Last week, I covered the basics of trading in Ascent. Through trading, I upgraded my ship to a Unicorn and built up a nice reserve of around 200,000 credits. One of the tutorial rewards was a deed on the planet Ceres and a Grain Farm blueprint. As you might suspect, this lets me build a Gain Farm and produce grain. In the starter systems, each planet only produces a single kind of good i.e. Grain. regular planets do not have this restriction. It's time I take a break from trading and start to be a producer.
Building in the starter Apollo (starter) systems is different than the rest of the 270 billion star systems. You don't really explore the planets yet, instead you are given a section to build on. Once you get a deed, you get a 6 x 5 grid, for a total of 30 plots on the planet.
After you find a nice spot for the farm, you can place it. The blueprint is not used up, so you can keep on building so long as you have the raw materials. To give the structure the materials it needs to be built, just double click on it. If you have the supplies in your cargo hold, they will be applied to the construction site. Now that I've started my structure, I need to go around to different systems and gather the needed raw materials. You can drop materials off, so you don't need to carry them all at once.
For a listing of building materials and some grid setups, check out this wiki entry.
Once all materials are there, it starts to build. In the case of my Grain Farm, it takes about 22 hours to construct. Once operational, the Grain Farm can hold 260 tons of grain. I'm a slacker, so I may not be getting to my farm before it overflows and no one wants to waste food. Luckily, there is a solution to that problem. Warehouses let you store up to 10,000 tons of goods. To get the goods to the warehouse, you'll need to setup some Transport Grid nodes. These nodes connect everything you build, so planning is an important part of building.
I went looking at each station's contracts and eventually found blueprints for the Warehouse and the Transport Grid. I then built a Warehouse and two Transport Grids to connect it to the Grain Farm. The Warehouse takes roughly 11 hours to build, and the Transports take 30 minutes. Total cost of this project has been 88,000 credits.
