Arknights: Endfield Factory and Base Building Guide

Arknights: Endfield is really two games glued together. There's the action RPG half, where you dodge-roll around Talos-II hitting angels with a polearm. Then there's the Automated Industry Complex, or AIC, which is a small factory game living inside the RPG. Your factory mines ore, refines it, crafts gear materials and healing items, and keeps humming in the background while you're out fighting. A big chunk of your progression runs through it, including most of the stuff you need to promote operators and build equipment. A messy base means slow everything else, so it pays to set the thing up properly the first time around.

Laying Out Your First Production Lines

Everything starts at the PAC, the Protocol Automation-Core. It's the big core building at your main base, every machine and belt ultimately plugs back into it, and its storage (the Depot) is where all your finished goods pile up. When you're standing near it the game flips you into AIC mode automatically. Out in the wild you switch modes by hand.

A production line is just three connections. Run a transport belt from the PAC's output port into a machine's input port, then a second belt from the machine's output port back to the PAC's input port. When a link is valid the machine gets highlighted white, and from that moment items flow on their own. That's the entire loop. Every chain in the game, no matter how fancy, is that same loop repeated a few times.

Your first chains should be the boring ones. Originium Ore goes through a Refining Unit to become Origocrust. Amethyst Ore refines into Amethyst Fiber, and a Fitting Unit then turns Fiber into Amethyst Parts. Those two items are the bread and butter of early construction. A Thermal Bank, which you'll want soon, literally costs 10 Amethyst Parts and 10 Origocrust to build.

Early crafts are fast, and the pacing matters later. A Refining Unit pops out an Amethyst Fiber roughly every two seconds, and the Fitting Unit converts them to Parts at about the same 30-per-minute pace. Component chains are slower: 5 Origocrust plus 5 Amethyst Fiber becomes one Amethyst Component every 10 seconds, or around 6 a minute. Keep those speeds in your head, because matching them up is most of factory building.

Getting machines in the first place

Facilities come out of the Basic AIC Plan, a research tree you open from the top-right of the screen. Research costs Basic AIC Index points, which you collect in the field from Protocol Dataloggers. The map marks those with a paperclip-looking icon, and there's a tracking toggle right next to each research cost if you can't find one. Research itself finishes instantly, no timers, so the real bottleneck is just walking out and grabbing the points.

Each research node also pairs with a Simulation, a small tutorial sandbox. Clearing one hands you the actual facilities plus a system blueprint, and most simulations can be skipped for the rewards if you're impatient. Do the first several by hand though. The belt-placement muscle memory is worth more than the minutes you save.

Layout habits that save headaches later

• Keep belts short and straight. Every tile an item travels is time added to the chain.
• Give a Refining Unit one input belt and one output belt. The machine crafts at a fixed speed, so feeding it extra lanes just backs the line up.
• When a belt clogs, the problem is almost always upstream. Walk the line back toward the Depot until you find the stalled machine.
• Use top view, which unlocks during the story mission Paving the Way. You can see the whole layout, drag facilities, and bulk-stash a whole area at once.

You can move the PAC itself, too. Walk up to it, open Protocol Management, and hit Move. A PAC sitting in the middle of your machines means shorter belts in every direction, and that adds up fast.

One more thing: blueprints unlock alongside Paving the Way. A blueprint is a whole pre-built layout you can stamp down in one go, and you can import layouts other players share with a code (codes are case-sensitive). Borrowing a good layout and tweaking it is completely normal. Everyone does it.

Automating Resource Gathering With Drones

Quick reality check first, because the internet keeps calling Endfield's auto-gathering "drones." The only literal drones in the game are quest props, like the Antique Drone components you hunt down in Valley IV. Nothing robotic flies your ore home for you. The real automated gathering is done by mining rigs and planting units. Same set-it-and-forget-it fantasy, different hardware.

You start with a Portable Originium Rig, and it's kind of a trap. It mines while you're standing nearby and you collect by hand. That's fine for the tutorial, but it turns into dead weight the second something better exists. The Electric Mining Rig is that something better. Drop one directly on an ore node, feed it power, and it mines forever. No belts at the mine site, no pickup runs. A powered rig ships its ore straight to the regional Depot on its own, even from way out in the middle of nowhere. Your job stops being "collect rocks" and becomes "keep the grid fed."

Getting power out to the nodes

Rigs only run on electricity, and electricity only travels so far. Relay Towers chain outward from a PAC or Sub-PAC, one hop at a time, with each hop covering roughly 80 meters of straight-line distance. A tower won't plug into a rig directly, though. You cap the line with an Electric Pylon, which wirelessly feeds every powered facility in a small radius around it. One well-placed pylon usually covers several rigs, so think in terms of coverage instead of one tower per machine.

