In Factorio, your factory is under constant assault. Biters chew through walls, spitter acid eats turrets, demolishers on Vulcanus flatten anything in their path, and even friendly fire from your own artillery can scar a base. Knowing exactly how to repair structures, both by hand in an emergency and automatically through a robot network, is the difference between a self-healing megabase and a base you spend your evenings babysitting. This guide covers everything about repair packs, the precise health-restore math, how construction robots auto-repair damaged buildings, and how the Factorio 2.0 quality system changes durability. Every number below comes from the official Factorio wiki.
What a Repair Pack Actually Is
The repair pack is the single tool Factorio uses to restore health to damaged buildings. It is a consumable item: as it heals, its durability drains, and once spent it disappears from the stack. There is no separate “repair gun,” no mana bar, no cooldown. You simply hold repair packs and apply them, either with your own mouse or through your construction robots.
The one rule that trips up new players is this: repair packs can only be used on buildings that are already placed in the world. You cannot select a damaged item sitting in your inventory and “fix” it before placing it down. If a turret took damage, got picked up, and is now in your hotbar, it stays damaged until you place it and then repair it on the ground. Repair is a world operation, not an inventory operation.
Manual Repair: Hold and Left-Click
The fastest way to fix something right now, with no robots involved, is by hand. The process is dead simple:
- Pick up a repair pack so it sits on your cursor (the held item).
- Move your mouse over a placed building that has taken damage.
- Left-click and hold on the building. The repair pack drains its durability, and the building’s health bar climbs.
- If the building needs more than one pack to fully heal, the next pack in your stack is consumed automatically as you keep holding.
This manual method is your lifeline during a biter breach. When a wall section is crumbling and your bots haven’t arrived yet, dropping repair packs on the failing wall by hand can buy the seconds you need for turrets to clear the wave. It is also how you fix things outside your roboport coverage, like a forward outpost or a rail line crossing open terrain.
The Repair Math: 600 HP Per Pack
Here is the part most thin guides get wrong or skip entirely. A repair pack does not heal “some” health. It heals a precise, calculable amount.
- A normal-quality repair pack has 300 durability.
- Repair converts durability into health at a fixed rate of 2 health per unit of durability.
- Therefore, one normal repair pack restores 600 health in total, spread across however many uses it takes to drain that durability.
This matters for planning. A wall segment might have a few hundred HP; a single pack can fully heal several of them. A large structure with a high health pool may need most of a pack on its own. When you stock repair packs in your network, you can now reason about how many you need: total HP of damage expected in a wave, divided by 600, gives the rough pack count your bots will burn through.
Automatic Repair With Construction Robots
Manual repair is for emergencies and the early game. The real Factorio answer, the one that lets you walk away from your base and trust it to survive, is automatic repair through construction robots. This is passive maintenance: robots detect damage, fly out, heal the building, and return to charge, all without a single click from you.
For this to work, three conditions must all be true:
- The damaged building must be inside a roboport-connected network, specifically within the green construction zone that roboports project.
- You must have construction robots living in that network’s roboports.
- Repair packs must be stocked in the network, sitting in provider or storage chests where the bots can grab them.
When all three line up, construction robots do their job. The official wiki describes them plainly: they “build, deconstruct and upgrade entities on command” and they “repair broken or replaces destroyed entities.” A robot pulls a repair pack from the nearest chest to the damage, flies to the wounded building, applies the pack, and either grabs another pack if more healing is needed or returns to a roboport to recharge.
The “nearest chest” detail is worth remembering. Construction robots pull materials from whatever chest is closest to the build or repair site, regardless of chest type. So if you want fast repairs at a perimeter wall, stock repair packs in a chest near that wall, not just one central depot far away. For a deeper look at how the robot logistics network is structured, see our comprehensive guide on Factorio’s construction and logistic robots.
Where to Stock Repair Packs
Construction robots will pull repair packs from any network chest, but the practical choices are:
| Chest type | Behavior | Good for repair packs? |
|---|---|---|
| Passive Provider | Places stored items at the network’s disposal (supplied when requested) | Yes — classic repair-pack stockpile |
| Active Provider | Pushes stored items into the network (actively emptied) | Works, but tends to dump packs into storage |
| Storage | Stores items currently not requested; can be filtered to one type | Yes — a filtered storage chest of repair packs is reliable |
| Requester | Filled by robots until a configured amount is reached | Use to top up a forward depot automatically |
| Buffer | Acts as both a requester and a passive provider (hybrid) | Excellent for distributed perimeter caches |
A common base pattern is a filtered storage chest or passive provider holding a few stacks of repair packs near each defended border, kept topped up by buffer or requester chests that pull from your central repair-pack production. That way, when a wall takes a hit, a robot grabs a pack from feet away rather than crossing the entire factory.
Quality and Durability: A Factorio 2.0 Change
If you are playing Factorio 2.0 or the Space Age expansion (both launched October 21, 2024), there is a major addition that older 1.1 guides never mention: the quality system. Quality did not exist in 1.1. In 2.0, items can roll quality tiers from Normal up through Uncommon, Rare, Epic, and Legendary, and for repair packs, quality scales durability directly.
