The commander’s guide

Factories and tech tiers

Queue ground, air and naval units, keep launch lanes clear, and upgrade your factories and engineers through three tech tiers.

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Factories: ground, air and sea

There are three kinds of factory, and each builds only its own kind of unit, up to its own tier: a tier-one naval yard builds tier-one ships, however far your ground factory has come.

The three factories
Factory	Builds	Stands on	Units leave
Factory	engineers, tanks, batteries	open, level ground	rolling out through its door
Air factory	aircraft	open, level ground	lifting off its deck
Naval yard	ships	open water off the bank	sailing out along its launch lane

Ordering. Select a factory: its UNITS tab lists what it can build, with a T1 · T2 · T3 switch. Click a card to queue it, Shift-click for five, right-click a card to remove one, and R repeats every finished unit.
Rally points follow the factory. Y or a right-click sets one: on land for a ground factory, on open water for a naval yard, anywhere for an air factory. Aircraft attack-move to it as they launch, or go sixty metres ahead of the factory without one, and land there once they have been idle for ten seconds.
Doors. Tanks roll out through a ground factory’s door, so you cannot build across one of your factories’ door lanes, and a new factory’s door may not face a building. Engineers that help a factory stand beside its door, never in it.
A factory keeps its doorway clear. If the lane is blocked, it asks the helpers and parked units in the way to step aside. After eight seconds, or at once if it has been walled in, the next unit is set down on open ground beside it instead. Ships and aircraft wait until their launch space is clear.

A waiting factory says why, on a plate under its health bar and in a sentence in its panel:

Why a factory waits
Plate	What it means
Clearing the door	Your units are being moved out of the doorway.
Door blocked	The next unit will be set down beside the door.
Door walled in	Something stands in the lane for good; units go beside the factory.
No room to roll out	There is no open ground beside it either: move units away.
Launch blocked	An air factory’s deck or a naval yard’s lane is crowded: move units away.

A Sunhearth ground factory with an Emberguard tank and an engineer outside its production bays — Ground factories produce your engineers and land army. Keep their doors and exit lanes clear. Open 4K view.

Tech tiers and upgrades

Nothing above tier one can be built until you upgrade a factory. A ground factory, an air factory and a naval yard all raise your tech.
For a ground factory, tier two costs 990 matter, 1,800 energy and 72 seconds; tier three 3,520 matter, 6,400 energy and 135 seconds. An air factory costs 1,080 / 1,980 / 80 s and 3,840 / 7,040 / 150 s, a naval yard 1,170 / 2,070 / 88 s and 4,160 / 7,360 / 165 s.
Select what you want to upgrade and press U: every selected building that can go up a tier starts. Other buildings pay the difference between the tiers.
A building keeps working at its old tier while it upgrades. A factory holds its queue until it is done.
An extractor or generator can go to tier three only once at least half of your finished ones of that kind are at tier two, and a factory of any kind only once at least half of your extractors are; the upgrade button says how many more you need. The water defence has one tier only.

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