The Captain of Industry’s Journal XVIII: Moving and Upgrading the Construction Facility

Putting out fires after a major upgrade is just par for the course.

Cement, concrete slab, and construction parts manufacturing are crucial to keeping the island running. Aside from needing construction parts to build every structure, we also need concrete slabs for laying out pavement, vehicle walls, and retaining walls.

We also trade concrete for coal — an important contract that helps keep the island running even when our mine isn’t running at full capacity. So, it’s time to upgrade and move our current construction facility.

Planning the Upgrades

At the moment, our construction parts facility only produces up to Construction Parts III. But since the next research item we will unlock is Construction Parts IV, we will include the necessary structures to build that in our planning.

We also want to accommodate the demand that Assembly V structures will have, since we plan to integrate concrete slab and cement production into the facility. That way, we don’t have to spend effort upgrading them in the future (hopefully).

So, according to our analysis, we need the following structures:

• 2 Assembly V: Construction Parts III (48) + Electronics II (24) = Construction Parts IV (24)
• 4 Assembly V: Construction Parts II (192) + Steel (96) = Construction Parts III (96)
• 6 Assembly V: Construction Parts I (576) + Electronics I (288) = Construction Parts II (288)
• 8 Assembly V: Steel (384) + Wood (384) + Concrete slab (576) = Construction Parts I (768)
• 32 Concrete Mixer II: Cement (84) + Manufactured (168) + Gravel/Slag crushed (504) + Water (336) = Concrete slab (674)
• 20 Rotary Kiln (gas): Limestone (360) + Hydrogen (120) = Cement (120) + Steam (depleted) (90)
• 6 Crusher (large): Rock (864) = Gravel (864)
• 4 Crusher (large): Gravel (192) = Manufactured sand (192)
• 4 Crusher (large): Slag (576) = Slag crushed (576)

All of these will deliver the following net resources per minute:

• Cement (18)
• Concrete slab (48)
• Construction parts I (192)
• Construction parts II (96)
• Construction parts III (48)
• Construction parts IV (24)
• Gravel (204)
• Manufactured sand (36)

Given the large number of buildings, we will need a substantial area to accommodate them all in one giant facility.

Building Construction Facility 3

We’ve prepared this construction facility for future upgrades.

As usual, we’re taking the modular approach when building massive facilities. We first broke down the Cement Mixer IIs,w Crusher (large) units, and Rotary Kiln (gas) structures into groups of four. From there, we connected them via transport.

Although the actual facility fits within a large grid square, it’s the storage units and train stations that occupy a significant amount of space. We doubled the usual storage capacity, ensuring that we will have enough construction parts in stock for large projects.

The train station that serves Construction Facility 3.

Since construction parts are only needed for construction projects, we did not see the need to add platforms for those resources. However, we added a platform for manufactured sand, as we can trade it for dirt if we choose to.

Putting Out Fires

Building the new construction facility didn’t take long, but we experienced a couple of critical moments on the island. The first was the food situation — because we added several new citizens to staff the new buildings, they put a strain on our food supply.

18 news farms should be enough to feed our large population.

Because of this, we had to demolish the old farming facility and replace it ASAP. We’re not as satisfied as we should be with the new farm build, but we will fix it later. After all, aesthetics matter less if you’re in survival mode.

The next issue we ran into was our cargo ships running out of fuel. This happened because our electricity consumption jumped when we stocked four storage unit IIIs worth of steel in the new construction facility. This move forced our steel smelting facility to run at high capacity.

Since we’re already using Arc furnaces, these power-hungry structures caused electricity demand to spike to over 100 MW for quite some time. While our generators and turbines can handle the load, it turns out that our logistics network can’t.

Because of this, we were forced to prioritize truck traffic to bring coal and hydrogen to the power plant. This extra consumption meant that our port wasn’t getting the hydrogen it needed to run the ships. Because of this, crude oil wasn’t getting delivered, and we eventually ran out of stock of this critical resource needed to make more hydrogen.

The Run on low fuel function saved our island.

Thankfully, the Run on low fuel function allowed us to run our cargo ships without fuel, but with a unity penalty and at a slower speed. Still, this is a better solution than having no crude oil at all.

This train station is too close for comfort to Iron Ore Mine 2, but it should do for now.

Because our trucks were so busy, our settlement also ran out of water and can no longer dispose of waste water. That’s why we also built a Settlement Services train station and assigned five locomotives to bring in water from the water facility. We also directly connected the waste water tanks to four liquid dumps, so that we no longer need our trucks to remove it from the community.

This is just a temporary solution, though, as we intend to build a proper waste processing facility in the future.

Island To-Do List

We spent the majority of our time today swatting out fires, but we were eventually able to fix everything. Since we had to prioritize a few items in our list, we are making some big changes to our to-do list.

1. Relocate the Electronics I and Mechanical Parts facility.
2. Relocate and expand the maintenance facility.
3. Relocate the rail facility.
4. Connect the farm to the rail network.
5. Process excess food production.
6. Build a fertilizer facility.
7. Build a waste processing facility.
8. Produce Electronics II.