Alchemy Factory Thermal Extractor Height Bonus

The two ways to make a liquid

Liquids in Alchemy Factory have no flow rate and no head: “if connected to liquid, then travel through pipe and go wherever it wants.” That makes it natural to put every extractor on the roof and pipe down, and it is why the comparison below only cares about machine count, fertiliser and fuel.

• Standard extractor. Any height, no fuel, 100 fruit wine a minute each in the comparison’s default settings.
• Thermal Extractor. Sits on a furnace, so it needs fuel, but gains a production multiplier with height. Guides report the maximum at 17 storeys in one build and at an in-game height readout of 273 (19 floors, mostly double height) in another, both giving 200% output.

The 1,200-a-minute comparison

The February 2026 comparison used the brandy chain (1,200 fruit wine per 480 brandy) with default rates and no upgrades:

The thermal route costs about 26% more per unit and trades fertiliser for fuel. The author’s conclusion: “I don’t think raw cost should be the entire differentiator… weigh factors like size, density, what you’re making your fuel and fertilizer out of, where your bottlenecks are.”

At 5,400 a minute

Scaled up, both routes needed 18 thermal extractors and three plants, or a stack of standard ones with 108 advanced fertiliser a minute. The thermal version ran on half a belt of black powder across three furnaces in a manifold, or on 130-odd coke powder a minute if you insisted on coke, so “your constraint is really on fuel, not on fertilizer.” The standard version’s constraint was fertiliser and floor height: a three-high stack fits a single-storey floor, a four-high stack wants double height, and either can go higher because no furnace is needed. The author, who had “always been using thermal extraction and evangelizing it,” came away impressed by the standard route.

The achievement

Watch Your Step! (“Build a Thermal Extractor with maximum production multiplier”, 2.4% of players) is exactly the max-height build above. It also implies the height rule: nothing stops you building a tower on the starter plot, which The Architect run relies on.

Which fuel up there

The heat page covers sizing: a furnace under a thermal extractor draws the extractor’s fixed P value, and since 1.0 nothing for itself. Black powder halved the belt count in the comparison and had its heat value doubled in June 2026, so a comparison recorded before then undervalues it. The Alchemy skill raises extractor and alembic output in the late game, which is the other lever.

Sources: Uglarvisk, “Comparing Thermal Extractors with Standard Extractors” (24 February 2026, transcript); Timm Plays Games, 50 tips (5 January 2026, transcript) for the 273 height and 19-floor build; v0.5.4467 notes (2 June 2026); Steam global achievement stats (9 September 2026); 1.0 Patch Notes.