Industrial Commodities

Industrial Commodities are a new mechanic added in the May 2016 reset, to allow players to make money from raw resources such as Metal or Nuclear Waste, replacing the old strategy of building station extensions and then selling them to a AI base.

There are 28 Industrial Commodities, arranged into a four-tier system. The first tier, tier 1, is constructed from basic materials, such as Metals, Silicon, and Nuclear Waste, among others. Tier 2-4 commodities are produced using several of the previous tier's commodities, as well as a rarer extractable or otherwise producable commodity such as Jelly Beans, Diamonds, or Enriched Nuclear Material.

Industrial Commodities will sell for slightly more than the value of their ingredients to certain AI bases. The only bases which will buy Industrial Commodities are AI bases in Wild Space. Additionally, each base will only buy a certain type of tier 2-4 commodities, as well as most or all tier 1 commodities.

Price-wise, Industrial Commodities function similarly to normal commodities. That is, a AI base will buy a commodity for less as more of that commodity is sold to them. AI bases will buy Industrial Commodities for 200% of it's base value when it has none of them stored, which eventually falls to 50% of the commodities' base value, beyond which the AI base will refuse to buy more. AI bases will consume industrial commodities over time, at a rate depending on the tier of the commodity. At tier 1, they will consume 100k-200k of each commodity per day, but only 1-5k of each tier 4 commodity per day.

Industrial commodities can only be produced by a number of specialized base-only factories, all of which are available in Capella. These factories are all 1000 size, require more workers to equip than other factories, and produce 1 of their respective commodity per minute.

(TBA: a table of the commodities, once i figure out how to add tables and have time)