Hot on the heels of Asura’s recent article Considering Making A Stim Chip Mill?, Rylar has investigated in more detail setting up a Stim Chip economy.

This article details the building setup and resource usage whilst maintaining details on profit. The conclusions are surprising!

Introduction

The lowest reasonable price for Neural Tissue, assuming a low trader income and a 2000/cr/tick owner income, is 145 cr/ton. The boost for low crime means each chip is about 158 credits cheaper to produce. Nice to have, but nothing exciting.

A Stim Chip Mill needs a large capacity to be effective, much like a Nebula Plant. So, we’re going to assume ideal conditions. The Stim Chip Mills are level 10, the Neural Labs are level 8 and everything is located near to an NPC starbase on the FWE route.

Proximity to a well stocked NPC starbase is important because only they can produce enough Animal Embryos to be considered effective. Even a Player owned starbase will be hard-pressed to make 3 Neural Labs tick.

A Self Sustaining Chain

In a low crime cluster, a single level 10 Stim Chip Mill requires 2.6 level 8 Neural Labs. Realistically, Stim Chip Mills are harder to stock, so 2.5 Neural Labs per Stim Chip Mill is a good goal.

In our set up with 5 Neural Labs and 2 mills, we’ll need the following buildings:

• 5× Neural Labs (level 8)
• 2× Stim Chip Mills (level 10)
• 1× Medical Laboratory (level 9)
• 1× Electronics Facility (level 6)
• 1× Smelting Facility (level 6)
• 1× Plastics Facility (level 6)
• 1× Chemical Laboratory (level 6)

Here are the resource requirements for a single tick of all those buildings:

• 98t Food
• 78t Energy
• 98t Water
• 230t Animal Embryos
• 40t Medicine
• 38t Nebula Gas
• 18t Electronics
• 18t Exotic Matter
• 6t Heavy Plastic
• 9t Metal
• 12t Ore
• 9t Chemicals

This chain requires an NPC starbase approaching 180,000 population to produce enough embryos. Note that this base will consume 470 tons of food every 4 hours.

Profit

With an ideal chain, low crime rate, low building income and low trade income, you can expect to sell chips for 3,800 credits each. Each Stim Chip gives about, 1/3rd the action points that drugs can provide (which sell for around 12,000 credits each). So, you can realistically expect 17,600 cr/day on Stim Chip sales.

This does not include the build cost (or defense module cost) for each of the buildings in the chain – certainly for the high level buildings (which require large capacity) this will require a significant supply of Metal and Ore.

Conclusion

Clearly the Pardus programmers are bad at math. You should not pursue Stim Chip for profit. Even Space Farms and Nebula Plants will serve you better than Stim Chips.

On the plus side, Stim Chips allow you to run a crime free cluster – which is priceless for Military Outpost quality.

Regular visitors may have already discovered the Pardus Clock page on this website, and for those of you who use userscripts, you may have installed the Pardus Nav Menu Clock userscript in the past.

I am pleased to introduce two extensions (one for Firefox and one for Chrome) that provide a large collection of universe independent and configurable Pardus Clocks for use in Pardus.

• Pardus MultiClock (for Chrome)
• Pardus MultiClock (for Firefox)

Please note that these extensions are not designed to work alongside the Pardus Nav Menu Clock userscript.

A lot of clocks are available to choose from – but it’s unlikely you will want to use them all at the same time (and indeed attempting to do so will require you have a wide screen to fit them all in). You can choose what clocks you want (for each of the universes you fly in).

Currently the following list of clocks are available:

• GMT/UTC time
• The time until server reset
• Eq degrade tick
• TO upgrade tick
• NPC Roam times
• Lucidi/Z Roam times
• Action Points
• Shield recharge
• Building tick
• Planet tick
• Starbase tick
• Leech tick
• Jeff Foam tick
• X993 Repair Drone tick
• ExoCrab Spawn times
• Starbase repair tick
• Squad Action Points tick
• Diversity Bonus tick

Do you know of a clock that is not present? Send me the details (Sparkle in Artemis) and I’ll update accordingly!

Anyone with at least 10,000 experience points can build a Stim Chip Mill. What does it take to keep one running successfully? How does one select a practical location? What are the most difficult hurdles to overcome?

