I see people ask in-game all the time. What’s needed? What’s lacking? Well one of the answers I keep seeing is batteries, so I decided to look and see what it would take to produce some batteries. I also though it’s a good example of exactly what Repop crafting is like.
Typically we start by opening the in-game database and doing a search for the thing we’re looking to create. In this case there are actually quite a few items. The batteries themselves. The battery cells, as we’ll see, are subcomponents. I believe the packs are an assembly higher up than batteries, I’m not really sure.
By clicking on something we can see some basic information, and the recipe and discipline used to produce it. In this case it’s the Battery Production recipe within the Robotics skill.
If we click on battery production, we can see a variety of things. The top bit is basic info, the skill again, the recipe book it’s found in, as well as the skill level required for different tiers. Even the simple battery recipes require a minimum of 150 skill, which I don’t think I have at the moment.
The section under that shows us the components used in the recipe, and in which quantity. Not shown here is that the agents are used per step, so since the first section tells us it’s three steps, to get the best result we’ll need three wires and three bonding agents total. In addition to that we’ll need a battery cell, an electrode plate, and an acid.
The last section tells us which items can be produced with this recipe and which ingredients must be used to get it. In order to get a Lithium battery we need to use a lithium battery cell. The specific electrode plate and acid appear not to matter. I’m not going to show pictures of every single subcomponent, but electrode plates and wires are from metalworking and most acids and bonding agents come from breaking down various plants and fish. The breaking down required to get the acids are typically a single recipe using heat and/or water. The metalworking recipes typically require you to refine the metal first, which uses the mining skill.
If we click through the lithium entry on filter 1 we can get to the summary for the lithium battery cell itself, which is made using the chemistry skill recipe “mineral reduction.”
Here are the skill levels and ingredients required for the mineral reduction. The chemical salt agent is actually pretty simple, as it’s breaking down any aquatic plant.
Here we can see that the lithium battery cell is a normal tier recipe, which requires 175 minimum skill. It also requires three very specific items in each slot in order to work. The 1-3 are in top to bottom order in the ingredient list, so greenockite is the mineral, potassium bioxalate is the base, and manganese acetate is the desiccant.
We can click through on any of these subcomponents to see their origin. The greenockite, for example, is mined from Niurevium deposits. If we clicked on that it would show us the various zones that these deposits can be found in, which takes some of the guesswork out of locating them.
I actually have some potassium bioxalate, it’s a simple plant breakdown from the Hok plant. It can also be obtained from breaking down Sangicumm wood, which is a better choice for me because my logging skill is significantly higher than my foraging.
The manganese acetate is somewhat more complicated, as it’s a seperate chemistry recipe with it’s own subcomponents, manganese oxide and acetic acid. The acetic acid is the result of breaking down Cree’it wood, which isn’t that hard to get, but the manganese oxide is from pyrolusite, which is much harder to obtain for me. It only has a limited set of spawns in my region and I haven’t yet gone in search of it.
Each one of these recipes has it’s own recipe level, which combined with the overall skill level, the quality of components, and a little rng, determine the quality of the final result. In order to make these batteries in the C0+ range that most people want I’ll have to use base components in the D8+ range with 200-300 main skill and preferably 100-200 recipe level as well.
Suffice to say, it’s absurdly detailed and not for everyone. It’s not exactly relevant to batteries, but with weapon and armor fittings the specific agents used can impart stats on the ingots which are passed on to the final piece, resulting in an entirely new layer of things to pay attention to.
I like it, but it’s designed to encourage specialization and cooperation between players. It’s theoretically possible to do it all yourself, but the time and effort required would be absurd. There are 24 main trade skills alone, each one having two dozen or more recipes requiring cross-discipline subcomponents.
I’m primarily in the collection and basic refinement business at the moment, as it’s the basis upon which everything else is built. There’s always some level of demand for good quality primary and secondary components.
Y’all take care, and try not to engage in absurd time consuming crafting systems.
Unidentified Signal Source 