Because health restored is always 2 HP per durability, more durability means more total healing per pack. Here is the full ladder:
| Quality tier | Durability | Total HP restored (2 HP/durability) |
|---|---|---|
| Normal | 300 | 600 |
| Uncommon | 600 | 1,200 |
| Rare | 900 | 1,800 |
| Epic | 1,200 | 2,400 |
| Legendary | 1,800 | 3,600 |
A legendary repair pack heals 3,600 HP, six times a normal one. For a megabase under heavy attack, producing higher-quality repair packs means each robot trip restores far more health, and your robots make fewer round-trips to chests, which keeps the whole repair network responsive during a big assault. It also means fewer packs clogging up belts and chests for the same healing throughput.
If you are still on the older 1.1 stable line, ignore the quality column entirely: every repair pack is effectively “Normal,” restoring a flat 600 HP. The quality tiers only apply to 2.0 and Space Age.
Building a Self-Healing Defensive Wall
Repair only matters because something is doing the damage. On Nauvis, that means biters, spitters, and worms, each in four sizes from small to behemoth, escalating as your evolution factor climbs. The Space Age planets add their own threats: Gleba’s pentapods (wrigglers, strafers, and stompers) and Vulcanus’s giant regenerating demolishers. A self-healing wall lets your defenses absorb these waves and recover between them. To assemble one:
- Line your perimeter with walls backed by gun, laser, and flamethrower turrets.
- Extend roboport construction coverage (the green zone) over the entire wall so bots can reach any damaged segment.
- Park construction robots in those perimeter roboports.
- Stock repair packs in chests distributed along the wall, not in one central pile.
With that in place, the loop runs itself: a wave hits, walls and turrets take damage, robots immediately fly out with repair packs and patch everything back to full before the next wave arrives. For the full breakdown of evolution factor, attack timing, and turret choices, read our detailed guide on dealing with biters in Factorio.
Don’t Forget the Power Behind the Robots
Construction robots only work if your roboports have power to charge them. During a brownout, when supply drops below demand, your whole grid slows, robots recharge sluggishly, and repairs lag exactly when you need them most. A defended base needs reliable power: accumulators to buffer night and spikes, and a backup steam line ready to kick in. Note the important 2.0 fluid change here, the optimal steam ratio is now 1 offshore pump : 200 boilers : 400 steam engines (about 360 MW), not the old 1.1 figure of 1:20:40. If your repair network ever feels sluggish, check your power first; our comprehensive power management guide walks through accumulators, solar, and brownout mitigation.
Producing Repair Packs at Scale
A self-healing base burns through repair packs whenever it’s attacked, so you’ll want a steady supply line feeding your network. Set up an assembler producing repair packs and route them into a buffer or active provider chest connected to your logistic network. From there, requester chests at each perimeter cache pull what they need to stay topped up. The beauty of this setup is that it is entirely hands-off: damaged buildings consume packs, the network notices the drop, and your production replaces them automatically.
If you want to push for high-quality packs, route the recipe through quality modules or a quality-focused production line so a share of your output comes out Uncommon or better. Even a modest fraction of higher-tier packs dramatically increases the effective healing your network can deliver per robot trip.
Running a Repair-Friendly Server
On a multiplayer server, a well-built repair network is even more valuable, because the base needs to survive while individual players are off exploring, mining, or sleeping. A self-healing perimeter means the factory holds together around the clock without anyone manually patching walls. If you’re planning a long-running shared megabase, a dependable host keeps the simulation smooth even as robot counts and entity counts climb. You can spin up a ready-to-go world on a dedicated Factorio server hosting plan built for exactly that kind of persistent, always-on factory. For step-by-step server setup, mods, and configuration, our Factorio server documentation covers the details.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much health does one repair pack restore in Factorio?
A normal-quality repair pack restores 600 health in total. This comes from its 300 durability multiplied by the fixed rate of 2 health per unit of durability. Higher quality packs (a 2.0 mechanic) restore more: Legendary packs have 1,800 durability and heal up to 3,600 HP.
Can I repair items in my inventory?
No. Repair packs can only be used on buildings that are already placed in the world. A damaged item sitting in your inventory cannot be repaired; you must place it down first, then hold a repair pack and left-click it on the ground.
How do I get my construction robots to repair buildings automatically?
Three things must be true: the damaged building is inside a roboport-connected network’s construction zone, you have construction robots in that network, and repair packs are stocked in network chests (such as passive provider, storage, or buffer chests). When all three are met, robots automatically fly out, repair damaged buildings, and return to recharge.
Why aren’t my robots repairing damaged walls?
Check the three requirements in order. First, confirm the wall is inside the green construction zone, not just the orange logistic zone. Second, make sure construction robots actually exist in the roboports covering that area. Third, verify repair packs are stocked in a chest the network can reach. A power brownout can also stall robot charging, so confirm your grid has enough power.
Does the quality system change repair packs in older Factorio versions?
No. Quality is a Factorio 2.0 and Space Age mechanic that did not exist in the 1.1 line. On 1.1, every repair pack behaves like a Normal pack: 300 durability restoring a flat 600 HP. The Uncommon-through-Legendary durability tiers only apply in 2.0 and later.
What’s the fastest way to repair during a biter attack?
For instant emergency repair, hold a stack of repair packs and left-click directly on the failing structure to heal it by hand. This is faster than waiting for robots when a wall is seconds from breaking. For the long term, build a self-healing wall with construction robots and distributed repair-pack chests so the network patches damage on its own between waves.
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