Share your production chains!

[Nachtu]

I'm interested in how other people have managed their stations/factories in terms of good manufacturing. Our player group will probably start with some good manufacturing soon. As the stations & factories in this game are very much a WIP, our playergroup will surely use some related mods, such as...

 

All Production Chains

CompleX3s

[OOSP] Out of Sector Production

 

All done by Laserzwei

 

What is a reasonable production facility to start with?

Some good production chains at this point?

How to make best use of AI stations nearby or in the same sector?

What mods are you using?

 

Also if anyone has any experience using Cargo Shuttles that would be nice to hear. I know they're supposed to ferry your goods around a sector from station to station, but never really heard anyone say how useful they are.

 

I'm thinking of starting with some Noble Metal and Diamond mines (Diamond mines are mod content) = good basic stuff with nice selling prices/volume. Later on maybe make a Jewelry Manufacturer type 2 to refine the stuff and sell it to random Trading posts. How does that sound?

[narhiril]

I started setting up a small production chain on a modded server recently.  I had a coal mine (mod content), a scrap trader, and a steel factory complexed together (via Laserzwei's mod) to produce steel endlessly, and then a nearby aluminium mine and steel tube factory.  The reason I didn't complex the whole thing together was because I wanted to give each station different orders - the steel complex and steel tube factory were set to "patrol sector" (and would launch fighters to deal with threats) while the aluminium mine was set to "salvage all" (to launch salvage fighters for cleanup).  The mine also shuttled to the tube factory and the tube factory shuttled from the steel complex, as complexes can be targeted with shuttles but cannot currently host their own. 

 

The whole thing worked perfectly, with the whole system defending itself from pirates, cleaning up wreckage, and with the steel tube factory getting everything it needed via shuttles.  Every station was making me money by selling off their excess product until I ran headfirst into this bug, which shows up and ruins the whole thing every now and then.  I'm hoping that bug gets fixed soon, because it's the only thing that's raining on my industrialist parade right now - I can't leave it alone, or bugged trade ships will grind the whole thing to a halt.

[Kamo]

Some vanilla feedback here :).

I'm using a Solar Power Plant, a Water Collector and a Wheat Farm in a sector with demand on all three in the wrecked, poor economy of the Bixxutqo (my starting faction, where they are situated, has something like 10 sectors, a prime sector (and probably a bunch of sectors) destroyed by rift, a one-way gate to one of their main trading partners (yes, no gate generated on the other side, may be a bug), and is hostile to another neighboring faction).

My stations have a comfortable 220+ production value and ~8000 cargo, and would struggle with a pirate attack if they werent't clumped together (and protected by the absence of pirates in out-of-sector simulation) because I didn't get much good turrets yet.

They are barely making enough money to pay the crew salaries for my 10-odd ships :( (mine, the stations, three less-than-10-crewed salvagers/miners, and a trash container). A few updates before, such a setup would have made me eleven times as much money: a profit of 1,5 million per hour. I definitely would like an economy de-nerf.

 

I am currently using no trade mods, nor cargo shuttles as I am beginning my empire right away in early Titanium-grade sectors (if I had Trinium, I would looove to put them on the solar plant and water collector to supply the farm). I am however using MoveUI (so good to see my creding rising and falling to verify if the stations work), and custom pirate/xsotan ship generator (which something makes "rarer" enemies) and other assorted minor changes.

The lack of turrets was due to the fact that I recently resetted my galaxy and gave me back the money to remake the three stations (which would have been destroyed by the crew changes of 0.15.x, I was grinding 50+ sectors away in "richer" places when it happened).

 

I'll have to grind pirates and trade routes for hours to make a wine complex to assist a luxury food factory (I've yet to make a detailed market analysis and quotation)... Good thing a neighboring faction, the United Emirate of Aorua, is in war against another, the Tamuatq': time to salvage active faction ships with delicious big generators and lots of modules ;D ! Until those idiots remember they were allies before, fighting the evil Sacaeq Syndicate, their hate of grammar and their gonarch-ships (which had way more titanium in their frigates ::)).

