| In Dwarf Fortress's production chains (version 53.16, as its wiki describes it), where one industry's end products often feed another, fetching the materials and hauling the product away are dwarves' jobs, and the wiki says no process can be truly automated. In Factorio, the Factorio Wiki says, inserters move items between belts and into and out of machines, and an assembling machine set to a recipe "should craft the item" once all its requested ingredients are in its input slots. | Automated craftingAutomated crafting | Wiki |
| The player always crafts at speed 1. Asking for an item whose parts are missing but craftable queues those parts first (chain-crafting), which assembling machines don't do. | Manual craftingAutomated crafting | Wiki |
| In Minecraft the player crafts by laying out a recipe's pattern on a 2×2 or 3×3 grid; the crafter, a late addition, made automated crafting possible in the base game. In Factorio the player asks for an item by its recipe: handcrafting runs at crafting speed 1, a recipe's time is its seconds at that speed, missing parts that can be crafted are queued first, and the player can handcraft only the "crafting" and "hand-crafting" categories, which leaves out the furnaces' smelting recipes. | Manual crafting | Wiki |
| The Factorio Wiki's Crafting page (October 2026 capture) says an assembling machine set to a recipe should craft the item once all the requested ingredients are in its input slots; that, unlike the player, it doesn't chain-craft, so each step of a recipe needs a machine of its own; and that continuous production takes ingredients brought by belts and inserters, with inserters taking the products out for use elsewhere in the factory. | Automated craftingAutomated craftingAutomated craftingAutomated crafting | Wiki |