Getting the right cargo moving

A factory can have power, money and a queue of orders, yet still sit silent because one ingredient never arrives. Between 26 and 28 October, we’ve been working through that problem across Adastrea’s station economy. We’re excited to see more cargo moving in our local development experiments, while following the shortages that still hold the frontier back. This dispatch covers work in progress: there were no new merges during these three days.

Factories with a job to do

We connected our station industry plan to a local game build with 55 starting stations, 63 organisations and 214 starting ships. Each dedicated factory has an assigned product and draws ingredients from the station’s shared inventory. The supply pass brought the starting setup to 339 dedicated factories, including supporting lines for other producers.

For players, the aim is a galaxy whose needs are understandable. A missing component should explain why a factory has stopped, and a real delivery should help it resume. Our preferred supply routes guide ships through existing mining and trading systems; they don’t create goods or guarantee a delivery just because a route appears in the plan.

Demand needs materials, too

We also worked on demand-driven expansion. A new production module now carries its selected recipe through construction and save restoration, and stations evaluate their own growth queues. Expansion still needs delivered building materials, funding, licences, power and room to place the module.

The latest local profile allows 48 total modules per station, including the core and infrastructure. Goods’ underlying values can move between 50% and 150% of base price before market margins, special bids and taxes. We doubled opening wallets as well, while preserving existing saved balances. These are experimental settings, not a newly merged release or a promise of final balance.

More movement in the short comparison

In the matched two-hour background comparison, second-hour production rose from 3,984 to 5,806 units, and delivered goods from 21,043 to 35,072. Factories’ recorded time waiting for inputs fell from 73.2% to 66.7%. All 64 opening wallets doubled exactly, with the starting goods and fleet unchanged.

That is an encouraging direction, but we changed several settings together, so we can’t assign the improvement to any one of them. This was a short headless simulation with no loaded sectors. It doesn’t establish long-term balance, visible traffic quality or performance in the cockpit.

The queues we’re still following

The clearest warning is construction: no new dedicated factory completed in that latest run. Nineteen of twenty outstanding construction orders were waiting for materials. A station can want more capacity and have money set aside, yet remain dependent on the same component chains it hopes to expand.

Our focused pricing, growth and budget checks passed all 26 cases, and the Editor and Game builds succeeded. The broader native run still has eight failures among 163 tests. We haven’t established a baseline that dates those failures, so we’re keeping them open rather than treating them as harmless leftovers.

We’re continuing to examine collection, stock reservations, delivery choices and access to operating capital alongside nominal factory capacity. The public industry guide now lays out the local configuration and its validation limits. Getting the right cargo to the right place is the next practical test of whether this busier frontier can keep working.