Ship Refabricator

The Ship Refabricator is a unit-refabricating building that remolds ships from stored materials rather than constructing them from scratch. It functions like other refabricators in the game family: it accepts item input, consumes the required components for a given ship, and outputs a repaired or reconstituted ship. The Ship Refabricator was added in Build 136 and received cost and build-time adjustments in Build 149.

The refabricator’s internal item buffer can hold twice the materials required to produce a single ship — specifically 120 Silicon and 80 Tungsten capacity for the Ship Refabricator’s production needs. This larger-than-one-unit buffer allows it to accept bursts of material and smooth short-term supply interruptions, but sustained high-throughput production requires careful factory balancing.

Production time for the Ship Refabricator is longer than the corresponding Ship Fabricator: it upgrades or refabricates an Elude in 50 seconds, whereas a Ship Fabricator produces a ship in 40 seconds. This gap is larger than the analogous gap for the Moss Refabricator (the Moss Refabricator’s delay relative to the Moss Fabricator is smaller), which means direct piping of fabricator output into refabricators can produce backlogs. For continuous, balanced throughput when converting fabricator output into refabricated ships, a recommended ratio is 4 fabricators to 5 refabricators.

Practical notes and deployment tips:

• The Ship Refabricator is best used where ships must be reconstituted from wreckage or when converting surplus components into ready vessels; its doubled internal buffer helps absorb upstream spikes.
• Because refabrication takes longer than original fabrication, place storage or distributor buffers between Ship Fabricators and Ship Refabricators if you intend to feed fabricator output directly; this prevents conveyor congestion and idling.
• Defensive placement matters: refabricators are production targets during enemy raids because they contain valuable components; protect them with turrets or by embedding them within defended production zones.
• When scaling active ship production lines, follow the suggested 4:5 fabricator-to-refabricator ratio to maintain steady output without long queues. If you expect frequent production bursts, increase local storage to compensate for the refabricator’s slower cycle.
• In Build 149 the Ship Refabricator’s build recipe and time were adjusted: tungsten requirements were changed and Oxide requirement was reduced, while the build time increased from 9.3 to 10.3 seconds. These changes modestly affected early-game placement and timing when ramping up a refabrication network.

Use the Ship Refabricator where ship restoration or conversion fits your strategy, and plan material flow and defensive coverage around its slower refabrication cadence to keep lines efficient and secure.