COMPANIES

Companies are the Empire’s private corporations. They hire players as contractors to turn cheap raw resources into goods worth far more. You can play them alone, for as long as you like: take a contract at a company’s office, make the goods, deliver them, and get paid in credits. Each delivery raises your standing with that company, and standing unlocks machines, bigger contracts, a shop and a title.

The eight companies

There are four sectors and two rival companies in each. The offices stand together in the Corporate Quarter of the Imperial City. Right-click an office to open it.

Everything Arms and Amira make is a trade good: you never equip, wield or use it, you sell it.

Standing and ranks

You earn standing with a company by delivering to it. A delivery earns 10 standing per credit of the goods’ normal value, more for Rush (×1.1) and Standing contracts (×1.05), and more again for Fine (×1.5) and Masterwork (×2.25) goods.

Rivals: delivering to a company costs you half that standing with its rival. You can climb one company per sector (up to four). Your rank with the other one of the pair stays at Contractor while you lead with the first. Standing never drops on its own.

Reaching Branch Manager takes most of a season: about 100–150 hours of play at one company. The whole server is told when someone gets there.

Contracts

Each company keeps a personal board for you with 3 offers a day (new offers at 00:00 UTC). Standing contracts run weekly, from Monday 00:00 UTC. You can hold up to 3 active contracts with one company.

• Pay follows the market. A contract pays the good’s current Imperial Market price times its margin, and your delivery adds to the Empire’s stock, just like a sale. Flooding a good lowers what both the market and contracts pay for it.
• Deliver in parts. Hand in any amount before the deadline. The office keeps count and pays when the contract is complete.
• Packs count. A Pack, Box or Pallet delivers as what is inside it. Big Bulk and Standing contracts ask for Boxes.
• Failing or abandoning a contract pays 70 % of what you had delivered, and costs a small slice of standing (never below the rank you already hold).
• Team share: 10 % of each payout goes to your team’s treasury. Without a team you keep it all.
• Rekto also buys raw crops in Packs and Boxes in its Bulk contracts. Mining, Ultramats and Herz also ask for some vanilla goods.

Your active contracts and your standing with every company are in the PDA Contracts tab (/contracts).

Quality

Company goods come in three qualities: Standard, Fine and Masterwork. Anything crafted by hand is Standard. Fine and Masterwork come only from a licensed machine upgraded far enough, and a good is never better than its worst input. Fine sells for 1.5× and Masterwork for 2.25× the Standard price, at the market and in contracts.

Making goods

Every step of every chain is a normal recipe in your recipe book. Craft it at any crafting table or furnace, or with an Auto Crafter or a vanilla Crafter. Company goods only work in company recipes: they never stand in for vanilla items.

Mining turns ores into ingots, five alloys (steel, tungsten steel, titanium alloy, electrum, platinum alloy), then billets, blooms and slabs, then bars, rods, rails, beams, plates and coils. Tubes are made from alloys and wires from ingots. Arms builds parts, sub-assemblies and finished goods from Mining’s metal. Biotech processes crops and farm goods into food and medicine. Colonial development turns building blocks into panels, kits and modules.

The new ores

Four new ores appear: Silver and Titanium (mined like iron ore, with a stone pickaxe or better), and Tungsten and Platinum (mined like diamond ore, with an iron pickaxe or better). They show up in the cobblestone-layer veins and in the Mines, where mined ores sometimes come back as one of the new ones. Smelt the raw ore into an ingot in any furnace.

Licensed machines

Each company licenses machines you buy at its office: the first at Supplier, the second at Associate. They are automation machines: they go in your claimed base, use power, take belts and movers, count toward your base’s machine cap, and charge a small fee from the team treasury only while they work. Both Mining companies license the same five machines.

A machine’s licence has 5 levels. Each upgrade costs credits from the team treasury plus a batch of that company’s goods: 10, 25, 60 and 120 credits. Level 2 makes Fine goods and level 4 Masterwork, and every level crafts faster. Levels 4 and 5 need Partner with a company that licenses the machine. A broken machine keeps its level.

Packs, Boxes and Pallets

Company goods (and the vanilla goods Rekto, Ultramats and Herz order) pack up: 9 items make a Pack, 9 Packs a Box, 9 Boxes a Pallet (729 items). Pack and unpack in the crafting grid at any time, or automatically with a Packer (5 cr, from the Engineering Merchant). Only the same good at the same quality packs together, so unpacking always gives back exactly what went in.

The bank vault refuses Packs, Boxes and Pallets, even inside a shulker box. Haul them in a mount’s cargo hold instead.

Selling

Every company good sells at the Imperial Market (both the screen and /market sell), on its own price curve. The Empire never sells company goods back. A Pack sells as its contents. Company goods also trade on the Flea Market under the Company Goods category.

The company shop

From Associate, each office has a shop:

The season wipe

The season wipe resets standing, ranks, contracts and machines. Titles and cosmetics stay.