Income and Expenses evaluation

[Mike Takumi]

Since I can't finish the main story due to that Dusty bug many people are getting. I decided to go check out how power/filter usage works and rough cost breakdowns and calculations

Core Power

Core has 3 components, Core/baseline power, Climate/blower, and Lights. Below values are PER battery.
-Core is base 31 power/hr just to have the truck on if you turn all lights off and climate
-Lights are 6 power each
-Climate is complicated, it has two knobs and power usage varies

Heater: This just sets target temperature and has no DIRECT impact on power usage. Settings are Cold/Cool/Moderate/Warm/Hot which sets the temp target to 50, 59, 68, 77, 86 respectively (F)

Blower: Also has 5 settings, Off/Low/Medium/High/Max. Maximum power usage is 7/18/37/75/112 for each setting. Yes even OFF draws power and can affect internal temp.

The actual values are less depending on the difference between the target temperature and effort required by the blower to maintain it. For a couple examples,
-In a 186F system with the Heater on HOT, OFF pulls full 7 power and can't maintain 86, LOW can maintain but draws 11 power, Medium is 15 power, High is 22, Max is 30
-In a 59F system with heater on COOL, Off can maintain and uses 1 power, Low is 3, Medium 7, High 15, Max 22

Pattern is it will use whatever amount of power to maintain based on lowest setting, and then low adds +2, Medium +4 on top of that, and High and Max+7/8 on top of that/each other.

Other Power

-Suit will draw about 60 power per minute while recharging, whether that's O2, Power, or both
-Grav is 128 power at all times if you have it on, whether you have 0 lbs of cargo or 4000 lbs
-Oxygen is 98 power at all times, with 4 filters, 0 filters, whether it's doing normal 23L O2 or having to push max 33L
-Mag is 63 power per battery if you have any load attached. Light load, heavy load, or multi trailer, all the same draw

Power cost

This gives roughly the following hourly costs at very conservative values

Core: 62
Climate: 20 (assuming it's not having to work hard most of the time)
Lights: 12 (We'll say one set of lights on average on)
Oxygen: 98
Mag: 84 (If you spend 2/3rds of the time being hooked to cargo)
Total Power: 276
With Grav: 404

Which makes for an hourly cost if you PURELY use small batteries at average $5 cost of $1,380/hr. With the grav it's $2,020/hr. Each additional light is $60/hr. If you use medium batteries the costs go up to $1,838/$2,691. And if you're insane and using the big batteries that is $3,450/$5,050.

Air Filters

Air Filters have both a health value and a % effectiveness rating, these are tied together. If you kick around a filter, you'll see when it's health hits certain points, it loses %. Around 450 it becomes 99%, around 400 it goes to 98%, then 370 for 97%, 340 for 96%, 320 for 95%, 300 for 94%, 290 for 93%. Note the % goes down faster and faster as health drops.

Heath is what drops when you install a filter. Every 8.5 seconds it will lose 1 health. If you install 2, then it will lose 1 health every 17 seconds. If you install 4 it's 34 seconds. When the health drops to 112, it's no longer able to produce enough O2 to sustain you.

O2 produced is purely an average of all installed air filters, whether you have 1 or 4 100% filters, you'll get 33L O2 produced. If you have 2 50% and 2 100%, then you'll be at 75% and be making 25L O2. However, the health drop benefit remains, so even with a 0% filter and 3 100% ones (75% average), you are extending the life of those remaining 3.

Another note is if you spring a leak, that has 0 impact on your filter decay rate or battery usage. It's only an "impactful" (sorry) problem if it causes you to start losing pressure in the cab, so don't feel rushed to fix it unless you're in danger of passing out.

You will burn through about 1.07 air filters per hour regardless of the number you use, and at 3000 a pop average, that means you're adding another $3,275 to your total hourly cost

Fuel

Average cost of fuel is around $2.20/gal. The tank can hold somewhere around 700 gallons. If you're being decently fuel efficient, that'll last you about an hour, so that's another $1,540/hr in costs

Total Expenses

That makes the LOW end of expenses at average price
Cheap batteries: $6,195/hr, $6,835 with grav (see, $60 for lights is nothing)
Medium batteries: $6,653/hr, $7,505 with grav
Big Bats: $8,265/hr, $9,865 with grav

Income

Now lets consider income. This will be shorter (the people cheered).

Completely/Mostly drained batteries will sell for 10% value so you'll get back some money from that and it reduces the power cost by 10%. Using our above options that means:
Cheap: 2.76/4.04 Bats $138/$202
Medium: 1.84/2.69 Bats $184/$269
Big: 1.38/2.02 Bats $345/$505

Air Filters similarly if you sell them at 68%/112 health will give back 25% value, so that is $819 back

Jobs average around $1250 per hop required after factoring in bonus payments if you're being quick and clean about it. If you're in a decent groove you can pull off about 8 "hops" of jobs in between restocking/refueling and time taken to drop off/dock for job/pickup job. So you're roughly looking at around $10,000 an hour in income. Which all together means your possible profit per hour looks like this.
Cheap: $4,762/$4,186
Medium: $4,350/$3,583
Big: $2,899/$1,459

So it's not terribly hard to actually be profitable unless you're using the big batteries. Especially if you are taking advantage of discounts for buying supplies and selling at high value systems, particularly filters since that's about half your costs if you're not rolling with massive batteries.

