GAMING
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Open any crafting task in SEED and the game tells you something most players read straight past. There are three times on the card, not one, and the biggest number is the one that matters least.
Set up a crafting task and look above the numbers:
Process Time combines the Seedling's active work with the machine's automated processing.
Then three figures. Biomass from a single Lumber at a chemistry station reads Work Time 16m, Processing Time 5m, Total Time 21m.
Those are not alternatives. They are two phases of one job, and they add. Your Seedling works the machine for sixteen minutes, then the machine finishes the last five on its own. After Work Time elapses, your Seedling walks away and starts whatever is next in its queue. The machine keeps going without it.
Which means Total Time is a description of when the output appears. It is not a bill. The bill is Work Time, because that is the only part billed to a Seedling's day - and a Seedling's day is the one genuinely scarce thing in a settlement.
Most recipes have no machine phase at all. Of the 730 recipes in the game's data that carry a time, 634 are pure Work Time - the Seedling does the whole job start to finish, and Total Time and Work Time are the same number.
The other 96 split into two phases, and across those the Seedling's share is a median of 21%. Four fifths of the clock, on average, is the machine working alone.
At the far end sit the extractors, where a Seedling's involvement is around one percent: eighteen minutes to set an extraction going, then two to three days of machine time nobody attends. That is not a slow recipe. It is a cheap one, wearing a big number.
Here is where reading the wrong number costs you properly, and it happens on an item every settlement needs.
SEED has two ways to make bandages, and in the item list they carry the same name.
Identical Work Time. Four times the output. Every instinct says take the first one.
Now price the Fabric, because Fabric is not something you pick up. Work back up the textile chain, all of it at Tailoring level zero:
One Fabric costs roughly 119 minutes of a Seedling standing at a loom. Two of them, plus the eight-minute bandage step, is about 246 minutes for 24 bandages. That is a little over ten minutes of Seedling time per bandage.
The raw-Flaxa recipe is eight minutes for six. One minute twenty per bandage.
The advanced-looking route costs nearly eight times more of the only resource you cannot make more of. Both cards show 8m. Nothing on either screen tells you this.
And there is a second reason to take the raw-Flaxa recipe early: retting and weaving both happen at a weaving loom, which is Engineering Lv 10. Until you have one you cannot make Fabric at all, so the expensive bandage is not merely worse - it is not available. When it does become available, it is still worse.
Everything above assumes you can choose. Often you cannot, and that is the part a recipe comparison hides.
Machines sit on an Engineering ladder, and the good recipe is frequently on a rung you will not reach for weeks. Three tiers, roughly:
So read the sections below as two different things: what to do with the machines you have, and what the ladder is actually worth climbing for.
Iron rods, and this is the one to change this evening. Both recipes exist early enough to matter, and the cheap machine wins.
Two minutes quicker on the card. A third of the output, for double the ingots, on a machine that costs an order of magnitude more to build. The metalworking bench is not the beginner's version of the lathe for this job - it is simply better at it, and it stays better.
That is the shape worth looking for: a first-week machine that quietly beats its expensive replacement at one specific recipe.
These two you probably cannot do yet. They are here because they are the reason to push Engineering rather than settle.
Seeds - the payoff applies to every crop in the game. Wheat, corn, tomato, pumpkin, herbs, flaxa, saplings, all on identical numbers.
The separator is what you will have, and for a long time it is the only thing you will have. It is not a mistake - it is the whole seed economy of an early settlement. But the growbox is two and a half times better per Seedling-minute, on every crop, permanently, and that is a real answer to "what is Engineering Lv 30 for".
Wood planks, where the longer number is the better deal.
The table saw's card shows a longer Total Time, and it is twice as good, because those extra sixteen minutes are the machine's, and the machine is not on your payroll. Worth building - but worth knowing you are buying throughput, not speed.
Three questions, in this order.
Processing Time is free. Spend the other one carefully - and spend your Engineering levels on the machines that pay it back.
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