Cogwheel

A node-based visual factory planner for Create and other recipe-driven mods. Plan your factory as a graph before you build it.

Cogwheel is an in-game factory designer built on the same wavelength as Satisfactory's blueprint tool. Press a single key, and instead of throwing recipes into a wiki, you wire them up on a canvas — Cogwheel does the throughput math, tracks Create's stress for you, and warns when your kinetic budget can't keep up.

It works as a planning notebook for any modpack with recipes, but it really shines next to Create.

✨ Features at a glance

• 🎛️ Visual graph editor — drag recipes onto a canvas, connect outputs to inputs, watch your factory take shape before you place a single block.
• ⚡ Create stress calculation — every Create-backed recipe knows its SU draw at any RPM. Mixer at 128 RPM? 512 SU. The math just shows up.
• 🔋 Cross-factory power sources — define your steam engines, windmills or flywheels once, assign factories to them, get warned the moment your budget tips over.
• 🌀 Sequenced assembly auto-expands — drop a Precision Mechanism recipe and Cogwheel unfolds it into a locked cluster with all five steps, the loop control, and the right SU sum.
• 🔁 Loop nodes — gate a chain with a Loop node that runs the contained recipes N times. Connect via the violet bottom-port ports.
• 📚 Multiple factories per save — separate JSON file per factory in cogwheel/factories/, switchable from the left panel, easy to share.
• 🔗 Cross-factory wiring — export an item from Factory A and import it as a source in Factory B by reference.
• 🧩 Clusters — group any selection into a sub-graph (USER cluster) or get auto-built ones (LOCKED) from sequenced recipes. Edit clusters in-place.
• 🎨 Fully themeable — every color, every text scale, every panel size is configurable from a tabbed settings page.
• 🔍 JEI integration — recipe pickers render JEI's own categories. Right-click any picker row to jump straight to JEI's full recipe view.

🚀 Getting started

Press K in-game (or whatever you've bound Open Factory Editor to) to open the editor.

From left to right:

1. Categories panel (left side): browse Recipes, Sources, Sinks, Outputs, Logic, Factories, Power sources, Settings.
2. Canvas: pan with middle-mouse, zoom with scroll, drop items here to add nodes.
3. Properties panel (right side): right-click any node → Edit, or double-click. Configure parallelism, RPM, recipe variant, port pairing.
4. Solver overlay (bottom): live readout of what your factory needs, produces, and wastes — plus RPM and SU draw against your assigned power source.

Adding nodes: drag an item or logic block from the left panel onto the canvas. Items land where you drop them.

🔧 Create integration

Cogwheel reads Create's stress-impact tables and recipe types directly. Every Create recipe is recognized and contributes its SU draw at the configured RPM:

Per-factory and per-recipe RPM

Each factory has a default RPM (1–256). Each Create recipe node and each cluster can either inherit that RPM or override it with its own value via a checkbox in the properties panel.

Sequenced assembly clusters

Drop a Precision Mechanism, Track, or Brass Casing recipe and Cogwheel builds an entire LOCKED cluster for you — every step in order, the right ingredients flowing through, a Loop node showing the iteration count.

⚡ Power sources

Power sources live outside any single factory. Create them once in the Power category (left panel) with a name and an SU capacity:

• Steam Engine — 16,384 SU
• Big windmill array — 4,096 SU

Then assign each factory to a power source via the ⚡ button on the Factories page. Cogwheel sums SU draw across every factory pointing at the same source and:

• 🟢 Green: comfortably within budget
• 🟠 Orange: nearly at capacity
• 🔴 Red ⚠: over budget — by exactly how much

🎨 Settings

Three tabs in the settings page:

• Colors — every node body, border, port dot, edge, canvas background. Click the swatch, pick a color from the HSV picker, done.
• Texts — text colors and the two scale knobs (node text scale, sidepanel text scale).
• Cogwheel — behavior toggles. Hide vanilla recipes from the picker so your modded factory isn't drowned in compaction recipes. Ponder integration is on the roadmap.

📦 Logic nodes

In addition to recipes, sources, and sinks, the Logic category has:

• Splitter — 1 input, 2–8 outputs. Configurable distribution mode.
• Merger — 2–8 inputs, 1 output.
• Limiter — caps the rate of flow on a single line.
• Void — discards items (useful for modeling waste on purpose).
• Cluster — empty user-created sub-graph for grouping.
• Loop — gates a chain to run N iterations per cycle.

📋 Requirements

The mod is client-side only — no server install needed.

🗺️ Roadmap

Things I'm planning but haven't shipped yet:

• 🎬 Ponder integration — auto-build example contraptions for your factories.
• ⚡ Bottleneck-aware solver (real backpressure modeling).
• 🪶 Per-output weights / fixed rates on Splitter and Merger.
• 🔗 Better Create addon coverage (CC&A, Create: New Age, etc).

If you want to ask for a feature or report a bug, head to the issues page.

🤝 Compatibility notes

• Designed for modpacks heavy in Create + addons, but works fine as a vanilla planner too.
• Recipe enumeration goes through JEI, so any mod that ships JEI categories will have its recipes pickable.
• Cogwheel doesn't change any in-world behavior — it's a planning surface. Your factory still has to be built by hand. (For now.)

👤 Credits

Made by Kima. Built on NeoForge + JEI + Mojang Codec. Stress values cross-checked against the Create wiki.

Source / issues: Github