Factory Town Guide: Making Sense of Mana

Step 1: Research

Folks seem woefully confused my how mana works in this game, so i'm going to try to explain and shed light on the whole situation.

Your journey begins with the Mana Purification research. You will need to get this done first before you can do anything related to Mana.

Once it is completed, it unlocks the Magic Forge building which you will be using heavily to produce everything mana related you need.

So now that you have all the tools you need to begin your journey, you need to start by harvesting Mana Shards.

Mana Shards cannot be harvested by your townfolk, they must be harvested either by a Mine building or by a harvester drill. I usually don't bother with harvester drills and go straight for a mine. Once harvested, send them to your Magic Forge, supply it with fuel (which i'm doing in the image with a forester) and tell it to start producing Mana Crystals.

Once you have the Mana Crystals, there unfortunately isn't much you can do with them at first. Just stockpile as many as you can and send them to your School because you will need them in order to research the next two research topics you need to deal with mana which are Mana Power and Mana Transmission.

You need BOTH of these research topics to really do anything as either is basically worthless without the other.

Once you have finished researching these two topics, you need to start producing and storing two new resources you will want enormous quantities of: Mana Bricks and Mana Pipes.

Step 2: Production

Mana Crystals, Mana Bricks, and Mana Pipes are all created at the Magic Forge. Mana Bricks and Mana Pipes require Mana Crystals to produce so you probably want all of your Magic Forges clustered in a single area.

Here is an example of a way I would setup production for these items. You can easily follow the chain of production from the crystal mine, to the forge to make crystals being stockpiled in the barn, which are then being split 3 ways: One to the school for research purposes (presumably far away, at least it usually is for me) one to a Magic Forge to make Magic Bricks and one to a Magic Forge to make Magic Pipes.

Forges always need fuel, so I throw down a Forester next to them to supply limitless wood for infinite operation. I find it is more convenient than making long, complicated mazes of ferrying other things like coal around. The Mana Pipes need Steam Pipes as well, which are being produced by the adjacent Machine Shop, which only requires Iron Plates which is being produced by its adjacent Forge which is also being supplied fuel by a forester. It only needs iron ore being brought in from somewhere. If you have enough resources, you could just throw down two iron mines next to it and then not having to worry about that.

At the top, Mana Bricks use Stone bricks, so there is an adjacent Stone Mason producing them. All it needs is a source of stone being brought in, or you could throw up a few stone mines to supply it.

Once your production is all setup properly, whether you do it my way or not, you'll be stockpiling Mana Bricks and Mana Pipes.

Eventually, you'll no longer need to send crystals across the map to your school via chutes or belts. When this happens, you can simply tear up that long path and replace it with a Mana Transmitter located next to your barn full of Mana Crystals so they feed directly from the Barn into the Transmitter.

Step 3: Mana Power

Now that you have Mana Crystals being fed into a Mana Transmitter, goto your build menu and select Mana Pipes. When you go into build mode for Mana Pipes, it will change your perspective to top-down and shade everything a tint of light blue. You'll also see Mana Transmitters, Receivers, and Connectors glowing on this grid. Mousing over these things will tell you what they are, but its easy enough to remember the symbols once you get used to seeing them.

So now we need to find a building that actually needs Mana Power so I can explain how to use it. It just so happens the next (and final) piece of research that needs Mana Crystals is called Elemental Extraction, which gives you a new building called an Elemental Refinery. Since you'll need to deal with this thing eventually anyway, i'll use it as the example to explain how to actually use Mana Power since the Elemental Refinery uses Mana Power to work. However, we'll need to setup a Refinery first, so i'll come back to Mana Power in just a moment.

So here is our Elemental Refinery setup. We have a mine positioned next to one of the four types of Elemental Stones: Earth, Air, Fire, or Water. The stones being mined are immediately being sent to the Elemental Refinery building which is set to process that particular element, in this case it is making Fire Ether. All it needs to create Fire Ether is Fire Stones and Mana Power, then it produces the Ether and dumps it into a barn (for now, we'll come back to this later).

So now we get to Mana Power. First thing we want to do is go back to Mana Pipe build mode, then we need to construct mana Pipes to ferry Mana Crystals to our Elemental Refinery.

To lay Mana Pipe, you just click and drag just like you're making a line of Chutes or Conveyor Belts. Mana pipes only flow in a single direction, so make sure you have them pointed the right way. I you forget or get lazy and accidentally draw them backwards somewhere, it can be annoying to try to find where you laid them facing the wrong direction sometimes. Notice that Mana pipes are a dark color.

As you lay pipes away from the Mana Transmitter, you will notice the Mana Crystals immediately begin flooding down the pipe. Now, we don't need a million Mana Crystals to power this building, so lets remove the section of Mana Pipe right next to the Transmitter to cut off this section of pipe from the transmitter. That means all the Mana Crystals that are currently in the pipes won't have more flooding in from the transmitter.

