Making
Industry
Rock and wreck to metal to components to a keel — the only way a hull enters the game.
There is no shop that sells you a ship. Every hull flying in Argus Dominion was laid down by a pilot out of materials somebody mined or salvaged, and the chain from rock to ship is four steps long.
| Step | In | Out | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Refine | ore, scrap | materials | at a berth |
| Fabricate | materials + a blueprint | components | at a berth |
| Lay a keel | components + a hull print | a job with a timer | at a berth |
| Collect | a finished job | the ship | at the berth you started it |
You hold one job at a time. That is the throttle on the whole economy and it is why hulls have a price: the constraint is not materials, it is that a pilot who is building cannot also be building something else.
Refining
Untrained, a refiner gets 65 % of a rock. Every level of Refining adds four points, so a maxed refiner gets 85 %. The berth's standing bid for raw ore is the 65 % already paid out, which means selling ore is never a trap — it is simply what your refining is worth at level zero.
Scrap off a wreck skips this step entirely. A salvager pulls a material, not a rock, so it enters the chain one box further along.
Components
A component's price, its bulk and its tier are all read off its recipe rather than typed. A structural plate is 20 ferrite and 19 silicate, which is a round thousand credits and 4.875 m³, and it is T1 because both of its materials are.
What it costs to supply a hull
Two thirds of a hull's bill by value is structural plate. The cheapest keel in the game is a Fighter at 180 000 credits of materials, and the biggest hold in the game is a Hauler's 9 500 m³ — which is the constraint the recipes are actually written against. A plate made of nothing but the cheapest material would have put a single Fighter's plate half at 10 000 m³ of raw ore, and no hull in the game could have been supplied in one trip.
Next — Money →