In Factorio, you’ll quite often find that you are carrying a lot of random junk that you no longer need or want. These could be materials, old structures/machines that are now useless or practically anything else.
At the moment, there is no official items in the game that allow you to destroy/recycle items, and dropping them certainly won’t help. However that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible.
Below, we’ll show you two ways of destroying and removing items in Factorio, using both the vanilla game and a modded version. For more guides, make sure to check out our dedicated area here!
Destroy Items in Vanilla
The easiest way to destroy and delete items in Factorio is by making a Chest. Craft a Wooden Chest under the Logistics tab out of 2 Wood and place it down in the game world. Next, place any items inside that you want to delete or destroy.
Now all you need to do is shoot the chest using your gun. Hover over the chest with your mouse, and either press or hold down the ‘C’ key by default to start shooting. If ‘C’ doesn’t work, you might want to check the controls settings.
Watch the health bar go down until the Chest is destroyed, looking like the image above. Now the chest can’t be interacted with, and any items inside will have been deleted. There are also some other ways of destroying items in Factorio, such as sending them into Space via a rocket when you reach that point in the game.
Using Mods
The option is also there to install some mods to Factorio, which will allow you to destroy your items much more efficiently, or even recycle them. Some which come to mind are Flare Stack and Void Chest.
In Flare Stack, you can place items into an Incinerator, burning them to nothing but dust. Where as Void Chest is a bit more simple, and simply adds a craftable chest that will automatically destroy any item placed into it.
If you don’t know how to install mods to Factorio, you can check out our short guide, which covers both automatic and manual installation.
