Ore Warehouse

The Ore Warehouse sets how much ore a planet is allowed to hold. Every planet starts with room for 100,000 ore and no warehouse at all. Each level raises that ceiling, and when the ceiling is reached the Ore Mine stops.

You build and upgrade it on the Buildings page. It has no building or tech requirements, so it is available from your first day.

What it does

One thing: it raises the ore cap on the planet it is built on. It does not speed anything up, it produces nothing, it uses no energy, and it does not protect a single unit of ore from being taken.

The cap is per planet and per resource. The Crystal Warehouse and Hydrogen Storage do the same job for the other two resources, and each one has its own level. Raising your Ore Warehouse does nothing for crystal.

It is the cheapest of the three. All three start at 2,000 ore, but the Ore Warehouse asks for no crystal at all, the Crystal Warehouse asks for 1,000 and Hydrogen Storage asks for 2,000. An Ore Warehouse level never costs you anything but ore, which is also the resource you have the most of.

Ore fills up first

At the same level an Ore Mine out-produces a Crystal Mine by half again, and a Hydrogen Synthesizer by two and a half times. The numbers behind that are 30, 20 and 12, and they are the same ratios the Trade Merchant uses to price the three resources against each other.

So if you keep all three tanks at the same level, ore hits the ceiling first every time, and it gets there while the other two still have room to spare. Most players end up running the Ore Warehouse a level or two ahead of the other two for exactly that reason.

When the warehouse fills up

The Ore Mine stops. Not slows down, stops. A planet with no Ore Mine at all still trickles 40 ore an hour, and even that trickle stops once you are at the cap.

The Production panel on the Buildings page carries on showing the mine's hourly rate while this is happening. That figure is what the mine would make, not what is landing in the pile. Nothing goes in until you are back under the cap.

Two places in the game tell you. The ore figure in the top right turns red once you are at or over the cap, and the Storage panel on the Buildings page picks up a "Capacity Exceeded" warning.

You can end up well over the cap, not just at it. Plunder you bring home, mission rewards and incoming transports all ignore it, and nothing is lost when they push you past it. The mine just sits idle until you are back under.

Three ways to get moving again: spend the ore, move it off the planet with a transport or a resource save, or buy another warehouse level.

Costs and capacities

The cost doubles every level and it is ore only:

Ore = 2,000 × 2^{Level - 1}

Capacity grows by a factor of 1.6 a level, rounded up:

Capacity = 50,000 × (round up(1.6^Level) + 1)

Which is the same as counting up from the 100,000 a bare planet already has:

Capacity = 100,000 + 50,000 × (round up(1.6^Level) - 1)

Table

Level	Ore cost	Capacity	Gain
0	-	100,000	-
1	2,000	150,000	+50,000
2	4,000	200,000	+50,000
3	8,000	300,000	+100,000
4	16,000	400,000	+100,000
5	32,000	600,000	+200,000
6	64,000	900,000	+300,000
7	128,000	1,400,000	+500,000
8	256,000	2,200,000	+800,000
9	512,000	3,500,000	+1,300,000
10	1,024,000	5,550,000	+2,050,000
11	2,048,000	8,850,000	+3,300,000
12	4,096,000	14,150,000	+5,300,000
13	8,192,000	22,600,000	+8,450,000
14	16,384,000	36,100,000	+13,500,000
15	32,768,000	57,700,000	+21,600,000
16	65,536,000	92,300,000	+34,600,000
17	131,072,000	147,650,000	+55,350,000
18	262,144,000	236,200,000	+88,550,000
19	524,288,000	377,850,000	+141,650,000
20	1,048,576,000	604,550,000	+226,700,000

There is no level cap. The formulas keep going as far as you want to take them. In practice the fields on the planet run out long before the maths does.

Where it stops paying

Cost doubles every level, which is 100% more each time, while capacity only grows about 60% a level. Those two curves cross, but because ore room is the cheapest kind they cross later here than they do for the other two tanks:

Up to level 13, an upgrade costs less ore than the extra room it buys. Level 13 is 8,192,000 for 8,450,000 more room.
From level 14 on it costs more. Level 14 is 16,384,000 for 13,500,000 more room.
By level 18 one upgrade costs more than the whole warehouse can hold. That is 262,144,000 spent for a 236,200,000 ceiling.

Hydrogen Storage crosses that first line at level 11 and the Crystal Warehouse at 12, so the Ore Warehouse stays worth building for three levels longer than the hydrogen tank does. That is not an argument for stopping at 13 either. Late game you will happily pay over the odds to hold a fleet's worth of ore in one place. It is an argument for building the level when you need it and not before.

Building it

Each level takes one field, the same as every other building, so a level 12 warehouse is 12 fields that are not growing anything.

Build time depends on the planet:

Hours = Ore ÷ (5,000 × (Capitol level + 1) × 2^{Foundry level})

A planet only builds one thing at a time, so a long warehouse upgrade blocks every other building and mine on that planet until it finishes. You can cancel a running upgrade and get the whole cost back, or pay credits to finish it early. Anything with under five minutes left finishes for free.

Tearing a level back down costs a third of what that level cost to build and takes a third of the time, and you pay that, there is no refund. What you get back is the field.

The More Info button on the warehouse gives you the next few levels and what they cost, plus the teardown price for the level you are on.

The Trade Merchant limit

The warehouse also caps what the Trade Merchant will hand you. The most ore a single trade can give you is your ore capacity. Ore already on the planet does not count against it. With a level 7 warehouse holding 1,400,000, the biggest trade you can make for ore is 1,400,000, whether you have 400,000 ore on hand or a full warehouse. Ask for more and the merchant caps the deal at that amount.

Going the other way there is no limit at all. You can trade away every unit of ore on the planet whatever your warehouse level is. Trading is capped on the receiving side only.

A full warehouse does not block a trade. The ore is added on top of what is there, even past the cap.

Ore is the cheapest resource at the merchant, so it is the one you are usually trading away rather than trading for. The rates are fixed and there is no spread: one crystal costs 1.5 ore and one hydrogen costs 2.5 ore, both ways. Every trade also costs 5,000 credits whatever the size, so small trades are mostly fee.

Storage is not protection

Everything sitting on a planet is a target. An attack that wins takes up to 50% of the ore, crystal and hydrogen on the planet, 55% if the two of you are at war, limited by the cargo space the attacker brought with them. A bigger warehouse means a bigger pile to take. On its own it makes you a better target, not a safer one.

The building that hides resources is the Resource Den. It shields a fixed amount spread across all three resources and what it shields cannot be plundered. The two buildings do different jobs and you want both.

Resources in flight are not on the planet, so anything sitting in a fleet's cargo on a resource save or a harvest cannot be plundered either. That is still the cheapest storage in the game if you are only trying to survive the night.

Moons and platforms

You cannot build an Ore Warehouse on a moon. Moons only take the Lunar Base, Capitol, Oracle, Warp Gate and Lunar Dock, so every moon is stuck at the base 100,000 ore cap forever. That destroys nothing. Ship a million ore to a moon and it sits there quite happily, because moons have no mines and nothing is trying to top the pile up. It does mean one Trade Merchant trade on a moon gives you at most 100,000 ore.

A deployed Hephaestus platform has no Buildings page at all. It carries a flat 1,000,000,000 of each resource instead.