 

A bug I found: I found a couple of zinc mines with 0 cargo hold space. BTW, my galaxy seed is KaedeIizuka, my starting point somewhere north-west, 450 away from the core like 300 : -250 and I'm playing on Easy (Beginner is actually harder as allied NPC ships do not do enough damage and get killed by enemies NPC ships which seem better at proximity fighting, and I'm trying the difficulties in order)

 

For the questions: What is a reasonable production facility to start with? No idea: the best thing to go for is for "holes" in existing production chains, but factions tend to spawn with way not enough basic/lowlevel stations (The Bixxutqo, for exemple, have one solar power plant for 10+ energy-using stations, and 4-5 farms... withno water collectors. They had some until one of the updates swapped their only Ice Mine and their only Water Collector with two Coal Mines :(.). Making system-based market studies before, during and after grinding, seem to be the best way to go as the economy is sometimes unstable, some stations beginning with large amounts of rare resources which then power chains that would actually be broken. With the absence of out of sector calculations (which one of LazerZwei's mods would alleviate), such broken chains would only be revealed after a few hours of acclimatation in the faction's territory, revealing the true and often sorry state of the faction's economy.

I don't know how the game calculates inter-faction economy: sometimes peaceful factions do not trade when they should really do, sometimes hostile factions send suicidal traders and freighters to be shot down by the local frigates.

Some good production chains at this point? I have no idea. Chemicals seem way cool: the products of a Chemical Factory are used in a lot of cool stuff like Acid for nearly all Mines, and they need one or two Gas Collectors (and water and e-cells).

However I think that Biotopes, Habitats, Casinos, Military Outposts and Research Stations are a really bad idea, as they need to buy a lot of stuff... and I'm not sure for what purpose. They seem like sinks. I would try to make a mil' outpost to get more lieutnants, commanders and generals to make bigger ships near aggressive faction borders, but it would be when I would be able to make 5 millions per hour by idling.

How to make best use of AI stations nearby or in the same sector? Currently, I use the Attack Enemies command. Seems okay. I recommand the turretfactory mod to modify turret seeds to get long range (12km+) independent targeting Cannons to do some real station-based defense.

In really bad sectors I'd make a lance of guardian ships (two line and two flak corvettes, typically), also in Attack Enemies mode as the Patrol Sector IA sometimes drives into gates and asteroid fields. In my creative mode galaxy I witnessed my light cruiser crashing in an asteroid field at its max speed of ~1200 m/s :(, so I removed an engine in anger "so it'd go slower next time".

What mods are you using?

• MoveUI
  
• Homemade Rare Pirate and Xsotan spawns (FOEs, Rare Elites and Semiuniques), maybe I'll post it one day but it's really easy to make.
  
• Modified pirateattackedbytraders event, with bigger freighters to defend so they do not almost instantly die to the band of pirates (had to remodify the shipgenerators).
  
• Homemade Useless Asteroid reducer (asteroid generation has a 50% resource asteroid rate instead of 5%, but makes ten times as less asteroids, so there's ten times less asteroids for the same amount of resources, so nine times less lag and loading time from roids as my computer is right at the minimal requirements.)
  
• Homemade startbuilding.lua with Station Founder checkbox
  
• Modified shiputility.lua with custom classes (going up to class 12 for all ship types)
  
• Modified xsotanbehaviour (or is it another script) to replace "Unknown Ship" classes to normal classes (with volume input increased, so a Xsotan Sentinel is the Xsotan-equivalent of a Sentinel which would be more of a scout, for exemple)
  
• Modified starting script (to give me the money from previous grinds)
  
• Maybe one or two other things
  

 

Addendum - Sectors (02/01/2018):

It seems that there's more or less three "sectors": agro-healthcare (all "basic stations", farms and chemical station), industry (all mining-related stations, from mines to Processors, Antigrav units and other, and medical supplies), and military-research-services (the other stations, which use excess from the industry and cannot function without).

