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Detailed Sector Specialisation Guide

By Water is Deadly

Taking inspiration from FxFighter's Sector Specialisation Requirements guide I decided to build a spreadsheet which shows the number of points on offer per specialisation building and create some examples of how to build to Tier 1 or Tier 2 and to answer the all important question....is it worth it.

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Water is Deadly
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Category: Gameplay Basics

Posted

Updated

21 Dec, 2022 @ 11:33am

15 Jan, 2023 @ 4:25pm

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Guide Index

Overview

Detailed Building Specialisation Points

Comments

Overview

I'll start by saying this is the first time I have written any kind of guide ever. I didn't do it for the praise but it would be good to know if people actually use it.

Props to FxFighter for posting his guide. It was super useful for me but also kind of frustrating needing 13 food buildings instead of the 6 mentioned because specialisations are more complicated than first thought. Anyway, let's get started...

Build enough buildings with specialisation icons on them and you'll get a sector specialisation which confers a bonus to that sector. You'll need a DLS to get this bonus and every sector should have a DLS anyway. I'll summarise the content here so the top level guys can grab what they need and shoot off...

Are these bonuses hard to get?
Tier 1 is usually not hard, Tier 2 requires you specifically build your entire sector a certain way and without bloating from housing and storage. You have to really want that Tier 2.
Buildings do NOT need to be active. Build those Docks/Airlocks and switch them off. Now watch that 1 active Airlock do more work.

Are specialisations any good?
Recycling, Food and Space specialisations are great.
Industry is meh and Population specialisation is trash.
Usually Tier 1 gives you what you really want and Tier 2 will give you an additional, somewhat related bonus which makes Tier 2 very unappealing considering how much work it is to get it.
There are achievements up for grabs on Tier 2 specialisations so there's always a reason to grab one then immediately tear it down.

Top Level Summary Table

Detailed Building Specialisation Points

Oh...You're still here? 1 red pill coming right up...

What are the God Tier Buildings?
There is really only 1.

The Mushroom Wall - best building for Food AND Recycling specialisations.

The Mushroom Wall? Who the hell snuck that in there? No one builds that! At least, they didn't before now but if you want that Food or Recycling Tier 2 Specialisation then you best start flinging this s**t at the walls.
I have now crunched the numbers. This building produces the most food per cycle in the entire game. Fully research and with Recycling Tier 2 it produces 14 food every 1.7 cycles. Considerably more than the Algae Farm (8+ per cycle vs 5.75 per cycle). It doesn't require water which is nice...but it does require waste, lots of it, which is a problem since you need that for Steel. So you actually want to keep most of these powered down. Just 1 or 2 active will take the pressure off your insect farms.

Best of The Rest

Electronics Factory for Industry
Crew Quarter for Pop (30 steel for 2 vs 80 steel for 1 Domotic Quarter)
Tech Lab for Space
Waste Treatment Center - It's average for both recycling and Industry but it does both simultaneously and is arguably the most useful building in the game.

Buildings to Avoid

The Drone Bay.
Observatory. Build it for the permanent bonus then scrap it.
Optimized Quarter. Obviously a good early-mid game housing option but these numbers are not...optimised.
Crop Farm. Similar to Algae Farm but with worse food output.
Exo-Fighting Dome. Bad for the points per tile. Good for ship-wide morale.

Table of Doom
I have now grouped the buildings by specialisation and sorted by total tiles required so you can see which buildings require the least space. Buildings with 2 specialisations are in the list twice.

You only have so much space per sector (1,680 tiles) and the table below shows that this is tricky since most require at least 700-800 tiles (excluding roads and storage) to get to Tier 2 even cheesing your way to the top. Most...except Food and Recycling...
Total tiles per sector figure courtesy of Nighthalk

26 Comments

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dekeche 25 Jan, 2024 @ 2:22pm

Just a small note - but the population T2 +1 stability to buildings also effects the Exo-Fighting Dome's shared stability bonus, so it's a free bonus +1 stability to all sectors if you can build it in a T2 population sector.

Galatian 22 Oct, 2023 @ 2:20am

I have found different opinions on the sector specialization and wether it affects different buildings or not. Does the Food Level 1/2 bonus on waste only affect Crop Fields / Algae Farms or also let's say Domotic quarters? Does the Recycling 2 Bonus really only apply to the Mushroom Wall and Wastetreatment Center. I mean I can really see a Layout, where one would go for 6 Mushroom farms in a population sector to get more Trash for example.

RED-Life 14 Aug, 2023 @ 6:46am

"I agree it is poor per waste and waste can do more elsewhere but you only need 1 or 2 active to seriously reduce the demand on your insect farms and 1 or 2 will use far less waste than a water treatment centre (3.5 waste per wall per cycle). The water treatment plant is also poor per waste at 25 waste per cycle. With lots of micromanaging if you want to keep that down. But the amount of food you need to produce is not that high."

