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[WhisperDSP]

Newer player here, I’ve been trying to look up the numbers regarding making colonies (ie the credit costs). I’ve not been able to find them and the wiki only has some numbers - not all.

Currently I’m going through a test-game to get the information. Since I’ve joined the forums though - is there some topic that my google-fu has missed which has the information I’m seeking?

Alternatively, would the results be worthwhile for other new players to plan their colonization efforts?

[Tigasboss]

You should try to get at least 1 million credits before making a colony, just to be on the safe side.
The reason you don't find numbers on the colonies is because it depends on a lot of stuff.
First you have the hazard rating, then you have to choose which industry to build first and different industries have different upkeep costs and different profitability depending on what they produce. The upkeep cost is multiplied by a hazard rating, on a planet with a rating of 100% if for example you build an industry with a cost of 10k for monthly upkeep youll pay those 100%, if you settle on a 200% one youll pay 20k.
You also have the option to pay a hazard fee which is another money sinker but usually worth it if you have the money because it makes it so that the population grows faster.

[WhisperDSP]

Thanks Tigasboss, I worded my post badly. What I meant was was there a list somewhere of the credits cost of each industry, structure, and upgrade.

Since there doesn’t appear to be one that I can easily find, I suppose that I should post in here what I’ve gotten together. Maybe a bit more info and examples to help other newbs like me plan ahead.

[BaBosa]

https://starsector.fandom.com/wiki/Industry?so=search

[Kos135]

IMO colonization isn't worth it. Sure it can net you lots of money and give you custom production of ships/weapons/fighters, but at what cost?

At the cost of your whole playthrough, your time and patience. Expect to dedicate your early/midgame to exploration to find planets worth colonizing and blueprints for custom production. That part isn't so bad because you're seeing new things, building your fleet and battling [REDACTED] along the way.

Late game will consist of tedious babysitting. Hopefully your fleet isn't too expensive to maintain because you'll be sitting on your butt waiting for your colonies to grow enough to yield a profit. I advise you to limit colonization to gate systems so you have easy access to all of your planets. It's bad enough that you have to do so much work just to get your colonies started, don't give yourself a long commute on top of that.

What I said above is why I advise you to take a commission. Don't colonize, just sign up with an NPC faction and let them pay you to experience the core of Starsector gameplay, combat.

[BCS]

Don't colonize, just sign up with an NPC faction and let them pay you to experience the core of Starsector gameplay, combat.

Colonies also give you money to experience combat. And they do it without making you randomly hostile to some other factions.

[CapnHector]

While the basic numbers seem to be available, maybe you could make a tool that calculates the optimal industries for and expected profit from a colony over time so you could look at that before colonization?

I mean from my understanding this is a function of among other things production from other colonies and market share and so on, but the baseline for these is fixed in vanilla Starsector, so it should be doable, right? For a modded game you would need to read the information from the campaign file I suppose.

[WhisperDSP]

https://starsector.fandom.com/wiki/Industry?so=search

Thank you! My google-fu really failed me there.

Kos135 & BCS, I’m conflicted re colonies. Pro’s and con’s:

They can be convenient as a place for free storage. Yet the abandoned stations are just as good for that.

They are good to build a fleet. Yet the black market weapons/ship makers will do, at double cost. Also, how many ships does a player really need to have built only to store away?

Credits. Le sigh. I’ve figured how to make colonies uninteresting to Pathers…so only Pirates and punitive expeditions are an issue. (I’m looking at TriTach: they sent an expedition over food to a L4 planet that only makes 10k food - when they make 100m food. That’s more than a little crazy IMO…the planet wasn’t *that* much of a threat to them.)

Back to credits: uninteresting planets don’t make much money. As in, an utter waste of time because it’s so pathetically small - a player can literally make more from bounties. Or as Kos135 states: get a commission.

It’s possible to make good amounts of money - over 500kcr a month. The price is that every year or so the players have to squash the Pather Sleeper Cell suppliers. Profit, if someone puts a bounty on them.

Also more attention from the factions the player is now competing with.

AI cores: dialing all of the above up to eleven, plus the Hegemony becoming essentially rabid as well. Hardcore, I may try a different path. Since I’ve noticed that selling a special item on the open market will incorporate the item into the planet infrastructure, it would be amusing to see if the Pathers start putting sleeper cells on their own planets. (Karma at work! It will be interesting to see if that also causes a bigger number of credits in the market too…)

Costs: thanks to BaBosa that’s what I've now been provided. I shall do simple spreadsheets with simple costs - the Hazard Pay and Accessibility functions are a touch more moving target and situational with Pirate raids and Pather cells. Simple should do for rough indicators.

