Galnet News just confirmed how to influence your Starport economy but...

[Three Stars]

There are two ways to get an Extraction economy on a major dockable station.

1. If you have an asteroid belt cluster or planetary ring slot, put an Asteroid Base in it. That comes with a built-in Extraction economy. This is the "easy" way.
2. Build an outpost or station with a Colony economy type, then put something with "System Economy Influence: Extraction" either in orbit around the same body, or on that body's surface if landable. Your options for this are "Orbital Installation Mining Outpost", "Surface Settlement Extraction" or "Surface Hub Extraction". (The Large Surface Settlement is probably best for converting the economy type; the other options have their own advantages and disadvantages)

(If you want an economy other than Extraction then the principle is the same, but the exact list of things you can build that come with it and things you can build that change Colonies into it will differ)

With all that in mind…having created an extraction economy in an orbital, how does one best increase the amount of things sold at the orbital?

I have a planet with 6 open slots beneath my Coriolis. If I hypothetically put 6 extraction settlements there, will I be swimming in gold? Or is it another factor that determines the amount of gold being sold at the Coriolis?

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I'm sure adding "Contraband" to the galaxy map will be done when FDev finally get around to realising that one should be able to buy things from black markets too.

Yes. In practical terms the "Contraband" economy seems to be "things which might be illegal elsewhere".
But of course, since they're also potentially illegal at the producing port if you give it to someone no-fun like a Federal Theocracy it probably won't produce anything at all.

And have a live bug where some are labelled the wrong way around in the UI, so you ask for one Installation and you get a different one.

Ah. No, not quite. Slightly different bug there. The bug here is that "installation entity model" and "installation role" are completely unrelated properties, but the lists have some names in common and they don't even line up consistently.

So I built a "Satellite Installation" (role) which appears in-game as a "Scientific Installation" (entity model name). But it does function as a Satellite Installation in terms of what build dependencies it unlocks. There's no such thing as a Satellite Installation (entity model name).

Of course, the confusion is then enhanced by there being a "Scientific Installation" (role) which may or may not build things with the "Scientific Installation" entity model name.

Frontier should retranslate all the installation entity names so that they match their colonisation roles, to avoid confusion.

With all that in mind…having created an extraction economy in an orbital, how does one best increase the amount of things sold at the orbital?

I have a planet with 6 open slots beneath my Coriolis. If I hypothetically put 6 extraction settlements there, will I be swimming in gold? Or is it another factor that determines the amount of gold being sold at the Coriolis?

That's an interesting and important question, and one we're a long way off having a definite answer to.
- if your orbital has any Colony economy remaining on its display (check the Journal, not the in-game display, as you can get a "Colony: 0" still showing up as Colony in-game), then building a second (third, whatever) extraction settlement below it probably will move it more towards Extraction, and therefore increase the production and consumption of Extraction-economy exports and imports (it'll also stop the residual Colony part of the economy from internally consuming the Gold and Silver the Extraction side is producing, before it reaches the market)
- if your orbital doesn't have any Colony remaining, it's not clear if you can make the Extraction side even bigger by adding more influencer buildings (no direct tests that I'm aware of; "by analogy" tests mean that it could go either way)

However the market quantities are also influenced by two other things
- permanently, by the various other system properties like Wealth, Development Level, etc. These can be influenced by anything anywhere in the system - so you might build a High-Tech settlement for +10 Tech Level on a different planet, and it won't pass on High-Tech economy to your Coriolis (which you don't want, in this case, because it'll start consuming your Extraction outputs: being able to keep all this stuff easily separated is a major strength of the current system) ... but the Tech Level change does apply to the whole system and will help your Coriolis. We do not yet know which system properties are most influential on the market sizes (there are early indications that it could be Development Level which has the most effect, but we do not have solid proof of that yet)
(and you can safely stick some more Extraction buildings below it to do this - the Extraction Settlements are better for converting the economy, but once that's done the Extraction Hub has a slightly better set of bonuses to system properties)

- temporarily, by creating and maintaining a BGS political state on the station owning faction which is one of the ones which boosts production. The system properties I just mentioned also affect the shapes and sizes of the faction "Economy" and "Security" state sliders, which may make certain states easier or harder to achieve. Exactly which state(s) you want depends on what commodities you really want to boost production (or consumption!) of, and whether you care more about the effect on the tonnage quantity or on the credit pricing. But in general a good basic rule is "Boom" and "Civil Liberty" states are great for production, and everything else is situational and better avoided unless you know what you're doing.

 

[CMDR X]

...
This also applies to my trading outpost, which is now doomed to produce only organic waste and gas forever.
Simply a cheek. A great feature that has now become a shot in the arm for an extremely large number of Cmdrs.

