3. Buildin stuff.
A lot of the architect profession is really about manufacturing. Key facets of the manufacturing process are quality, efficiency and inventory control.
3.1 Making a good product.
There are only a couple items that have varying quality : harvesters and crafting stations. There isn't much of a market for sub-max harvesters or low quality crafting stations. If you are planning on selling these items then you'll do a lot better if you strive to achieve the highest quality possible. For harvesters there isn't much option other than BER10 / BER13. Lower BER havesters sell slow and have to be deeply discounted. Crafting stations have a good market if >40 functional rating and can carry a heavy premium for the highest ratings.
3.1.1 Max BER harvesters.
The only materials that mater for quality in harvester BER are those used in the mining component and during final combine. All of the materials should have high Heat Resitance (HR), Shock Resistance (SR) and Unit Toughness (UT). Using a chemical such as lubricating oil that does not have these stats will make that material not count in the equation (i.e. acts as null). The steel, metal and ore should have HR, SR and UT stats above 900 and preferably as high as possible.
When making the mining component you will see a BER rating. This rating currently maxes at 4 for medium components and 6 for heavy. Don't let this number fool you. In fact I'd recommend just ignoring it altogether. It is not good enough just to hit BER 4 or 6 for the mining component. You should strive to hit an experimental result in the high 90% range. This percent value is the real indicator of the mining component quality and counts as half of the factor for the final BER rating. Hitting an experiment result in the 98-99% range for the mining component will make it a lot easier to get max BER on the final combine and allow you to use lower quality materials during final combine.
3.1.2 High rating crafting stations
High rating crafting stations pretty much require that you are a master artisan. This is a pretty heavy investment of skill points so it is not for everyone. Currently crafting stations use artisan experimentation points rather than structure experimentation. (No, I don't know why.) Also the Micro sensor suite (MSS) and Control unit (CU) sub components are master artisan schematics. The third optional component required is the droid storage compartment (DSC). So you will need the help of a master droid engineer assuming you aren't one yourself. The key thing with stations is that you will need the best quality materials you can find. Preferably the stats should be in the 950-1000 range. For the base combine you need very high conductivity which is usually found in copper. You will need high OQ inert gas, ore, copper, steel, metal and polymer as well as metal and/or with high OQ and conductivity for the MSS and DSC. Each subcomponent needs to be used and will need to be experimented to the highest percent possible. Rougly speaking for a station in the +40 range you'll need DSC and CU in the 95% range and MSS in the 85%level.
One trick to note is that during the station combine it requires 400 units of metal and 50 units of mineral. You can use an ore for the 50 units of mineral and since ore does not have conductivity the quality of the ore does not matter towards the final outcome.
3.2 Manufacturing efficiency.
Here are some basic tips for increasing your manufacturing efficiency:
Make schematics for your deeds. If you make deeds one at a time by hand then your success rate of obtaining maximum BER will be much lower on average than if you create a schematic. As long as your business is large enough to deal in more than a small handful of harvesters then you should be making schematics. Even a short run of 5-10 harvesters can make it worth your while.
Your factory(s) should have as close to 100% utilization as possible. What does this mean? It means that even if you aren't currently building something specific that you can use your factory to make some walls from your structure modules, run off a few more crates of candles for the vendor, setup some more small structure storage modules, make a few more paintings or get some turbo fluidic drilling pumps ready for your next harvester run. You can't make money without building stuff so factory downtime translates into lost business.
Make large runs of structure modules over night. This is a key way to maximize your factory utilization. If you make a schematic and put 200k of ore and 50k of metal in the input hopper and then turn on the factory as you quit playing for the evening then it should be done by the time you get home from work/school the next evening. ( A full run of structure modules takes a little less than 18 hours)
Gather together all the materials to make a full run of generator turbines and then spend a night doing a full run of 1000 turbines (or as many as you can). This will make it so you won't have to worry about generator turbines for a while and will mean you'll have to make fewer deed schematics.
Make a single schematic for Small Structure Storage Modules to use in all your deeds. You may want to run off a full 1000 of them or just run off 50-100 once in a while when your factory is otherwise not in use.
If you can, try placing your factory as close to your house and/or vendor as possible. If your factory is an extra 200m away from your house then you'll spend an extra 1-2 minutes every trip just running back and forth. That may not sound like a lot but it adds up over time. Many city plans don't allow you to have your factory next door but try and get it as close as you can.
If working at your factory you can use a droid with a structure and furniture crafting module in it to make quick schematics rather than having to run back to your home to access your private crafting station.
3.3 Inventory management.
It won't take long as an architect before you realize that you've got a ton of raw materials to obtain and store as well as various parts to track and store.
3.3.1 How Much Do You Need?
The amounts of materials you'll need depend on how large your business is and how much you sell. If you turn over about 10 heavy harvesters a week then you'll need
If making harevesters or buildings then a good rule of thumb is to acquire as much ore as you possibly can and then try to get more. Seriously, ore is your largest material requirement and you'll find yourself needing lots of it. After ore you'll need a large amount of grind metal of any type. You'll also need good stocks of steel, aluminum, copper, chemical and specifically carbonate ore.
