Station management tips (spoilers)
Hey guys, so here are a few things I've learned about running a production station that could help you save some time. First off, don't spend all your money trying to get production up and running right away! It is a slow burn and you will need more than you think to start earning credits.

- To get started, I recommend running at least 2 miners and a trader. Feel free to setup auto-mine with the miners, but I recommend manually controlling the trader. Pilots do gain experience, so its important to start running your trader as soon as possible and early traders are pretty bad at maximizing their profits. Provide him with a fighter or two as escort depending on the status of your galaxy. A M-class transport can net you more than 100K per trade run. Aim for higher cost items like microchips with good spread between the buy/ask. In my game, the range is about 1300 ask and to 1600 buy. That 300 split is your profit per unit. Doing everything manually is great to Start because you can chain the purchase and subsequent sale to see your total profit for that finished trade run.

- The quest station includes enough resources to build a dock and a pier. Hire a builder in the station planner and queue up the production for the dock and pier. To hire a builder, move yourself, a sat, or ships under your control over to a major station like trade, shipyard, or wharf. Ideally, do so in your same system. Now you can zoom out and on the select a builder menu and hire one for 50k. The alerts at the bottom of the build menu should all have gone away and you an now proceed with the build. It should happen within 1 hour real-time.

- Set a station manager. To do so, land one of your ships on the dock at your station. Open comms with that ship's captain and ask him to change positions. Select the station and set his role as station manger.

- Gather labor. At the start of the game, you won't have the resources or logistics to manage biological workers, so you will need to rely on drones. To get drones, provide funding to your manager in the station's manage funds tab. Give him about 250k to start. Now go to the logical station menu and queue up several of each drone type under the drone tab, with greater focus on cargo. Everything is handled automatically over an hour real-time.

- Once you've saved up about a million credits, you should have enough to move on to the next phase of your station building.

- The next item doesn't really matter much since everything is interconnected and you will need to build a few things to get up and running. But I started with storage. There are 4 types: gas, liquid, solids, and container (5 if you include the "build" storage). You start with access only to the container storage BP, which is not enough for any kind of production as it does not hold "raw" material like ore. But, it is still necessary to hold finished goods.

- Select the storage building in your build planner and place it on your station. You will need to once again hire a builder.

- This time, when you plan the building, you will notice an alert stating that you are missing resources. Open up the Manage buy offers panel and scroll down until you see the estimated price vs. available money for construction. You'll need to slide the add money to the pool by sliding it over until it exceeds the estimated price to buy all goods. Go over by about 10% to avoid delays. These funds are drawn from your personal wallet.

- After creating your container storage, you should think about which production direction to take and make that be the deciding factor for which raw material storage BP you should purchase. You can purchase the blueprint from a faction rep once you reach +10. Repeat the building process.

- Now save up for for your first production building, this one will be more expensive than the storage ones, so save up another million and a half for the blueprint (I went with Water production first) and a million and a half for the building materials. Queue up production.

- Once the production building, appropriate storage modules, labor, and station manager are in place, you should finally have everything in place to automate the process. Check your "Upkeep Missions" and see if there's anything missing. At this point it should ask you to do three things: provide a miner (for the raw resource that matches the storage that you created), a trader (ideally he's level 3 now), and some more credits for your station manager to use toward production. Fulfill these three things and you should see your miners automatically taken over by the manager.

- The trader will likely not come online if there isn't a demand for the products. So feel free to put him back to work until production has piled up. Go back and occasionally hand the trader over to the manager to see if he can be used.

- Leave the prices at auto if you are unsure about anything, but feel free to tinker with them in the logical menu to balance stock with earnings.

Good luck!