Artisan Archive

Is there a secret to keeping these things running? I set up 2 chemical and 2 mineral extractors and they keep shutting down on there own and tell me I have to pay maintenance to start them up again. I can understand if they would run for a while paying maintenance, but I left them for a day and when I came back, 2 had empty hoppers, one had 4 units of ore and the other made it to 106 units and all were placed where the resource survey of what I wanted to extract was 70-80%. The first one I set up I checked after an hour and it had stopped and was still at a condition of 96% and said I had to pay maintenance to restart it.

Is there something I'm doing wrong? Please help.

The condition has to be 100% for it to extract anything. You need to pay the maint up for however long you want it to actively extract and not decay. Also make sure you put in enough power.

so your saying you have to pay for the maintenance in advance???

so your saying you have to pay for the maintenance in advance???

Exactly - both maintenance fees and power must be supplied in advance. Use the 'status' option to check how long the current maintenance and power supplies will last. Once either runs out, the harvester will stop running. If maintenance runs out, the harvester starts degrading.

Oh, and power is only used when the harvester is running, maintenance is used constantly.

Maintenance and Power reserves are kept in the deed if you destroy (Undeploy) it, and are ready to be used right away when you set it up elsewhere, so you can feed it up for quite far ahead without worrying about losing any cash or power.

One other reason it may stop working is resource shift. Every now and then the resource fields will move about overnight. Took me ages to figure out why some of mine had just stopped working, until I resurveyed and found the resource vanished. If the resource it's set to suddenly goes 0%, it will stop working too.