Fabrication

Fabrication is where raw materials become real gear. You refine ore into metals (see Mining), then a Fabricator turns those metals (plus a web of intermediate components) into the actual ship and station modules. This page is the fabrication side: the fabricator block, the per-craft job model, and the standing-order queue that lets you build a self-running factory.

The Fabricator module

The Fabricator (the MANUFACTURING module) is the workbench of the tech tree. It installs like any other module: place the module block in an open slot inside a host's interior. A "host" is either a ship or a rented room; both share the same fabrication code, so you can run a fabricator on your own ship or inside a station Faction Hall room.

In the world the fabricator renders as a dispenser-style block. You operate it by right-clicking it.

The craft loop: start, process, collect

A fabricator runs one job at a time, mirroring the refinery's produce → buffer → collect loop:

1. Start. Right-click an idle fabricator to open its recipe UI. Click a recipe whose inputs you have. The inputs (and a blueprint, if the recipe needs one) are consumed from the host's shared GENERAL cargo hold, and a timed job begins.
2. Process. The job runs for the recipe's processingSeconds, a real-time timer. It only advances while the owner is online. Times range from ~20s for a basic component up to 1200s (20 min) for a Dreadnought shipkit.
3. Collect. When the timer elapses, the output lands in the fabricator's own buffer. Right-click the fabricator again to dump the buffer into the GENERAL hold (capacity-aware: if the hold is full, output stays safely buffered, nothing is lost).

Important: inputs are read from and outputs are written to the host's GENERAL hold, not the ore hold. Refined metals, components, and raw silica all already live in the GENERAL hold: refining outputs land there, and mining secondary drops (silica, flux, Tritanium) deposit straight to the GENERAL hold too, so there's no transfer step before a craft. (Only the primary raw ore sits in the ore hold, where it feeds the refinery; the fabricator eats the refined output and the GENERAL-hold feedstock.)

Each fabricator placement tracks its own job and output buffer independently, and that state persists across restarts.

Module tier gates which recipes you can run

Every recipe has a tier (1–5), and so does every fabricator module (Mk I–Mk V). The rule:

• A Tier-N fabricator can run recipes up to tier N + 1.

So a Mk I fabricator builds T1 and T2 recipes; a Mk IV builds up to T5. The "+1 reach" means you don't have to own the top-tier fabricator to build the top-tier item, but you do have to climb. A handful of capstone recipes are flagged to require a fabricator of exactly their tier (no +1 reach); those need the matching top-tier fabricator.

Where you can install a high-tier fabricator is itself gated by the host platform: small ships cap low, capital ships and stations cap high, so the install gate plus the tier rule together form the progression ladder.

Blueprint gating (BPC): T4 and T5

Low- and mid-tier recipes need only materials. The high end needs a Blueprint Copy (BPC) as well:

• Most T4 and T5 module recipes (requiredBpc) consume one matching BPC from the GENERAL hold per craft, e.g. manufacture.cannon_t5 needs bpc.cannon_t5. The capital shipkits (Battlecruiser Guardian, Colossal Dreadnought) need their own BPCs too.
• The BPC is consumed by the craft, so you need one per item built.
• If you're missing it, the craft is refused with a "needs a blueprint copy" message (the engine's MISSING_BPC outcome).

BPCs are not sold by NPC vendors. They come from:

• Pirate drops. Tier-5 BPCs drop from Reaver kills; tier-4 BPCs drop from Corsair kills.
• Quest rewards. Certification and capital-track quests hand out specific BPCs (for example, the Guardian questline rewards bpc.manufacturing_t4). See Quests.
• Wormhole expeditions for some capital blueprints.

This makes the endgame craftable only by players who also fight or quest for the blueprints; gear can't be bought straight to the top.

The intermediate components

Between refined metals / mining feedstock and the final modules sits a layer of six intermediate components. You fabricate these first, then feed them into module recipes. They're the real chokepoints of the T3+ tree because their feedstock is gated by where you mine.

How they slot in:

• Circuit Board and Focusing Lens are the electronics backbone: they gate the T3+ tree across drives, lasers, shields, salvage arms, warp drives, fabricator upgrades, and drone miners.
• Magnetic Coil feeds the high-tier engines, wings, and warp drives.
• Munitions feed the high-tier cannons.
• Reinforced Composite (built from the earlier structural_plating component) feeds the largest cargo holds and tier-3 drone miners.
• Coolant Cell feeds the T4/T5 shields.

The gating feedstock is the part you can't buy:

• Raw Silica (ore.silica.raw) is a mining drop only; it's the feedstock for Circuit Boards, Focusing Lenses, and the Iron Chelate crop supplement. See Mining.
• The planet minerals (mineral.rare_earth, mineral.oxidizer, mineral.carbon, mineral.cryo_salt) drop only from surface mineral deposits when you land on a planet. They are the gate on coils, munitions, composites, and coolant. See Planets.
• Fluorspar drops only from frozen-planet underground veins (vendors will buy it from you, but never sell it) and gates the Enrichment Centrifuge (30× per build) — the door into the nuclear fuel chain. See Planets.

