Is there a way to speed up station building?

[Walker]

Like collect the building materials yourself? HOw do I get my builder to take from my wares?

[facciola007]

You can always place wares in your build storage for your stations. I would say there is a debate on how many build drones make a difference somewhere between 40 and 80. You can assign trade ships to the station as trades (build storage, or station wares itself)

[mmmcheesywaffles]

There are calculators online to help you work out what you need to collect. Then place it in the Build store. With all collected the build will be faster.

Using your own Builder will help and especially if you equip it with lots of build drones and have a good Captain

[Asmosis]

From my enquires builder ships cap at 30 active construction drones, which most NPC ships use. The only difference a player owned ship provides is the convenience of always being available.

Assign ships to "trader for build storage" and they will go out and buy the necessary goods to build your station.

After much observation i did find that either your "trade for build storage" ships or your station "trade" ships will on occasion "buy" resources from your station and "sell" to your build storage. This isnt reliable though since your build storage is competing with everything else out there.

I would also recommend *not* making a megafactory (at first) that produces everything it needs, since you can only ever allocate one builder ship for the entire production chain.

Make several factories that build 1 or 2 things, like the NPC's do. then you can have 5 or 10 different stations all being built at the same time vastly speeding up the process. It also makes it easier to scale individual resources without tearing down everything you have planned to build in your megafactory just to build one thing sooner.

There are also mods which speed up building.

[Belteguesian]

I personally keep two "dedicated" M freighters for building purposes (very cheap to buy in ALI Warf), I guide them manually to collect and deposit what's needed (found in the built plan of the station), which is way faster, because the NPC will take into consideration only price, while the distance that the trader will have to travel seems of no importance, or, sometimes the product is not in the range of the Station's manager...

[HoloByteus]

Builders are capped at the use of 30 build drones at a time by design as is the build speed with that cap. Having your own builder is great if you're building at a single site however you also have to consider travel time if you're not and it's often quicker to just hire a local. Once your rep is up you can easily check their build drones for at least 30 or just scan them prior to hire.

More often than not it's better to build a dock first or at least make sure it's first in construction by placing it first so you can assign a manager and add your own trade ships to help with gathering wares. Using trade rules you can then force build to gather from your property only however it needs to be in trade range of your manager's skill. Once setup I'd also check the stations Trade for build storage offers to be sure they mesh with what you see in the build plan as needed wares. You can run into a bug here where an offer or offers weren't generated. I've run into this twice with the current beta and had others work fine.

[Asmosis]

Another bonus of using NPC builders is you can send them into dangerous regions and if they get blown up, you only lose 50k.

[yaroslav.fursov]

I like build missions because they give good profit, increase reputation and creates a new client for trading. Also sometimes they ask you to build a defense platform near Xenon gates - and such missions are truly means!
Once I have build for Teladi TRUE defense platform with a lot of turrets. They was able to save their sectors from huge Xenon fleets. Because they own it - they had to repair it (instead of me). Next Teladi became powerful enough to gather own fleet and claim Xenon sector (with my help)!
How to build fast:
1) Buy own build ship with full set of build drones.
2) Assign 5 star captain.
3) Hire full set of experienced crew.
4) Buy your own large trade fleet from biggest M trade ships.
When you taken build mission - create plot (you can fly to sector on your fast ship or teleport to some ship or station there) and assign your builder ship. This will create build goods storage with trade offers. Next took one of your numerous trade ships and order it to buy required product at somewhere at cheapest price and transfer to build storage.
In 10 minutes your builder ship will arrive to build place and by this time trade ships will gather required materials. Next 5 minutes - and station is ready!

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by Asmosis:

Make several factories that build 1 or 2 things, like the NPC's do. then you can have 5 or 10 different stations all being built at the same time vastly speeding up the process. It also makes it easier to scale individual resources without tearing down everything you have planned to build in your megafactory just to build one thing sooner.

^^ I agree. I think this strategy makes a huge difference to build speeds - basically it allows expansion using parallel builds. The more individual specialised stations, the more parallel, the faster the overall project build time.

