Tutorial : How to Build and split your Factories : X4 Foundations

[@storbokki371]

Thank you for helping me rap my head around this. It was only after I saw this video that I could grasp the bigger picture of the X4 economy. Since then, I have personalized my version some though, using only four factories. Basically, I use your Solid factory and Liquid factory, then create a: STATION FACTORY hull parts, claytronics, turret components, advanced electronics, shield components, field coils. SHIP PARTS FACTORY advanced composites, engine parts, antimatter converters, weapons components, drone components, missile components. (you left out this one) For me, it's important that I can build early stations with defense and shields. In this way I can have everything I need for a station in one place. I also have dedicated trade stations I build that trade in Station Factory wares before I start trying to build up in a sector to cut down on build times.

[@garrettblanchard2036]

You apologized for it being all spreadsheet, but it made a lot of sense to me. Thank you, this helped more than any other single resource I've come across on the subject.

[@huffinLeeroy]

Group all your station miners under 1 miner to mimic the lead miner, and they will all mine independently. Then, you can have a fighter wing assigned to protect the lead miner, and they will protect ALL the miners no matter where they are when attacked. It can allow you to have the M miners (which I find more efficient).

[@dichebach]

My initial Get Rich Quick Scheme: take the Callisto which HAT gave me to the Equipment Dock in Black Hole Sun IV: outfit it with an All-round thruster Mk3, a Mk3 Shield, two Mk2Pulse lasers, and 50 Nav Beacons for a cost of 308,007. Then fly it to the Wharf in Argon Prime and outfit it with an All-round thruster Mk1, an Mk1 Shield, sell the two Mk2 Pulse Lasers, and sell the 50 Nav Beacons for revenue of 558,586. 81.4% profit! With this mechanic I went from about 800,000 in liquidity to about 2,077,969 in the span of 30 minutes of real-time. The nice part about it is: you really only have to interact with the ship once or twice and it takes a good 10 minutes for it to get to the point where it is idle so you can have a single NPC Callisto doing this while you are other stuff in your own ship. Once you get an Argon Mil license, you can "ship" Ion Blasters Mk2 from Black Hole Sun IV to Argon Prime. Buy two Ion Blaster Mk2 ($774,000) and then when you refit in Argon Prime: leave the weapon slots EMPTY = 100% profit. In the instance of the game world in which I explored this gambit the price for those Ion blaster Mk2 were $1,418,000 apiece at Argon Prime! 🤯That is a 283% profit! 😂 Eventually, the Equipment Dock in BHS-IV will start to run low on Weapons components, so there does seem to be a bit of a plateau effect to this gambit, but it is a nice way to rack up a good 25 to 30 million in the first 5 or 6 hours of a new campaign.

[@Nurskul]

Traders HATE him!

[@NuclearWinter69]

Heretics end is great. Once you start supplying the zya and argon it keeps them stocked up to fight off the zenon. Which keeps the economy going as they use tons of materials to fight both fronts.

[@Dragonlord7012]

I've found that building 'In house" factories works way better. Basically you don't ship middle-tier parts anywhere, you ship raw resources, and end products. and just ratio out your factories, and make everything on site. This removes part bottlenecks, its never an "antimater cell" bottleneck which now needs ships to carry them, and who knows what else. Its a Hydrogen bottleneck. You can even sell the excess.That means you predominantly ONLY* needing to ship raw resources around the map. Do this with large miners and they can more or less ignore the Xenon, so you more or less only need to worry about K's and I's. I look at the resources required per hour, and give that station a few dedicate miners. These don't need to saturate demand, that would be wasteful. They just slow the 'decay' of storage. ideally they will harvest a bit below what is needed on average. Lastly, build a resource hub or three, and set them up with their own mining fleets, and more miners but with cargo drones instead of miners to ship the raw resources around as needed. This is where demand gets saturated. THis is honestly probbly the best first station, because its all profit once built. And you can build them on the cheap too. Overall this setup needs a lot less ships to keep running, and less reliablity on fleets that might get destroyed ,at least until you lock down sectors with defnese bases. The two exceptions I make to this is food/med hubs, for obvious reasons. And Shipyards, which just have ships to yoink finshed products off the other stations in the system. These are the only solid delivery I need. Admittedly, this method requires the most forplanning, for station setup, But I find the simplified logistics helps a lot, and feels a lot cheaper to get setup and maintained.

