Not getting enough Firmarlite?

[Catpuppy]

I started the robotics assembly line, but it's not making enough Firmarlite to even provide materials to sustain itself it seems like. But there's another bit of confusion for me, looking at the stats screen on the radio tower, on the Sales tab, on the left side there's a statistic called "Currency Storage", which reports that there are 170k firmarlite bars... But I have no idea where they could be? I have one storage warehouse only, which gets a supply of firmarlite and then quickly empties out into the production line.

[Mister Fabulous]

You're not pulling them out of the station fast enough with one warehouse. As is often the solution with these games, build more

[Catpuppy]

I built two more stations and two more transport ships and it's flowing much more smoothly. However, the number is barely going down, and the flow is slowing down again. Does that mean I still need more?

[TargetLost]

170k is what is still on your station you should best get them down.

I don't know if this helps but i build about 10 mediom storage which each can store 3200
and then connected a grren belt from the warhouse to all this storages like you do with assemblies each has an in and an out belt.
That emptied the 20k it had still on the station.
But my case was that I didn't really need them right then so i decided to get them at least from the station because it says 4000 max and i am not sure if it means if you are over that that you start losing them?

It is crazy that one medium crate very small in size can hold 3200 of them yet the big warhouse it self only 1000

[sxl2]

Problem was probably not enough ships, they only run so often and take time to travel. And maybe upgrade space station a bit to increase buffer there. It looks like there's a timer on the sales, so you need a buffer on the space station to keep it from filling between sales, and to handle the amount of firmarlite you get per sale.

Parallel belts out of the warehouse they way you have solves the other potential bottleneck.

[Stellar Remnant]

One other thing: put the requester warehouses as close to 0,0 as possible, and near the build height if you can. The cargo ships travel to/from the station at 0,0 just above the build limit, so minimizing that travel time can help.

[Soran]

Okay so I ren some number and from what I can tell robots are sold for 200 bars. This translates to 10 sheets (2*100 every 100 is 1250l of molten = 5*250l and every 250l is 1 sheet)
And it costs 14 sheets to build a robot. (2 per robot par 6 robot parts per robot + 2 sheets on the torso)

So not counting any of the other resources on the firmarlite alone. You lose 4 sheets per robot and win nothing in return.

[GD]

Originally posted by Soran:

(...) And it costs 14 sheets to build a robot. (2 per robot par 6 robot parts per robot + 2 sheets on the torso)

Incorrect. It cost 8 sheets to build one (6 for Components + 2 for Torso). Robot components take 2 sheets but produce 2 components from it. So you gain +2 sheets per robot.

[GD]

A real pain are the bars/sheets. To transport them (especially vertically) and smelt them. You need 100 bars to make 5 sheets. But you need 8 sheets alone to build one robot let alone 32 robots per minute to maxout the assembly line which would need 256 sheets per minute.

256 sheets per minute would need 6.4 gigantic electric smelters feeding 51.2 casting machines. All just for one assembly line.

And you need to move 5120 bars per minute (8 green belts of Firmalite bars) to keep it running while station receivers stop at 1000 and transport ships only transport 250 per vehicle.

Edit:
It continues to get worse. I noticed a station receiver is maxed out with ~1.5 green belts, even if you have more transporters it will not come quicker. So you need 6 station receivers with at least 6 transporter platforms and 24 ships to keep all running just for one assembly line.

There are multiple things in need of rebalance here which impact each other.

There are 2 things which would help.

#1 Smelting/casting on the station
The station can be extended with a smeltery so only sheets are transfered between orbit and planet. It would reduce significantly the number of transfered items.

#2 Firmalite Bricks
A condensed version of Firmalite bars. 10 bars packed into one item like a stack of bars. Which can either be directly smelted (needs alternative recipe) or which can be "unpacked" with the crusher into bars again. And we need a way to tell the station receiver to pickup bricks instead of bars.

In either case it would reduce the number of receiver, transportships and belts or even electric smelters/casting machines.

[Soran]

Originally posted by GD:

Originally posted by Soran:

(...) And it costs 14 sheets to build a robot. (2 per robot par 6 robot parts per robot + 2 sheets on the torso)

Incorrect. It cost 8 sheets to build one (6 for Components + 2 for Torso). Robot components take 2 sheets but produce 2 components from it. So you gain +2 sheets per robot.

Thank you for pointing this out. this is in fact the case and I have turned my assembly line back on.
Not entirely sure all the other things needed to make the robots are worth 2 sheets of firmelite but hey it is something.