Production chains: a concrete example
Last updated
Last updated
In today's guide we will be producing cement, to build strong foundations on the topics of refining and manufacturing. These two activities are domains where engineers shine, and having some of them in your crew will reduce the production times. We'll be needing a refinery and a factory.
The entire economy in Influence is player driven, with higher end products building upon the lower tiers. This is perfectly illustrated and easily visualised in Elerium's Production Planner. Here is our blueprint for the cement production chain (https://influence.elerium.dev/production-planner.html#Cement):
We can see here that there are two different processes leading to the production of cement, taking different input materials. We will use the simpler Salty Cement Mixing process because you can directly extract water on Adalia Prime, and use the calcite extracted from the previous mining guide. If you don't want to extract the water yourself you can buy it from the market, or even buy deionized water and switch to the other recipe which has a slightly better yield.
As shown in the purple hexagons, there will be two steps required in the transformation of our calcite into cement:
Calcite Cacination, using a refinery
Salty Cement Mixing, using a factory and requiring water as a second input
Locate your refinery, and click on the Refine Material icon. Choose Calcite Calcination in the process list, and select the input and output inventories.
The process for calcite calination produces two outputs. In our case, the most important product is the quicklime, so click on the Quiclklime image to select it as the primary output. A refining process can only have a single primary output for which you will receive the full quantity. All other (secondary) outputs will also be delivered to the output inventory, but suffer some waste penalty. This penalty can be reduced by having scientists in your crew.
Right under the process selection list is a slider to choose the amount of Standard Recipes (SR) that you want to run. One SR of calcite calcination requires 100kg of calcite as an input and delivers 56kg of quicklime (as primary output). You can select any number of SRs including non-integer values, but in this case rounding will apply (input quantity rounded up and output down). The process duration is computed based on two values:
a process setup time, which is 5 minutes for calcite calcination - displayed above the slider
a run time per SR, which is 0.3 seconds for calcite calcination - shown below the slider multiplied by the selected number of SRs
(The values above are influenced by crew bonuses)
This logic means that it is more time-efficient to run bigger batches of SRs. Here, a single SR would require 5 minutes, while in 10 minutes we could run 1000 SRs.
The total processing time can be found in the details at the bottom of the window.
Click on Begin to start the refining process. Wait for the teal notification that your process is ready, and complete the refining by clicking on Finish to deliver the quicklime to your storage.
Locate your factory, and click on the Manufacture Goods icon. The window is very similar to one seen in the previous refining step. Select the Salty Cement Mixing and your input and output inventories, and the desired number of SRs. Note that all input products should be located in the same storage, as the process does not allow selecting multiple input inventories. Click on Begin to start the manufacturing process, wait for the teal notification and deliver your cement by clicking on Finish.