So the component layer is what forces the full mine → refine → fabricate journey instead of a credit shortcut.

Role sub-assemblies: the layer that makes factories worth it

Base components don't feed modules directly any more. Between them and the finished gear sits a second layer of role sub-assemblies, so each kind of module pulls its own distinct part:

• T2 modules are built from Machined Parts, so even early gear is a refine → machined part → module chain, not a one-click craft.
• T3–T5 modules consume their role's sub-assembly instead of a pile of loose components: a cannon wants Weapon Mounts, an engine wants Drive Assemblies, a cargo hold wants Armor Segments.
• T4/T5 capital modules add a Composite Frame on top for real depth: a single capital module is a 5–6 stage tree (ore → refined → alloy/component → sub-assembly → frame → module).

The point: one capital module now pulls from several different sub-assembly chains at once, so building it quickly means running several parallel fabricators, each making a different sub-assembly, feeding a final assembler. That's exactly what the standing-order cascade below is for, and why a single fabricator is no longer enough for serious production.

Standing orders: turning a fabricator into a factory

A fabricator can hold a standing order: a recipe it re-runs automatically on a timer while the owner is online. Set it by shift-clicking a recipe in the fabricator UI (shift-clicking the already-queued recipe clears it). A background ticker then re-attempts the order roughly every couple of seconds:

• If the fabricator is idle and its inputs are present, it starts the craft. The craft's own input check is the gate, so a standing order is a harmless no-op whenever inputs are missing, and auto-resumes the instant they arrive. No manual restart.
• A fabricator pauses its order when its pending output piles up past a cap (backpressure), and resumes once the output drains.

Standing orders are online-gated (offline owners never tick) and survive a server restart, so a factory you set up keeps running session to session.

Auto-deposit and the cascade

Each fabricator also has an auto-deposit toggle (default ON):

• ON (cascade). Finished output is flushed into the host's shared GENERAL hold automatically. Because every fabricator on a host shares that one hold, the output of one fabricator becomes the input another fabricator consumes.
• OFF (buffer). Output stays parked in the fabricator's own buffer for you to collect by hand. Use this for a final product you want to grab yourself rather than feed onward.

The cascade is how you build a real factory. Put several fabricators in one host and chain them through the shared hold:

1. Upstream fabricators run standing orders for the base components and the role sub-assemblies (Machined Parts, Weapon Mounts, …), auto-depositing them to the shared hold.
2. A downstream fabricator has a standing order for the final module, which needs those sub-assemblies. It sits idle until they arrive, then auto-resumes.
3. Feed raw refined metals and mining/planet feedstock into the hold, and the whole multi-stage chain runs end to end on its own.

Because a capital module pulls from multiple sub-assembly chains, a real factory is several fabricators deep. That's the difference the deeper tree makes: a standing-order line is now genuinely worth configuring instead of click-crafting one item at a time.

This is the difference between hand-crafting one item at a time and operating a production line that turns feedstock into finished modules while you go do something else.

Where to put a fabricator

• On your ship: portable, mine-and-craft on the go. Limited by the ship's module slots and tier cap.
• In a rented room: rent a door in a station's Faction Hall and install industry modules inside. Good for a fixed production base without owning a whole station. See Stations → Rooms.
• On your own station: the industrial endgame; the highest-tier fabricators install here. See Stations → Industry modules.

Access is gated: you need MODULE_USE rights on the host to operate its fabricators (see Stations → ACL).

What can go wrong

• Missing materials. The recipe UI marks each input with a ✔ or ✘ and shows how many you have. Load refined metals, components, and silica into the GENERAL hold (not the ore hold).
• Lost feedstock. Mining secondary drops (raw silica, refining flux, and Tritanium Crystal) deposit straight into the GENERAL hold (only the primary ore goes to the ore hold), and fabricators read the GENERAL hold, so there is nothing to transfer. But the deposit is best-effort: if you have no GENERAL hold, or it's full, those drops are discarded when they roll. Carry a GENERAL hold with room in it while you mine, or you lose the silica and Tritanium the T3+/T5 tree needs.
• Tier too low. A recipe more than one tier above your fabricator is refused. Build or buy a higher-tier fabricator first.
• No blueprint. A T4/T5 craft with no matching BPC in the hold is refused. Go earn the BPC from pirates or quests.
• Cargo full on collect. Output stays buffered; free up hold space and right-click again. Nothing is lost.

See also

• Mining: ore, the refinery, silica, and Tritanium
• Planets: surface minerals that gate the T4 component web
• Stations: where the high-tier fabricators live
• Quests: quests that reward blueprints (BPCs)
• Crafting wiki: full bootstrap tree for every item