[@hlpbgh]

This is a very good tip. When you compare Solid/Liquid mining ships to Container freighters, the miners are something like x2.5 times more efficient for shipping (based on m3 of storage and travel drive speed). That number also takes into account the fact that raw material takes up more space than refined material - miners are just that much better.

[@monstrosity8855]

Idk if I’m just dumb but I’m not exactly sure what you mean by in house and what not…

[@monstrosity8855]

Does this mean for example claytronics: your factory starts off making Graphene, silicon wafers and superfluid all the way to claytronics? Isn’t this the same as “mega factory”?

[@Dragonlord7012]

@@monstrosity8855 Basically you ratio out your production chains, then make a station for finished products. So if I'm shipping out, for example, Field Coils/Shield Components. I would have Graphine, Superfluid Coolant, Quantum Tubes, and Plasma Conductors all attached to the same factory station as Field Coils/Shield Compoenents. (With a good ratio) Once I can afford the infrastructure to build this up, the ONLY inputs I would need are Methane, and Helium and the only thing I output is Field Coils/Shield Components, This means i spend less money on imputs (if any considering I will likely own and attach dedicated mining ships.) And I can directly sell and distribute the outputs.

[@Dragonlord7012]

​@@monstrosity8855 Megafactories try to "Do everything". Your not wrong, in that technically you could in theory just build one massive station like this but the AI has problems dealing with that strategy last I checked. Megastations gets overly congested and it ends up being LESS productive than several smaller dedicated stations. It's also a lot harder to find bottlenecks/ratios. Thus I build several smaller factories with only Raw resource as inputs, and final products as outputs. I also mess with station/ship controls so I don't ever ship intermediate components. I will Caviate this, with your first factory best being Hull Parts / Silicon Wafers. You can expand them out later but those two seem to have very high demand overall, and are good for early game station profits.

[@turosianarcher8771]

I believe, sir, the word you were looking for with the second factory was "Fluids Factory". Good stuff, as usual.

[@griggitz487]

I told my friend to watch you because he was having troubles with ONI and Rimworld. He's English and you know how they say peoples names wrong. I don't remember the conversation but you came up and he made some mouth noises and I didn't recognize it as words but I guessed . "You mean Francis John? That Guy I told you to watch?" Yeah him , he said. I go, "Yeah he makes the obtuse approachable, doesn't he." . . Yes that's it.

[@TormodSteinsholt]

Goddamn. This perspective is simply gold. I want to do a playthrough of the entrepeneur path, but this rabbit hole is something I've never dug myself through. It may seem lazy, but I would really have appreciated prefabs for starting purposes. Granted, I probably have less than 40 hours in this game total, but my attempts at creating a few stations saw the money running out before I was able to complete anything viable and profitable. Add to that that I basically had lost my train of thought before acquiring the funds to proceed. This guide with intermittent stages and not scope creep galore will probably help a lot if I can get some playtime during the xmas holidays.

[@TormodSteinsholt]

BTW. Did i get that stuff at the @17:00 mark correctly? You don't actually need the infrastructure to house or sustain a workforce? They are bonuses, not prerequisites, to production?

[@FrancisJohnYT]

That is correct, all factories work without workforce. Adding workforce gives production bonuses.

[@madrooky1398]

For a very basic entry into production you simply build a solar power plant. I think most game starts should even have the required modules for that already unlocked. A solar power plant needs simple dock, a storage, and of course the energy cell module. You can scale this up as much as you like and it does not need any input. Sure, the profit generated might be small, but it is reliable and everyone needs energy. Later you can build other producers and you will have your own energy supply. Also, if you have the pirate dlc, power plants in Avarice produce an insane amount of energy cells, though you have to keep the tide in mind which is a whole nother story. But a power plant in Avarice and a recycling complex in Windfall IV can cover the whole universe with construction materials make make you filthy rich. Although this setup is something you should only attempt if you know the basics around base building, trading and the intricacies of the tide.

