Buildings

The construction menu, with Farm selected

Buildings are essential to getting your city up and running.

Every building can be built using either logs, lumber, stones, metal, magmium, vulcium or adamantine. The choosen construction material will determine the health and armor of the building, so in most cases this does not matter for non-military buildings.

Before constructing a building, you are able to see what materials are required to construct it, as well as which commodity said building can produce. You may also choose which commodity the building should start producing, or if it should actually produce anything at all. Note that factories and other resource-gathering buildings set to do nothing are useless, and as such they should always be producing something.

Construction Rules

Buildings construction is governed by different build rules, depending on the role of the building. The building codes window shows the build rule for every building. The building codes window is accessed from the Construction (F11) window and from the ``Help`` menu while in the designer.

Civilian	Cannot be built on worlds claimed by an alien empire. Cannot be built in the police jurisdiction of an alien city.
Military Headquarters	Can only be built on worlds claimed by your empire.
Military	Can only be built on worlds with empire military headquarters.
Capitol	Cannot be built on worlds claimed by an alien empire. Cannot be built in the police jurisdiction of an existing city.
Police	Can be built in the police jurisdiction of an empire city. Can be built where an empire capitol building is in its jurisdiction.
City	Can only be built in the police jurisdiction of an empire city.

The term alien denotes any city that belongs to an empire that is not yours.

Inventory and Power Reserve

Each building maintains an inventory of all commodities stored within its storage. The size of the inventory depends upon the building blueprint of the building. The Building tab of the City (F10) window contains information about the amount of storage in a particular building. The inventory size limit is applied to each commodity individually. A building with an inventory size of 100 can store up to 100 units of each commodity: 100 vegetables, 100 beans, and 100 mechanical parts for example.

A building's inventory may contain a mixture of qualities of the same commodity. The combined total may not exceed the inventory size. A building with an inventory size of 100 might have 30 beans of quality 200 and 45 beans of quality 125, leaving room for 25 more beans, but the total amount of beans in stock will not exceed 100. Better quality commodities will replace lower quality commodities when most of the storage is filled.

Construction and manufacturing processes fetch materials from the building's inventory or any connected building's inventory as needed. The resulting quality of construction and manufacturing is the average quality of the components used to make the building or product. To produce the best products and buildings, a building supplies the best quality commodities from its inventory before the poorer quality commodities.

A building's capacitor is treated much like the buildings's storage. Electricity is stored in the power reserve when it is produced, not in the city's inventory. Electricity is always quality 255. Buildings and roads use varying amounts of electricity depending upon the size of buildings, manufacturing processes, life support, and electric lighting. Spacecraft may purchase electricity from the building's capacitor to recharge their capacitors and buildings will purchase electricity from spacecraft.

Ringworlds provide power as part of the ring hull infrastructure. Ringworld power is adequate to supply manufacturing processes and lighting. military bases require a great deal of power to be readily available in city capacitors. For this reason, power plants should be built in ringworld cities that have miliary bases.

Building Destruction

Buildings can be damaged and destroyed. Military buildings have 10x the armor factors of civilian buildings made of the same building material. Hit points are based on primary construction material and the amount of that material used to construct the building. Other ancillary materials do not contribute to hit points. Spot a building to see its health, or use the top-down view's Buildings overlay to see the health of all damaged buildings.

Citizen population works to repair buildings when the city is no longer under attack. That is about 15 minutes after the last building was damaged or citizen was injured. Building repairs cost some of the building's primary construction materials to repair, citizens will fetch them automatically when repairing.

Citizens do perform construction and manufacturing jobs at damaged buildings. Buildings operate at their full potential until destroyed.

There is no way for a player to repair a damaged building. Damage is only repaired by citizens.

Buildings that are destroyed will disappear completely. An avatar will have to replace the destroyed building manually.

Fire

Buildings can catch fire when attacked. Probability of catching fire is based on the construction material, weapon effect, and damage inflicted in the hit. Heat/fire and electric weapon effects have a higher probability of lighting a fire. Hits have a higher probability of causing a fire as the amount of damage increases.

Once lit, a building will burn itself to the ground unless the fire is extinguished. All available Fire Stations attempt to extinguish fires. Every Fire Station level is counted. Up to 4 levels of Fire Station will be committed to fight each active fire. One citizen is needed to operate each Fire Station level to fight fires. This does not take people away from other jobs; it just limits the available Fire Station levels to the current population of the city.

Fire fighters fight fires even when the city is under attack.

Buildings continue to manufacture things and perform construction when burning.

Repairs are not performed on burning buildings. The fire must be extinguished first.

There is no way for a player to put out a burning building. Fires are only fought by citizens using Fire Stations.

List of Buildings

For a full list of all buildings. See the Category:Buildings page.