HOWEVER. This assumes you never are having any collisions. Each one of those can easily rack up 1-2k in damages to be repaired, which very rapidly wipes out all that progress. Also it seems you take damage just from general wear and tear/flares/shocks that will add up over time, so there's always some amount of damage to repair.

ALSO. This presumes you are entirely ignoring the story, as the majority of that does not pay you anything to do. You're still racking up the expenses, but have no income to offset it.

I think between these two factors, it is INCREDIBLY easy to comprehend why many players feel like there is no progress to be made with hauling jobs. A single rock can completely negate an hour of work. A single story quest requires 2-3 normal hauling jobs to afford to do.

The bigger balance joke

Instead of doing those hauling jobs for an hour, having to carefully drive and avoid damage and determine which systems are worth hitting up the store, there's a much smarter method to get money. if you rush yourself to get the ping scanner and go spacewalking, you can easily replace those 8 hops with half a dozen salvage jobs and make 3 times the money. Those tend to offer up around $5,000 of goodies you can go sell, so why in the hell would you haul things around for an hour for 5 grand, when you can spend 10 minutes grabbing up lootbox and make the same amount? Even worse on balance: you can find these in black market systems, so you can be sure everything can sell without getting caught; if you get pinged for a weight scan, you can just ignore it until you offload your items then go visit it; and there is EXTREMELY low risk of collision due to the low speeds you will be traveling and that you will be off the main routes.

[Mike Takumi]

My suggestion based on numbers would be cutting the cost of filters in half, bringing it in line with your other cost categories at around $1,500/hr, and then raising payments from jobs by 20%

[worldnamer]

I finally stabilized with a number of key strategies:

1. Upgrading fuel efficiency early really helped.
2. Market arbitrage made it possible to get early game purchase, especially the Atlas Prime to Edgeburge route.
3. Leveraging "credit" balances and buying high value items for resale, usually air filters and expensive batteries, ironically.
4. Ignoring the NPCs absolutely until I had over 5k in the bank, with at least a few grand worth of upgrades.
5. Save scumming constantly. I would save one to two times per city that I jumped to. Since any single rock could tank the run, I tried to save as much of my time as possible.

After about four or five hours of official game play (probably six if you count reloads due to insanely suicidal AI and magic space rocks appearing right in front of my vehicle), my run stabilized and I began to have more freedom to do the things I need to do, as long as I am obsessive about collecting batteries and air filters. I have even skipped profitable loads because I needed to return to Atlas Prime because that was the only place in the game where I could buy enough batteries to keep the game running.

It's tedious, but it can be done. I hate how the best solution is to just completely disengage from the game and hack around the balance though.

[Mr.Sentinazo]

Originally posted by worldnamer:

I finally stabilized with a number of key strategies:

1. Upgrading fuel efficiency early really helped.
2. Market arbitrage made it possible to get early game purchase, especially the Atlas Prime to Edgeburge route.
3. Leveraging "credit" balances and buying high value items for resale, usually air filters and expensive batteries, ironically.
4. Ignoring the NPCs absolutely until I had over 5k in the bank, with at least a few grand worth of upgrades.
5. Save scumming constantly. I would save one to two times per city that I jumped to. Since any single rock could tank the run, I tried to save as much of my time as possible.

After about four or five hours of official game play (probably six if you count reloads due to insanely suicidal AI and magic space rocks appearing right in front of my vehicle), my run stabilized and I began to have more freedom to do the things I need to do, as long as I am obsessive about collecting batteries and air filters. I have even skipped profitable loads because I needed to return to Atlas Prime because that was the only place in the game where I could buy enough batteries to keep the game running.

It's tedious, but it can be done. I hate how the best solution is to just completely disengage from the game and hack around the balance though.

Wha this man said,

Originally posted by worldnamer:

I finally stabilized with a number of key strategies:

1. Upgrading fuel efficiency early really helped.
2. Market arbitrage made it possible to get early game purchase, especially the Atlas Prime to Edgeburge route.
3. Leveraging "credit" balances and buying high value items for resale, usually air filters and expensive batteries, ironically.
4. Ignoring the NPCs absolutely until I had over 5k in the bank, with at least a few grand worth of upgrades.
5. Save scumming constantly. I would save one to two times per city that I jumped to. Since any single rock could tank the run, I tried to save as much of my time as possible.