[@HenrikEbert]

This man making a wonderful guide to efficient stationbuilding and there is me: "Megafactories go brrrrr".

[@jakotheshadows87]

Things do change a bit in how you plan your factories based on your reasons for building the factories. This approach is the most efficient if your goal is just to speedrun to building your own ships. If you're building the factories to do things like terraforming or satisfy galactic demand dynamically, I'm afraid you're going to want to split things up quite a bit more than that. You can easily fill a full plot just making hull parts or even weapon components for all the shipyards in the galaxy and it still won't be enough. At that point, you really will need to specialize your factories quite a bit more. I usually make a separate factory for every single ware that NPC shipyards will buy. Due to game performance reasons, I've also been thinking about trying to make the factories smaller and spreading them out to different sectors, as whenever I concentrate everything in a single sector the game performance starts getting a bit sad even on the mightiest of PCs.

[@JoshSweetvale]

Having shipyards in different sectors also has the fringe benefit of not having ships bought by faction A and B attacking eachother as soon as they roll off the production line.

[@undeadpeak]

@@JoshSweetvale with tides of avarice and salvage I hardly see why that's an issue have both sides grind each other down on your ship yards then salvage their wrecks to make even more profit.

[@JoshSweetvale]

@@undeadpeak Having running battles outside your station is dangerous, _and_ it weakens empires's reserves to throw against the Kha'ak and robot things. Let 'em muster.

[@undeadpeak]

@@JoshSweetvale hear me out, deal with the xenon yourself, and the khak only spawn in certain systems and the hives allow for smaller spawns within 3 hexes (wipe out hives continuously) then profit off of suffering, you’ll have enough money to deal with the damage.

[@o0pinkdino0o]

Yup. My first sector I built combo factories, but was not satisfied with the control I had. Every sector post has had individual factories per output and the fidelity is far superior.

[@vladlenskii4611]

Your are the best! Explaining very complicated stuff so easy. Thank you. Great work.

[@FrancisJohnYT]

Thanks, I like to have the info there so when I go back to play I can look it back up again.

[@Koshea69]

Only thing I will probably change on what get's made where, is you can import Advanced Composites to the Clay Factory instead of the 5th Factory and make Antimatter Converters there instead. Helps with the metric butload of inputs in the 5th Factory I think.

[@fredrikkihlberg2757]

Engineers when the function has spreadsheets: YEEEEEEES!!

[@breytac]

One of the patches after the Kingdom End release (might even have been the Kingdom End release) introduced something really cool. Go into the behaviour tab for each ship assigned to a station, and you can choose which wares each ship mines, or in the case of traders, which wares they carry. No more mixed cargo!

[@abetts123]

I know you said you were finished with X4 series but maybe you could do a “second run” with the lessons learned. I’d love to see you just stomp all the xenon sectors and then become the new galactic scourge!!

[@huffinLeeroy]

No one is ever truely done with x4. They just take a short break before being sucked back in.

[@sofiejensen3804]

It is so interesting to see you play this game! If I only had the time to paly it also

[@james2042]

I kinda like the ai approach of scattered smaller factories. Its less efficent than producing everything in the same spot but it gives some room for the ai to interact. Plus it helps me see what the area is short in and what its not, if my graphine factory is always empty and selling at mad dollar, then i know theyre choked for it and can ramp production. But if theres other things there supplementing the inventory, then it takes more work to see graphine is empty all the time

[@Skyx700]

I love spreadsheets, I'm going to need to see more.

[@rybuds47]

So much info! Thank you sir!

[@brianhauptman]

Spreadsheets with Francis John. I'm surprised we didn't get a Visio production network diagram.

[@onlytwogenders420]

Good information, I still do not understand the factory building yet, as I have not gotten there in game, and it was all a tangled mess to me. This definitely helps clarify a few things. Good to know resources regen as well.

