Farms & Factories

Cost to Operate: β 8,750 per day (per 100ft²)

Expansion: Increases manufacturing speed

Conversion: Yes

Other Factors:

Machinery & Training: Raises quality appeal, increase at any time, reduced after expansion.

Factories are the main source for the products sold in Retail Stores.
Each factory is dedicated to a product, and that product has a recipe which requires inputs and a manufacturing fee.

Operation

To start production, you will choose a quantity and the inputs will be taken from your warehouse.
- If you have multiple inputs of different brand and exactly the same quality appeal, the smallest quantity will be taken first.
- If you have multiple inputs with different quality appeals (because they are different brands or because you are using an advanced non-automerge strategy), the default is to take the lowest quality first but you can manually select something different at production time.
When production starts a resulting quality appeal is calculated based on the inputs and research used. However, all quality appeal degrades as time passes and that includes items in the Factory.
Production is limited to 4 weeks but due to quality decay mentioned above it may be adviseable to use shorter durations.

Upgrading a factory gives a semi-permanent boost to the quality appeal of produced items. Each point spent on Machinery & Training (maximum of 10) counts as a point of research.
When an Factory is expanded, the M&T level is reduced by the lesser of:

Example: A 100ft² Factory with Machinery & Training of 8 is expanded to 300ft². The result will be a building with 6 points.

Example: A 20,000ft² Factory with Machinery & Training of 8 is expanded to 30,000ft². The result will be a building with 5 points.

Cost to Operate: β 5,500 per day (per 100ft²)

Expansion: Increases farming speed

Conversion: Yes

Other Factors:

Training & Conditions: Raises quality appeal, increase at any time, reduced after expansion.

At this time, Farm operation is identical to that of Factories, except with different terms and products.
In general, Farms are cheaper than factories but operate more slowly.