Industrial Foregoing is an automation mod built around one idea: if you can farm it, you can automate it. It packs in machines for resource production, mob farming, crop and animal husbandry, ore multiplication, power generation, and a set of over-the-top Infinity Tools, all tied together with the mod's own conveyors and fluid systems. There is no boss to beat and no linear questline, so progress here means building better farms and unlocking stronger machine tiers.
The whole mod runs on a simple loop that repeats at every tier. You extract Latex from logs, turn it into Plastic, and use that Plastic to build machines that gather resources for you. Those resources then feed the next round of crafting in the Dissolution Chamber, which unlocks better machine frames and more powerful machines. This guide walks through that loop from your first Fluid Extractor all the way to the Mycelial Reactor and Infinity Nuke.
One thing worth knowing up front: Industrial Foregoing is deliberately weak at moving items and fluids around. Its Fluid Transporter only pushes fluid a single block, so most players lean on the push and pull settings built into each machine, or pair the mod with a dedicated logistics mod. Keep that in mind as you plan your setups and you will avoid a lot of early frustration.
Getting Started with Industrial Foregoing
Your first goal is Plastic, because almost every machine in the mod needs it. Getting there takes a short chain of machines that you can build with basic materials and no power at all. The steps below take you from an empty world to a working, powered Plastic line that feeds the rest of the mod.
Craft the Industrial Foregoing Manual
Your in-game guide to every machine
Combine a Book, a block of Dirt, and a piece of Redstone to make the Industrial Foregoing manual. Players describe it as the one item that "tells you all the information you possibly require from all aspects of the mod," listing machines roughly in the order you should build them. Keep it in your inventory and open it whenever you are unsure what a machine needs.
Build a Pity Machine Frame
The heart of every early machine
The Pity Machine Frame is the base of every early-game machine, and it is cheap enough that you will make dozens of them. It is crafted from a Redstone block, logs, and Iron, so gather plenty of both before you start. Think of it as the equivalent of a machine casing that the mod stacks other parts onto.
Extract Latex with a Fluid Extractor
Pull Latex out of ordinary logs
The Fluid Extractor is your first real machine, and it pulls Latex out of any log placed in front of it. Each cycle takes about 5 seconds and slowly strips the log until it breaks, so you will need a steady supply of wood. It runs with no power at all, but supplying energy makes it work much faster, and you can point several Extractors at the same log to speed things up.
Early on this feels slow, since the Extractor only holds a small internal buffer of Latex before it stops. A cheap way to keep it running is a Block Placer loaded with logs, which automatically replaces each log as it breaks. Pair a few Extractors with one Block Placer and your Latex production becomes hands-off.
Turn Latex into Plastic
Process Latex into rubber, then smelt it
Pump your Latex into a Latex Processing Unit along with Water, and it produces Dry Rubber. Each piece of Dry Rubber costs 750 millibuckets of Latex and 500 millibuckets of Water, so keep both tanks topped up. If your version outputs Tiny Dry Rubber instead, craft nine of them together into one full Dry Rubber.
Smelt the Dry Rubber in any Furnace and it becomes Plastic. This is the single most important material in the mod, since it goes into nearly every machine you will ever build. Once you have a small stockpile, add a Water Condensator next to a pool of water to feed the Processing Unit automatically instead of hauling Water buckets by hand.
Power Everything with a Pitiful Generator
A simple coal-burning generator
The Pitiful Generator is your first power source, and it burns coal or any other furnace fuel to make energy. It produces 30 FE per tick and stores up to 100,000 FE internally, which is enough to speed up your early Extractors and run the Latex Processing Unit. It is weak, hence the name, but it gets you off the ground before you build proper generators later.
You do not need power for your very first Extractor. Build one Fluid Extractor by hand, make just enough Plastic for a Block Placer and a Water Condensator, and only then loop the power back in. Chasing full automation before you have any Plastic is the most common way new players stall out.