[@BlackRainEntertain]

the best reason for keeping stations relatively concentrated is, that the more moduls a station already has, the longer the individual build time of an extention of one modul becomes. at the start your solar array is done in 15 minutes in seta, if your station is already a megafactory, a single more array can take 6 hours in seta the reason they did this is, that egosoft is aware about how the game renders certain elements. everything arround in a 40 km circle arround your position consumes gpu everything outside of that circle cpu. they're designdecision is based on what most computers can handle and what not. so by making multiple factories nearbie, instead of one megafactory, the game runs smoother. tbh, when i am sitting in my hq, the game runs on 1 fps, cause i simply didnt care and wanted to push the limit of my hardware lol, i thought the idea of beeing able to teleport the hq with 20 destroyers docked right into the middle of a xenon sector, was too badass to not try it out on my first savefile. on my next game ill only be having storages and dwarfs for terraforming drones on my hq, the entire productionline should be autonomous and spread out through the galaxy, connected by big trading stations, it sucks to have a home where you can't hang out lol i wish they would give us a teleport device modul we could add onto other stations too, so i could bypass this main issue a bit without beeing forced to extend trading routes excessively just to get planets on the other side of the universe terraformed. i would do it exactly like you say here, with having 6 teleportable stations specifically to have them near my hq without killing my performance

[@maestro-zq8gu]

On my first game, I have like 15 factories, 3 of which aren't giga sized but do emphasize production of a few mid and end wares. I don't however plan to build anything insane like you show at the start of this video. While I plan to expand existing factories, I don't intend for them to get stupid big. Profits are starting to really go up. I hope I'm doing things sorta ok.

[@MementoMoriMillenial]

Thanks for this loved the spreadsheets

[@Rainoth]

One thing definitely worth a mention is that if you build such a monstrosity of a base it will murder your frames. I've built one gigafactory and it becomes unplayable when your ship (player) is near it. Goes from 60fps to whooping 2 (and occassionally crashes). In my case i've ran out of FPS way sooner than any raw resource in my vicinity. I recommed building it either smaller or far enough from gates that it won't cause any issues. Or just have PC like FJ, that works too i guess :)

[@Suzuki_Hiakura]

early on I figured just having dedicated factories would be best lmao. Never even considered such a jack of all trades kind of approach, as I figured it would require far more of an investment, like an early game money pit lol

[@a.retired.villain]

Francis John: If you cool anything down far enough it will become a liquid. Me: Liquid plasma?

[@Rustygiz]

Ty for this. Just started up a new x4 save

[@pelgrin21]

Very well explained thank you. What I find amusing we need to take KZbin lessons to learn this game Lol

[@anthonyzepeda2171]

Finally on sale! Sadly I’m swamped in school for the next 2 weeks, so can’t play till then. Won’t watch tutorials till I’m maybe, 15-20 hours in.

[@Nightstrand]

How many of each type should i be aiming for? So if i was building a solids factory. How many refined ore do i need for example

[@FrancisJohnYT]

You should have a look at the station calculator. It will auto fill the buildings you will need to construct. www.x4-game.com/#/station-calculator

[@nomad25c]

hi, awesome vid. I was looking for this kinda setup for stations. Any chance you can make a video on the terran economy? I love this build logic

[@FrancisJohnYT]

I have only skimmed the Terran economy so I would not have the knowledge to do a detailed tutorial on them. I will have to go back and give them a go some time in the future.

[@chadholland9844]

What about the Terran playthough factories. Y'know, the playthrough where you raze everything outside of Sol?

[@sunstormer5064]

Yeah even the Dev's hinted it's not a good idea to go down the Mega Factory route, while it may seem a great idea, it's just counter productive to the games performance.

[@o0pinkdino0o]

Can I assume that a mining outpost is simply a station with storage and no manufacturing ?

[@liammurray9274]

he did say turn the methane into graphene at the outpost as it becomes easier to transport.

[@liammurray9274]

Just a fun fact, the word you wanted was "fluids", Gas and liquids are both fluids.