After about four or five hours of official game play (probably six if you count reloads due to insanely suicidal AI and magic space rocks appearing right in front of my vehicle), my run stabilized and I began to have more freedom to do the things I need to do, as long as I am obsessive about collecting batteries and air filters. I have even skipped profitable loads because I needed to return to Atlas Prime because that was the only place in the game where I could buy enough batteries to keep the game running.

It's tedious, but it can be done. I hate how the best solution is to just completely disengage from the game and hack around the balance though.

What this man said, have played 16 hours and I'm getting tired of the game because I'm focusing more in abusing mechanics and planning every move (save scumming like crazy, driving with everything I can off, checking mileage/profit of loads) than in actually enjoying the game.... it is getting annoying that in a game like this I spend more time checking menus and screens than trucking.

I made it to 20k and I'm stuck there between upgrading the truck and buying consumables it is difficult to keep making money

[Deonix]

is the logic of the batteries correct? because the bigger the battery, the more efficient it becomes, unless the efficiency is an illusion brought by the extra energy they hold?

[MetaRex88]

Originally posted by Deonix:

is the logic of the batteries correct? because the bigger the battery, the more efficient it becomes, unless the efficiency is an illusion brought by the extra energy they hold?

big batteris are scum 2x the energie but 5x the money
But upgrades for less energie usage (Grav) would still be nice

[Mike Takumi]

The bigger batteries will show a different %/hr rate of usage, but it's perfectly proportional to their larger storage vs the small batteries. If you put the biggest battery in your grav, it'll show 64% drain rate. Which is the same 128 energy of that 200 battery

[lnomsim]

Originally posted by worldnamer:

I finally stabilized with a number of key strategies:

1. Upgrading fuel efficiency early really helped.
2. Market arbitrage made it possible to get early game purchase, especially the Atlas Prime to Edgeburge route.
3. Leveraging "credit" balances and buying high value items for resale, usually air filters and expensive batteries, ironically.
4. Ignoring the NPCs absolutely until I had over 5k in the bank, with at least a few grand worth of upgrades.
5. Save scumming constantly. I would save one to two times per city that I jumped to. Since any single rock could tank the run, I tried to save as much of my time as possible.

After about four or five hours of official game play (probably six if you count reloads due to insanely suicidal AI and magic space rocks appearing right in front of my vehicle), my run stabilized and I began to have more freedom to do the things I need to do, as long as I am obsessive about collecting batteries and air filters. I have even skipped profitable loads because I needed to return to Atlas Prime because that was the only place in the game where I could buy enough batteries to keep the game running.

It's tedious, but it can be done. I hate how the best solution is to just completely disengage from the game and hack around the balance though.

That's what i ended doing.
Save scumming is the biggest helping factor.

[PodsofWar]

Does cruise control save you any fuel costs, or does it use more fuel?

[Mike Takumi]

Turning off flight assist obviously saves the most fuel
Cruise controlling at a steady pace seems to save more fuel than trying to manage it yourself, but alternating between coasting with FA on and throttling down will keep your engines cooler overall than Cruise will.

Also going at lower speeds will be more fuel efficient, but more heat intensive.

[Will]

It is absolutely wild to me that in this game about space trucking, it is an order of magnitude more profitable to hunt for salvage and trade wares between sectors.

[Alaena 🖤]

I never really had any issue with the economy, i think getting in the habit of salvaging whenever possible earlygame is huge just because of the supplies you can get like air filters and power cells

[Mike Takumi]

Just another thing to note that I forgot to put into the main post (edited it in now). Leaks also do not do anything to your Oxygen power usage or air filter decay rate, the only negative from them is if/when it causes you to be losing O2 in the cabin and putting you in danger of passing out.

[TheStechi]

Interesting.
Well the calculation will be different if you play on another difficulty.

But then again I personally am not playing the game to min-max, but because of the vibe. If you are driving more like truck simulator in space and not like GTA V in space, then you won't actually get in trouble money-wise, if you aren't coming across one of the few bugs.

But I will take note of turning of the lights, maybe gravity and regulating my climate control, when I am getting power trouble.

[AusWilko]

Man, I am a old guy, I don't play games to stratigise them to get the best.
If there is a easy mode that is what I click, I do this to relax as my r/l is intense enough and when I am sitting alone relaxing I just want to pick up a load and cruise along to some tunes and deliver it.
I started a custom game and gave my self a heap of starting cash and turned all the power consumption and filter use to low so as long as I go with the lights off the batteries are only a worry every now and again, and yeah i save / reload as needed as there is like it has been mentioned crazy AI and magic rocks.
Each to their own, we all enjoy it in our own way, me I want ATS in space not truck mechanic/space accountant

Enjoy

[Crunchy[Daz]]

I'm not sure why you put so much effort into that when the sheer amount of complaints have already prompted the devs to start rebalancing. Its alot of work for sure but its all going to change.