Machine Frames and the Dissolution Chamber
Progression in Industrial Foregoing is measured in machine frames, and every higher-tier machine needs a higher-tier frame to craft. The Pity Machine Frame is just the start; the better frames are all made in the Dissolution Chamber, which dissolves items in a fluid bath to produce components, frames, add-ons, lenses, and Infinity Tools. Understanding this one machine unlocks most of the mod.
Building the Dissolution Chamber
The Dissolution Chamber is crafted from Plastic, a Pity Machine Frame, and a Diamond Gear, and it draws roughly 90 FE per tick while running. You load items into the ring of slots and keep the center tank filled with a fluid, usually Latex for basic recipes. One Pitiful Generator will not keep up with its power draw for long, so plan to upgrade your energy supply soon after building it.
The Four Machine Frame Tiers
There are four machine frames, and they roughly map to the four stages of the mod. Each tier needs a signature material that gates it behind a particular farm, so building a better frame usually means building the farm that supplies it first. You can rush the higher tiers surprisingly fast once you have Pink Slime and Ether Gas flowing.
Pity
Simple
Advanced
Supreme
Automating the Dissolution Chamber
Automating this machine is famously finicky, because it only accepts one item per slot at a time and many recipes need two of the same ingredient. The cleanest in-mod solution is to lock the recipe with the padlock button, then feed each ingredient through an Item Transporter set to a regulation limit of one. This forces exactly one item into each slot so stacks never pile up in the wrong place.
Most players find it easier to pipe ingredients in with a dedicated logistics mod once they have one. Either way, locking the recipe first is the key step that keeps the crafting grid from jamming. Skip it and you will constantly find two Iron Ingots sitting where a Nether Brick should be.
How Industrial Foregoing Machines Work
Every machine in the mod shares the same interface, so learning one teaches you all of them. Once you understand the colored side buttons, the add-on slots, and the Redstone modes, the rest of the mod is just applying those controls to different jobs.
Configuring Inputs and Outputs
At the bottom of every machine GUI sit colored squares, one for each tank or inventory. Clicking a square highlights that resource and lets you set each side of the machine to push, pull, or disabled. This means you often do not need pipes at all: set a machine's output side to push and it will shove products straight into an adjacent chest or machine.
The green progress bar on the side of the GUI shows the work timer. When it fills, the machine performs one operation, whether that is planting a crop, killing a mob, or crafting an item. Redstone modes let you gate that behavior, with options to ignore Redstone, run only with a signal, run only without one, or pulse a single operation.
Machine Add-Ons
Add-ons are upgrades crafted in the Dissolution Chamber and slotted into a machine's purple add-on slots. There are four families: Range, which extends a machine's working area and comes in twelve tiers, plus Processing, Efficiency, and Speed, which make machines faster or cheaper to run. You generally want all three of the latter for a fully optimized machine.
Tier one add-ons are barely worth the trouble, so most players start crafting at tier two. Range add-ons only fit machines with a working area, such as the Plant Sower or Mob Slaughter Factory, while an Efficiency add-on reduces the power a machine burns per operation. A good first upgrade is a tier two add-on dropped straight into your Fluid Extractors.
Conveyors and the Machine Settings Copier
Conveyors move items, entities, and fluids across the ground, and they accept upgrades that let them extract from inventories, drop items off edges, or bounce entities. Dyeing a conveyor with Glowstone makes items travel faster, while a Plastic upgrade stops items on top from being picked up. Fluids only travel horizontally on them, so they are best for item and mob transport.
The Machine Settings Copier is a huge time-saver once you are building many identical machines. Shift-click one configured machine to copy its side settings, then shift-click others to paste those settings instantly. It will even try to insert matching add-ons if you have them in your inventory, and shift-clicking the air resets the tool.