A good habit: carry a stack of Relay Towers while exploring. Ore nodes are scattered all over Valley IV, and every node you light up is passive income for the rest of the game. Areas with no factory of their own, like Aburrey Quarry, get their power from long relay runs off the nearest PAC.

What to mine early

• Originium Ore, found around the Hub. Fuel, batteries, basic materials. You will never stop needing this.
• Amethyst Ore, over at Origin Lodespring. Feeds the Amethyst chain that your gear parts come from.
• Ferrium Ore, spread across Valley IV. Used for late-game outpost production and Ferrium Components.

Plants get automated too. A Planting Unit paired with a Seed-Picking Unit runs a little farm for things like Buckflower and Sandleaf. Buckflower feeds med production (Buck Capsules), and Sandleaf is quietly one of the best early lines in the game: one leaf crafts into 3 Sandleaf Powder every 2 seconds. Plant a farm loop and never think about it again.

There's a compounding reason to rig every node you find, too. Placing a rig on a node for the first time bumps your Regional Development metrics, and higher Regional Development means purer nodes (more ore per pull), a bigger Protocol Capacity budget for buildings out on the map, and roomier Depot stacks. Gathering makes gathering better. Hard to beat that deal.

Assigning Operators to Factory Roles

Your operators fight, but most of them also hold day jobs. Aboard the OMV Dijiang, your home ship, there are four rooms you can staff: the Control Nexus, the Manufacturing Cabin, the Growth Chamber, and the Reception Room. Putting someone in a room is what activates their base skill.

Base skills are passives, totally separate from combat skills, and they grow as you promote the operator. A skill that unlocks at the first promotion gets a stronger version at a higher one. The numbers look small on paper, something like 20 to 30 percent, but stacked across a room full of workers they add up to a lot of extra output.

Who goes where

• Manufacturing Cabin: these skills boost EXP material output. Laevatain, Ember, and Wulfgard push operator EXP material efficiency up, while Gilberta, Pogranichnik, Chen Qianyu, and Arclight do the same for weapon EXP materials. If you're constantly short on level-up mats, this room is why.
• Mood keepers: some operators slow Mood Drop for their whole room by around 14 to 18 percent. Gilberta, Pogranichnik, and Laevatain all carry a version of this. Mood drains as people work, so slower drain just means longer shifts at full output.
• Control Nexus: Lifeng raises everyone's Mood Regen by about 12 to 16 percent, and Perlica has a slightly smaller version. One operator stationed here props up every other room at once.
• Growth Chamber: Yvonne speeds up fungal growth, Last Rite handles vitrified plants, and Chen Qianyu covers rare minerals. Good picks once you're farming growth materials.
• Reception Room: Ardelia and Last Rite speed up clue collecting, which feeds your contact and trust grinding.

Rarity doesn't matter much here. A 4-star sitting on your bench with a +20 percent Manufacturing skill beats a 6-star with nothing relevant, so staff the rooms with whoever's idle. Worth checking a base skill list before you promote someone purely for a factory role, since some of the best worker skills live on otherwise unremarkable operators.

Outposts and Liaisons

Operators also staff the outposts scattered around the map, as Liaisons. Each operator's liaison traits line up with an outpost's qualities, so matching the right person to the right post earns you noticeably more. Staffed outposts fill supply orders on their own while you're off doing something else, and they pay out Stock Bills plus Convention Certificates. Certificates trade for pulls and progression materials. A staffed outpost chain is basically a second, smaller factory that runs itself.

Balancing Power and Logistics Networks

Every region's power grid starts at 200 capacity, and every facility you place draws from it. Go over the limit and things start browning out, which is a genuinely bad time since a power dip can idle the very machines making your fuel. Thermal Banks are how you raise capacity. A bank is a 2x2 machine unlocked at the Power I node in the Basic II tier of the AIC Plan (that tier needs the Basic Expansion Core from the story mission Paving the Way). Research runs 1 Index point, and building one costs 10 Amethyst Parts plus 10 Origocrust.

A Thermal Bank burns fuel to raise your grid. What you feed it decides how much you get:

| Fuel | Burn time | Power per bank | | --- | --- | --- | | Originium Ore | 8s | 50 | | LC Valley Battery | 40s | 220 | | SC Valley Battery | 40s | 420 | | HC Valley Battery | 40s | 1100 |

Raw ore is the training-wheels fuel. Batteries are the real thing, because they convert the same ore into way more juice. Burning 20 Originium Ore directly across four banks holds about 200 power for 40 seconds. Run that ore through your battery lines instead and you're looking at 440 power over the same window from the same input. That gap is why your first big mid-game project should be a stable LC Valley Battery line.