Here’s a few pro’s that I consider interesting:

* drawing from your own planet stockpile is a fixed price, no chasing market variations
* own planet stockpiles (at L5-6) are more substantial than open market (10+k of fuel and supplies)

These two in particular are powerful in conjunction and can evolve interesting strategies:
* gate travel is half hyperspace travel fuel costs
* gate travel is instantaneous (so no supplies costs at all)

So having a gate in your multi-colony system is wonderful. Nipping over to the Syndrians to buy up all their fuel is a breeze. Not requiring tons of supplies for long travel is very nice too, given the cost is 4x that of fuel.

Drawing down on planetary stockpiles  is what I consider a major benefit.

Time to park it for the night. I’ll work on number-crunching tomorrow. Many thanks!

[BCS]

Kos135 & BCS, I’m conflicted re colonies. Pro’s and con’s:

Free storage already exists, and guaranteed in Core worlds which are in the middle of the map. There is really never a reason to use free storage in your colonies.

You can use them to build ships, but unless you are running some VERY exotic stuff it's just easier to find ships on the market(even Black Market can have capitals without a commision)

They print money. They print a LOT of money, much more than commission can get you and without the commission downsides. Basically the moment you put the colonies down you can forget money exists for the rest of the game.

As for colony threats, there are several:

 - Normal expeditions: these will happen sooner or later but the colony patrols should deal with them on your own. You don't have to do anything about these.
 - Pirates: they will target any colonized system, so the odds of them targeting your system are very small but when it does you need to go and squash their base. Pretty random.
 - Pathers: Like pirates but with a calendar. If you go over 6 planets you'll have to work twice as much(since there can be two Pather bases, each can target 6 planets)
 - AI Inspections: these ramp up in frequency with the amount and quality of cores. Even with something unreasonable like 10 Alpha cores and 10 Gamma cores they happen once every ~2 cycles. In current version of the game AI Inspections are rather trivial to deal with because fighting them near an your own orbital station/friendly patrols will cause them to join the battle, even if you're not officially on the confront stance. Well, they are easy to deal with regardless with any endgame fleet.

As for supplies, you will be almost always be able to buy them cheaper somewhere so I don't think your colonies stocking them at stock prices is anything to talk about. Then again I generate endless supplies/fuel from bounty runs so maybe it's just my playstyle that makes me not care about them at all.

[WhisperDSP]

BCS, I must run an extremely hungry/thirsty fleet. Newbie I guess - I'm forever having to grab large amounts of fuel/supplies.

Exactly re ships - I'm not doing that, too new to be poking into the exotic fleet stuff yet.

Approx 2 cycles between for inspections, hmmm? I will play with adding AI cores to all and sundry - my current testing has been focused on keeping everything on the down-low to not attract Pather interest. No Tech-Mining, only using one item (Fullerene Spool) on the farming planet, etc.

[WhisperDSP]

Prelim result is 5-6mcr per planet to max out the infrastructure/structures, depending on what is built. Adding Hazard Pay for max colony growth (or *any* colony growth) was over another 5mcr per planet, varying. This test involved maxing out every infrastructure/structure on my 4 planets ASAP, so they were all in the red all the time.

Administrators: all human experts or the player

Special Items: one only (Fullerene Spool on the first/farming planet) to keep Pather interest down

AI Cores: none used

=================================================

For anyone who wants a reasonable starting seed (nothing hugely flash planets-wise), this one gave me a reasonable system 10ly from the core worlds with a gate:

Planets: 5

Gas Giant: abundant volatiles, hot
Rocky Metallic: moderate ores, no atmosphere, hot, low gravity
Arid: decivilized subpopulation, poor farmland, vast ruins, ultrarich ores, common organics, hot (habitable, of course)
Barren: moderate ore, no atmosphere, low gravity
Barren: sparse rare ore, moderate ore, no atmosphere, cold

Seed (for normal mode): MN-8225076349649643496

I colonized 4 of them and built everything to max. Now all are at size 6, income is: 43kcr, 25kcr, -300cr, -4kcr

Add the human administrator costs for 3 of those, they're barely in the black - less than 10kcr.

