Stations and Production

Stations hold facilities, facilities run recipes, and generators power them: the production chain from ore to finished goods.

Stations

A station sits at a body and moves with it. Its type is the blueprint it was built from.
A constructor builds any station where it is, paid from its hold. The hull builds the basic stations. A surface station, such as a surface base, is built only by a landed lander.
A station has a hold, generator slots and facility slots. Its blueprint's allowed_facilities lists what it can hold; every station allows generators.
A station's fuel sits in its hold.
POST /v1/fleet/stations/{id}/docks opens or closes a station's dock to its owner's allies, who may then refuel and repair there from its hold (docks.opened).
GET /v1/fleet/stations, GET /v1/fleet/stations/{id} and GET /v1/fleet/stations/{id}/facilities show the owner's stations.
Orders to a station or its facilities travel the Infonet to the station, as orders to ships do. A station beyond every relay its side can use receives nothing, and runs only the schedule it already has. See Orders and Latency.

POST /v1/fleet/stations/{id}/build builds a facility inside the station, one at a time. Its other facilities keep running.
POST /v1/fleet/ships/{id}/build builds with the hull or a constructor: stations, the basic ships, and gates.
POST /v1/fleet/stations/{id}/facilities/{facility_id}/build builds a ship at a shipyard, one at a time per shipyard. A fitting is built at the facility its blueprint names, into the station's hold.
The cost leaves the builder's hold when the build starts. What is built appears at the builder's body, made of that cost (build.started, entity.built).
A builder builds only up to its max_build_size (too_large). GET /v1/sizes orders the sizes.
A constructor builds a gate in its current system pointing at a charted system within the gate's range. Two gates pointing at each other form a pair, and any two gates within reach can link by exchanging codes. See Standard Gate.
POST /v1/gates/{id}/link, with the other gate's code, links two gates once both owners have entered each other's (gate.linked). POST /v1/gates/{id}/unlink cuts it. POST /v1/gates/{id}/open sets who may jump from a gate (gate.opened). GET /v1/gates lists the owner's gates with their codes.

A new station has no power, so its first facility is a generator.
A new facility needs spare power: the station's draw plus the new facility's must not exceed its output.
Each tick, generators switch on in priority order until they cover the draw of facilities running work, plus always-on facilities. Idle facilities draw nothing.
Each running generator burns fuel from the station's hold once a minute. The fuel becomes exhaust.
Work without power waits and loses nothing: job.paused (no_fuel), then job.resumed.
Always-on facilities (firewalls, monitors, data warehouses, key vaults, spoofers, defences and sensor arrays) draw power every tick and work only while powered. Uplinks and repeaters need no power.
POST /v1/fleet/stations/{id}/facilities/{facility_id}/priority sets a facility's priority, lowest first. It orders both which generators run and which work gets power (priority.set).

GET /v1/recipes lists the recipes. The codex shows each one and the crafting tree joining them.
POST /v1/fleet/stations/{id}/facilities/{facility_id}/produce runs a recipe made for that facility's type.
Inputs leave the station's hold when a run starts. Outputs, byproducts included, arrive when it ends (recipe.started, recipe.completed).
Output that does not fit waits and retries each tick (recipe.blocked).
Matter is conserved: inputs and outputs weigh the same, and byproducts such as slag make up the difference.

.../cancel on a station or facility ends a build or production run. What it had taken becomes scrap of the same mass in the hold.
POST /v1/fleet/stations/{id}/facilities/{facility_id}/scrap removes an idle facility, freeing its slot and power. What it was made of becomes scrap in the hold.
A generator whose power the station still needs cannot be scrapped.

POST /v1/fleet/stations/{id}/transfer moves cargo or fuel from a station to the owner's ships at its body and stations in its system.
A ship loading from or unloading into a station needs a dock there and must be no larger than the station. The hull needs neither.
Ships and stations trade only at the same body (not_colocated), two stations included. Goods reach another body in a ship's hold.
Everything done at a dock or shipyard needs the ship at the station's body: transfers, trades, courier deliveries, payouts, repairs and fits.
Transfers work between any ships and stations in the same hands, companies included. See Companies.

A deep drill in a surface station drills while powered: POST /v1/fleet/stations/{id}/facilities/{facility_id}/drill.
It takes from deep deposits its owner found at the body first, then from the layer under the surface. See Exploration.