Now we need to draw our Mana Pipes over the Elemental Refinery (on the top right). Mana Pipes going over buildings don't actually do anything, they must be connected to the building via Mana Connector Pipes. You can build these manually if you want to, but I never do, because if you start or end your Mana Pipe laying on a tile above a building that uses Mana Power, it will automatically create a connector. It shows up as a little square.

Now you will immediately notice that as the Mana Crystals flow into this square, they turn black. That is because their energy is being sucked out by the building, thus powering it.

As we extend the pipe a bit more, more Mana Crystals are being used to power the building, but now we're left with a lot of pipe full of black, depleted crystals. So what do we do with them?

You need to create what I like to call a Mana Recharging Station. That is not an official name and you won't see it anywhere in game, it's just my unofficial label for a collection of buildings i'm about to show you.

This is my version of a recharging station. Other folks may make them other ways, you may even find your own way ultimately, but this is how I do it. Pay attention to the output arrow directions. You want the output of the receiver to be going down that belt and you want the belt all the Mana Rechargers are outputting onto to be running into the Mana Transmitter. The final touch you need are to put a series of Pushers (or Splitters if you are doing something weird) along the belt moving away from your Mana Receiver. The pushes are required to push the black crystals into the Mana Rechargers.

Now that our recharging station is finished, we go back to Mana Pipe laying mode. From here, connect your exiting pipe full of black, depleted Mana Crystals up to the Mana Receiver. They will start flowing into it and being dumped out onto the conveyor belt below, then pushed into Mana Rechargers. The Mana Recharges will then slowly recharge them back into full powered Mana Crystals then spit them out onto the other conveyor belt which dumps them into the Mana Transmitter.

From here, you just need to draw a pipe from the Mana Transmitter back up to the connector on the building. In this case, i'll draw it straight up to connect with the pipe that already runs through it.

After you create a loop with Mana Pipes, they will start glowing and animate so it is very obvious to you by looking at them that you have created a loop with them. That handful of Mana Crystals I fed into this isolated loop will now operating forever cycling around powering the building, turning black, recharging, turning white, then restarting the circuit. Over and over. Your Elemental Refinery is now fully powered forever and you don't have to worry about it anymore.

The next step should be erasing all of the no longer needed Mana Pipes. This will prevent you from accidentally sending more Crystals to this loop (when they aren't needed) and it just makes everything look nicer in my opinion.

And done. You now know how to create and use Mana Power. Mana Receivers, Mana Transmitters, and Mana Rechargers all use a LOT of Mana Bricks and you will obviously be using a LOT of Mana Pipes as well to move these crystals around the map and create all these isolated circuit groups so that is why it is important to keep your production of both of these resources going strong all the time. The example image I gave you is a good starting point, but you should really be expanding on that and producing more. Thankfully you don't need Mana Pipes or Mana Bricks to be sent anywhere as part of any other production lines, just let them pile up in barns so you can use them for manual construction/building placement.

Step 4: Elemental Power

Now there is one last thing I want to talk about real quick and that is what to do about that elemental (Fire) Ether and also how to get Elemental Crystals.

So the first thing you need is to find the appropriate Elemental Temple. You CANNOT build these Temples, they are located randomly outside of the map bounds. When you scroll to the edge of the map, you are given an option to purchase more land to play in for a gold coin cost. You need to buy the surrounding lands to find each of these four elemental temples. You will never be able to build them or move them, you just have to find them.

These temples elementally charge your Mana Crystals with a particular element. In practice, it means they consume Elemental Ether and Mana Crystals and output an Elemental Crystal. For this fire temple, we need to get our Fire Ether to it as well as Elemental Crystals.

Getting the Mana Crystals down there will be easy, it will just take Mana Pipes. Usually elemental temples are far away from where you're making your Mana Crystals because they can spawn all over the place at the very edges of the map, so there will always be one of two really far out. Just build a Mana Reciver next to it and put a chute or conveyor belt there so it takes your Mana Crystals from the receiver and dumps them into the temple, then build a loooong Mana Pipe all the way from your Mana Crystal production area all the way to this Mana Receiver.

After you ship your Ether and Mana Crystals down the the Temple, it will start pumping out elemental crystals. Once those crystals are made, store them up and connect them to a Mana Transmitter so you can send them where ever you need. Different recipes and buildings require different elements to operate.

My favorite is the Fire Shrine. They consume Fire Mana Power to produce Magma. This is absolutely wonderful for a few reasons. First being that you can just recharge these Fire Crystals infinitely as you can normal Mana Crystals, so you effectively have unlimited fuel production. Second, a Fire Shrine is only 1x1 tile in size, so you can squeeze it in between other buildings to conveniently supply fuel to several at once. Magma provides 8 units of fuel each, it is miles better than any other type of fuel, so a single Fire Shrine can supply fuel to a number of buildings, they are glorious.

But anyway, I hope you found this useful and informative. Good luck.

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1700164197

Guide: Making Sense of Mana

Step 1: Research

Step 2: Production

Step 3: Mana Power

Step 4: Elemental Power

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