In orbit.industries, players can experience two separate game modes: external 3D space building view called the ESV and internal view focused on the production setup and maintenance called the ASL. Our today’s blog post is about the latter so-called ASL view (Abstract System Layer) - it’s basically your orbital space stations’ “interior design circuit board". If you want to learn more about the External Station View (ESV), check out our last post: Exterior Station View (ESV).
The first important note is that the interiors of your space station aren’t realistically visualized - instead, they are presented in a symbolic, more engineered way to simplify the flow of resources over hundreds of production lines and modules.
ASL's initial concept was to give it a blueprint-like look as if players were to make 2D plans of their production lines. The final ASL mixes 2D and 3D graphics; the camera can be navigated almost free if you keep above the grid plane.
Players can manually switch between ESV and ASL views at basically any time. All resource-producing modules in the ESV have their counterpart in the ASL under the guise of systems.
Systems look very much like computer chips and may be placed freely on the circuit grid. Each system has up to 4 input possibilities, either no or 1 output port and they start being fully operational as soon as they are fully connected by Players who draw or drag wires between the corresponding ports. Wires and their corresponding ports have different colors depending on the resource that is produced and transported. Electricity, for example, is represented with the color yellow, all systems from the Defense category are represented with the color red, systems from the category Research are represented with the color green, and so on. A given system’s output may range from 0 to 100%, depending on its input values. If there aren’t enough resources to feed the cycle, efficiencies may drop below 100%.
The ultimate Player challenge is to, essentially, form production cycles that operate as efficiently as possible, operating at its peak capacity. You are free to place everything as neatly as possible, drawing clean and beautiful wire arrangements. Still, you are also free to focus on efficiency only, making placement and cleanliness less of a priority. Your station will function any way but it may be tricky to oversee everything the bigger the station gets over time.
As per the usual principle of life, it can’t always be sunshine and rainbows - and progress slowing errors may occur on your station. There are 4 different error types, each of them based on specific risk values and probabilities and all of them may negatively impact the output of individual systems and, further down the line, also the overall efficiency of a given production cycle. Furthermore, some errors may spread along their connective wires to other methods and systems! Keep this fact in mind when planning out your circuits, especially cross-disciplinary ones.
In our next blog post, we will cover the last central pillar of the game – the economy and the procurement systems. We’ll go into detail on how to earn money for your station, how to unlock new technologies, and how the ESV/ASL views are interconnected with the economy of orbit.industries.
