a collection of assemblers and conveyors; it is a living organism that must defend itself against the encroaching wilderness. The biters that swarm the edges of the base are the first warning, but the spitters, lizards, and the larger creatures that emerge in later biomes demand something more than a ring of gun turrets. The Cannon fills that gap. It is the industrial answer to the question 'what do we do when the thing shooting back is bigger than us?' A single cannonball, hurled with the force of a small locomotive, can level a spitter before it finishes its next volley. It is not fast—its reload is measured in seconds, not milliseconds—but the damage per shot dwarfs anything the gun turret can muster. For the player, the Cannon is a rite of passage. Crafting one requires a working steel production line, a stable power grid, and the confidence that your base is big enough to warrant it. Placing the first Cannon on the perimeter and watching it annihilate a spitter that would have shredded a turret is, for many, the moment the factory stops feeling like a project and starts feeling like a civilization.

In Their Own Story

The alarm klaxon had been screaming for eleven seconds. Mara watched from the monitoring terminal as a spitter the size of a small truck crested the ridge, its maw already glowing with the blue-white charge of another plasma bolt. The gun turrets on the east wall were already smoking, their barrels warped, their targeting systems cycling uselessly. She didn't need to issue an order. The Cannon on the north bastion had already tracked the target. The reload bar had been filling for four seconds—she could see it on the minimap, a thin white line creeping toward full. The spitter fired. The bolt arced toward the assembler line. The Cannon fired. The impact was not a sound so much as a pressure wave. The spitter simply… wasn't there anymore. A crater where it had been. A faint smell of ozone and melted polymer drifting across the conveyor belt. The assembler line kept running, oblivious. Mara exhaled, took a sip of cold coffee, and queued up two more Cannons.

Reader's Guide

The Cannon is a defensive structure, not a production machine, so it sits outside the usual input→output loop. Its sole 'input' is electrical power drawn from the grid; it has no product output. Its function is to fire a high-damage projectile at a single enemy within its range, then enter a multi-second reload before it can fire again. It is unlocked by the Cannon technology, which sits in the military research tree. Crafting it requires iron plates and steel plates, meaning you need a functioning steel furnace line before you can even place one. Because it is electrically powered, it must be connected to your power grid—place it near substations or ensure your poles reach it. A Cannon on a dead power line is just expensive scenery. In a production-line context, the Cannon has no throughput or speed in the traditional sense. Its 'throughput' is one shot per reload cycle, aimed at one target. This makes it a single-target weapon: it will not split fire across multiple biters the way a gun turret might. For swarms of small biters, gun turrets remain more efficient. The Cannon shines against high-health targets—spitters, lizards, and the larger creatures in later biomes—where its per-shot damage overwhelms what a turret can chip away at. Adjacency and placement matter. Stacking multiple Cannons on the same wall is possible but wasteful if they all track the same target; spread them along the perimeter instead. Pair them with gun turrets for layered defense: turrets handle the small swarm, the Cannon handles the thing that would kill a turret in one hit. Keep a buffer zone of at least a few tiles between the Cannon and your production structures so that a spitter's retaliatory shot doesn't land on your assemblers while the Cannon is reloading.

Did You Know?

• Unlike the gun turret, which can rapidly fire at multiple small targets, the Cannon is strictly single-target: it locks onto one enemy, fires, then reloads before selecting the next.
• The Cannon's introduction in Factorio 2.0 gave players a meaningful answer to spitters and lizards, creatures whose health pools made gun turrets feel almost ceremonial.
• Because it is electrically powered, a Cannon can be disabled simply by cutting its power supply—useful for conserving grid capacity during a power crisis, though it leaves your base undefended.
• The Cannon's crafting recipe requires steel plates, tying military capability directly to your smelting infrastructure: no steel, no heavy defense.