Farming Plants and Crops
Crop automation is one of Industrial Foregoing's strongest features, handled by four machines that work as a team. Together they plant, grow, harvest, and even recycle the waste into building materials. All of them use a working area above the machine that a Range add-on can expand.
Plant Sower
The Plant Sower plants seeds, saplings, and other crops across its working area, and you can assign specific plants to specific corners of that area. It does not till soil or place water, so prepare the farmland yourself before you set it down. Locking the input is especially useful here, since it reserves slots for each crop type so a fast-growing plant cannot fill every slot and crowd out the others.
Plant Gatherer and Sludge Refiner
The Plant Gatherer harvests mature crops and trees in its area, but it always produces Sludge as a byproduct. Rather than throwing that Sludge away, pipe it into a Sludge Refiner, which converts it into basic materials like Dirt, Sand, Gravel, Clay, Soul Sand, and Red Sand. This turns a simple crop farm into a passive source of bulk building blocks.
Plant Fertilizer
The Plant Fertilizer speeds up crop growth in its working area, accepting either Bone Meal or the mod's own Fertilizer. It is optional, since crops grow on their own, but it dramatically increases yield from a fixed farm footprint. The mod's Fertilizer comes from animal sewage, which ties your plant and animal farms together nicely.
Animal Husbandry
Industrial Foregoing automates the entire animal farm, from breeding to shearing to slaughter. The machines are designed to chain together, moving animals through a series of pens so the whole operation runs itself. This is also where you produce the Fertilizer that feeds your crop farms.
Animal Feeder and Baby Separator
The Animal Feeder puts nearby animals into love mode using the correct breeding food, such as Wheat for cows, and it breeds them automatically. To keep pens from overflowing, the Animal Baby Separator moves either babies or adults from one pen into the next. A common layout uses a Feeder in the first pen, a separator set to move babies into a grow-out pen, and a second separator moving adults into a kill pen.
The separator's direction matters: it moves animals from the side it faces, which trips up a lot of players the first time. Always fence your pens fully, since animals can otherwise climb out over low walls and wander off. Get the fencing and facing right and the whole conveyor of animals runs untouched.
Animal Rancher
The Animal Rancher interacts with animals without harming them, milking cows, shearing sheep, and collecting ink from squids. It uses buckets and shears internally and stores fluids like Milk in its tank. This is the renewable, no-kill side of animal automation, perfect when you want products rather than meat.
Sewer, Sewage, and Fertilizer
Place a Sewer beneath a pen and the animals standing above it passively produce Sewage into its tank. Pipe that Sewage into a Sewage Composter and it becomes Fertilizer, the same Fertilizer your Plant Fertilizer wants. This closed loop, where animals fertilize your crops, is one of the most satisfying setups the mod offers.
Mob Farms and Pink Slime
Mob farming gives you two prizes: Essence, the mod's liquid experience, and Pink Slime, the key material for Advanced-tier machines. Three machines cover killing, spawning, and processing mobs, and you mix and match them depending on what you need.
Mob Slaughter Factory
The Mob Slaughter Factory kills mobs in its working area but gives no loot or Essence. Instead it produces Liquid Meat and Pink Slime, both stored as fluids. As a rule, hostile mobs yield more Liquid Meat while passive mobs with higher health give more Pink Slime, so a cow farm feeding a Slaughter Factory is a classic Pink Slime source.
The Pink Slime fluid is then combined with a Glass Pane in the Dissolution Chamber to produce solid Pink Slime, which also releases Water as a byproduct. Pink Slime is required for the Advanced Machine Frame and fuels the Pink Mycelial generator, which is why players call it one of the most wanted materials in the mod.
Mob Crusher
The Mob Crusher works like the Slaughter Factory but keeps the loot. It kills mobs, hitting blacklisted entities for 75 damage, and produces Essence plus normal mob drops into a tank that holds up to 32,000 millibuckets of Essence. You can toggle whether it collects Essence or instead spends that experience on a Looting effect for better drops.
