Big Ambitions Factory Guide: Are Factories Worth It?

Factories are the point where Big Ambitions stops being a shop game. Instead of buying finished goods at a wholesale price and selling at retail, you import raw materials and manufacture the goods yourself. The catch is a large fixed cost that arrives before any of that pays off.

What a Factory Physically Needs

A factory is placed inside a warehouse building — the H, I, P and Q building codes. You need:

All the factory equipment comes from the Factory Supply Depot in Lower Manhattan. Note that both stations together are $50,000 before you have bought anything that actually makes a product.

The Full Machine Price List

This is the number most “should I build a factory” questions really need:

The spread is the whole strategy. A clothing line built around a $50,000 sewing machine is a completely different investment from a jewelry line that needs a $235,000 polishing machine, or an electronics line reaching for the $280,000 laser cutter.

Getting Raw Materials In

Factories import raw ingredients rather than buying them off a shelf, and the import locations along the pier specialise:

Set the contract up through a purchasing agent at a headquarters workstation — the full five-step chain is in suppliers and importers. Two constraints bite here specifically: every importer has a minimum purchase value below which it will not deliver, and the factory needs enough pallet shelves to physically receive what you ordered. Deliveries land at midnight on the delivery day.

Repeating orders behave as a target stock level rather than a fixed quantity — set 500, hold 200, and the importer sends 300.

Are Factories Worth It?

Honestly: not always, and not early. Here is the decision framework, because Hovgaard has never published margin tables and anyone quoting exact payback numbers is guessing.

A factory is worth it when:

• You already own several stores selling the same product line, so the output has somewhere to go
• That product has a manufacturable chain — clothing, liquor, electronics, jewelry and food all do
• You can absorb the equipment bill without starving your retail expansion

A factory is not worth it when:

• You have one or two stores. The wholesale route is simply cheaper at that volume.
• You want to sell the surplus on the market. Since 1.0, exporting moves the import price index — over-export and the price of that item drops for the rest of the week. Overproduction now has a market cost.
• You have not yet solved delivery. A factory that cannot get goods to shops is an expensive warehouse.

The Four Lenses Experienced Players Use

The most thorough community analysis of this question — a 0.9-era breakdown built on hundreds of in-game days of testing across every major factory type — evaluates factories through four lenses rather than one. It is a better framework than “is it profitable”, and it survives the 1.0 changes:

The conclusion that framework reaches, and the reason it is worth repeating here: timing matters as much as choice. The same factory that carries a run at one stage can stall it at another, because the capital is locked in machines instead of leases. That is why the machine price table above is the first thing to read — a $50,000 sewing machine and a $280,000 laser cutter are not the same decision at the same point in a run.

Hovgaard has never published payback numbers, so treat any specific ROI figure you find — including in community videos — as tied to the difficulty setting and patch version it was tested on.

From Warehouse to Factory

A common progression question is whether to convert an existing warehouse. Mechanically a factory is a warehouse building with production equipment in it, so the question is really about floor space and vehicle capacity. H-series buildings (690 m²) take one vehicle; I, P and Q series take two. If your warehouse is already running two delivery vehicles at capacity, adding production to the same building means production and distribution compete for the same loading capacity.

What to Read Next

The actual production chains — which machine turns what into what, and how long each step takes — are in factory recipes. The distribution side, including why finished goods sometimes never reach a store, is in warehouse and deliveries.