Production

Production is the process by which raw materials are manufactured into various items useful throughout the combine. Please note that this is different from Construction, which instead looks at building facilities and stations as opposed to items and ships. This article attempts to cover production of items, ships and vehicles in brief.

Requirements

There are various requirements which must be met before a user can attempt to produce objects. The user must acquire the various items needed to start the process. Below follows a list of some of the main requirements before a user can attempt production, along with brief explanations.

• Datacards - All entities in the combine universe are based off Datacards. These small objects contain the technical blueprints to construct an object. Datacards can be set to a finite number of uses or unlimited use.
• Resources - All production requires raw materials to work with. Depending on the project, different resources will be required. For example in ship construction you may need Varmigio to produce Hyperdrive components and you will often need Nova to produce explosives. Note that if you are producing items for a faction then you need sufficient privileges in order to use faction resources. Production will also cost credits for each batch of items produced.
• Facility Access - Almost all production methods, with the exception of items obtained through crafting such as keycards or force craft items require that the user have access to a facility such as a factory in order to produce the entity. This facility MUST be managed or owned by a faction of the appropriate type. For example only a medical facility can manage facilities used to make medical items. Item factions may be used for weapons, armour and tools etc. When producing ships, users may either use a factory for small ships or in some cases, may need to use shipyards.
• Workers - Worker NPCs are required who must be managed by the same faction which manages the facility. They must be available for use and not in a party. The minimum requirement is one NPC, with more reducing the production time. Be aware that there is an optimum number of NPCs required for production, exceeding this will start to increase the production time.
• Capacity - There must be sufficient space inside the facility to store the finished product. This does not apply however to large ships which are instead built externally.

Preparation

Following the requirements, the user must then prepare the facility for production. The materials which are needed must be located in the facility itself. The NPCs must also be located in the same place.

Next the Datacard must be provided, this can only be done from the Command Room of the facility, again the user must have sufficient privileges to use the command room of the factory. The datacard must be assigned to a specific facility based on it's ID number, which must be provided to the card owner for them to assign. Once the card is available to the facility, the machinery must then be retooled. The retooling process represents the machinery being set up for the next project and existing machinery being changed. It is entirely automated and will take a few hours to complete.

Queues and Producing

With the facility tooled, resources available and the NPCs free to work, it is now possible to start production from the facility. Again using the command room, the user must set the number of batches (for items) or quantity (for ships). With batches, items are not produced individually and are produced in lots of a predetermined size and packaged into crates upon completion. This order then forms the first item in the production queue. Note that larger batch orders would mean more are completed in one go and would take less time overall however would take a significantly longer time to get a return. It is therefore possible if users require faster returns on items, to add multiple small batches of the item to the queue.

Once prepared, the user may commence the production. The NPCs and facility will get to work producing the requested entities. The amount of time taken and the financial cost is determined by the users management skill, with higher levels reducing the time and cost. Once the order has been completed, the managing faction will receive an update, the user will receive a notification and experience points and if set, the facility will start work on the next batch of items.

It is possible, if the facility has multiple datacards attached, to create production orders for multiple objects, for example it is possible to set a facility to produce a blaster first and then move onto armour afterwards. This will then be added to the queue. Note however, that when the blasters are finished, the facility will still need to be retooled however once retooled the order can be restarted easily. Also note that items and droids can be in the same queue together, and vehicles and ships can be in the same queue together, however items and droids cannot be in the same queue as vehicles or ships, and vice versa.

Tips

• Before starting any type of production - above all ships, vehicles, and droids - check if there are some produced ones already inside the factory. If so, unload them out of the factory, to make space for the producing entities and not cause problems at the end of the process.
• With the new system, the optimal number of workers to be assigned is always displayed automatically in the drop down list.