Item Construction Cost and Value

This page is not yet complete. Not all items have been fully decoded.

The purpose of this page is to compare how much time, how many ingredients, and how may trains are required to construct each of the items in Trainstation 2. It also lists out the cost in gems for purchasing ingredients that you are short of, and the value that the game places on the items (how many it requires to complete jobs or to exchange for union items in the Union Trade Center). This in-game value will help you decide the optimum size of the stock of each item that you keep in your warehouse (you need to keep a much larger stock of Cement than of Cheese because the game requires much more Cement to complete a job than Cheese).

## Raw Materials and Factory Manufactured Items

The table below contains a list of all raw materials and manufactured items, where they are manufactured, how many are produced at a time, the total number of raw materials needed, and the manufacturing time. A complete listing of the recipes for each item can be found on the Bill of Materials or the Factories page.

For raw materials, I assume a typical train size of 40, so this is the production number listed. For items such as Steel or Timber, you have the option to build a factory that produces the item as a raw material or manufacturing the item at your station in the Smelting Plant or Sawmill. In the table, I list them as a raw material rather than a manufactured item.

## True Construction Cost and Item Value

The "Time to Make" numbers above assume that you already have sufficient raw materials to build the item. More time is needed to make the item if you first have to gather the raw materials or manufacture other intermediate items as ingredients. In the table below, the "Time from Scratch" column includes the time needed to gather raw materials and manufacture intermediate items as ingredients. It also includes the number of trains needed to gather any raw materials. A typical train size of 40 is again used when calculating the gathering time and the number of trains needed.

As an example, Copper Wire can be manufactured in 25 minutes, but if you included the time to gather the required Copper Ore and Coal, and to manufacture the intermediate Copper ingredient, it takes 1 hour, 4 minutes, and 15 seconds to manufacture, and requires 2.75 train runs of size 40 trains to gather the raw materials needed.

To Build 110 Copper wire requires:
* 25 minutes to manufacture
* 70 Copper Ore, which requires 8 minutes and 45 seconds and 1.75 trains to gather
* 40 Coal, which requires 30 seconds and 1 train to gather
* 80 Copper to be manufactured using the above ingredients which takes 30 minutes

If you are short of ingredients, the game gives you the option of purchasing the missing ingredients using Gems. The number of gems needed per unit of each item is also listed out in the table below as the Gem Purchase Cost.

Also listed in the table is the value that the game places on each item (the In-Game Value). In the game, which item is required to complete a job is selected at random, but the number of items needed is selected based on the value that the game places on the item. The values listed in the table are relative to the value of Coal (Coal has a value of 1). So the game values Cement at 60% that of Coal (it has a value of 0.6), and Cheese at 630% that of Coal (it has a value of 6.3). As an example, for a particular job, the game randomly chose that it requires Coal, and the amount of Coal needed was calculated to be 300 units. If the game had instead randomly chosen Cement, it would require 500 units of Cement for the same job. Similarly, if it had randomly chosen Cheese for that same job, it would only require 48 units of Cheese.

As well as the number of items needed to complete jobs, these in-game values are used when choosing how many items are needed to complete a building (this is where they were decoded from, see the Buildings page), and the number of items needed to purchase union items in the Union Trade Center (from Feb through Nov of 2023 there was an additional random factor added for the Trade Center exchange).

These In-Game Values are particularly useful when deciding on the size of the stockpile of a particular item to keep in your warehouse. You need 10.5 times more Cement than Cheese to complete a typical job, so you should scale your stockpile accordingly.

## Item Cost and Value Comparison

It is instructional to compare the cost of manufacturing an item (ingredient cost, manufacturing time, trains used, and gems spent if the item is purchased) with the value that the game places on the item. The table below and the graphs that follow shows the In-Game Value per ingredient, per minute, per train, and per gem user to purchase the item.

## See Also

Bill of Materials
Buildings
Factories