[@Rhondaandjames]

Yeah Mega Factories are grand as long as you never go through that system. I had a massive Xenon raid hit near my first and only Mega factory build It took about 90 real game minutes to beat them back at about 9fps...

[@jdkem104]

Holy crap……. I’m now kicking myself for being halfway through building one megafactory to make both claytronics and hull parts. I guess now my current playthrough will be mega engineering and next playthrouhh can be lean clean manufacturing

[@FrancisJohnYT]

Don't kick yourself to hard, everyone does it the same way first time. It's a rite of passage for all new players who make it that far.

[@mailleweaver]

@@FrancisJohnYT I've started a semi-mega factory that has all the stuff to make hull parts from ore. Instead of building all of one production module before going on to another, I build one or two of each in order of what's needed to produce the final product, so production starts immediately and isn't ever bottlenecked. I accomplished this with the calculator you showed. I started with one hull parts module and autopopulated the rest. I wrote down how many of each module was needed, then increased the hull parts module count by 1, autopopulated again, taking note of when counts increased for other modules, repeated to the desired number of hull parts modules, and used this as a build order. I stopped at 9 hull part modules, though, since I figured that at that point I'd probably start having to worry about balancing storage and docks with the production. Adding something into the middle of an established, complicated build order is a pain in the butt. I had to jiggle everything after I laid out the station and then realized I'd accidentally used Teladi hull parts modules and had to replace them. Luckily, I noticed the mismatch on the station overview before it had gotten as far as building any of the hull parts modules. Once I get this station working smoothly, I figure I can just build an identical second one in the same sector when I get to the point of needing more hull parts. I'll probably work on claytronics and advanced electronics first, though. Advanced electronics seem to be the tightest bottleneck for building my gate defense platforms when relying on the other factions' stations. Hull parts and claytronics are my first focus just to cut out a lot of the expense of building more stations.

[@SalvatoreEscoti]

So do cargo drones deliver materials needed by the factories automatically?

[@FrancisJohnYT]

Unfortunately no, you would need to assign cargo ships to transport resources between the factories. The simplest way to do it, limit your factories to only trade with each other, give them all some money and let them buy resources from each other. The cargo ships you assign to your factories will automatically get the resources they need from your other stations. Though you might need to tweak the money in each every so often.

[@anthonychristianson257]

Dont suppose you could do a tutorial nugget on how to get traders to trade amongst these factories? I got the miners going, but how to I get the materials from Solids and Liquids factories to go to my Hull factory?

[@bowserwandalin4942]

just assign traders to trade for your station to all your stations. they do the rest on their own

[@femimark5021]

You need to set miners as traders, traders can't carry raw resources

[@Gneeznow]

So after watching this I reckon I'm just gonna go back to X3:AP, because X4 is such a massive departure from everything else in the series I'm kinda lost

[@mobildisko579]

advance satalite😍

[@SuperMonkei]

This just gives you the newbie basics.

[@Hydroculator]

He didn't explain how to get the option to build a factory or a station. I don't have any options to build anything but a dock and a storage on the station they gave me. It took me forever to build those, because it took four tutorials to figure out what a build storage is, how to use it, how to find builders, make enough cash, and to figure out that I needed to deposit money into the station. I also have one worker since I cant build housing. What you call newbie basics I call advanced far beyond anything I can do yet.

[@BlazingImp77151]

how does this differ if you choose to focus on the terran economy rather than the general economy?

[@galsherp6173]

u saved my insanity.

[@Bloxor21]

I was wondering, how big you’d make each factory regarding module numbers.

[@greydeathy2456]

nice this was helpful

[@01axor]

Brilliant😂😂😂

[@legendaryone696]

I can't get my traders to do anything within my own factories. They'll be in the same system looking for the thing I'm producing and will hover around saying there are no allowed trades. I always have to just do repeat orders

[@Skyx700]

How do you setup trade ships between your stations without them leaving to go sell/buy from other stations?

[@FrancisJohnYT]

Not in front of my PC right now but I believe it's a trade restriction. If you can't find it try a quick Google or go to the reddit and post a question. They are generally very helpful.

