This is another in my series of "Understanding" guides, delving into various aspects of FOUNDRY to help players understand the game and maybe enjoy it more.

In this guide we will explore the Fuel Depot on the Space Station. The fuel depot provides an alternative way to refuel your space ships, rather than by purchasing fuel from the Galactic Market. Note that this purchase of fuel is automatic in the game, you don't have to do anything for it to happen, except have enough firmarlite in the vault! But if you want to invest the time, it can be a cheaper way to refuel your ships.

The fuel depot screen of the space station

The fuel depot is one of the screens of the space station. Here you can see how much fuel is being used per hour by your space ships and how much that it costing you. If you have uploaded fuel canisters to the station, this is where it is either manually or automatically transfer the fuel in those canisters to tanks.

You can see that at this point in the game I'm using about 2.2 million liters an hour.

Once the space ship fuel is transferred to the tanks, the canisters disappear, magically.

The fuel canisters are brought up from the surface by cargo ships assigned to Planetary Shipping.

A rather obvious question might be, can I buy fuel canisters on the Galactic Market myself? The answer is no.

I am currently at the 227 hours played mark in the game with my current factory and have a lot of space ships. A lot of them. In fact I have 276 ships, some small, mostly medium, all the T2 variety.


My highest numbered ship is #286, but I did sell off some ships earlier in the game

Fuel usage is actually calculated. Fuel is used by the planetary shipping ships, those going to and from the Galactic Market, and finally those delivering products (bots, drones and robots) to other planets. Note that the farther away a planet is, the more jumps needed to deliver the cargo and the more fuel that is used. While there is some abstraction in this, for game purposes it all works.

Fuel canisters cannot be made by the character and are actually rather complex

A fuel canister is a rather complex construction in the game, consisting of five components. Like some other aspects of the game, dealing with fuel canisters is entirely optional. You can just instead let the game buy the space ship fuel for you. But what fun is that?

As I noted above, I am using about 2.2 million liters of fuel an hour (that's real world hour, by the way). In order to provide those 2,200,000 liters per hour on the space station, with a fuel canister holding 100 liters, we need 22,000 fuel canisters an hour, or 367 per minute. It is actually at this point easier to discuss things in terms of per minute.

I won't show all the math, but will be happy to discuss any questions in the comments.

Working backwards, the final step of production, making 367 canisters a minute, requires 31 Chemical Processors.

To feed those processors, each minute I need

• 372 x barrels
  
• 1,860 ignium powder
  
• 37,200 liters liquid fuel
  
• 7,440 liters water
  
• 1,860 firmarlite sheets

Each Assembler III makes 40 barrels a minute, so need 10 Assembler III units making barrels.

Each Crusher II makes 24 x 5 = 120 ignium powder per minute, so I need 16 Crusher II units making ignium powder.

I need 37,200 liters of liquid fuel per minute, and a Chemical Processor makes 1,125 liters liquid fuel a minute, so I need 33 chemical processors. In each chemical processor 50 liters low density olumite makes 150 liters liquid fuel, so I need 12,400 liters low density olumite per minute.

A distillation column makes 1,500 liters/minute of low density olumite from 1,500 liters of olumite, so I need 9 distillation columns which make 1500 liters/min each to make 12,400 liters per minute low density olumite.

I haven't listed the materials needed to feed those structures, which is not insubstantial. Barrels need xenoferrite plates and ignium powder of course needs ignium. At least water is pretty cheap!

A Lava-Smelter II makes 20 firmarlite sheets/min, so I need 93 additional Lava-Smelter II units. I currently have 97 and they are all busy!

So the structures I need are

• 10 x Assembler III
  
• 16 x Crusher II
  
• 93 x Lava-Smelter II
  
• 33 x Chemical Processors making liquid fuel
  
• 31 x Chemical Processors making fuel canisters

The above represents a lot of effort to manufacture fuel canisters. The question becomes, is it worth the effort? It depends on how much money you want to save by making your own fuel rather than paying for it. Let's check out my current Accounting History screen


Ignore the "Today" column, those numbers are in flux. The "D-1" and previous days are good indicators

As can be seen, each day I'm spending just under three hundred thousand firmarlite on fuel. And each day my profit is about fourteen million firmarlite. So if I didn't have to pay for fuel I'd be increasing my profit by about two percent. That really isn't going to convince me to start making my own fuel. But then, that's up to you, Player!