Pt's time to aggravate the Pathers.

-edit-

Less than 5kcr in the black.

System name: Ishtar

10ly ENE of the core worlds.

[Thaago]

Hmmm, what exactly do you mean by "maxing out every infrastructure"? Because one of the key ways of making a profit from colonies is to not do that. A decent farming world (with no rare ore if wanting to item it) will make a profit immediately and keep doing so as it grows, but not if it has a maxed ground defenses/station/military base at size 4.

I'd also advise against trying to avoid pather interest - the items/cores magnify profits significantly.

[FooF]

By the time I have multiple colonies up and at full speed ahead, I’m usually making between 200-400k/month. I imagine I’ve sunk 5-10M credits in, though. From a return on investment standpoint, it would take many cycles to recoup what you put in but at the same time, there comes a point where you need a money sink because having more doesn’t net you anything really.

I’ll be glad when colonies are more than money factories.

[BCS]

BCS, I must run an extremely hungry/thirsty fleet. Newbie I guess - I'm forever having to grab large amounts of fuel/supplies.

I have Salvaging, Containment Procedures and Makeshift Equipment skills which drastically lowers my fleet running costs(most people don't do this because technically it is a waste of skillpoints) I also have five developed security agents on Asharu so I get at least two bounties per trip, and I can always fallback on killing something in a Remnant system if it's on the way. Still, I believe that every "endgame" fleet should have 3 Salvage Rigs in it, they absolutely pay for themselves.

Approx 2 cycles between for inspections, hmmm? I will play with adding AI cores to all and sundry - my current testing has been focused on keeping everything on the down-low to not attract Pather interest. No Tech-Mining, only using one item (Fullerene Spool) on the farming planet, etc.

Pathers will target any successful colony, it's pretty much impossible to not get targeted by them. Might as well go all out with an Alpha core admin/Beta core P&I and special items in every industry IMO.

As for planets, you generally want four:

 - One Habitable with farmland(or aquaculture) and organics - farming, mining, light industry go here
 - One no atmoshpere planet - mining(optional), refining, heavy industry, fuel production goes here
 - One extreme heat planet - High Command goes here. These also will usually have great mining potential which means one industry less for your "no atmoshpere" planet
 - One gas/ice giant for volatiles - usually useless for anything else and with high hazard rating

There is some minmaxing you can do here, for example extreme heat gas giant will save you a planet, or if you're extremely lucky you can get a toxic planet with organics which means you can use autonomous mantle bore on it(otherwise organics are always paired with habitable which precludes it) - but in general goods output is not a problem; you only worry about output in case of High Command(you need Pristine Nanoforge in Orbital Works to satisfy its needs) or if you use it, the Fusion Lamp(need at least Diffuse Volatiles on your Gas/Ice Giant)

[WhisperDSP]

Hmmm, what exactly do you mean by "maxing out every infrastructure"? Because one of the key ways of making a profit from colonies is to not do that. A decent farming world (with no rare ore if wanting to item it) will make a profit immediately and keep doing so as it grows, but not if it has a maxed ground defenses/station/military base at size 4.

I'd also advise against trying to avoid pather interest - the items/cores magnify profits significantly.

I had done exactly that re maxing out the infrastructure/structures as I went through my testing.

I was obsessed with having each planet being armed to the teeth ASAP, capable of holding off any attacker/s that went near it: pirates and punitive fleets from the established powers. The Patrol HQ upgrades were held-off until size 5-6. I was also obsessively cautious about keeping the planets on the down-low items-wise so that pathers wouldn't become interested.

End result of this approach: lots of pain money-wise.

I've come to the realization that using the items to have things stay profitable is vastly more important than worrying about the roaches that are pirates/pathers/punitive expeditions. Those I can handle with my fleet.

The next step in my current test is to ram on all the special items that I've held off on and see what happens. The RNG has been oddball this game: 2x pristine nanoforges, yet no cryoarithmetic engines or catalytic cores. Though half the sector still needs to be explored, plus Tech-Mining needs to be investigated.

Final step will be Alpha AI cores on everything and seeing what the Hegemony does. It might be funny to put a couple of Alpha AI on a disposable Tech-Mining in a [REDACTED] system, let the Hegemony wipe themselves out against that tough nut.

Then it'll be time to run through again with a more balanced approach to building things.