Introducing Modulus Academy

Hey Module Makers!

If you've been following along with our Modulus Academy video series, you'll know that Creative Director David has been dropping some seriously useful tips for getting the most out of your factory. Whether you missed an episode or just want a handy written reference, here's a rundown of everything covered so far.

The first episode laid the groundwork with one of the most fundamental concepts in Modulus: identifying and eliminating bottlenecks.

David walked through a basic production line, four miners feeding a furnace, a cutter, and an assembler, to demonstrate a common pitfall. The miners produce 60 polyrock per minute, the furnace processes that into 15 cubes, the cutter slices each cube into 4 pieces (60 pieces per minute total), and it all looks great... until it hits the assembler. The assembler can only take in 15 pieces per minute on each input, meaning it consumes just 30 of the 60 pieces being produced. Half your output is going to waste.

The fix? Double up your assemblers. By running two assemblers in parallel, you consume all 60 pieces per minute and jump from 15 modules per minute to 30, using exactly the same upstream resources.

David also showed a smarter, more space-efficient alternative: using two furnaces feeding an assembler to first create a larger intermediate module, then cutting that bigger module into four pieces. The result is 60 final pieces per minute in a much more compact footprint.
The lesson here is that the order of operations matters. Thinking carefully about which step comes first can unlock serious efficiency gains without needing more floor space.

Episode two stepped up in complexity, moving from individual production lines to efficiently supplying an entire building, in this case, the Basic Blue Pigment Refinery.

The key insight is that a well-run building should never be waiting on modules, and no module you produce should go to waste. To achieve that, you need to match your production ratios to what the building actually requires.

David's process breaks down into a few steps:

Check the module requirements. The refinery needs three different modules, one of them required 32 times, the other two 16 times each. That's a 2 : 1 : 1 ratio.

Match your production to that ratio. Since each module is 64 voxels (one full cube's worth), you allocate two cubes of production to the first module and one cube each to the others. This gives you 30 per minute of the first module, and 15 per minute of each of the others, a perfect 2 : 1 : 1 match.

Set your crane ratios correctly. Cranes always operate at 15 deliveries per minute, so delivering 30 per minute requires two cranes, and 15 per minute requires one. If your crane ratios are off, the building will sit idle waiting for the slower module to catch up, even if the other modules are fully stocked. Getting this right means all modules are delivered and consumed simultaneously.

Don't forget production-phase resources. Once the building is fully constructed and begins producing, it may require additional resources. In the refinery example, that's blue hexa crystals. The same crane ratio logic applies, match the crane count to your production rate so nothing clogs up or falls behind.

When everything is dialled in, the refinery produces a clean 15 blue pigment per minute. As David points out, 15 is the magic number in Modulus, everything in the game works in multiples of it.

The most recent episode tackles a resource that players often burn through without realising: paint.

David opened with an honest admission, the example setup he built was deliberately inefficient to illustrate the problem. Building the modules for the Droid Assembly using three separate painters results in 45 paint consumed per minute to produce 45 modules. It works, but it's wasteful, especially as your factory scales.

The core problem is a common instinct: make your shapes first, then paint the individual pieces. This means you're running paint through the machine multiple times across multiple parts.

The smarter approach is to paint earlier in the process, before you cut and assemble. By painting the raw cube blue at the start of the production chain, every piece cut from it is already the right colour. You don't need additional painters downstream. The result in David's improved setup: the same 45 modules per minute, but using only 15 paint per minute, a threefold saving.

For more advanced factories, David shared an even more efficient technique: combine multiple furnace outputs into one large block, paint that block once, then cut it down into smaller pieces. Because paint in Modulus coats an entire object regardless of its size in a single application, painting at the largest possible volume before cutting gives you the best paint-per-piece ratio you can achieve.

The takeaway: always ask yourself where in the order of operations you can apply paint to cover the most surface for the least cost.

That's the full Modulus Academy catch-up! Make sure you're following us on Steam so you don't miss the next episode. See you on the factory floor.

- Team Happy Volcano