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The upgrade progress will then be displayed with the remaining time left. The factory will not produce anything while the upgrade is in progress. Once the upgrade is complete, the factory production will start again
3 Running a Station
You have a number of options available to run your station, the options available will depend on the type of station, ie if its a Factory, Complex, Dock or your Headquarters.
3.1 Adjust Station Parameters
The Adjust Station Parameters menu is used to control your factories settings as well as transferring wares between factories and docked ships.
3.1.1 Transferring Wares
To Transfer wares to a ship, you need to access the "Adjust station parameters" menu via a docked ship. If you access it directly from the station, it will only transfer to your own ship, if you are docked, or wont give the option to transfer at all if you are not docked.
The Top of the Menu will display the products/resources stock, this is where you transfer between the selected ship
The "Stock" level is the amount of wares currently in the stations hold, and the "Ship" level is the amount in the Ship
The Transfer Bar will be displayed at the bottom
Here we are transferring 37 units to the ship. You can transfer wares back and forth between the ship and station.
3.1.2 Single Factory Settings
The Products and Primary Resources section shows the stock level and allows transferring to a ship. These only appear if you have a selected ship.
- Product Selling Price Setting
This displays the product (only 1 for single factories).
"Avg Cr" is the Average Cost of the ware, all wares have an average cost, generally its best to buy wares below its average, and sell them above.
"Cr" is the current price you are selling at. Any ships that dock to buy your product will pay this price. You ships working for the factory will use this price as the minimum value (although will attempt to get a higher price if possible)
"Jumps" this is the number of jumps where a station is available to buy at the price you set. Showing "None" means there are no stations in range willing to pay the price.
NOTE: the Jumps will only include stations known to you, and doesn't take into account stations that might be blocked via the Blacklist.
The Trade bar at the bottom is used to change the current price between its minimum and maximum price
The number in \[Brackets\] shows the current production cost. This is how much it costs to produced, based on the current price of your resources. So setting a price above this will make a profit.
- Primary Resource Buying Price Limit
Similar to the Product Selling price (above), this is the price that resources are bought at. And ships docking to sell their wares will receive this price per ware.
- Minimum Storage
The Minimum Storage value is used to keep a certain amount of products. If the amount of available products is below the minimum storage, then they will not be sold. They will however be used by your own ships when they want to resupply, but not if they are trading.
So if you set the value to "100", and you have 110 stock level, only 10 items will be buyable.
This allows you keep some wares, like Energy Cells, available for when your ships need to resupply, or if you want to keep a certain amount of wares and only sell the excess
- Fund Transfer
This allows you to transfer funds between the station and your personal account. This allows you to give the station money so it can buy its resources, or take the profit so you can use it for something else.
All ships working for the station will used the stations account instead of your personal ones, so you may want to make sure it always has money available if it needs to buy things
- Maximum Jump Range
The 2 jump range options allow you to set a range that ships working for the station will trade at. This only applies to your ships working for the station, and doesn't include NPC ships that are coming to buy/sell wares.
You can set a different range for buying and selling, and allows you to keep your ships away from hostile sectors by limiting their range
- Other races can Trade
When disabled, this prevents any trade ships from docking and trading with the station, this includes some of your own ships like the Trade Command Software MK3. But any ships assigned to the station will continue to work
3.1.3 Dock Settings
You can also build your own Trade and Equipment docks, that allow buying and selling of wares, as well as for storage.
Unlike factories, these stations do not produce any wares
They also allow you to transfer any wares from your ship to the station, which will then be added to the stations available list. Transferring is done in the same ware as factories, only they are displayed in different categories.
The common options work the same as for factories, so see above for more info.
As well as storing wares, you can also get upgrades and equipment (Equipment Docks only)
These do cost money to apply however, the same cost as if you bought them at NPC docks, and are purchased in the same way.
NOTE: Equipment needs to be unlocked via Diplomacy before they are available.
The main difference between docks and factories, is that you have control over the individual wares. This is found in the "Tradable Settings"
Select the ware and open the settings to apply to each ware.
The "Ware Type" is how the station handles the ware.
- Tradable: This option makes wares both buyable and sellable and is the default setting. This also functions the same as in previous games
- Product: This option make the ware act as a product, IE, the station will only sell it, and not buy it
- Resource: This option makes the ware buyable, but will not sell the ware
- Storage: This option prevents trading of the ware at all, and keeps it in storage
The Price Settings works the same as for Factories, and controls the price your buy/sell at
The Minimum Storage only applies to wares set to "Tradeable" and "Product" and is the same for Factories
Due to how the Headquarters stores its wares, it will have an additional option called "Maximum Storage". This is because for normal docks, each ware has an independent storage, that is limited, and not effected by the storage of anything else.
The Headquarters on the other hand has a shared storage space, so when you add wares, it will reduces the available storage for all other wares. The Maximum Storage limits the maximum capacity so it works more like a normal dock (although the storage is still shared).
This can prevent the station filling up with just one ware leaving no room for anything else.
3.2 Station Command Console
Some additional control of the station is available via the ships command console. This includes some additional settings and the ability to run certain commands on the station.
This is found in the Advanced Submenu
The command slots allow you to select additional commands to run on the station. Each command needs a separate slot, and are mainly used to automate certain areas of the station. This includes things like the Station Manager, Automatic Money Transfer and Automatic Pricing.
The Configuration Options will depend on the type of station
Factory:
Dock/Headquarters:
The Factory Serial simply changes the name of the factory, so if you have multiple factories of the same type in the sector, you can tell them apart.
Don't show warnings will remove the flashing yellow warnings you receive when the factory is unable to produce anything
Add/Remove Available wares is only available on docks, and allow you to control the wares list on the factory, here you can add a new ware, or remove an existing one if the stock is empty.
Property Configuration
The Property Configuration is used to configure how the station is used in the Property Owned Menu, this allows you to Hide the station, set it to favourite so it appears in the Favourites Tab, or change the custom grouping. The custom grouping is only used when the Property Owned Menu is set to group via the Custom Groups.
Station Manager/Supply Stations
These are the settings used by the station manager (see Station Manager for more info)
Adjust Friend/Foe
This is the Friend/Foe settings, of how the station sees any faction ships.
3.3 Reports and Graphs
To help you run your stations, there are a number of reports and graphs available to see how your station is doing