Because a station build will start as soon as the materials required for the first module alone arrive it is overwhelmingly the case that NPC traders will deliver the materials for the remaining modules in time for construction to start as soon as their turn in the queue comes up. Thus trying to accelerate builds by delivering your own materials will have limited if any effect beyond the first module. IMO it's not really worth your time and resources.

The other advice on station build times is to recall "A watched pot doesn't boil". Go and do something else, deliberately plan to do something else in advance, resist the temptation to keep checking on the build. If it's your first station this can be a bit harder, but if you do this you'll find your station seem to get built in a jiffy and you'll be like "OMG, I need a manager, fast!"

[Gestapo]

I was interested in the same question as the OP. I am probably wrong, but i remember the modules taking roughly 20-30 minutes once the mats were stocked and builder on site. As of coming back the last 5 days, production modules are taking 60 minutes [pretty sure not the module cross connectors]. Does faction rep of the sector your building in influence time? does the rep with the owner of builder?

Please note - I am just referring to the actual timer countdown, i understand that i can supply myself etc. I agree with previous poster, it just gives time to plan next investment, but 10 hrs is 10hrs - especially when i can make a killing supplying these desperate factories!

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by Gestapo:

I was interested in the same question as the OP. I am probably wrong, but i remember the modules taking roughly 20-30 minutes once the mats were stocked and builder on site. As of coming back the last 5 days, production modules are taking 60 minutes [pretty sure not the module cross connectors]. Does faction rep of the sector your building in influence time? does the rep with the owner of builder?

I have noticed per module build time can go up to 60m. I suspect the reason is using the "wrong" construction ship, e.g. using a Teladi construction ship to build an Argon module. IIRC the worst are Paranid construction ships trying to build any other faction's module. I think the worst scenario is, for example, building an Argon module with a Teladi construction ship in Paranid space.

So if you always match the construction ship to the modules the build time for main modules will always be 20m each. Or actually there may be a small penalty for building in the "wrong space" (e.g. building an Argon module with an Argon constructor in Paranid space). I might be wrong about this, but if there is it's minor, like 25m per module or so.

It's also possible that rep has something to do with it but I've noticed these delays with 20+ rep with all factions concerned, so I'm pretty sure if rep is a factor it's small factor. I've also noticed that if you build e.g. an Argon module with an Argon construction ship in Argon space you get no penalty no matter what the rep.

Anyways, there are rules about this which the game doesn't really tell you. It means it pays you hand over fist to nab the "right" construction ship for the job even if it takes an age to fly out to your site. It also means if you are using mixed faction modules you want to split the build up into faction based chunks and order the right construction ship for each chunk. At least I think that's what it means.

[Asmosis]

I think it relates to the tier of module based on their icons.

You have refining primary resources (ice, ore, silicon etc)
You have refining secondary resources (water, silicon wafers, refined metal etc)
and you have refining tertiary resources (hull parts, advanced electronics etc)
Then you have wharfs/shipyards etc.

I'd have to double check, but i think each tier probably shares the same duration.

[HoloByteus]

Larger structures should take longer than smaller structures, I'd think that's logical and meshes with my observations. I don't believe a faction's builder or rep has anything to do with construction time, just how many build drones it has will make a difference. One other thing may improve build time... don't be in sector watching it. Almost all operations in X4 execute a bit faster if you're OOS.

Consider, what they do for the player will also apply to factions. I really don't want to see a decrease in build time, I don't want to have an hour pass and find a faction has popped up 2 new stations or rebuilt one I just destroyed. They're already to fast at that IMHO.

[Asmosis]

You could build a couple stations near their claytronics factories with the sole purpose of draining those from the economy. Just set price to max and your traders will constantly keep their factory empty, which brings everything else to a standstill.

Ideally you could use those someplace else, but meh. Hull parts as well if you want them to stop beating everyone else up. I'm sure some combination of buy/sell restrictions with stations every other sector would result in you sucking all the claytronics out of one faction and depositing them in another. Restrict Buy to HOP and Sell to Argon for example.

[Nobutora]

can you use mods

[Sel Und Irae]

Install mods and disable them after
This isn't paraDOG interactive where if you want to have fun you don't get privilege to do achievements