X4 My stations aren't generation a profit

[Fortune]

I've built a few meat plants, waterplants and a microchip factory with 2 traders and miners assigned to the station, essentially built a few stations in a half day and my stations is a stand-still and not producing enough wares, it's been like 12 hours now i'm running out of money and can't build or buy anything because the station won't produce fast enough, what do i do?

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/947344671101563776/0E44345848BE867646DF4132E527F9D9DCF1D595/

[Fortune]

I'm waiting here twiddling my thumbs for my ships to do anything, and i have no profits to buy any other moduels. lol

[Malkuth]

Stations are a pain in the ass to get going. Took mine almost 16 real time hours to start making money.

And thats only when I made sure that I was trading selling the final product. If you don't have your sliders for the Building products set to make sure your own traders don't sell them, than you will never take off. The traders are Not smart at all.. Terrible.

Anything your building, say your building your own Energy Cells to supply you SmartChip plant. You want to meke sure that the slider that allows you to sell that product is Set to the highest price! That way your traders won't try to sell it.. Its too expensive.

Do this with all the products that go into the final product. Also make sure you set anything your making buy prices (IE your traders will buy them for your station) to the lowest price (no AUTO) that way nobody will sell them to you..

ALso make sure that your factory can support the end product.. If your not building enough Energy Cells per hour to supply your Chip plant than your not going to produce anything.

[DrSuperGood]

Anything your building, say your building your own Energy Cells to supply you SmartChip plant. You want to meke sure that the slider that allows you to sell that product is Set to the highest price! That way your traders won't try to sell it.. Its too expensive.

You want them to sell your energy cells as that is basically free money. Do not worry about running out of Energy Cells as the station manager will reserve (not put for sale) a sensible number of them to keep all other production modules running.

What you need to be careful of is your station manager buying in Energy Cells because storage is below his reserved amount. When a station is starting out consider restricting trade with other factions until the reserve amount is hit. Sales can be automatic priced then but purchases should always be set to lowest price just in case.

what do i do?

You are building way too many interconnect modules. For cost efficiency it is usually best to keep stations small and compact and the number of inter connect modules down.

For a station to truely make a lot of profit you need to be in control over the entire supply chain so intermediate price values no longer matter. This would mean having Energy Cell production to power the station, Water Purification to supply water, 4-6 M miners to supply ice, wheat farm, spice farm, etc. Now economists could argue that some of those resources would be more profitable somewhere else, eg mining ore and using those profits to subsidise the factory buying ice, but ultimatly this is a sure fire way to make a profitable factory.

It is worth noting that without doing this some production modules can even lose money. It is possible to purchase silicon at a higher price than the silicon wafers the production module produces from it, especially without labour bonus. Since you can mine resources like Silicon and sell to NPC factories directly, this means such production modules make very little profit and are only useful for supply assurance.

In the case of the food chain industries, most of the profit is weighted heavilly on the resulting food and medicine as opposed to intermediates. There is still some money to be made selling the intermediates, but potentially a lot more by turning those intermediates into end products.

In the mean time I suggest doing missions to generate some credits. Carefully adjust the station purchase and sale prices such to prevent it from losing money. It is far better to have a station sit around doing nothing for now while funds are gathered for its expansion rather than have it running at a loss.

Energy Cell Production is always a good module to add to a station. It might not get good returns but it will generate sales. NPCs love to buy energy cells despite how few get used.

[Fortune]

Okay thanks this is really good information I had no idea about, I'll twine my moduels down a little and try to specalise into one or two things and get them too work good before I add anything with what you said about moduels being self succifient before expanding onto another one.

[salzlaender]

Next time take the logical overwiev screenshot, this one does nto tell anything about production ;)

Anyway: You definitely need traders for your station. Don't wait until yout station manager puts everything on sale for AI to come.

[Nemund]

I wonder about a mod that increases station storage by 10, and production and consumption of nearly all goods by 10 as well.... Would that make L traders or even traders in general far more effective because they would be hauling larger loads.

[Aieonae]

Go into the logistic flow page Turn off autopricing for buying material and set the price to the lowest.

If you own resource produce off station use the "restrict faction trade" to prevent buy sell by npc traders.