A peeling run is a production line with one worker, and every production line has exactly one constraint. Spending money anywhere else feels productive and changes nothing. The skill is knowing which of the four constraints you have.
The only formula you need
Throughput is potatoes per minute. It is limited by the slowest step, not by the average:
Potatoes per minute = 60 ÷ (peel time + walk time + queue time) Our model. The game does not display these numbers; measure them with a stopwatch.
The three terms are not equal. Peel time shrinks with skill and knives. Walk time shrinks with layout and carrying capacity. Queue time shrinks with machines and channel speed. If one term is twice the others, that is your constraint.
| Symptom | Constraint | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Always a potato waiting on the board | Peel time | Technique first, knife second |
| Board empty, you are walking | Walk time | Bucket, wheelbarrow, closer station |
| Peeled potatoes queuing at the water | Channel | Channel speed upgrade |
| Machine idle with potatoes outside it | Input | Hopper loading, sacks, conveyor |
| Everything full, nothing moving | Output | Check the machine outlet and the channel inlet |
Symptoms are observable in any run; the mapping to upgrades is our recommendation.
Batch, do not juggle
Carrying one potato at a time means the walk is repeated for every unit. The game gives you buffers for a reason: a bucket, a wheelbarrow, machine hoppers and the vacuum tank all hold potatoes between steps.
- Peel a batch into the bucket or wheelbarrow instead of walking each potato to the channel.
- Empty the batch in one trip. The 1.0.2 notes confirm potatoes in a bucket or wheelbarrow return to the pile on load, so the game treats them as real storage.
- Refill while the channel drains. If the channel is still busy when you return, you have found the next upgrade.
Layout beats strength
Distance is the cheapest thing to fix and the last thing players fix. Every metre between pile, board and water is paid on every potato. Before buying a faster knife, ask whether the station can move closer to the pile — or the pile closer to the station.
- Keep the board between the pile and the channel, not off to one side.
- Put the bucket where you drop potatoes, not where you pick them up.
- Leave the machine hopper reachable from the main path. A machine you have to detour to feed is a machine that idles.
Late-game throughput
Once the crane and autopilot are running, the pile is restacked every 3 minutes while you are not looking (1.0.1), and the recount runs every 2.5 minutes with autopilot (1.0.2). That is the game telling you the pile is now a bulk material, not a hand-fed queue.
At that stage the constraint usually moves to the water channel. The last two channel speed levels were made slightly faster in 1.0.2 specifically because late-game jams were the most common performance complaint. If your frame rate drops when the channel is full, that is the same bottleneck showing up as physics.
For the purchase order that follows from this, see the upgrade ladder.