We recently added a second recipe for STL fuel. Our initial estimate showed that it would be on par with the existing recipe, but it turned out to be way better than the old recipe. This has been noticed and discussed by many players, among the first ones have been @rain9441 and @TwilightSentinel, thanks!
Hence, we will change the recipes next Tuesday, July 27th!
The existing recipes 1 AMM + 5 NAB -> 200 SF 3 H + 1 NA + 1 BOR -> 20 NAB
will be changed to
1 AMM + 5 NAB -> 150 SF 5 H + 1 NA + 1 BOR -> 20 NAB.
this type of change should be announced by email in advance. Done this way, it ruins the business as an effort was made to invest in supplies bringing losses. This is not acceptable
Looking back, some of those supporting the change were NAB producers.
Where there is a local GAL supply though it doesn’t seem to make sense.
It is marginally cheaper at best to produce SF but takes twice as long so once you factor in wear and tear on the REF, I doubt that is is cheaper at all.
Looking back, I don’t think there has been a single sale of NAB in the Benten system since the announcement.
What producers are they? the big ones or the little ones? very strange, this sense of justice. NAB serves only two purposes and to have NAB you need NA which takes 13 hours to produce 2 using the same production line while H is in 9 different recipes producing high demand items and is just collected. Why the only solution was to punish NAB increasing dependence on H??
As probably the galaxies biggest producer of NAB I think the nerf was a bit of an over reach. If the duration of the NAB to SF recipe had been reduced by 33% to compensate for the decreased efficiency, I think it would have been a reasonable change. This would have kept the same SF output from the refinery, just less efficient than before.
I think the original formula would have been ok were H selling at a reasonable mark-up, but NAB producers were making a killing with H fluctuating between 120 and over 150 on Katoa, with Umbra right next door.
I had my own H production on Umbra in the last universe and that would represent a 200% mark-up over production cost.
Competition with NAB was slowly bringing the cost of H down, but the price is on its way back up since the nerf.
I’ve been running the NAB SF recipe for over a month on Montem with 8 refineries now and the old recipe was far far too strong. To the point that it completely replaces the GAL recipe and you could get a 20 day ROI just selling SF to the market maker. On top of that, NAB is extremely easy to transport around, but GAL is not. So it’s really easy to produce a ton of it and export it everywhere in the galaxy.
My impression of the recipe for NAB is that it was always intended as an alternative for GAL, not a replacement. So a nerf was absolutely necessary. I also think that the current state is perfectly fine as the NAB recipe still gives a better profit margin than GAL at the current price point if you cannot produce GAL locally. Since NAB is so easy to transport, it can be used anywhere that GAL is not locally available so all areas can produce SF.
One month later, I can say that NAB has fallen behind GAL fuel. Largely because of how much cheaper H is now. It could use a little love, like a buff to 170-175 per order. Going back up to 200 per order would be far far too strong and it would beat out GAL fuel in all respects in that case, even with extremely low H costs.
NAB fuel still has its uses, as it requires far less logistics to haul. Both the product and the inputs.
I think NAB is underrated, but very few people seem to be taking advantage of the cheap NAB that I have been listing on all of the CXs. I think part of the problem is the AMM shortage, making SF production in most regions difficult.
In any case, I think the SF shortages in most regions should be an indication to the devs that they need to revisit the fuel refining process and think about tweaking it.
The AMM shortage is mostly down to the fact that the only viable source is Katoa. Random planet generation didn’t put any useful AMM planets nearby the CXs and all of the GGs have mineral deposits, making it unappealing to get AMM until all of the other GG resource markets had been saturated.
I think people, especially in HRT, are just being ignorant by flooding the H market and ignoring AMM. There are seven bases on VH-331f and apparently nobody can be bothered to build any extractors. By my math, assuming AMM at 200 and H at 75 the profit per day and ROI on an extractor is significantly better (around +50%) than building a collector, and the actual price of BSE/AEF/INS doesn’t even change the math much. There were bids for AMM as high as 350 as recently as earlier this week. As a bonus you would only need some fraction of the shipping to bring AMM to the CX compared to the much less valuable H.
Hopefully some people will wake up and start bringing AMM to the CX to push the price down to a more reasonable number. I think the target price for AMM is probably going to be around 2x the price of hydrogen, so assuming people like money and not paying extortionate prices for SF, we should see the price swing down and start fluctuating at this level.