With Update 2 to FOUNDRY, the game now has a purpose for your factory... to make money!! You make money by selling your products (bots, robots, etc) to other planets, but optimizing your shipping is important. So you need to look to the skies.


A castle, err, landing pad in the sky

Update: I did another Steam guide after this one where I went into the actual numbers of the savings from using a high altitude shipping pad, see the following guide for more details

https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3535343381

Every extra second that a product take to reach the space station is costing you money. So how to make it quicker? The answer is in altitude.

If you notice, your space ships coming down from the space station and going back up travel at a fixed speed. Since you can't make the ships come to you faster, you need to shorten the time they take to reach a Shipping Pad. And you do that by building a pad really, really high in the sky.


These guys sure do move slow

Yup, turns out that the maximum build-able altitude in the game is 255. That's the top of anything you build up there. You'll find that when you try to build, the game will not let you place an object if the top of it would exceed that 255 height. No big problem.

Oh, and be sure to enable Build Mode: Free!


My ship in the sky

Yes, a whole lot of conveyors would be needed to bring your products to the Shipping Pad, very messy. So instead I built a freight elevator instead.


Don't forget to provide power to the elevator loaders

The easiest way I found to do it is to put down the elevator base first, then using your jet back go up and place the top. Remember that while you can top off your elevator at 255, you need to make some allowance for the height of the Shipping Pad.


One small ride for a bot, one giant...

No, that would be silly. Instead I use my handy-dandy solar powered low voltage grid. One small transformer, small battery and small solar panel, plus a power pole.


Power to the loaders!

First the caution. Sometimes you might find you are being prevented from placing a Shipping Pad at that height for something not obvious, this happened to me. Turns out I was trying to place my Shipping Pad in the landing approach of another Shipping Pad, this one on the ground. You can't do that.

So, in conclusion, this method is a bit more trouble, but in the long run it ought to provide an advantage in getting products to the station. It also has the advantage of giving you more clear space on the ground for building. And me, I always seem to be running out of free space.

Update: I did another Steam guide where I went into the actual numbers of the savings from using a high altitude shipping pad, see the following:

https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3535343381