I’ve had my PI opperation running for a while now, and I’ve noticed something as of late.
When I go to restart my extraction phases, I see that the amount of materials I will be extracting is close to 600k units, but when I start the extraction, this value drops down to nearer 150k (or even less in some instances). This doesn’t happen on all of my planets though, my Gas planet does experience a drop in values but not to the degree of the others. What is causing this? Why wouldn’t the game just tell me how much im going to be extracting, without reducing the value immediately after starting the extraction?
When you setup your program it shows you average per hour across the program. The extractor window will show you current cycle (30 minutes) - generally the first cycle will be considerably larger than the average. Yield will drop over the life of the program.
Bear in mind that these are estimates. You may not be the only player harvesting the resource.
My question is now: why wouldn’t it show the estimated figures factoring in the degredation of cycle yields, before you hit ‘run program’? That would get rid of a lot of confusion if im honest.
In this case the estimate improved a bit when I started the program:
The initial cycle is a bit more than twice the average. It’s also a 1 hour cycle - not 30 minutes - it’s the basic industry facility that has the 30 minute cycle.
As mentioned by @you_are_evil , the planetology and advanced planetology will impact the accuracy of the estimate.
In fairness, I’ve never checked at the end of the program to see how closely the actual matched the estimate - normally I set my programs for 3 days and collect the output every 2-3 weeks. I’m getting a reasonable return on time invested.