Rylar wrote about Stim Chips when they were first introduced to Pardus, and now Asura has contributed more details on actually planning (and implementing) a Stim Chip chain.

Where To Build?

The bottleneck for a good location is Neural Matter. Yes, you need Exotic Matter (you will need to be within trade range of an Exotic Matter source) but a smaller trade ship (like a Babel or a T-Bird) can carry enough Exotic Matter to keep your Stim Chip Mill supplied for many production cycles. The same is true for Electronics – you need a supply, but not necessarily a high-volume supply.

To keep a Level 2 Stim Chip Mill in production, you need 50/56/62 tons of Neural Matter per cycle (varying by the crime level of the cluster). If you have a slightly lower supply available in the sector, then you’ll occasionally spend a cycle without producing – but if you’re producing chips on, say, 9 out of 10 cycles, then that’s reasonably efficient.

So you will need a Neural Lab somewhere very close to your Stim Chip Mill, close enough that you can haul Neural Matter from the Neural Lab to the Stim Chip Mill at sustainable AP cost. Note that a level 5 Neural Lab produces 48 tons per cycle; a level 6 Neural Lab produces 56 tons per cycle.

A level 5 Neural Lab requires 31 tons of Animal Embryos per cycle whilst a level 6 Neural Lab requires 36 tons. Therefore, the Neural Lab should be close to an active Starbase, a Type G Planet, a Type I Planet, and/or a type R planet. An ideal location might include more than one Animal Embryo source – and consider the needs of any Space Farms also supported by that source (you don’t want to break an economy that is already in balance).

A Neural Lab also needs Food, Water, Energy and Medicine – so you will need to source Medicines from somewhere as well.

Making Good Use Of Your Building Slots

Since it requires you have at least 10,000 XP to build a Stim Chip Mill, you will already have at least three building slots. One for the Stim Chip Mill and one for a Neural Lab would be an ideal start.

You might use your third slot to establish your own supply of Medicine or Electronics. If not, then perhaps you could build a Trade Outpost and sell your Stim Chips from there (whilst also using the Trade Outpost to store extra resources you need to support your other buildings). Other options might include a Military Outpost to help defend the location which includes your buildings. Perhaps before you build the Neural Lab and the Stim Chip Mill you might build an Asteroid Mine or Smelting Facility to generate the building materials you will use. I’m curious to learn about other third-slot synergies (please feed back to Asura or Sparkle in Artemis on this)!

What Makes a Good Building Location?

The upkeep requirements for a Stim Chip Mill vary based on the Crime Level of the cluster it is built in – so check the Crime Rate first (click the Statistics menu and then the Other tab).

Narrow down a few sectors where there is currently an Animal Embryo supply that is currently going to waste; or where the Animal Embryo supply could (and would) increase if you become a local consumer.

Consider faction and Alliance politics as well. Are there people who would actively interfere, by indirect means (such as buying up the materials you’ll need), or more direct means (such as attacking your ship and/or raiding your buildings)? Are there Military Outposts between you and your upkeep sources (and will you have permission to pass those Military Outposts)? Are there Military Outposts which would protect you from raiders? Are there supporters who would come to your defense if needed? Will your buildings affect which Alliance has sector dominance? Is the location often disrupted by Alliance conflicts or full-fledged Faction wars?

Check for NPC spawn locations. If you are near Asteroids or Nebula Gas, would you mind running into cloaked NPCs when trading your buildings? The Stim Chip Mill can be built on an energy field – are there Pirate NPC spawn locations nearby?

Finally, send Asura in Artemis any feedback on what worked for you (and what didn’t), so that this article can be updated and become more useful!

This userscript modifies the list showing the NPCs you have killed on the Overiew Stats page.

An image is added to the page for each of the NPCs in the list. The number of kills remaining until the next medal is shown as well as an image for each of the medals you have already gained.

The list of NPCs is also re-ordered to show the NPCs with the least kills remaining until the next medal entry.

Updated 23rd September, 2019 – v2.1 – added the Pirate Captain.

Updated 22nd April, 2015 – v2.0

For each of the NPCs you have not yet killed (and which counts towards a medal) is now shown at the bottom of the list of NPC kills and medals.

• Download and install the NPC Ribbon Hunter Companion script

• Install the NPC Ribbon Hunter Companion script (for Chrome)