I spotted an angular stone between agro-healthcare and industry: the medical supplies and zinc mines. Zinc mines need medical supplies which need chemicals and zinc. Mines also need Acid (made by the chemical factory) and Mining Robots need Coolant (same). So if the zinc cycle is broken, all industry stops functioning.

Also, it seems that, in general, industry is bogged down by its own complexity. To make Mining Robots which seem capital to all mines (emphasis on seem, I've seen mines work with none), most metals are needed, especially gold, silver, platinum and steel, but also copper, zinc, silicium, ore, crystal in addition to diamonds for drills, which are also a minable component of mining robots but also needed for mines, and raw oil for plastic, which is also mined.

If a mine doesn't make at least 12-20 times (depending on how redundant some production lines are) the amount of mining robots it uses to produce materials, the mine won't make enough material to support the mining industry needed to support itself !

 

Addendum - The Wojou' Rigs and Transformators (21/01/2018):

I've gone a few dozen sectors away, to a faction that needed plastic, the grumpy Wojou'. I built two big ore rigs, a refinery and a little solar power plant in a "yellow" offgrid sector two sectors away from two sectors from that faction. It worked and, apparently, uses the plastic in tow working and well-supplied transformator factories.

So I built:

• A (big) water collector
  
• A (big, again) solar power plant
  
• A corn farm (for a sheep ranch that needed corn while being supplied by wheat - that faction's kinda dumb ::))
  
• A steel factory (supplied by a 300-unit scrap metal trader which produces 3x60 units every dozen seconds, the thing's probably got a lot more production capacity than cargo units :()
  
• A gas collector, for neon and helium precisely (but I made the one that also gets more other things to help chemical industries in general)
  
• A plasma cell factory (using the sheep ranch bio gas, gases from the collector and energy from the solar power plant)
  
• A power unit factory (using the plasma cells, energy form the solar power plant and transformators from aforementioned petrochemical complexes)
  

...to make Power Units out of those transformators, to help advanced industry, which uses a lot of the stuff. (And in the case it fails, it's also consumed by other things like shipyards, equipment docks and repair docks.)

 

(I did spend 70 of my 81 million credits that I made by selling the loot from (link) raiding and exterminating the Tamuatq' in a war that spanned several (maybe even real-life) days of grinding stations to dust with a lot of salvaging beams.

By the way: if you are destroying a station, salvage and loot it all, its wreckage will disappear along with the rest of the loot ! I got the bad surprise of not seeing any wreckage when coming back to a place that had 5 trading posts, so I may have lost ~30 stations' worth of loot.)

 

Big production chains like those are difficult to judge, as they are slow to "initialize". For exemple, one of my stations recently bought 5 million of something, and the others are working fine, but slowly (probably because of the steel production which depend on a very irregular station), so I think I made money by idling (2.5 million at the last hour, so probably 1.5 million from those complexes), but when is the next 5-million buying of materials from whatever bought the first batch ?

For every time trader come and go, my solar power plant has a chance of supplying the sheep ranch, which has a chance of supplyling bio gas to the plasma cell factory, which has a chance of supplying my power unit factory (instead of the one twenty sectors away, or a random trading post, etc.). So for my production chain to work I need to wait for several of those cycles to get goods hauled and supplied to the right stations, while some is... or may be lost to other production facilities or chains, or "early consumer" factories, especially since my fragile steel chain may output to the nearby Shipyard instead of the plasma cell factory one gate away. So even making valid production chains can result in loss of benefits (selling steel is good, but selling steel to make and sell power units makes more money... theoretically). And the only alternative would be automated cargo runs (I know (link) there's a mod for that, but I try staying as vanilla as possible to observe the economy's natural state).

