Unblocking a Production Queue

More about Production

Playing Stars!

If one of your planets has run out of minerals while producing an item in the production queue , the item name turns red. This means it'll never be completed unless you do something about it. You have two choices: transport minerals from other planets or use mineral alchemy (or use a combination of the two). 

Transporting Minerals

To transport minerals, set up freighter waypoints to transport minerals from your remote miners or mineral-rich planets to your planet with the blocked production queue. If you have a mass driver on the needy planet and the mineral-rich planet, you can also fling mineral packets between planets without using ships.

Mineral Alchemy

Mineral alchemy transmutes resources into minerals (sort of your own Philosopher's Stone). If you can't complete an item in the queue because you've run out of one or more minerals, place mineral alchemy in the queue ahead of the item you're trying to build. Each unit of mineral alchemy will turn a mere 100 of your resources (25, if you have the Mineral Alchemy lesser trait) in 1 kT of each of the three minerals. This is a good strategy for unblocking queues on a planet where you have a large population and can quickly replace the resources used by alchemy .

Add as many mineral alchemy units as you need to finish the item stuck in the queue. Like other items in a queue, the color of each Mineral Alchemy task will tell you how long it takes for the process to complete. If you have a large number of resources dedicated to production, you can create a large amount of minerals fairly quickly.

Mineral alchemy is one of the items available for auto-building. Consider adding it to your default or a custom production template, if it isn't already there. If auto-alchemy is placed in front of an item, it will be used only if you have a mineral shortage. If it is the only item in the queue, it will create resources until you remove it or place another item immediately following.