Spawning Mobs: Duplicator and Mechanical Dirt
To supply a mob farm, you need a source of mobs. The Mob Duplicator spawns copies of a captured mob using Essence, and you capture that mob first with a Mob Imprisonment Tool by right-clicking it. Because you choose the mob, this is the precise option when you want a specific drop.
Mechanical Dirt is the cheaper alternative: fed with Liquid Meat, it passively spawns random hostile mobs on top of itself, but only under normal mob-spawning conditions like darkness. Pair either spawner with a Mob Slaughter Factory or Mob Crusher and you have a self-sustaining farm. A Mob Detector can output a Redstone signal based on how many mobs are present, useful for controlling the whole loop.
Power Generation
As your machine count grows, the Pitiful Generator stops cutting it. Industrial Foregoing offers a ladder of generators, from simple coal burners up to a reactor that outputs absurd amounts of power. Most run through the Mycelial family, small generators that each burn one type of fuel.
Bioreactor and Biofuel Generator
The Bioreactor turns plant matter into Biofuel, but efficiency depends on variety. Filling its slots with up to nine different items pushes efficiency toward 100 percent, while a single repeated item leaves it very low. Feed it a mix of saplings, seeds, dyes, and vegetables rather than a stack of one thing.
That Biofuel then burns in the Biofuel Generator, which produces 160 FE per tick and stores up to a million FE. A single bucket of Biofuel yields around 640,000 FE, making this a solid mid-game power source once your farms are running. It is a natural pairing with the crop automation you already built.
The Mycelial Reactor
The Mycelial Reactor is the mod's ultimate generator, and it produces a staggering 25,000,000 FE per tick when running. The catch is that it only runs when all sixteen Mycelial generators around it are actively producing power at the same time. Each of those generators burns a different fuel, from Pink Slime and Ender Pearls to Lava, Nether Wart, TNT, and Nether Stars.
Keeping all sixteen active is the real challenge, because a generator that fills its internal buffer counts as idle and stops the reactor. The trick is to constantly drain power out of the whole array, so pull energy into a high-capacity buffer like an Infinity Charger. Get that flow right and the reactor delivers effectively unlimited power for the rest of your world.
Making Ether Gas: The Wither Drill
Ether Gas is the endgame fluid, required for Supreme Machine Frames, Infinity Tools, and the strongest add-ons. The only way to get it is to drill a live Wither with a Fluid Laser Base, which is exactly as dangerous as it sounds. With the right cage, though, it becomes a safe, automated process.
The entire setup only stays safe while the Stasis Chamber is powered. If it loses energy, the frozen Wither breaks free and wrecks your base. Give the Stasis Chamber its own dedicated power source as a backup in case your main network ever drops.
Building the Cage
Place a Stasis Chamber and power it, then build your Wither directly above it so the Chamber freezes the boss in place and stops it from powering up. The Stasis Chamber freezes an entity's AI and even hides its boss bar, but you should add add-ons to keep the hold rock solid. Many players also wall the whole thing in a Wither-proof box for extra safety.
Fluid Laser Base and Laser Drills
Set a Fluid Laser Base a few blocks above the Stasis Chamber and insert a Purple Laser Lens, which is the lens that yields Ether Gas. The Laser Base itself does no work until Laser Drills point at it from within their three-by-three-by-three range. When placed correctly you will see particle beams traveling from each drill into the base.
Laser Drills draw about 1,000 FE per operation each and need to be aimed carefully, since their facing depends on the direction you are looking when you place them. Ring the base with as many powered drills as you can fit, ideally fitted with high-tier add-ons, and the Ether Gas fills steadily. The same drill-and-base pattern also powers ore generation, covered next.
Ore Processing and Laser Drills
Industrial Foregoing can both generate ores from nothing and multiply the ores you mine. These are two separate systems, but both are worth building once you have steady power. Together they can keep you supplied with metals for the rest of the game.
