Trade Servers
Trade Servers are how Trading companies make money. They're physical blocks — a beacon server block with a custom head display. Craft one, place it, power it, cool it, repair it, and it produces money and XP over time.
Capacity & production
- You can run as many servers at once as your company's Trading level.
- Level 1 = 1 server, Level 10 = 10 servers.
- Each active server produces money every production cycle (about 600 per cycle for a tier-1 server, every 60 seconds) and gives company XP.
- Leveling up increases your concurrent-server cap.
Soft cap: if more than ~20 trade servers across the whole server are producing at once, every server's payout is scaled down (never below 25%) so the market doesn't flood.
The four things to manage
Electricity
Trade Servers run on electricity, not fuel buckets. Wire the beacon to a powered Electric Cable network — a server draws about 200 power/sec. When the grid can't meet that demand, the server reads "No power" and stops producing.
Durability
Each server starts with 20 HP. It loses 1 HP per 15 minutes of active runtime. At 0 HP it breaks. Repair with a Server Repair Tool (30 uses, +1 HP each).
Temperature
Servers heat up while producing. At 125 °C they OVERHEAT and stop. They restart only after cooling below 70 °C.
Water (coolant)
Add coolant by depositing water buckets in the server GUI. Capped at 100. One bucket adds 25 water. While water is present, heat gain is fully blocked and water slowly evaporates while cooling. Evaporates more slowly in cold worlds such as the Moon. You can also automate this.
Open your company menu → Trade Servers to manage placed servers. The GUI shows live electricity status, heat, water, durability, status and location.
Automatic coolant
Instead of pouring buckets, you can keep servers cool automatically with a Water Pump — an electric power machine gated behind the Oil Pump investigation. To set it up:
- Place the Water Pump next to a connected water source with at least the configured number of source blocks (
power.water-pump.min-source-cube-diameter³). - Wire electricity to the pump.
- Run a Fluid Pipe from the pump to the server.
While the pump is powered and has a valid source, every connected server tops its coolant up each tick on its own — an overheated server even recovers and restarts without anyone tending it.
Switching power machines off
Every power machine — the Oil, Water and Fuel Pumps, the Oil Refinery, generators (solar, wind, coal, combustion), Power Cells, Oil/Fuel Storage and the market machines — has a right-click status panel with an ON/OFF switch in the bottom-centre slot.
Flip it off and that machine leaves the grid entirely: it generates nothing, draws no power, and its stored oil/fuel/charge is isolated from the network until you switch it back on.
Only the machine's owner (or staff) can toggle it. The setting is saved, so a machine stays off across restarts.
Tier 2 upgrade
Once your town has investigated Tier 2 Trading Server (see Investigation), you can upgrade a tier-1 Trading Server into a Tier 2 server by shapeless-crafting it with a Meteorite Rock from the Meteorite Shower.
A Tier 2 server produces about 1000 per cycle and has 40 HP. Exact numbers are server-configurable.