If making harvesters then you'll need about 1-2k of high quality materials (HR,SR & UT see above) for each harvester. The proportions you'll need for the high quality materials are roughly: 2 steel : 2 metal : 1 ore : 1 lub oil plus a little bit of inert gas. Since steel is a metal you can use all steel or if you have high quality iron available then you can use a mix of steel and iron. Typically iron and steel are the only materials with very high HR, SR & UT. Note that the lub oil and inert gas can be of any quality but its best to get a big pile of them for use with your harvesters mining components so that you don't have to keep remaking your schematics.
3.3.2 Raw Materials
There are two main ways to obtain the raw materials you will need: mining and purchasing. Mining is the cheapest route but is limited by the number of lots that you will have to your disposal and is also time consuming. Purchasing material on the open market is convenient but has a heavy cost.
3.3.2.1 Mining
You should upgrade your personal fleet to heavy minerals as soon as you can. It is a fact that medium minerals are more efficient than heavies in the sense of credits per unit production cost but heavies will give you about 3k more output in materials per day at a marginal cost of only about 1320-2000 credits more. That’s a cost of only .43-.66 cpu. So it is worth it to go with the heavies because it will increase your output at a very reasonable marginal cost increase.
Consider buying fusion power rather than mining your own. Consider this comparison:
9 x BER13 minerals and 1 X BER14 fusion: operating costs: ~21k credits/day, output : 117k resources / day
10 x BER13 minerals and buy power at 1.5 cpu: 49k credits/day, output : 130k resources/day
For an additional 28k you get an extra 13k resources. That works out to 2.15 cpu. Plus it gives you an extra 13k material to work with. Note that this is looking at PE=500 but it usually averages about 750. If power costs you 1 cpu then it is even more advantageous. This is just an example and you should figure it out on your own based on current material and power pricing for your server.
Instead of tending to your harvesters every day, set them up with maintenance and power to last them for a long period of time and then only check to make sure that the resource you are mining is not gone and that the hoppers are not full. You can figure out how long until your hoppers are full based on the known output rate of the harvesters. We know that out put is BER * density % * 1440 units per day. Roughly you will get 13k per day out of a heavy on a 70% spot. So a 100k hopper will not fill up for over 7 days.
You might even consider doing just static mining. Static mining means you leave the harvesters in one spot and just mine the best material that happens to be available in that location. This will cut down the amount of time spent surveying and tending harvesters by a lot. Static mining will be a lot less efficient because you'll only be able to mine whatever pops up under your harvesters. Since most of our material requirements are for grind quality and we can use any ore or metals there is usually a metal in the 50-60% range and an ore in the 30-40% range available. You can figure on costs of about 0.75 to 1.5 cpu for the materials that you static mine. THis is around double the cost if you do dynamic mining but it is a time versus profit trade off.
3.3.2.2 Purchasing materials
Depending on your style of play you may find yourself unable to mine all the resources you need. Your primary alternative is to buy resources on the open market or from specific suppliers. The public bazaar is worth a look but it often can be over priced and material there is only available in small stacks and you may never find ore in any significant quantities. IN general finding a bulk material miner will be the best way to go for material purchases. You'll want someone large enough to deal in large stacks of materials and who has a fairly consistent stock or can fill orders quickly. Prices for materials vary a lot from server to server so you should shop around on your server and determine what a good price is but bear in mind that availability is worth something.
3.3.3 Where do you put the stuff?
With one small/medium house and a factory you will have around 560 storage slots: 60 items personal inventory, 50 items in backpack, 100 items in bank deposit, 150 items in small/medium house, 100 items in factory input hopper and 100 items in factory output hopper. Also your finished goods can be placed in a vendor which will not take up storage. Over 500 storage slots sounds like a lot. But once you start piling up sub components and materials you can eat that amount up pretty quickly.
Use your factory input and output hoppers for storage. When you finish a factory run, leave the crates in the output hopper until needed. Note that there is a bug seen by many which causes factories to issue an error when the output hopper hits a certain limit that is somewhere below the 100 item level. If you hit this error then you'll need to make sure your output hopper does not get too full or you'll get some factory runs prematurely ending. Some have said that redeeding the factory will stop this error.
Remember to make use of your bank account. To make it more convenient you can store items there that you access less frequently.
3.4 Just In Time Manufacturing
In the ideal world you will complete your deeds 1 second after the customer orders them. Of course we are not all blessed with powers of the force that allow us to see the future. So we must do the best we can and relay on some basic techniques of planning and preparation.
If stocking a vendor then you should watch your sales and get an idea of what items sell faster than others. This will give you a better idea of what mix of items to make on a regular basis. For example if you start with a freshly stocked vendor with 5 of each type of furniture and then all the candles and lamps sell out within a day then this would tell you that candles and lamps are something you'll need to keep a lot of stock so you should increase your production and stock more on the vendor at any given time.
When making items that require sub components such as harvesters you can prepare in general for any demand by keeping the sub components in stock. If you have 200 walls, 20 generator turbines 200 small structure storage modules and 20 of each type of mining unit in stock at any given time then you are just an hour or so away from having 10 finished deeds of any type.