I know it takes some micromanagement, but it isn't that bad. Once you're stable you hardly have to do anything on the ship anymore, so going back into your food sector to turn on your Water Treatment plant until your food stockpiles are filled isn't that much work. Also if you're doing it this way instead of leaving your Water Treatment plant run non-stop you hardly ever run out of waste (Though it's smart to keep a Fusion Station and ice as backup if it does happen).

Also also, you have the added bonus of not having a diet of insects and mushrooms.

Water is Deadly [author] 19 Jan, 2023 @ 6:51am

That makes sense. In fact it's the same methodology I used to get these numbers except I couldn't see these scores so had to run with arbitrary tier/points requirements instead.
Looks like the biggest deviations were from the single build limit buildings which makes a lot of sense.

Mystik 18 Jan, 2023 @ 7:15pm

Yea, guess I wasn't explanative enough. The TorusSector.sav does indeed only give information on your sectors and what score they have. I.e. they contain these lines of importance:

"specializations": {
...
"food": {
...
"highestTierUnlocked": 2,
"score": 1032
}
}

That let's me know that my sum in the sector for the food specialization is 1032 points and I'm tier 2. But I can use that information to determine the points of all building types by deleting almost all the buildings, saving, and checking the scores from a mostly empty sector. I.e. if I had just a mess hall I know the 24 food and pop points in the sector are the mess hall. If I add a Crew Quarters on top of that I know that the 9 additional population points are the Crew Quarters. Repeat for all buildings, and you end up with something like this: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQvY2z6n0hZZbiqkzvn6Rlo7iUmF-QhLVvWYVgzw-wfCCspn2mMoAFAn8_9FlPhgaCu_EaEx3xxyrWN/pubhtml?gid=73617034&single=true

Water is Deadly [author] 17 Jan, 2023 @ 1:05pm

Thanks Mystik.
I did find the file, I don't have anything to open sav or json specifically so opened it in notepad and did some find/searching but couldn't find much of use. Specialization was getting some hits but wasn't too sure on what the numbers were relating to (other than my current sector scores - the only thing that really made any sense). The buildings aren't named in there, they seem to use IDs instead so decided to give up on that.
It would be nice to get specific details on points required per sector and per building just to be a perfectionist but as long as the above does the job then I think we're good.

Mystik 17 Jan, 2023 @ 11:30am

Yea, the Biocenter is terrible, and thanks for updating the guide as it's been extremely useful.

Regarding TorusSector.sav; The game has an internal point system to calculate the specializations and you can get a glimpse of it in your saves, which are stored at %USERPROFILE% \AppData\LocalLow\BulwarkStudios\Ixion\Saves\%ID% . This information specifically is in the TorusSector.sav file, which is JSON-like (if you're a programmer you might recognize the term, if not then don't worry about it except that it's somewhat readable with a normal text editor). The scale it uses is roughly one point per tile for most buildings, and the specializations are on the orders of hundreds of points (i.e. 300-500 for tier 1 and 700-1000 for tier 2). I've got my own spreadsheet with those numbers but it's value to you is probably marginal at best.

Water is Deadly [author] 15 Jan, 2023 @ 4:17pm

Hi Mystik. I have just confirmed everything you said with some testing. I don't know what file TorusSector.sav is and couldn't find it myself but the bioengineering center equates to 1 point towards industry and 1 point towards recycling in my setup...which is terrible for the size of building it is.

Mystik 14 Jan, 2023 @ 10:13pm

There's a few discrepancies with your bottom table:
* Your space tier 1 requirement is off by a point; should be 5 on your scale
* Missing the train station, which would also be a space point by your scale
* Missing the Bioengineering Center, which I can't convert to your point system but is 81 points by the scale in the TorusSector.sav for both Industry and Recycling

Water is Deadly [author] 3 Jan, 2023 @ 1:31pm

I agree it is poor per waste and waste can do more elsewhere but you only need 1 or 2 active to seriously reduce the demand on your insect farms and 1 or 2 will use far less waste than a water treatment centre (3.5 waste per wall per cycle). The water treatment plant is also poor per waste at 25 waste per cycle. With lots of micromanaging if you want to keep that down. But the amount of food you need to produce is not that high.

With 5,500 pop I need to produce 277 food per meal...or 55.4 food per cycle (with fully upgraded mess halls). This can be achieved with 45 insect farms or 32 insect farms and 2 mushroom walls. Even the 45 insect farm option is doable with 4 open sectors. If you have 6 open sectors you can easily put out enough food with just insect farms and save all of your waste for steel to repair the now profusely bleeding hull.

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