Building Planetary Structures

Build a structure in place

There are two ways to build a planetary structure. You can craft a packed copy in your cargo hold and deploy it where you want. That requires holding the full recipe in your cargo at craft time, plus room for the packed structure afterward. For most structures, that's more cargo than an early ship can carry. Or you can claim a build site directly on a planet and stack components into it over multiple trips until the structure forms in place.

Claim a build site

With a crafting-capable entity at the planet coordinates where you want to build, claim a plot for the structure you want. Claiming takes 60 seconds. Build sites can only be claimed at planet locations. Asteroid, nebula, and ice field locations won't accept one.

Pick the spot carefully. Planetary structures can't be picked up and moved once built. You can demolish them, but demolish destroys the structure outright; the components don't come back. Relocating means rebuilding from scratch.

Deposit the components

Once the claim resolves, send the recipe inputs to the plot the same way you send cargo anywhere else. A Warehouse T1 takes 20 Plates and 10 Frames. The plot only accepts items the recipe calls for, and caps each input at the required quantity, so you can't over-fill it.

Deposits are one-way. Once you transfer components into a plot, the only way they leave is by becoming the structure. There's no withdraw. The plot's cargo is the progress counter. There's no separate fill meter.

Finalize the build

With the plot full, finalize the build from your crafting entity. This schedules a construction task whose duration scales with the input mass. When the task resolves, the plot becomes the finished structure in place: same coordinates, same entity id, now a fully-formed Warehouse. The Warehouse's stats are the quantity-weighted average of the Plates and Frames you deposited, so better components produce a better Warehouse. See the Warehouse T1 reference for stat ranges.

The same flow produces any planetary structure, like a Factory or an Extractor. Recipes differ; the mechanic doesn't.

Plot vs. craft

The other path produces something tradeable. Crafting yields a packed cargo item that can be wrapped as an NFT and handed off before deployment. The in-place path skips that intermediate. Your structure lands ready to use but isn't tradeable as an object. Pick the in-place path if you're building it where you want it. Pick Craft if you need to deliver the structure to another player.