Why won't my cobalt transfer to my outgoing link?

[Zagzagel]

I screwed up and took the mission of supplying cobalt to Volii Alpha. Okay, so I have to build an outpost. I've tried to get one up and supply cobalt and just for the fun of I also set up a water collector. I've got solid collectors for the cobalt and tanks for the water. I've got everything connected to everything else and of right now I've got 125 water in the outgoing cargo link. But no cobalt even though one of my storage containers is showing full. I've even connected a small warehouse to to everything else. Why isn't my cobalt moving to the outgoing cargo link? It shows I can set up an outgoing water link, but no cobalt. (I'd imagine because no cobalt is moving to the outgoing terminal.)

[AoD_lexandro]

Warehouses are only for manufactured goods, not raw minerals. The outgoing link has a limit on it, if you have filled it with water it cannot take any cobalt.

[Zagzagel]

Is there anyway to increase its capacity? Now it has 325 units of water. Now two of my hoppers are full and it's still not transferring. I must have done something wrong. It shouldn't be this hard to set this up.

[AoD_lexandro]

There is no way to increases its capacity unfortunately. You could take a screenshot overhead of the base with connections. Could be more helpful to diagnose any issues.

[fizzbin]

one thing I found is that you have to do things in the order they flow. Build the cobalt extractor, build the power generator/solar/whatever, build the cargo link. Wire the power to the extractor, then create a output link from the extractor to the cargo link. I usually name my outpost for what it makes then local or out of current system. Go to the destination that was where the resource was headed in the mission. You will find one of the terminals will let you link the outpost to the destination you are at. As said before, no other resources and you do not need tanks for anything when it comes to a mission (the cargo link tank is good enough).

[spam]

You will need to either disconnect your water extractors and remove the water from the outgoing side of your cargo link, or build a second cargo link for the cobalt. Trying to export more than one resource at a time in a single cargo link ends with the one resource saturating the entire link and crowding out the other resource. If your not using it I would just manually remove the water and drop it on the ground. It will stay there a pretty long time and will probably be there if you ever need it.

[ZombieHunter]

I try not to mix resources and send 1 type of item per cargo link. You 'can' send more but as has been said since there is no way to limit how many of each goes into the cargo link and there is no way to set the frequency of transports you end up flooding the cargo link with the fastest producing item and the other item never has enough room. Then the mining for the other item backs up since it has no outlet.

This would be similar in X4 to producing a good locally and storing it but never selling it. Eventually the storage fills up and production stops. Or producing two items but not having enough storage so one item produces faster and fills up the cargo space meaning you might have 80% of one type and 20% of another.

The outpost system will eventually clog up since there is no consumer for the products unless you are the consumer. The only way to consume the goods is to manually go sell them which is extremely painful given the low amount of credits vendors have, or you take the resources and turn them into secondary resources like wire and comm relays, or you manually consume the resources at your outpost by crafting items at a workbench. Benches in your outpost will pull from local storages and warehouses. Warehouses are for completed items and storages are for raw storage of liquid, gas and ore / minerals.

If they allow us to link a cargo link to a station to 'auto-sell' or 'find the best price' then the system would be automatic and would not clog up so long as the station kept buying. But as the station kept buying the price would go down b/c they would end up with too much of the item in question. Since no one in the game buys anything from merchants except for you, the same problem would happen. Also if they did this, it would turn the game into something more like an X-series game than an RPG. You would also need a much better UI to manage all of this 'stuff'. It would also turn the game into a slideshow since there would be a lot of background processing going on.