Ore Laser Base and Lenses
The Ore Laser Base generates ores out of thin air, even at bedrock on a superflat world, as long as Laser Drills power it. Each colored Laser Lens biases the output toward certain ores, and stacking more lenses of one color raises the odds of that ore without guaranteeing it. Every ore has a weight and a required Y-range, biome, and dimension, all listed in the Recipe Viewer.
Because lenses only shift probabilities, you always get a spread of ores rather than a single target. Load several White Lenses to chase a rare ore, but expect plenty of common ores alongside it. Mixing lens colors lets one base produce a broad range of materials at once.
Multiplying Ores
The ore multiplication chain turns raw ore into up to five times as much. First the Washing Factory combines raw ore with Liquid Meat to make Raw Ore Meat. Then the Fermentation Station ferments that meat, and the multiplier you choose sets both the cost and the time.
Doubling takes about 5 seconds with no catalyst, tripling takes around 45 seconds, quadrupling needs Pink Slime and takes two minutes, and the full five-times output needs Ether Gas and runs the longest. Finally the Fluid Sieving Machine uses Sand to sieve the Fermented Ore Meat into dusts, which you smelt into ingots. A Resourceful Furnace speeds up that last step by smelting several at once.
Growing with Hydroponic Beds
Hydroponic Beds are one of the most sought-after machines in the mod, especially in modpacks that use mystical crops. They mimic farmland in a compact footprint and can auto-harvest whatever grows on top. There are two versions, and the second removes the running costs of the first.
Hydroponic Bed
The Hydroponic Bed acts as farmland, so you plant a crop or sapling directly on top of it. It needs Water and power to run, and supplying Ether Gas lets it automatically harvest the mature plant. As it works, it collects data into a Simulation Processor, which you then use to build the upgraded version.
Simulated Hydroponic Bed
The Simulated Hydroponic Bed grows crops from stored simulation data and only needs power to run, with no Water, Ether Gas, or physical plant required. Better still, it improves over time as it keeps simulating, making it the endgame choice for large crop setups. Because it never needs replanting, it also handles saplings and tree mutations cleanly.
Enchanting, Potions, and Utility Machines
Beyond farming and power, Industrial Foregoing automates several fiddly vanilla tasks. These machines are not required to progress, but they save enormous amounts of manual clicking once your Essence and material farms are running.
The Enchantment Machines
A full suite of machines handles enchanting with Essence instead of experience levels. The Enchantment Factory applies random enchantments to items, with roughly 3 buckets of Essence buying a level 30 enchant. The Enchantment Extractor moves an enchantment onto a book, the Enchantment Applicator applies a book's enchantment like an anvil, and the Enchantment Sorter separates enchanted items from plain ones, which is perfect for filtering mob-farm loot.
Potion Brewer and Material StoneWork Factory
The Potion Brewer automates brewing end to end, running up to six steps in order, from filling bottles with Water through each ingredient to the final Dragon's Breath. Lock the recipe and it churns out the same potion endlessly without you touching a Brewing Stand. It is a fantastic way to mass-produce Splash or Lingering potions.
The Material StoneWork Factory chains vanilla stone-processing steps into one machine. You define each stage as smelting, crushing, or crafting, so Cobblestone can become Stone, then Smooth Stone, or be crushed into Gravel and Sand and smelted into Glass. It is a compact early-to-mid game source of bulk stone, sand, and gravel.
Infinity Tools
Infinity Tools are the mod's flashiest reward, a set of gear that scales with how much power you pour into it. The set includes the Infinity Drill, Saw, Trident, Hammer, Launcher, Nuke, and Backpack, all crafted in the Dissolution Chamber with Pink Slime and expensive materials. Every tool teleports its drops straight to you.
