At some point you need something your world does not provide: water on Venus, seeds for a new crop, superalloys without an advanced furnace. Then it is time to trade. You reach traders through a satellite dish, and they land with a shuttle on your landing pad. All offers in detail are in the trader overview.
The three dishes
| Dish | Power range | Base draw | Kit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small Satellite Dish | 50 – 200 W | 10 W | 5 gold, 10 copper |
| Medium Satellite Dish (medium) | 500 – 7,500 W | 50 W | 20 steel, 15 electrum, 10 solder |
| Large Satellite Dish | 2,000 – 50,000 W | 100 W | 20 waspaloy, 50 inconel, 100 astroloy |
All kits come from the electronics printer. Each dish is aimed via Horizontal and Vertical, and you set the power via Setting. The Communications Motherboard (5 gold, 5 copper, 5 silver, 2 electrum) also belongs to trading.
The trader classes
Every trader belongs to a class. It determines how much power must reach the contact and how long the trader stays:
| Class | visible from | contact from | contact time | stays | pause |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Utility | 0 W | 25 – 30 W | 20 – 30 s | 1,200 – 1,260 s | 300 – 600 s |
| Basic | 0 W | 25 – 30 W | 20 – 30 s | 1,200 – 1,260 s | 30 s |
| Medium | 20 W | 180 – 200 W | 60 – 120 s | 1,200 – 1,260 s | 30 – 60 s |
| Large | 250 W | 6,000 – 8,000 W | 400 – 600 s | 2,400 – 2,460 s | 60 – 120 s |
| Exotics | 100 W | 6,000 – 8,000 W | 400 – 600 s | 2,400 – 2,460 s | 1,200 – 2,400 s |
What that means for the dish:
- The small dish, at most 200 W, manages utility, basic and just about medium traders.
- The medium dish, at 7,500 W, is enough for large traders and exotics as long as their demand is below 7,500 W.
- The large dish, with up to 50,000 W, covers everything.
How much power actually reaches the contact is shown by the dish as WattsReachingContact, the contact's demand as MinimumWattsToContact. The connection's progress shows in InterrogationProgress (0 to 1).
From signal to trade
According to the game code a trade runs in four steps:
- Aiming. The dish points at a signal with
HorizontalandVertical. The full power only arrives when it is aimed to within 2°; at 5° off it is 90 %, at 22.5° only 10 %.SignalStrengthreports the deviation in degrees. - Resolving. If the dish stands still and at least the visibility threshold arrives, the signal is resolved. Until then
SignalStrength,WattsReachingContactandMinimumWattsToContactreport −1. Every movement and every change toSettingrestarts the resolving. - Connecting.
Activate1 (or the button) starts building the contact to the strongest signal. It only runs while at leastMinimumWattsToContactarrives – if the power drops below, it aborts and starts from scratch on the next attempt. The contact time in the table applies exactly at this minimum power; with double the power it takes half as long. - Landing. Once the contact is made, a second
Activate1 calls the trader to the landing pad. Which pad is meant you choose withTargetPadIndex: counted from 0 among the landing pads on the dish's data network, sorted by ReferenceId. Trading then happens at the landed shuttle.
As for power: at rest the dish draws its base draw, while resolving a tenth of Setting, while connecting the full value of Setting. A medium dish at 7,500 W therefore needs 7,500 W while connecting – more than the 5,000 W normal cable carries.
A worked example on timing: a large trader needs 400 to 600 s until contact at minimum power and then stays 2,400 to 2,460 s. The large dish at 16,000 W connects a trader with 8,000 W demand and 600 s contact time after only 300 s. A game day has 1,200 s – so you have about two days to trade.
Paying and delivery
You pay with the Credit Card. The game looks for it first in the slots of your uniform, then in your hands. Without a card every purchase and sale fails, and a purchase only works if the balance is sufficient. If you merge two cards, the game fills one of them up to 100,000; the rest stays on the other.
Bought items land in free storage slots of the vending machines that are switched on, powered and connected to the landing pad's data network, and only after that in your hands. Bought gases and liquids go into the landing pad's pipe network. For selling, the trader takes matching goods from the same machines and from your hands.
For bulk goods such as water by the litre, the class scales the stock: utility, basic and exotic traders carry 0.5 times, medium ones 1 times, large ones 2 times the amount. The price per unit does not change.
Who stocks what
| Trader | Classes |
|---|---|
| Ore, alloy, gas and construction traders | basic, medium, large |
| Hydroponics trader | basic, medium |
| Liquid trader | medium, large |
| Food, hardware, consumables, medical and appliance traders | utility |
| Genetics trader, rare items trader | exotics |
Some offers exist only with certain classes. The ore trader, for example, offers lead, nickel, silver and cobalt ore only as a medium or large trader. A price example: water costs 18 per litre at the gas trader and 12 at the liquid trader. For 100 litres that is 1,800 against 1,200 – the liquid trader pays off if your dish reaches a medium trader.
Traders also buy. Almost all of them take water, for example, and boxes of food such as tomato soup, corn soup and bread. The complete lists with prices, amounts and chances are in the trader overview.
The landing pad
Traders land on a landing pad. Its parts come from three kits, each made from 1 copper and 5 steel in the electronics printer:
| Kit | builds |
|---|---|
| Kit (Landing Pad Basic) | centre piece, data and power, straight, cross, diagonal, blank, arrow |
| Kit (Landing Pad Atmospherics) | gas and liquid input and output, gas storage, tank connectors |
| Kit (Landing Pad Runway) | taxi pieces, threshold, trader waypoint |
The parts sit on the large grid. The centre and field pieces are finished by welding on one steel sheet; the data and power piece gets 10 cable coils. The data and power piece (10 W) connects the pad to the power and data network and reports its state via Mode: None, NoContact, Moving, Holding or Landed. Which landing pad is meant is set by the dish via TargetPadIndex (see above).
According to the game data gas and liquid traders arrive with a gas shuttle. The parts from the atmospheric kit are meant for them: the gas input contains a volume pump as a build stage and has a gas pipe connection. IC10 knows the shuttle kinds in the namespace ShuttleType.: Small, Medium and Large, each also as a gas variant, plus MediumPlane and LargePlane.
Trading and IC10
For chips there is the namespace TraderInstruction. with entries such as WriteTraderData, StrongestContactIdHash or TraderBuyThingData. How namespaces work in IC10 in general is explained in the lesson IC10 Academy: constants and namespaces.
Next steps
- All offers and purchases: Traders
- Superalloys for the large dish: Furnaces and alloys
- Power for dish and landing pad: Power grid basics
- Rockets for your own flights: Rockets: structure, fuel, launch