You never know. Organic gas might be the next Painite...

 

[Galactic Fork]

My colony turned into Colony/Refinery after completion so the Refinery Hub 'did' the trick. The planetary outpost is only exporting Copper and Polymers and Nerve Agents. It makes me wonder if there'll be other commodities that show up or if I need to put more refinery hubs or extraction hubs perhaps?

I have a colony planetary outpost on a gas giant's moon and a refinery hub on that moon's moon. Still just a colony. So installations on orbiting bodies don't affect planetary outposts.

 

[Three Stars]

Very useful answers that I’m truncating for space.

Let’s also assume that this hypothetical orbital with 6 planetary slots also has two additional orbital slots. If I slap two mining installations in those slots, will they also assist the Coriolis in its quest for gold? What about outposts or other stations in those slots… will they steal resources from the original Coriolis, or do all eligible orbitals receive the same benefits from the planet?

 

[Greasetrap42]

- 'system' economy influence: misnamed by Frontier in the English translation (and apparently even worse in Russian), should be called "body economy influence", affects the economy of all major stations

Apologies for a question way off topic. What do you mean by "misnamed in the English translation"? Is it believed that portions of Elite Dangerous are developed in a non-english speaking environment? I thought Frontier developed their stuff in Britain. Are components subcontracted elsewhere (and apparently not closely overseen by an english speaking British head office)? This would explain why there is often non-ED-standard UI methods implemented, and contradictory/confusing words found throughout the game. The game often has the 'feel' similar to a manual translated from another language. And some elements of the game do have the appearance of being developed by someone not following the overall big picture of how the game works.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Let’s also assume that this hypothetical orbital with 6 planetary slots also has two additional orbital slots. If I slap two mining installations in those slots, will they also assist the Coriolis in its quest for gold?

Yes, mining installations should do the same as mining settlements (though not necessarily to exactly the same strength) for converting the Coriolis from Colony to Extraction.

(Looking at their respective stats, a medium mining settlement is cheaper and better than a mining installation - so I'd go for those if space allows)

What about outposts or other stations in those slots… will they steal resources from the original Coriolis, or do all eligible orbitals receive the same benefits from the planet?

This hasn't been tested yet. We don't know if you've got settlements adding say "0.8 Extraction", if that's 0.8 separately to every station in range, or 0.8 split between every station in range.

Apologies for a question way off topic. What do you mean by "misnamed in the English translation"? Is it believed that portions of Elite Dangerous are developed in a non-english speaking environment? I thought Frontier developed their stuff in Britain.

Frontier does their development in Britain (Cambridge, specifically) and to my knowledge uses some dialect of English as their operational language. And despite that, things still sometimes seem to get translated weirdly between their internal terminology and the official English frontend for the game, so I do joke about it at times.

Mostly it's harmless like the internal name for engineering blueprints being "recipes" or the internal Journal name for the Type 10 being the "Type9_Military" ... and the "Type_X" being one of the Alliance C-ships. And sometimes it ends up with stuff like this where it's actually confusing for players because they clearly have an internal mental model for how things work and have not managed to pick the right words to describe it in the interface for how non-dev players will experience it.

 

[lefty1117]

So if you have a station orbiting a gas giant which has moons orbiting it, and you put ground or space installations on or around the moons, do they affect the station? Are they all "connected" by virtue of orbiting the parent gas giant?

 

[Kaocraft]

The real issue is that the design wasn't communicated and there's no recourse - you can't delete anything or move it around, so a lot of people will feel like they've put a lot of effort into what turns out to be a broken design.

Yeah this is what throws me about Frontier's response.
"We heard you were mad about the surprise outcome of a design decision that we never told anybody about. Don't worry! We're going to change the design now!'

Like, people are mad about a lot of their design decisions but it's not because the design decisions are bad (not defending or criticizing one way or another for now) it's because they aren't being disclosed. Hence we can't really PLAY their game so much as stumble through it.

Seriously one person tweets at them, and they're all "oh sorry we'll change the way our game works right away!"

How about TELL US upfront how your game works and then we can maybe have an adult discussion about the pros and cons?

Frontier: You really didn't hear us if you think we're primarily angry about your game design, here. It's way too early for anyone to have opinions on that.

Despite the university thesis worth of work people are putting into researching and cataloguing the game design that you have for some reason chosen not to describe, we are still far too in the dark to evaluate any given design choice. All of these systems are interconnected and only really "make sense" or "are bad" in the context of all the elements of design that we STILL don't understand and you still haven't described.

Please: set some expectations. If not in-game, then at least in a bullet point list which describes the factors that a player might need to take into account before they decide to click on any button in your game which enacts an irreversible choice of strategic consequence.