All factories in the X universe are designed around the concept of interoperability. That is, if you have a Cahoona Bakery, it is designed to consume Argnu Beef at the exact rate that a Cattle Ranch can produce it. All factories work this way.
They each can hold exactly 5 hours 33 minutes and 20 seconds worth of resources. That is 5.555 (repeating) hours worth. The same goes for product. This makes it easy to determine the rate of resource usage per minute or per hour. If you want to know how much of a resource a factory will consume per hour, then take the amount of it the factory can hold, and divide it by 5.555 to get the amount that will be consumed per hour. Divide that by 60 to get the amount consumed per minute.
If you go around and look at all your factories, you will find that whatever length their production cycle is, they always use resources at the same rate. For example, energy. All factories (except for Solar Power Plants) use energy - and despite the fact that different factories take different amounts of time to make their products, you will find that they all use energy at a rate of precisely 15 units per minute. If you take 5000, which is the amount of energy any factory can store, and divide it by 5.555 (repeating), you get 900 units per hour, which is 15 per minute. So the formula works.
Like any rule, though, there are exceptions. Two of them in fact. The first is a mine. We will cover that later in the turtorial. The other exception, is the Solar Power Plant. This is a special case that makes the economy work.
A Solar Power Plant is special. It is the only factory in the X universe that makes a product faster than it consumes a resource. A normal Solar Power Plant (or SPP) uses crystals at a rate of one every 59 seconds. Which, for all intents and purposes, is the same rate that a Crystal Fab produces them (1 per minute). However, if our rule were to hold out for a SPP, then it would produce only 15 energy per minute. Instead, it produces 138 per minute. This is enough energy to feed 9 factories!
And this is the basis of making a profit. Energy is the basic unit in the X universe. If you want to make a chain of factories that makes products without costing you any money, then you need to produce free energy. This is possible because a Solar Power Plant produdes more energy than it takes to make the crystals that it consumes. More than twice as much, actually. Here is how you figure it... a Solar Power Plant requires:
- 1 x Crystal Fab which uses 15 energy per minute, plus the output of one food factory and one Silicon mine.
- 1 x Food Factory for the Crystal Fab (depends on what race's crystal fab you use - in the case of the Argon, Crystal Fab, this will be a Cahoona Bakery) which uses 15 energy per minute plus the output of one farm.
- 1 x Farm for the Food Factory (ie: Cattle Ranch), which uses 15 energy per minute.
- 1 x Silicon Mine, which uses 15 energy per minute
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- Grand Total: 60 energy cells per minute.
Free Energy
In order to chain the factories without using money, you will need to make a small upgrade to your "Buy Ware" command. As it currently sits, there is no way to order your transports to buy resources for a factory only from a factory you own. To build a factory chain that requires no money, you need to download and install the excellent script written by Raskor414 that acts as a replacement for the "Trade->Buy Ware..." command. Once it is installed, you can now order your transports for a factory to "buy" resources from a factory you own. And when the transports are buying from another factory that you own, you can tell them not to pay for the resources (pay 0 credits).
We will go through and set up a chain of factories to make free energy. For this setup, I am assuming you are buying Argon factories. You buy one Solar Power Plant, one Crystal Fab, one Cahoona Bakery, one Cattle Ranch, and one Silicon Mine (place the mine on an asteroid of yield 25 or more).
It will take some money to get things originally set up. You need to get all the factories up and running initially. For that, you will probably have to buy some resources made locally. Meatsteak Cahoonas are hard to find in quantity. A tip is that the sector Nyana's Hideout has three Cahoona Bakeries that are almost always all full. I won't cover how to perform the initial setup of the factories. It is assumed you have built factories before and know how to get them running. One note, though - make sure that you set all these factories to NOT sell to other races.
Once they are all running, you need to chain them. The Cattle Ranch will have one freighter. Order it to "Trade->Buy Ware...". You then select your power plant and energy cells as the resource. The new script will then ask how many times to make the trip. Use "-1" as the value - that will tell the script to run forever. The script will then ask how much to pay per unit. You don't want to pay anything, so enter zero here.
For the Cahoona Bakery you need two freighters. For the first, do exactly what you did with the Cattle Ranch's freighter - tell it to buy energy cells from your power plant at zero cost. For the second, tell it to buy Argnu Beef at zero cost from your Cattle Ranch.
The Crystal fab will get energy at zero cost from the power plant, meatsteak cahoonas from the bakery at zero cost, and silicon from the mine at zero cost. The mine gets energy at zero cost from the power plant.
And now... you're done. A solar power plant that is supplied at zero cost.
