When you are on the space station you can visit the R&D Lab and spend points to reduce the product weight, increase the price you get for a product or increase the production efficiency. The first two are fairly obvious, but what about the third one?

Each time you make a product (drones, bots and robots) you accumulate XP for that type. When the XP reaches a certain amount, you increase the research another level and you get a point to spend on one of the three categories mentioned in the Introduction. Here we are going to talk about Production Efficiency.

In this guide we will talk about the Mining Drone. Here is my current Mining Drone research level.


Mining Drone research stats

If you look closely you can see that the Production Efficiency for the Mining Drone is 48%, which can be a little misleading. It is actually 100% more than that, a final value of 148%. In other words, when you first produced a Mining Drone you were at 100% efficiency, but now you are 48% better. OK, it's a bit confusing. Let's just say we are 48% better at making the drone than before.

Back on the planet surface we are standing next to an Assembler III which is making Mining Drones. Let's take a close up look at the panel on the building.


A closeup of the Assembler III panel

If you look closely, you can see a thin blue horizontal line under the box that says "Mining Drone". This is the Production Efficiency indicator. It will change on each cycle of the Assembler.

If you look even closer, you can see that the line goes across about half the length of the box. This correlates directly with the Production Efficiency value we saw on the R&D screen before. That line is the representation of the 48% Production Efficiency.

Once the current cycle is complete a Mining Drone is produced and the Assembler starts making another one. And that original 48% bar has another 48% added to it and the game must do some rounding up, because now the blue bar is the full length of the box.


The blue line is at 100%

This can be more easily seen in a video


When the next production cycle completes, instead of one Mining Drone being produced, two are made instead.


First cycle


Second cycle

To calculate the increased output of your machines, take the production efficiency value as shown the R&D lab, add 100% then divide by one hundred. So, for instance, if the production efficiency is shown as 40%, add 100 to get 140% then divide by 100 and you get 1.4. So now you get 1.4 times the number of products from that machine than the default production value over the course of time.

As a reminder, the additional output of products does not cost additional resources.