The UI desperately needs a panel with amounts and values of bought and sold things in the last hour or two : I currently need to let the game play itself for several hours and check how credits come and go to notice the difference, and I don't see which station makes which credits.

 

Addendum - After some idling (23/01/2018):

(Link) I'm blocked off high industry and services because of the 500k cap on buyable goods, at least until my benefits attain 30+ millions per hour to allow myself to make all of the necessary stations, the NPC stations frozen because of the cap.

My benefits have stabilized at 3 to 5 millions par hour, a nice amount by all means (starting investment was 50 to 60 millions).

My next venture is fertilizer: a lonely Spices Farm with a Solar Power Plant as her only company sleeps at the other side of the Wojou' territory, with the first fertilizer factory more than 10 gates away and the next water collector 7 gates away (and it's used by the farm I supplied win my previous venture. Waiting for 60 millions to pile up before making a fertilizer factory, with plankton, mineral and water collectors nearby.

 

Addendum - Kickstarting blunder ! (25/01/2018):

Something weird happened ! After making the fertilizer chain, I decided going for a Medical Supplies Factory, as the Wojou' and their Jaleyji friends had both an excellent agro-chemical complex going, but no Medical Supplies Factories (as you know, those are the cornerstone between agro-chemical and industrial economical sectors). So I plopped an Onodera right in a place with a fabric supply 3 gates away, two chemical suppliers 2 gates away, a water collector and a zinc mine 1 gate away, and chlorine 4-5 gates away (from my Power Unit chain).

Then I got out of the sector and wondered what to do, so I've gone to the fabric factory, taking 2000 or so to kickstart the station. When I returned to my factory, it was like completely supplied and full of all five good types, like some sort of superfreighter went here in the five-minute span of me getting the fabric. Had to put the fabric in a trash can near the station, waiting for the Combat Update and ability to go in sectors (to, bit by bit, supply the station with the excess fabric until I can get rid of the can).

So, 0.15.8 changed trading to a whole another level, which is seriously worrisome. One would embark in a trade route to find that it was invalid the minute after, and market analysis has become almost impossible as supply seems now utterly unpredictable. Jumping by a sector a farm would be at 0/25000 water (a serious sign of water deficiency), on the return jump it might be at 24950/25000 (a serious sign of water saturation) !

[Kamo]

Back to Season 2-3 (23/07/2018):

It's been a busy week building stations in my new galaxy (Seed: HappyThoughts), but nothing new: trudging through the Iron Wastes and Titanium Belt as a Charlier, laying Primeforts and Syabus to boost the native factions' ailing production chains, still at the Iron tier because the new starting point is devoid of any big Titanium roids except a pitiful 60k one (near the prime sector of a faction called the Cluuz'iiiij, if you come there) :(.

I just begun to understand something pretty aggravating by arranging the production of Targeting Systems: it seems that stations, when out of a particular good, request it only if they cannot finish the next batch when they finished the previous one, as, only if they are freshly out, and request only that good regardless of other goods.

So, for example, the Targeting Systems Factory is out of Energy Cells but has like 17 wires left. It will request only Energy Cells, produce a batch and then request Wires, and so on. So stations with more requested goods get much more downtime than "simple" stations, which become dramatic as the produced good increases in value (since Targeting Systems are worth 25k, my boosted 1.2k Syabu churns out one every 20 seconds, and seems to produce two batches of eight, multipling cycle time by 16 :-\).

 

Though, there are stations which seem to restock more "intelligently", which is probably due to getting more ambient traffic maybe ? The Targeting Systems Factory in my example is in a nice spot, but offgrid.

The game started seriously lagging and the server crashing more and more after fifty or sixty built stations, probably due to memory or disk usage (but now my new rig runs it mightyfine, so it's not the end of the CII saga :)).