Free Energy - Now What?
You've got free energy now, so what do you do with it? Well, one of two things - you can sell it. You are diverting 60 units of energy per minute from the solar power plant to feed the factory chain. Assuming that you sell energy at the full 23 credits per unit, this is like getting crystals at 1380 credits each (23 * 60). This Solar Power Plant will make more money than any SPP that buys its crystals from the market.
The real benefit, though, is in setting up other factories. As mentioned earlier, a normal SPP will produce enough energy to feed 9 factories in total - 5 factories more than it takes to supply the crystals. You can use this setup to make any factory that produces for free. A Laser Tower factory requires a Silicon Mine, food factory, and farm to supply it. That's 4 factories. A single SPP chain will supply that for free and have enough left over for one more factory.
If you convert all your factories over to using free energy, this simplifies accounting greatly. You don't need complex accounting scripts - you can simply drain all the money from any factory that actually sells to the public. None of your factories need to have a "base amount" of money in them any more. Drain them all. Free money!
Higher-output Solar Power Plants
As mentioned earlier, the Solar Power Plant is an exception to the rule of always using the same amount of resources. If you look at the galactic map, you will see that each sector has a "Suns" value expressed as a percentage. Any solar power plant in a sector that has greater than 100% will produce energy faster, and also consume crystals faster. On the surface this looks like it would throw everything out of wack. And if you wanted to run these plants at full output, it would throw everything out of wack.
However, the simplest answer is to ignore it. The "Suns" value will never be under 100%. So, if you still treat all Solar Power Plants as if they will feed a total of 9 factories, you will never consume more than 135 energy cells per minute. Then these SPPs will never try and produce faster than a single crystal fab can feed them. If you were to try and run them at full, in a 150% sun sector, you would need to use 3 crystal fabs to feed 2 SPPs. That means you would need 2 freighters for each SPP to buy crystals. The cost of this makes it just as simple to build one SPP for each crystal fab chain. The added complexity doesn't save any money, and just makes it harder on you.
High-Yield Mines for Profit
Silicon and Ore mines are the other exception to the rate rule. With an Ore or Silicon mine, the production rate is based on the yield of the asteroid it is built on. Asteroid yields are also standardized across the X universe, with the base standard being an asteroid with a yield of 25. That is, if you place a mine (Ore or Silicon) on an asteroid with a yield of 25, then that mine will make products at the exact rate that any factory uses it.
For example, a Crystal Fab can hold 208 units of Silicon Wafers. It consumes them at a rate of 5 every 8 minutes, or 5/8ths of a unit per minute. A silicon mine built on an asteroid with a yield of 25 will produce exactly 5/8ths of a unit per minute (or 1 unit every minute and 36 seconds). This same hypothetical mine will also consume energy cells at the standard rate of 15 units per minute. As the yield of the asteroid increases, both the consumption of energy and the production of products increases. So a higher yield asteroid does not make a mine that is any more efficient, it is just faster. If you want to have enough Ore or Silicon produced from any one mine to feed a factory, then you must build it on an asteroid with a yield of 25 or more.
If you are using the mine to feed a factory, you can simply ignore it if it has a higher yield than 25. The factory will only use Ore or Silicon at the standard rate, which will limit the mine to producing it at the standard rate, which will cause it to consume energy at the 15 units/minute standard rate . No worries - it's all standard. Really, it's standard I tell you.
If, though, you want to sell the Ore or Silicon, then you need to work out how much energy it will consume so you know how much to allocate from your SPP chains.
To work out how much energy per minute a mine will use is easy. Divide the yield of the asteroid by 25, and this will give you the relative speed of a mine built on it. That is, a mine built on an asteroid with a yield of 50 will work twice as fast as "standard". A silicon mine on a 50 yield asteroid will produce 1.25 units per minute and consume 30 units of energy per minute.
If you are using the easy way to calculate factory chains, which is that a SPP will produce enough energy for 9 factories in total (or 5 after the consumption), then simply think of an asteroid with a higher yield as more than one factory. The "standard factory equivalence" of a mine is the same as its speed - the yield of the asteroid divided by 25.
Formulae
Here is a list of all the formulae:
- Resource consumption per Hour = Resource Capacity / 5.555555
- Resource consumption per Minute = Resource Capacity / 333.333333
- Production Rate formula = Resource Consumption formula
- Ore Production Rate from Ore Mine per Minute = (Yield / 25) * 2.5
- Silicon Production Rate from Silicon Mine per Minute = (Yield / 25) * .625
- Standard Factory Equivlance Rating of Mine = Yield / 25
