The Works: crafting comes to the galaxy

Star Captain, until now the ore you mined had two futures: sell it, or refine it and sell that. From this week it has a third. The Works is Ultra War's new crafting system: production lines you set up, run and tend, turning your own refined goods into the parts that ships, stations and the war are built from.

This post walks through what the first stage of the Works does, what it looks like, and where it goes next.

From ore to parts

The chain has three steps you already know and one that is new:

1. Gather. Mine ore in the belts, scoop comet volatiles, salvage wrecks.
2. Refine. The station Refinery or your own Refinery wing turns them into Metals, Alloys, Energy and Helium-3.
3. Process. A works line turns refined goods into workpieces: Hull plate, Conduit coil, Lens blanks and seven more.

Workpieces leave the works as goods in your Cargo bay, ready to list on the Exchange for other captains.

Ten workpieces, two grades

Every workpiece comes in Standard or Fine. Nothing about it is random, and the Works view shows the grade a bay will make before you start it. Two things decide it:

• Your own goods. Fine needs at least half its inputs, by value, to be your own: goods you mined and refined yourself. Bought goods make Standard.
• A tended, cool line. Each running line wants tending once a shift (four hours of line time). Dock, press Walk the deck, and every line is tended for the next shift. An untended line keeps running, one grade lower.

So the captain who mines, refines and works their own goods gets the best parts. The captain who buys in still gets Standard parts, and loses nothing for it.

Eight works floors

Every workpiece has a standard route that anyone can run, and most have a faction route too. The Fungus grow chitin hull plate in their vats with no furnace power at all. The Nereid draw conduit coil with tide-cooled ice. Gobbos cast hull plate from slag other factions throw away. When power runs short in a region, or a comet pass floods it with gas, a different route becomes the cheap one, so the galaxy's own economy decides which faction's way of working pays best that week.

Each faction's works has its own painted floor behind the Works view, and Charter yards on the Rim have a plain working look of their own.

Two places to build

Leased bays. Every faction Refinery and Shipyard, and the Charter yards, rent bays by the day. A bay costs 45 GC a day for each level of its unit, and gets dearer as more bays at that hub are taken, so busy capitals cost more than quiet frontier hubs. Your first lease gets its first day free, with a little Energy from the yard to get the line going. Leased bays run their hub's faction route, so a Solari captain can grow Fungus chitin plate by leasing a bay at a Fungus hub.

Your Works Deck. A new module for your Colony Station, docked beside the Refinery wing. It starts with two bays and grows to six as you raise it, and its level never passes your Refinery wing's. Bring your own Metals toward the build and the GC price drops by their worth.

Running a deck

Each bay holds one unit, and you choose which:

• Line: the furnace, press, vat or loom that makes a workpiece.
• Reactor: power for the deck. Short of power, lines slow down, but never below a quarter of their speed, and they never stop.
• Radiator: carries heat away. A deck running hot keeps its speed, but makes one grade lower and 25% more waste.
• Salvage press: turns three Swarf into one Salvage.
• Gas trap: pulls trace Helium-3 back out of Off-gas.

Changing what a line makes takes 30 minutes of line time, never GC, so it pays to plan a little.

Waste is part of the game

Real works make waste, and so do these: Slag, Swarf, Spent coolant, Spore mash and Off-gas. By-products take hold space, and a full hold pauses your lines. You can reuse them on another line, list them on the Exchange, or pay a small fee to have any Refinery clear them. Reuse always pays better than the fee, and there is no pollution penalty. The fun is in finding the loop, not in being punished for missing it.

Fair by design

The Works was built and tested against Ultra War's economy before anyone saw it. Bots mined, traded, hunted and crafted through hundreds of simulated hours so that no route, deck or faction runs away with the galaxy. A few rules matter most:

• What you are shown is what you are charged, every time.
• Nothing is sold while you are away. Your lines can run, but sales happen when you are there to make them.
• No GC moves while you are in a fight.

What comes next

This is the first stage. Next comes the second: assemblies. Workpieces go into frames, weapon housings, shield lattices, drive assemblies and more, and top-end Mk IV and Mk V modules will need assemblies made by players. That is where your Fine plate starts to matter to everyone else's loadout. The faction floors also gain their own twists: Solari radiators that double as solar vanes, Spacers retooling in no time, Gobbo lines that can be run "rattlin'" hot for speed.

After that, convoys to move your goods across the galaxy, with pirate captains who learn your routes.

Opening the Works

The Works are built and tested, and they will switch on soon. When they open, the First Works guide will walk you through your first lease and your first Fine Hull plate. The Field Manual has the full rules under Works Deck.

Ultra War is free to play in your browser at ultrawar.io.