Production Lines

## Introduction

A production line describes a sequential process applied to a series of connected industry units and containers to achieve a desired output. At the end of a production line is usually a consumable (Fuel, Warp Cell or Scrap) or an Element (Meshed Voxel or Non Meshed) that can be attached to a construct or sold on a market. The diagram below shows in a very simplistic form all of the industry units within DU and where they sit within the production cycle. All production lines follow this basic schematic, refiners make consumables, chemical industries make consumables and product etc. In practice, most production lines end up far more complex and some extend into thousands of industry units.

This guide will hopefully show you the basic mechanics of production lines and offer some guidance on next steps. Building systems at scale is quite an art form and there are tutorials online describing large scale production lines. But lets start with the basic rules.

* Every input and output attached to an industry unit must be a container (or a container hub)
* The input and output containers cannot be the same
* All industry units need schematics apart from a Transfer Unit
* All industry units can have only one output
* All industry units can have up to seven inputs (the maximum schematic ingredient components)
* Units accept multiple inputs of the same component provided source is separate containers
* Catalysts are never consumed

Production lines are generally built around a single end-product like a territory unit, or around a type of product like adjusters, or group of products like detection zones. Some production lines are vertical where the whole factory produces only one outcome, the most common vertical production lines are warp cells, fuels or honeycomb. You can purchase warp cell factory blueprints from players and some are advertised on Du-Creators.

#### Example Production Line

After doing your research and have decided to start a production line you will need to determine how many schematics you will need. This will depend on how many items you wish to produce, but as a general rule, you will need more complex parts the more items you wish to produce, it is not uncommon for a factory to need only one group of tier 1 refiners to support a hundred industry units. In our example, we will use Adjustors M as our target product and use modular production lines, this method adds to your production line in small increments using as many common schematics as possible.

Adjustor M requires the following components

To complete this production line, we would need 6 containers 4 refiners 1 Chemical 2 Smelter 5 Metalwork and 1 Assembly Line with 18 Schematics. To take advantage of the initial investment you notice that the only difference between an Adjustor M and a Vertical Booster M is the functional part of a Basic Ionic Chamber S. Adding that to your production line and its dependencies increases your portfolio using the common production line already built. This is only one way to build production lines there are some valuable YouTube tutorials that offer good practical examples

There are many community projects that offer production line estimates, crafting calculators and factory builders

Building modular production lines using one input create what is known in the community as Giga or Mega-factories. Examples of large large scale production lines can be seen by visiting the SVEA factory ::pos{0,2,7.6002,78.2065,34.1692} or the GottChar factory in VR.

## Cost Calculations

There is a natural tendency to fill up all your containers of each product and parts so you do not run out, while you *can* take that approach it is not the most efficient or cost effective. Of course, this is a game and however you want to play DU is valid, but there are ways to make a more efficient production line. The best approach is to first determine how many end products you need per time period, this will depend on either market supply and demand, or on your demand for the item if you are the end consumer. All markets only demand a particular level of supply and it is advisable to stay within market constraints. Once you have determined the desired volume of your final product you can calculate backward your input requirements. The objective is to reduce the idle time of your industry unit, this will help you calculate your input costs as market prices for ore fluctuate. Items can take many days for one cycle so you will need to determine how often you will calculate your ore input costs. There is also a temptation to not include costs for ore you mine yourself, as this is an opportunity cost of your time, you should use market prices for all inputs.

### Staggering Maintain

One tool to monitor the efficiency of your production line is to stagger your maintain amounts. If you have determined that you need 4 metalwork industries to produce the volume that allows for your required demand of the final unit, you would stagger the maintain cycles 60%, 30%, 15%, 5% of total load. Your first and second unit will have green lights on all the time indicating the machine is operating 100% of the time, your third some of the time and your fourth rarely. This way you can visually determine load across the maintained item, adding more industry units when all unit lights are green all the time. This technique is useful when building intermediary and structural parts that are used by multiple products. Another advantage of staggering maintain cycles helps when the multiple industry units deliver the same part to a single container and all maintain the same amount, all units will start attempting to fill to the last item, only one will be successful and the others indicate output full.

### Spreadsheets

Sooner or later we have to resort to spreadsheets, you can say that is one step too far or use this as an opportunity to finally learn how to pivot that darn table! All the tools mentioned in this article will only take you so far down the generic production line, more complex configurations will need spreadsheets. Most organizations have players that have been down the spreadsheet path before you and can supply you with some foundation knowledge and templates.

## Managing Production Lines

Managing large scale production lines can be daunting with some recorded factories surpassing 8,000 industry units. Players can split factories, this can be done by Tiers, Basic, Uncommon and Advanced in one factory and Rare/Exotic in another, or along element types, for example an ammunition factory or warp cell factory. There are a few community tools that can help manage sprawling production lines; using industry specific HUD's or monitoring containers

### Transfer Units or Additional Units

Containers have a limit of 10 output links, this becomes problematic when expanding a production line. This hard limit can be addressed either by branching off more Industry Units or using Transfer Units to fill up additional containers, thereby increasing the link capacity of the product. Deciding to go transfer unit or additional units will depend on the type of production line, volume and tier of the end product. Modular production lines generally use more transfer units with intermediary parts and refined product. In the longer run complex parts, the bottleneck is usually volume where extra units or greater efficiency talents are more effective. For more in depth view of link limits see link on slot limitations.

## References

1. ↑ https://du-creators.org/
2. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1dhCrT\_U88&t=2625s&ab\_channel=GottChar
3. ↑ https://github.com/Dimencia/DU-Industry-Tool
4. ↑ https://hq.hyperion-corporation.de/crafting-calculator
5. ↑ https://github.com/lgfrbcsgo/du-factory-generator
6. ↑ https://github.com/Jericho1060/DU-Industry-HUD
7. ↑ https://github.com/carmopereira/DU-Container-Monitor