Power Tiers and the Infinity Charger
Each tool's strength is set by its stored power, climbing through seven tiers: Poor, Common at 4 million FE, Uncommon at 16 million, Rare at 80 million, Epic at 480 million, Legendary at over 3 billion, and finally Artifact. A higher tier widens the tool's area of effect and unlocks perks like a larger mining radius. The Infinity Charger stores an enormous amount of energy and refills these tools almost instantly.
What the Tools Do
At high tiers these tools are ridiculous in the best way. The Infinity Hammer can clear an eleven-by-eleven-by-eleven area in a single swing, and the Infinity Drill mines huge volumes at once. Loading Biofuel into a tool makes it burn fuel instead of stored power, stretching each charge much further during heavy use.
The Infinity Backpack rounds out the set with item and experience magnets, auto-pickup, and a feed function that eats Liquid Meat to keep you fed. The Infinity Nuke is the endgame spectacle, built with Nether Stars and Ether Gas, and it respects claimed chunks so it will not grief protected areas. Together the tools turn late-game resource gathering into an afterthought.
Tips for Success
Use another mod for logistics. Every experienced player agrees that Industrial Foregoing's own item and fluid transport is weak, with the Fluid Transporter reaching only a single block. Rely on each machine's built-in push and pull side settings for short hops, and bring in a dedicated pipe or cable mod for anything longer. Fighting the mod's transport system is the fastest way to sour on it.
Stack Fluid Extractors on one log. You can point several Fluid Extractors at the same log at once, which multiplies your Latex output without multiplying your log usage. Players recommend Acacia logs for the best Latex yield, and adding a Block Placer to replant broken logs keeps the whole line automatic. This early optimization pays off for the entire game.
Fill the Bioreactor with variety. The Bioreactor's efficiency climbs with the number of different items inside, so a mix of nine distinct plant products reaches near-perfect efficiency. Dumping in a single stack of one crop leaves you with dismal output. Route several crop types from your farms into it rather than one bulk resource.
Lean on the Machine Settings Copier. When you build a wall of identical Fluid Extractors or Laser Drills, configure one machine perfectly and then shift-click it with the copier to clone those settings onto the rest. It even pulls matching add-ons from your inventory. This turns a tedious ten-minute setup into a few seconds of clicking.
Lock your recipes and inputs. The Dissolution Chamber and Plant Sower both behave far better when you lock the recipe or reserve input slots. Locking stops stacks from piling into the wrong slot and jamming a craft, which is the single most common automation headache in the mod. Set it once and the machine runs clean.
Frequently Asked Questions
The mod's transport is intentionally limited, and the Fluid Transporter only moves fluid one block. For most setups, use the push and pull side settings inside each machine's GUI to send products directly into an adjacent block. For longer runs, pair Industrial Foregoing with a dedicated logistics mod, which is what most players do.
The Dissolution Chamber accepts only one item per slot at a time, so hoppers that insert full stacks will jam it, especially for recipes needing two of the same ingredient. Lock the recipe with the padlock button, then feed ingredients through an Item Transporter set to a regulation limit of one. Also make sure the center tank has the required fluid, usually Latex.
Ether Gas is produced by drilling a live Wither. Freeze a Wither in a powered Stasis Chamber, place a Fluid Laser Base above it with a Purple Laser Lens inside, and surround the base with powered Laser Drills. As long as the Stasis Chamber stays powered, the drills safely extract Ether Gas from the trapped Wither.
Most machines need power, but a few early ones do not. The Fluid Extractor and Water Condensator run with no energy at all, just slowly, and supplying power makes them much faster. Nearly everything past the Latex Processing Unit, including the Dissolution Chamber and all the farms, requires a steady energy supply, so build a Pitiful Generator early.
Pink Slime is a mid-game material made by killing passive mobs in the Mob Slaughter Factory, then solidifying the fluid in the Dissolution Chamber. It is required for the Advanced Machine Frame, the Pink Mycelial generator, and the four-times ore multiplication step. A cow farm feeding a Slaughter Factory is the standard way to produce it in bulk.
