So You Want to Be a Rugged Industrialist

Find a lot that gives you room to grow. For every 75km from an established market, you will need roughly 1 hour for materials transit times. Balance these realities against lease costs that is sustainable against profit margins on selling market goods. Try to avoid lots with over 70% abundance of raw resources if possible, leaving them for extractors and miners.

Myriad Industries has decided to begin with some basic refining to establish a foothold in the markets and develop some regular income capital.

Purchase a lease on this lot and plan a warehouse. Purchase the materials needed to build the warehouse from a market. This will cost 141,037 SWAY (at starting seeded market prices). Ship the materials to your construction site. Once everything arrives, begin construction on your warehouse. This warehouse will be your storage location for items you purchase from a market before you send items to an industrial building for processing and for your valuable refined or machined products. It must be completed before making your first non-construction materials purchase.

This effort will take at least 8 hours between materials transit time and actual construction, so your crew will be idle for a while. Once materials are delivered and you have initiated construction, it’s time for the next step.

Lease a new lot no more than 5 lots away from your warehouse and plan one of a:

REFINERY - 585,515 SWAY in materials construction costs

Refineries turn basic materials into more advanced materials of higher value. Refiners purchase high volumes of raw materials from markets and supply the crucial components for manufacturing and chemical processing. Profit margins are lower though they can be increased by importing raw materials not available on a local asteroid and refining them into locally rarer products.

BIOREACTOR - 898,910 SWAY in materials construction costs

Bioreactors perform organic processes that convert raw and basic refined materials into higher value materials. This is a specialized refinery and can produce the foundation materials for food production. Raw materials are purchased from markets and tend to be slightly more expensive than those of basic refinery recipes. Produced values are typically higher as a result. Input materials tend to come from I-type asteroids.

FACTORY - 936,698 SWAY in materials construction costs

Factories take refined materials and combine them into usable products for either further processing or for sale as finished products. This takes a substantial investment in materials to feed through a factory as refined goods are expensive. Output products provide accordingly high profit margins depending on local need.

Purchase the required materials, wait for them to be delivered, and begin construction.

Once your warehouse is completed, browse available markets for materials needed for processing in your industrial building. Pay close attention to the cost of inputs versus the price of outputs to determine your proposed sales price and profit margin. If you have a scientist on your crew, factoring in secondary outputs can contribute further to your planning. purchase materials from markets and begin stockpiling them in your warehouse.

Once the industrial building is constructed and materials have been delivered, begin processing your chosen recipe. Do not set the recipe to output maximum possible product yet. Consider how often you would like to log in and play, setting your production time around that same period.

Collect your output products and send them to market. Sell at a competitive price or fill an advantageous limit order if demand is high enough. Save your SWAY for step 06 but don’t forget to occasionally purchase food from the market to keep your crew in optimal shape.

Restart the industrial building with either the same recipe or something new should you discover a market opportunity. You can also refine your previously created products further to generate increasingly complex (and profitable) materials.

Continue construction of refineries and/or factories as many times as you can until you have as many lots as you can afford. Processes can take days per effort, so a single crew can initiate production on multiple lots in a single day.

Once you get comfortable within a production stream, it might be beneficial to expand into different processing opportunities. If you have a few refineries, consider building a factory to further increase your throughput and offer higher value items on local markets.

Sell your goods at market or refine them further into increasingly complex (and profitable) materials. Try to stay ahead of market trends. If you see a large order book for a certain resource and feel that you can produce materials in time and at profit, buy the input materials and start processing. The same can be said if you see stocks getting low for high-demand materials; you could set the new price once existing inventory is gone.

As your refineries, bioreactors, and factories get built, initiate production cycles on each lot in between constructing new structures as you can afford them. Don’t overextend yourself!

A single crew can manage between 4 and 8 refineries and factories, though refineries tend to see more consistent use over time. Bioreactors take longer per process so a single crew can typically operate 4-6 structures on their own.

Once you begin earning a profit, you can mint additional crews to speed the transit of materials to and from markets and sell them with reduced fees (Merchant focused crew), diversify into related production areas (if you were refining, build some factories), or specialize by building ships. You can also mint a Pilot crew and begin shipping your valuable resources to other asteroids and profitable markets.