 

After replacing a power supply (08/08/2018):

Not much things happened: but the remaining problems I'm getting in Avorion are of four origins:

• The ever-hateful "500k cap" on NPC stations, which disables their high-tech industries, which means I'm also stuck on low-tech unless I make high-tech industry stations myself, which won't serve me much unless cargo shuttle-supplies complexes happen (so, until I get to the Trinium Reaches). Maybe the 500k cap should be disabled once the player has 5 or 10 million creds... or disabled altogether.
  
• Xsotan biting off engines off NPC freighters before dying to my stations, which causes supply to freeze off and the freighter to forget their run and go idle even if it gets in range of the station dock. I have to Force Gun the freighters onto the next Xsotan/pirate attack group to make 'em kill it :'( to both unfreeze the supply route and save rep. Freighters need to auto-repair their engines and thrusters if they cannot move/turn towards stations.
  
• Reputation grind. I just had a minor trading authorization incident which had me trudging from Abhorrent to Good relations. Those idiots also gave me 740 rep points per pirate ship killed so it was horribly slow. The worst is, the UI to make negotiations is already there :(, it just doesn't work and the removal of all mission rep gains that happened as this failed UI change makes that the only way to grind rep up to Poor is to wait for purely lucky events to happen like a poor hobo, while I have millions upon millions of credits.
  

The last, and it's becoming more ubiquitous by the second, is the supply failures. It seems some (if not all) stations are supplied by one single NPC cargo run, which supplies one type of good at a time and only in times of dire need, so stations with three or more goods waiting to be supplied get into an almost hour-long downtime, and when those stations are part of chains the downtime propagates and multiplies.

So chains that should be healthy and producing a lot of goods gets plagued with horrendously low efficiency, and not because there isn't enough stations supplying the chain, but because there are not enough freighters doing the supply, leading to absurdities like a farm getting hit with endless droughts while there are two>:(! full>:(! Water Collectors specifically supplying it !

The only way this problem could be fixed is the implementation of cargo runs, especially manual cargo runs (ordering a PC freighter to go buy goods from specific stations to sell to another).

Alive Sectors begins to be a problem (30/08/2018):

I probably have around 110 stations around sixty-odd sectors, but I reduces my server's maxAliveSectorsPerPlayer to 25: putting it at the default 500 creates a slowly snowballing cascade of overdue sector updates which bogs down the system due to ever-increasing memory usage.

Now a question is rearing its ugly head: does stations in non-alive sectors still create money through the Out Of Sector Simulation ? Right now I am exploring new systems, munching the stocks of Resource Depots and buying some modules. I am supposed to make around 25 million an hour... but I lost around 40 million in probably half a dozen hours.

Though right now I ceased playing on Survival, as I want to wage war against two enemy factions but there are salvage AI problems (I want to eat enemy ships, not have my shiny-new war salvagers get stuck on null-worth tiny pieces of wreckage and lose millions' worth of delicious titanium and naonite :().

Right now my technique to make stations is:

[*]Go to the prime and all on-grid sectors of the faction to fully initialize their economy

[*]Make a second visit, look what is lacking and note it on the sector map

[*]Go to another part of the galaxy, probably doing the same thing

[*]Return to the previous sectors and "verify" the lack of noted goods

[*]Wait around five to ten minutes, scan freighters in search of the still-missing goods

[*]Maybe repeat the three previous phases one more time

[*]Build the station in a sector either

• At two or less gate jumps
  
• At two or less two-sector jumps (with the intermediate sector having at least a station or gate of course)
  
• ...or at the best-looking place to make the least elongated chain
  

It'll hopefully ensure not bearing the crushing cruelty of deception as seeing a freighter supply the good as you just come back from building the station :-[.

[Kamo]

The 0.20 Update (11/12/2018):

Back again in Survival after an update introducing map commands, and with them, manual cargo runs: now player-made freighters can be assigned to buy and sell a specific cargo type from the most profitable station in the sector.

