star system improvement?

[Pokemastuh]

I'm making a ridiculously small amount of dust and when I check why it's because colonies are making a -40 or so dust production because of "star system improvements". How the hell do I fix this? I've already tried improving the sytems with star system levels.

[Kornstalx]

"Star system improvements" in the negative means you're losing more money than you're making off the things you've built in the colony. It's not uncommon for this to be negative. This is because every single building you build in the game has an upkeep cost associated with it, anywhere from 4 dust a turn up to 32/64 dust a turn. If you essentially build everything in every colony, you better have a damn good economy or you'll bankrupt yourself. Pick and choose your buildings based on their upkeep wisely.

If you absorb or conquer enemy colonies (or you just overbuild you own too much) and find that you are hemorrhaging dust, you can scrap expensive unnecessary buildings for a bit of cash and to get rid of their upkeep. Click the little building icon in the colony screen that's right next to the income marker on left upper panel. It will bring up a list of every building in the colony, and what the upkeep of each building is. You can scrap them by clicking on them.

Note you shouldn't ever need to do this really, unless you've conquered or culture flipped too much too fast and break your economy. If you're scrapping your own buildings, you overbuilt and your gameplay isn't optimal.

[Detrian]

Probably forgot to research some dust giving tech. There's a bunch of them in the economic section of the research screen: Astrofinance, some of the market techs, there's some that are early game tech so it shouldn't be hard to find.

[GeeBee]

You can also top up your dust by selling resources in the market. This is a good way to counteract the negative flows you are seeing until you are able to research and build a number of the trading technologies that will boost dust output each turn