Introduction
Warehouses are a station unique to the Home of Light DLC. They are also unique in the way that instead of possessing production lines, they can be set-up to buy and sell any ware. As with other stations, ships can be assigned to their crew to Protect, Trade and Mine, with harvested resources able to be sold like other wares.
Taking into consideration the presence of NPC traders throughout the galaxy, examples of things they offer include:
- Trading of wares for profit.
- Ability to acquire or stockpile wares, even when hostile to major factions.
- Automation of the supplying of harvested resources to other stations via Trade ships.
- Cost effective castles, covered in cannons.
Selecting a location
As with any station, identifying an suitable location is key to keeping the Warehouse busy and helping you in whatever task(s) you plan for it.
Things to take into consideration:
- Station with Command Relays may only trade system-wide. Can it's ships buy wares you want?
- Whether your customers and supplies are your assets or NPCs, where are they located?
- If you'd like to harvest particular resources, where are they located?
- With up to ~300 weapons, where would you like to place your fully armed and operational battlestation?
Construction
Warehouses are built like any other station but only the Terracorp Construction Vessel (Home of Light DLC) is able to do it. The first stage of a Warehouse requires surprisingly few components, costing ~2.5 million credits. Although it bristles with ability to mount surface elements such that 16 million additional credits offers 102 HIT/MA, and 56 Plasma/MAs, 2 V Launchers and assorted Force Field Projectors.
Note that the initial stage only offers Container storage. Whilst that is a popular class of wares to trade with, it is worth emphasising that this means that the Architect must extend the Warehouse with additional storage modules before Bulk, Energy or Liquid wares may be stored and traded.
Station management
In general, Warehouses are setup and managed like regular stations, with crew and Manager settings like Supply Options. Where they differ from other stations is that the Manger has an additional option called "Manage trade offers" instead of "Manage trade offer prices". Within which we can add or remove wares to the list of items the Manager may trade with.
After pressing "Add Trade Wares" and selecting one, we are presented with number of options:
- The ability to select whether the Warehouse with Buy and/or Sell the ware.
- A definable Stock Limit.
- Definable Sell price (default = maximum = approximately 7.5% above base price in the encyclopaedia).
- Definable Buy price (default = one below the maximum).
- A cross icon for removing the ware from the list.
As noted above, the first stage of the Warehouse may store, and therefore trade, only Container Wares. Until the Warehouse is extended with further storage modules, Bulk, Energy or Liquid wares will be greyed out within the initial "Add Trade Wares" menu.