Assignment 1

A bottleneck-diagnosis report on a supplied mid-game save, covering everything from balancer theory to rail intersections.

Due: 25 September 2026 · Weight: 20%

The brief#

You are handed a save that runs, but under-produces. Find out why, and fix it.

The supplied base looks fine at a glance — belts are full, furnaces are smoking, nothing is on fire. The point of this assignment is that “looks fine” and “is fine” are different claims. Somewhere in the chain from ore to finished product there is a ratio that doesn’t hold, a buffer that’s starved, or a splitter quietly feeding one side more than the other. Your job is to find the actual constraint — the one thing that, if relieved, raises overall output — and say how you know it’s that one and not something else that merely looks suspicious.

What you submit#

Your modified save file, plus a short written report: what the bottleneck was, the measurements or ratios that prove it, the fix you applied, and the throughput before and after. A report that names the right bottleneck but can’t show its working scores lower than one that shows the working, even if the fix is the same.