[@paragondega]

Sad i hadnt seen this, just built my first factory last night and it was for Advanced electronics start to finish, which im figuring is most peoples "first".

[@Divine_Evil]

Too ARMS! It was supposed to be ONI day!!!

[@WhereTheGustGoes]

Void isn't that bad. The killer gas is limited to certain parts.

[@o0pinkdino0o]

I think you can fit ships with in game mods to ignore that gas.

[@WhereTheGustGoes]

@@o0pinkdino0o When L miners have enough regen to do it stock, it's just not worth the cost to fit mods to medium miners.

[@kazwright1233]

"there's going to be spreadsheets..." 😮 5 years of 2 accounts in Eve Online panic memories come crashing back...

[@MelfiortheOne]

No Terran station tutorial 🥲🥲🥲

[@nagyandras8857]

no you don't. the ingame AI controlling miners goes nuts if you set it up like that. so what you do is, have 3 stations. hydrogen, methane, and helium. from there its only a personal preference to witch you add ore, and chose a nother one for silicone. then your miners won't screw up. then you have a 4th station with the ship yard and wharf. solar arrays you have on eatch, allso you have medical supplies and habitats for each along with food production.

[@the1gofer]

Lies!!! You said oni ;)

[@yenmeng3862]

I was waiting for this too AHHAHA

[@not_just_burnt]

a massive letdown... /lh

[@AndrewSPb]

+1 and still waiting for a miracle =)

[@brianhauptman]

Two videos today?

[@FrancisJohnYT]

Spent to long strip mining the space biome could not get the science rocket built in time. Had this video ready to go in case. Should be able to get the rocket video finished for tomorrow. Been a while since I did a Saturday video but trying to make up for missing last Thursday.

[@rafaelvieira113]

I was making a factory for each ware, it's turning a mess, now I think I can make it smaller and more efficient 😅

[@kiatvdo]

what is this ? นี่คืออะไร

[@v44n7]

what bothers me about this game is that depending on the faction you have different wares to do the same thing. How annoying! I mean how cool it would be to have the same wares for all? Galaxy trading wise would make much more sence

[@drew21t]

Do not build mega factories, they do not scale well at all. One factory per ware and you can scale way better. Yes there a bit more management up front but if you setup your global orders and travel bans properly you will reach peak efficiency very quickly.

[@Quintinius31]

Laugh in terran superiority

[@leftblank131]

I gave up on this game. I wanted to like it but 3+ days into the game my Med miners thought it'd be a good idea to "Attack" the KHK. Default global settings: "Use your judgement". Not good judgment. With no station restrictions, plenty of storage space, 24Million in station account, parked right next to the station it mines for with a 3 star manager, my gas miner "can't find a buyer in allowed systems". Just an absolutely horrific AI system. If you like micromanaging everything to get the job done then this game is for you, but the automated systems DONT WORK!.

[@leftblank131]

You'd think a "Use your judgement" test for a global setting would have question 1 be "Do I have a gun? No? Ok, don't attack"@@gdouble4710

[@wileywilson]

Only time I’ve had a problem with the auto systems is when I’ve set it up wrong, which happened often when I was learning the game! Once your ship and station globals are set up correctly, the auto systems work really well. Re. Your issues. I only use large miners in non-xenon sectors. Orders are set to “ignore” attacks and I’ve never lost one to KHK. As to why your miners aren’t trading. We’d need to look at how’ve you set everything up.

[@Jesse_IDG]

hmmm why are you talking so fast? it's like you tried tricking KZbin on the video length turned you down to 0.75 playback speed and you still sound like someone talking at a good pace. really makes the video seem WAY more chaotic than it is, and not enjoyable at all.

[@TIB1973]

it would be so much more enjoyable if you could play this game in CooP. All this effort into a single player game is boring.

[@janetsminten8196]

Not really. It's a perfect sandbox just the way it is. It wouldn't be the X series if it was multiplayer.

[@TIB1973]

@@janetsminten8196 everything is better if you can share it with others...everything.

[@Tom-lu9gj]

Thank you!