This allows for unthinkable amounts of profits, as having a freighter just carry the goods for you instead of waiting for an NPC to buy the goods saves huge amounts and time... and money, as the player-made freighters gets to sell directly to the supplied stations, thus profiting from the margin !

However, those profits are currently hidden, as the client logs aren't even registering those transactions.

 

They also cannot use gates, which rule out Bobs from the equation in the Iron Wastes in favor of the more expensive and actually slow Charliers.

In fact, they actually hate gates: one day a naonitegrade Setsuna was blocked because a gate was in the way of the station she was selling at, causing her to involuntarily take it to her previous sector and submit an error. So large amounts of Force Guns may be involved in trading somehow, to displace the heavy gates ::).

 

Currently, my trade route making efforts are suspended as I try to wage a war, as another effect of the update was to (partially?) debug salvage AI. But now, I have two wars to wage: one against two very aggressive (as in, almost killing out my scout ship) clans of pirates (including a full-faction one) first to unveil a third, and then another against a syndicate, so there'll be a hiatus between posts as an epic WAAAGH is in the doing.

 

No mining, No nothing (15/12/2018):

I am again at a hiatus, because not only do the player-made freighters do not work in Out of Sector Simulation (fortunately, the NPC ones still do and make credits for me) as they become stuck in "unloaded sectors", but Mining and Salvaging do not work anymore too. The result is, as I'm waging a WAAAGH against the ferocious Berybou Pirates, the rare losses I'm taking are making me lose Iron, while I should gain a steady supply of it !

 

I made a Trading Post to unload goods from the WAAAGH's booty-filled cargos, but had to make most of the CommanderVideo out of Titanium to avoid spending too much Iron, somehow wasting a supposedly more precious resource.

This Out of Sector Simulation problem also keeps me from organizing the several freighters to supply my Targeting Systems Factory, to see if it's necessary or not to make "advanced"/"giant" versions of my Heavy Stations to actually make the more expensive goods at all (or if the absence of progress bar is an UI bug).

 

Here's two screenshots of the WAAAGH though. The map orders are at least good to summon nearby fleets !

"This is your last warning to surrender !" [Enemy frigate fires. Cue 32 CII warships, coming from two sides 8).]

Yes, I also made a random ship name generator for my fleets, and one of my preferred YouTubers' in there :).

Also, why are almost all my ships holding fire while I make screenshots ? It makes 'em boooring :(...

[Nakinto]

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IkS_7mXWl5ZCvJ1AtTd7Hz7qF2JiqdHyUtoUBnGmPN8/edit?usp=sharing

 

 

Because anything else is just FAR to long... This is spread out between three systems and I have to move a few supplies between them... All so I don't have to search for anything to build Railguns :) lololol A few traders/shipyards to 'store' the finished goods and 'defend' the system and I only have to stop off at 2-3 places to collect :) Works great... Now... to get lighting turrets set up...

 

!#$!@# you Google! Changed the public access before... changed it again, hopefully it sticks this time? lolol

[Kamo]

You should set reading access to public, can't read even by connecting to google ???.

Edit: Thanks :D !

[Meliandah]

Hi guys o/ I restarted to play with the 2.0 and finally the civilian shuttles help a lot ! (i also had few factories already docked together with a Dock Distance Upgrade)
In solo it's still a bit laggy in sectors where it work 😕 If someone know why ? 
Well so this is my first x2 sectors production.

Here we have all to produce Steel & Plactic to Transformator (then this one with steel goes to 2nd sector)



- Mines : Coal + Oil + Ore 
- Tier 1 Factories : Carbon extractor + Steel + Plastic
- Tier 2 : Transformator 

And this is 2nd sector where it goes to Tier 3 Fusion Generator production ! 🙂 all in dock chain :

Mines : Aluminium + Gold & Platine + Gas Collector
Tier 1-2 : Steel Tube > Energised Tubes > Fusion Core > Fusion Generator
Other : Trading Post (for some steel & energy & etc)