Help & getting started

Raw crafting materials, the wood, ore, fabric, glass, oil, and the circuits, batteries, and binding your gear is built from, come from two places. Gathering them yourself: Work a node in the field by hand, see help mining, help woodcutting, help collecting, and help drilling. What you pull depends on your skill and the richness of the node. District production: An empire's developed districts produce materials on their own every hour into the empire's shared stockpile, no gathering required. This is the passive, territory owning side of the economy. What a planet can produce: Every world has its own geology, the handful of materials its districts are able to produce. Check the planets command, a controlled world shows a Can produce line listing what it offers. An empire's leaders assign those materials to individual districts and set how rich each vein is. How much, and how good: A district's output rests on four things, the richness of its vein, its Exchange specialization, its loyalty, and its structure. Richness runs on a scale from 0 to 100 and sets the baseline, a vein at 100 is as rich as the finest node you could ever mine by hand, and every point in between counts, so a vein at 55 really does sit between 50 and 60. An Exchange district amplifies it, the Trade Hub facility raises the volume while the Exchange facilities together refine the quality, but Exchange is not required, any owned district produces on its geology alone. Loyalty and structure then scale the result, a battered or disloyal district produces only a trickle, and a razed one produces nothing. Amount is not quality: Two separate numbers describe the output. The amount is how many units arrive, a strong primary tops out near 24 a day. The quality is a grade stamped on each unit, on the same 0 to 10000 scale as anything you mine. So a district making nine ore at quality 4000 is making nine pieces of good ore, not four thousand of anything. Richer veins give you both more units and better ones. Food resources: Two of a planet's resources, fish and vegetables, are food rather than crafting stock. A Farm district turns them into edible items that boost your stats, the Hatchery driving fish and the Field driving vegetables, and its Granary can make a harvest come out legendary or celestial. They fill the stockpile and are drawn out the same way, as real fish and vegetables of varying species and quality. See help districts. Getting the goods: Everything produced flows into your empire's shared stockpile. Any member views it with stockpile, and an empire's leader or generals pull materials out with stockpile withdraw , up to 100 at a time, at the quality they were stored (the best quality first). See help production and help stockpile.