Two bank layouts have shake out as the standards. The manifold lines up 2 to 4 banks along one fuel belt; it's compact, but the farthest bank fills slowly, so hand-fill the far ones once to kickstart it. The load-balanced setup splits fuel evenly to every bank so they all run at once. It's the most efficient shape, just slightly bigger.

Whatever you do, don't wire a battery production line straight into your Thermal Banks. If that line clogs, the banks starve, power dips, and now the machines building your batteries are down too. The whole thing snowballs. Make batteries into storage instead and feed the banks through a Depot Unloader. The buffer eats the hiccups.

Belts, buses, and everything in between

As the base grows, moving stuff around becomes its own game:

• Splitters spread one belt's load across branches. Use them to feed two machines at matched rates instead of guessing.
• Belt Bridges run belts over the top of other lines. Straight runs only, no turns mid-bridge.
• The Depot Bus hauls bulk goods between the Depot and the far side of your base.
• Belt-free transfer covers the field cases: a Protocol Stash out in the wilderness can dump its whole contents back to the Depot with no belts at all. One simulation has you move 1500 units of ore exactly this way.

Rate matching is the actual skill here. One LC Valley Battery line produces a battery every 10 seconds, and each battery eats 5 Amethyst Parts plus 10 Originium Powder in that window. If the parts trickle in slower than that, the battery line starves and your grid sags a few minutes later.

The PAC's Protocol Management screen is your dashboard. It shows actual output next to theoretical output for each line. Below theoretical means there's a bottleneck somewhere, so walk the chain and find the starving or clogged machine. Sitting at theoretical and still not enough? Then you need more machines, not better ones.

Scaling Your Base for Late-Game Output

Somewhere past Authority Level 18 the training wheels come off and the item list gets serious. Three Sub-PACs open up across Valley IV as you push the story: Valley Pass after Building an Outpost, Originium Science Park after Down the Hill, and Power Plateau after Mysterious Signal. A Sub-PAC is a full satellite factory, and it shares its region's Depot with your main PAC. Buildable space at the main site ends up bigger once everything's expanded, and it gets Depot Bus access on two sides instead of one.

The clean way to split the work: put self-sustaining lines at the Sub-PACs, things like battery production with their own Thermal Banks, or plant farms. Keep the main PAC focused on high-priority stuff, meaning gear components and whatever the current story mission wants. That way a clogged experimental line at a satellite never chokes your main output.

Buying space with Stock Bills

You will run out of room. When it happens, look for the AIC Steward standing near the PAC (and each Sub-PAC) after the Steward mission, and pay Stock Bills to permanently expand the buildable area. Bills come from outpost orders and from Stock Redistribution, the little stock market running on terminals around the map. Train up Elastic Bond there, watch the prices your friends offer, and sell high and buy low. Redistribution has a daily cap, which is exactly why staffed outposts earning bills passively matter so much.

The Regional Development flywheel

Regional Development metrics go up from first-time rig placements, outpost trades and upgrades, unlocking Recycling Stations, and finishing missions. Every level raises node purity, Protocol Capacity, and Depot stack sizes, and certain milestones unlock quality-of-life wins like Regional Transfer, which auto-moves items between regional Depots once an hour. A later upgrade, Metastorage, copies items across regions without even draining the source. Knock out a metric or two whenever you play and this stuff quietly stacks.

What to actually build in the late game

Late Valley IV, roughly Authority Level 34 to 43, is component country. Ferrium Components (10 Origocrust plus 10 Ferrium per craft) and Cryston Components feed the top-end gear grinding, and SC and HC Valley Batteries take over your power grid, each SC needing 10 Ferrium Parts plus 15 Originium Powder and each HC taking 10 Steel Parts plus 15 Dense Originium Powder. Keep a Sandleaf loop running the whole time, since Sandleaf Powder feeds into that battery grinding and costs you almost nothing to produce.

And lean on the community for endgame layouts. Blueprint codes exist for battery farms, component malls, and whole mega-bases, ready to import and stamp down. When one of your own lines turns out particularly well, save it as a blueprint so you can paste it at the next Sub-PAC without rebuilding it by hand. One HC Valley Battery holds the punch of five LCs, so once an HC line is fed and stable, your power problems are more or less over for good.