How to mass craft?

[Squirting Elephant]

I have 100k ferrite and need LOTS of metal plates. Going through space stations to buy them in cumbersome.

I know I can press A and D to increase the amount crafted but i can only increase it by 1 and i still have to press D 5000x... What am I missing?

[Foxglovez]

If you need lots of plates I imagine you are making some kind of farm. Do be aware that there is limited usefulness to farms now. About 10k worth of whatever gas/mineral is the limit before diminishing returns sets in. Not saying you can't do it or shouldn't do it if that is your thing, just that the game has changed since a lot of videos on how to make money were made.

Back in the day we all had huge activated indium farms but because of all the building pieces they used it was problematic. The wires alone were a total crap show. But that was then and this is now and diminishing returns are a thing. I for one am happy about that and tore down all my big farms. If you want to make money now, a pretty worthless project as the limit is like 4.3Billion, make devices. Way less time and trouble.

[Scaramouche]

Now, you can fine tune your settings. Set crafting to free for your huge project (no more supply trouble), set it back to normal once it is done

[momopovich]

To answer the question (very unusual concept on forums), you can't craft in bulk

[Foxglovez]

Sometimes it's important to answer more than the obvious question.

[Zigamus Wizard]

There IS a mod that changes the press each time for a press and hold and it will auto-repeat for you. Don't remember the name tho, sorry

[Xariann]

Originally posted by Foxglovez:

If you need lots of plates I imagine you are making some kind of farm. Do be aware that there is limited usefulness to farms now. About 10k worth of whatever gas/mineral is the limit before diminishing returns sets in. Not saying you can't do it or shouldn't do it if that is your thing, just that the game has changed since a lot of videos on how to make money were made.

Back in the day we all had huge activated indium farms but because of all the building pieces they used it was problematic. The wires alone were a total crap show. But that was then and this is now and diminishing returns are a thing. I for one am happy about that and tore down all my big farms. If you want to make money now, a pretty worthless project as the limit is like 4.3Billion, make devices. Way less time and trouble. :nmsunits:

I used to have some huge farms in an old save but have not played in a while.

What diminishing returns are you talking about? And what worthless project are you referring to?

[Squirting Elephant]

It's true that there are diminishing returns but I'm farming at least every mineral once and I want a HUGE supply storage on each so I only have to come back once in a blue moon to collect.

[wkitty42]

Originally posted by momopovich:

To answer the question (very unusual concept on forums), you can't craft in bulk

minor correction: you can't craft large bulk amounts... like i'll do 50 or 60 metal plates in one go for building my extractors and storage tanks but that's because i also limit the way i build my farms...

for me, i build in stacks using the build camera and looking straight down... i bulk craft enough plates for two stacks of whatever i'm building... most of the time my extractor stacks are three tall... if i go four tall, the fourth extractor has a reduced amount generated... the next one up will also have a reduce amount and so on due to the diminishing returns code now in place... so i limit my farms to generally one or two stacks of extractors on a hot spot and numerous stacks of storage tanks for each item i'm extracting with one storage tank per item placed near my base's landing pad for fast and easy harvesting...

over time, depending on my use of the material, i may add more storage tanks and possibly another stack of extractors... more storage is most likely, though... i think max 10 tanks plus one at the landing pads is plenty for most use cases... why? because sooner or later, one will be maxed out in units and won't be harvesting huge mineral and gas farms on a regular basis...