GHOSTau's Station Planner Designer and Optimiser

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This mod is, and always will be, 100% free. However, reverse-engineering and building against an existing game takes hundreds of hours of unpaid late-night coding, testing, and debugging.

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GHOSTau's Station Planner & Optimiser

A production-chain planner that sits inside the station build menu. You tell it what you want a station to produce; it works out the intermediate wares, the modules, the workforce and housing to run them, the storage, and the build cost. The result is a list inside the build menu, and each row places its module when you click it.

There is a second mode for stations you already own: it reads the design on the holomap, reports what is short and what is surplus, and converts each shortfall into modules to build.

What it does

• [] Plans a chain from your end products. Pick what the station should make and how many modules of each. The planner walks the dependency graph backwards and lists the intermediates as well as the end products.[/]

  []Offers wares you have blueprints for. The ware list is built from the blueprints you own and the modules they unlock, so it does not suggest a chain you cannot construct.[/]

  []Lets you choose make or buy, ware by ware. Supply sets the default for the whole station: build the chain, buy everything, or let the sector's sunlight decide which. Then override any single ware in the list underneath, in either direction, without touching the rest.[/]

  []Places modules from the results list. Each outstanding row is a button. Clicking it attaches the module to your cursor, the same as clicking its tile in the module browser. The counts fall as you place them.[/]

  []Audits an existing station. Optimise mode reports input shortfalls in wares per hour, surpluses, workforce coverage and whether the station has a dock, then turns each shortfall into modules. Those rows are clickable too.[/]

  []Accounts for workforce and its food. Staffed production raises output, but only if the workers are housed and fed. The planner books the habitats and the food chain, shows the worker count, and lists the habitat options that would cover it, grouped by how many modules each takes.[/]

  []Builds the design for you. Press Build This Design and the planner puts the whole bill on the station as a build task, connectors and all, and every module it places is connected to the station. Nothing is built and nothing is paid until you assign a builder, and you can still move or remove modules first. A large station takes five to fifteen minutes and the game keeps running while it works, so you can close the menu and carry on playing.[/]

  []Tells you what it could not fit. A few modules usually will not fit, which is normal on a large design. They are listed at the top of the panel with counts, attachments first, so the missing pier is the first thing you see rather than the last.[/]

  []Tidies up what you placed by hand. "Tidy Up Placed Modules" runs the game's own layout routine over modules already on the map. That routine declines fairly often, so the button retries before giving up, and tells you plainly when it has run out of room rather than looking like a button that does nothing. It is not the auto-designer: it rearranges what is there and deletes hand-placed connectors, so it asks twice.[/]

  []Filters by race. Restrict the whole design to one race's modules, or leave it open. It applies to production, storage, housing, docks and connectors alike. Where your race has no module you own for a job, another race's module can fill it, or the job is listed as a missing blueprint.[/]

  []Shows the conversion. Set a ware to three modules and its tooltip reads "3 modules x 1176/h = 3528/h", so the module-count-to-output conversion is checkable. The settings that are not self-explanatory carry an explanation on their own tooltips.[/]

  Getting to it

  The planner draws in the station build menu, on the left, in the space the module browser uses. It