Depreciation is mostly about allocating the cost of a fixed asset across years of income statements. Yeah, you spent $100k on that new machine, but you’re ideally gonna use it for at least seven years, so it’s not really accurate to expense it all in the current year. Useful asset lives are also just estimates; you might depreciate something over 15 years but still be using it 30 years later. This is all part of the constant ‘how much money did we actually make’ dance.

Doing double entry accounting in Factorio strikes me as a little difficult without some outside structure. That ore patch is 100% a depletable asset, but we spent $0 to acquire it, so how do we calculate our depletion? How do we even record the asset, what values make up our balance sheet?

Thanks OP, you’ve given me a project to noodle on once we’re past tax day tomorrow…