Extractor

The Extractor tooltip tutorial as seen in the game.

The Chain Extractor tooltip tutorial as seen in the game.

The extractor is a building used to extract shapes or colors from resource patches. It is one of two buildings available to build at the start of the game.

Extractors will only produce output when placed on a shape or color resource tile. If placed on a blank tile, they will do nothing.

Chain extractor

The chain extractor is an unlockable variant of the extractor. It has the unique ability to pass its output to another active Chain Extractor directly in front of it, ultimately summing together the production of all extractors in the group.

If the resources mined by a group are dissimilar, such as when a paint patch overlaps a shape patch, then the total output will be representative of that. However, since extractors on a blank tile are considered inactive, they will break the chain, not passing through the outputs of any other connected Chain Extractors.

Hovering the cursor over any chain extractor will highlight the connected group and display the total production of the group. While the tooltip will show a warning that production is limited by belt speed, this is misleading — like many other buildings, they can be supercharged at up to 1.25× belt speed.