AIC Industry: Facilities & Base Building

You cannot automate everything on day one, and trying to is how bases end up half-built and fragile. Build automation in this order:

1. Amethyst Parts production — Ore to Fiber to Parts via Shredding/Fitting Units. This feeds both your Thermal Bank construction and your early battery chain, so it pays off twice.
2. LC Valley Battery line — the moment Packaging Units are available, per section 2's efficiency math. This is your first real power upgrade.
3. Depot Node upgrades — raise storage caps before you scale production further; a full depot silently halts belts and is the most common false alarm in troubleshooting.
4. SC / HC Valley Battery lines — only after your LC line and backup bank are stable. Each tier adds its own power draw (LC/SC/HC battery crafting all consume grid power to run), so don't chain them all at once.
5. Reactor Crucible chemical lines (Xiranite, Cuprium, Hetonite solutions, etc.) — this is a Production II facility for crafting materials, not a power concern; automate it once your power base is stable, not before.

Do not automate Protocol Stashes as a storage shortcut — they draw power continuously with no off switch, and every one you place is a small permanent drain against your margin.

The failure pattern reported consistently by players: your battery production line (Shredding Units, Fitting Units, Packaging Units) is itself powered by the same grid it feeds. If total consumption creeps above generation even briefly, the battery line is one of the things that stalls — which means no new batteries reach your Thermal Banks — which means the banks run dry — which means the facilities that were keeping the battery line running lose power too. The whole base goes dark in a chain reaction, and because everything died at once, there's no obvious single cause to point at when you come back to check on it.

Three rules that prevent it:

1. Keep one Thermal Bank completely outside the loop. Feed it from a dedicated Originium Ore miner that isn't connected to anything else. If your battery pipeline ever collapses, this bank still runs on raw ore and gives you enough power to manually restart the rest by hand instead of rebuilding from zero.
2. Never let your battery-crafting chain's own power draw eat your safety margin. Before adding a new Shredding/Fitting/Packaging Unit, check that your current surplus (generation minus consumption) can absorb it. If margin goes to zero, you're one hiccup away from a cascade.
3. Never dump the output of a single battery-packaging line into just one Thermal Bank. Each bank only pulls one battery every 40 seconds — if your line produces faster than that, output backs up the belt and stalls the whole production chain behind it. Use a Splitter to round-robin batteries across several banks.

If you already blacked out, recovery checklist (community-reported staged approach):

1. Remove — don't just disable — any Protocol Stashes; they draw power continuously and switching them off does not stop the drain.
2. Get one Thermal Bank running on raw ore first; it ramps slowly but won't spike consumption further.
3. Once power is climbing, reactivate mining facilities gradually rather than all at once.
4. Bring battery production back online in stages (LC before SC before HC) so each tier's draw is absorbed before adding the next.