Once you have chosen the kind of building and it’s location, you will need to gather the necessary resources together and complete the initial building phase to take it to level 1 production with 100t of capacity.

For this initial building phase each building has different resources required – but they all need you to spend 500 APs to finish… so make sure you have enough APs available.

Making your building bigger

Once you have built your building you can immediately start using it as a place to store the resources you gather for the next steps of building. When you transfer goods into your building, they move to the right side of the screen. If you want to use them to build with, make sure they have moved to the very right hand side.

Building a production level 4 building with around 200t of capacity is a good goal. If you do the capacity upgrade first, then you can use the extra space to store resources needed for the production upgrades (so you don’t need a big ship to get started). Collect the necessary resources to increase capacity (and you can store them in your building until you have everything you need).

Step 1: Collect 33t metal, 33t ore and 33t energy and take it to your building
Step 2: Upgrade the capacity of your building from 100t to 200t

Once you have completed Step 2, you need to go out and gather the resources required for the production upgrades. The table below shows you how many of each resource are required to upgrade to the next level of production.

Production Metal Ore Energy
Level 1 » Level 2 20t 15t 15t
Level 2 » Level 3 28t 24t 24t
Level 3 » Level 4 46t 43t 43t

You could gather all the resources first and then do the production upgrades in one go – or collect what you need and updgrade and then collect again. It will not take you very long to have made it to production level 4 where you should stop for a while.

Step 3: Gather 94t metal, 82t ore, 82t energy in total to allow you to upgrade production
Step 4: Perform each production upgrade as you are able and then stop at production level 4

Now you need to open the doors, put some initial upkeep stock in there and just watch all the traders rushing about making money for themselves as well as for you.

Allowing others in to trade your building

To turn on trade for your building, click the “Activate Trade” button in the building screen and fill in the Max and Min values to accept 8 ticks of upkeep – and set the Buy and Sell values according to our alliance price list (which can always be found on the Our Alliance page in the Diplomacy section of the game).

To make this step easy for you, here are the common building prices and min/max settings for level 4 buildings from our alliance that are built in sectors with an M-Class planet (Edvea, Oldain):

Chemical Laboratory – level 4

Resource Min Max Price Sell Price Buy
Food 999 16 999 160
Energy 999 56 999 180
Water 999 16 999 140
Chemical Supplies 0 0 200 0

This building returns 76,720 credits profit per week – or more if you trade.

Plastic Facility – level 4

Resource Min Max Price Sell Price Buy
Food 999 32 999 160
Energy 999 32 999 180
Water 999 32 999 140
Nebula Gas 999 56 999 170
Chemical Supplies 999 56 999 350
Heavy Plastics 0 0 554 0

This building returns 71,120 credits profit per week – or more if you trade.

Optics Research Center – level 4

Resource Min Max Price Sell Price Buy
Food 999 16 999 160
Energy 999 56 999 180
Water 999 16 999 140
Gem Stones 999 32 999 180
Optical Components 0 0 214 0

This building returns 77,560 credits profit per week – or more if you trade.

Electronics Facility – level 4

Resource Min Max Price Sell Price Buy
Food 999 16 999 160
Energy 999 72 999 180
Water 999 16 999 140
Metal 999 56 999 600
Heavy Plastics 999 32 999 690
Electronics 0 0 773 0

This building returns 70,560 credits profit per week – or more if you trade.

Adding some defenses – a deterent

At this stage of the game it isnt worth investing a lot of your money of making this into the fortress. The facts are that people don’t destroy one another’s buildings on a whim. The only people to be concerned about are the rare pirate player who might attack for a round or two to see if they can steal some of your building upkeep.

Adding a single defensive module is usually all you need worry about doing to deter pirates. Click on the Manage modules link near the bottom of your building management page. Click on the Buy button beside the Medium Missile Turret module. It costs 25,000 credits and will deter any pirate from attacking your building.

Open the doors and let them in

All that is left to do now is get some initial upkeep stock into your building to that when the building “tick” happens your building will produce it’s output and the trades can begin all over again.

Maybe you will stay around and trade your own building for a while (and those of other buildings beside you) – this will double your income (and then some) as you are making excellent profit on the trading part as well. Maybe you will move on and do some skilling and leave your building for others to stock and trade.

No matter what you choose to do, as as long as your prices are in accordance with the Alliance guidelines, the economy will have no choice but accept an enforced (but gradual) swing away from the profit being entirely in the building owner’s pockets – and toward allowing traders to make a good profit for the efforts they put in maintaining the economy.