Automation buys distance, not cleaning

// Dispatch 02 · automated tier

The first robot fixes distance, not coverage

The first automated unit in a base is not a cleaning upgrade in the sense the brush ladder is. It does not scrub faster; it walks. The robot vacuum mark one cleans the nineteen world hexes around the dock, two rings out from the pad, carries the dust home, and the dock packs that dust into capsules on a belt. That is the entire job. Buying it is not buying speed at the working face. It is buying back the twenty or thirty seconds that used to sit between every fill and every sale.

Priced from the same terminal, the mark one lands near three hundred and twenty-five units once power is counted: seventy-five for a solar fixture and roughly two hundred and fifty for the vacuum itself. Against a hand brush that costs ten, that reads as absurd; against a five-hour session where the depot walk repeats a hundred times, it reads as the cheapest item on the board.

The reason to buy it early is not the money it earns. It is that it keeps earning while the player is somewhere else. A unit working a ring around a fixed dock is the first thing in the game that produces without being watched, and nothing earlier in the upgrade list has that property.

The second tier is where coverage doubles

The mark two cleans thirty-seven hexes instead of nineteen, at five hundred units. That is not a small step. It nearly doubles the ring the unit can service, which turns the dock from a hub fed by hand into a hub visited between loads. Nineteen to thirty-seven is the point where an automated base stops needing supervision.

The trap is buying the second tier before the first one has paid for its own power. A panel that cannot reach the unit is a five-hundred-unit decoration. Power coverage is sixteen metres from the panel, and that number, not the vacuum radius, decides where the dock can sit.

Power is the prerequisite nobody prices in

A solar fixture at seventy-five units powers machines within sixteen metres wirelessly and carries no battery of its own. The missing battery matters more than it looks. Machines here run on internal cells, and those cells drain. In daylight the panels cover the draw. Before sunrise, or after it, the same machines live on stored charge, and a base that expands in the dark discovers this the hard way: new panels are placed, the sun is not yet up, and the reserve is already spent.

The practical rule is that every automated unit needs two numbers checked rather than one. The first is whether the panel reaches it. The second is whether the panel produces at the hour the unit is expected to work. A base that expands at night is a base that stalls at night.

The production chain is priced per metre

Between the dock and the sale there is a chain, and every link has a price and a question mark. Conveyor belts cost fifty cents a metre, which sounds like nothing until a route crosses a crater rim and comes back. The packager costs a hundred units and, in the build played here, never states what it does; it gets bought anyway on the guess that it is a silo with a lid. A pressure chamber presses moon dust into moon sand at five kilos every twelve seconds, and the pressed material is worth roughly three times the raw dust, but the chamber needs solar panels of its own.

That combination is the real economy of automation. The robot moves dust. The conveyor moves it further. The chamber changes what it is. Each step multiplies the value of the previous one, and each step adds a fixed cost that has to be paid before the multiplication begins. A chamber built before the belt produces value that cannot be moved. A belt built before the robot is a route with nothing on it.

Height is the other half of routing. Conveyors are cheap enough to run overhead, and running them overhead is what lets a base keep expanding when the ground floor is already full of machines. The cost per metre is trivial; the cost of tearing out a floor-level route later is not.

The vehicle ladder is where the run changes scale

Vehicles start at three hundred units, and the ladder above that is steep: a five-hundred-kilo sweeper with a two-metre sweep, then a lunar sweeper at two point eight metres, then a rung that measures three point seven. Every step is roughly fifty percent wider than the one below it, and width on a vehicle compounds exactly the way width on a hand brush does. The difference is that a vehicle carries its own hopper, so the fill-and-walk cycle collapses twice at once: fewer passes, fewer trips.

The run recorded here waits for the ride-on unit instead of buying another hand tool, and the reasoning holds. Below a certain width a vehicle is just a faster way to do the same small job. Above it, the vehicle is a different job: it crosses ground a hand tool would take an hour to reach, and the hopper means the crossing is not wasted. A hundred-kilo hopper on the rover tier is the number that makes long routes worth running at all.

What automation does not do

It does not remove the player. A robot cleans a ring around a fixed dock, and the moon is larger than any ring. Every automated unit is a claim on a small piece of ground; the rest of the ground still needs a brush or a vehicle. Automation multiplies the area already under control. It does not control it.

That is the honest reading of the terminal. The purchases that look like automation are mostly logistics: they shorten the distance between what was cleaned and what was sold. The purchases that change the work are the ones that widen the tool, and those stay in the hand-tool tab for most of the run.

Basis for this page

Every figure above is taken from recorded play, not from a store description. The claims are listed with the wording they were drawn from so they can be checked against the transcript held with this manual.

• The mark one services nineteen hexes around the dock and feeds capsules onto a belt.
  Original spoken wording

  complicated. Robot vacuum. The robot cleans the 19 world hex's around the dock, two rings, and brings the dust home. The dock packs it into capsules on a belt.

• The mark two covers thirty-seven hexes for five hundred units.
  Original spoken wording

  robot vacuum more expensive. It cleans 37 hex's around it.

• A solar fixture powers machines within sixteen metres and holds no battery.
  Original spoken wording

  Uh, full sun fix, no battery, powers machines within 16 meters wirelessly.

• Conveyor belts cost fifty cents a metre.
  Original spoken wording

  Conveyor belts are 50 cents a meter.

• A pressure chamber presses dust into sand at five kilos every twelve seconds.
  Original spoken wording

  Presses moon dust into moon sand up to 5 kilos every 12 seconds. Send cells so

• Pressed material sells at roughly three times raw dust.
  Original spoken wording

  three times dust. Needs solar panels.

• The packager never states its own function.
  Original spoken wording

  I don't know what a packager does.

• Vehicle sweep width climbs from two metres to two point eight to three point seven.
  Original spoken wording

  So, this will get a 500 kilo sweeper, 2 meter sweep. So, it's 50% wider again and hopefully fast. The lunar sweeper is 2.8 m. So, that's nearly 50% bigger again. That's 3.7.