How to expand your Power Grid in Arknights: Endfield beta – Destructoid
Your base’s Power Grid is like your overall influence over the overworld in Arknights: Endfield, and expanding it is a key component of the overall game. You need an ever-increasing Power Grid to even solve some of the game’s overworld puzzles, so here’s how you expand it when needed.
How to increase your Power Grid in Arknights: Endfield
Building up your Power Grid is directly tied to the core base-building aspect of Arknight: Endfield, and you’ll need to use the mechanics to accomplish this goal. The core to Power Grid expansion is the use of Relay Towers. Relay Towers are like powerlines. They connect your grid to anywhere else you’ve placed a Relay Tower, but you need to make sure they are all connected together to formulate your grid. This is very easy to do, but since Arknights: Endfield is rather complex at times, I’ll go ahead and walk you through the process.
How to place Relay Towers
First, make sure you have a few Relay Towers in your Backpack. If you don’t have any, you’ll need to make some at any AIC (Main or Sub). They only require a bit of Origiocrust to craft.
Once you have a few, make note of the location you wish to expand your grid to and start placing the Relay Towers from your Backpack. A visual silhouette will appear to inform you of exactly where the tower will be placed.
Once placed, you next need to connect the Relay Tower to your existing grid. If you don’t do this step, no amount of Relay Towers will expand your Power Grid. To do this, click the Start Transmission option.
This will give you a Power Cord that trails behind your active character. It can only extend out to 80 meters, so you’ll need to make sure the Relay Towers you place never exceed this distance. With the Power Cord active, head to a Relay Tower or an AIC Base already in your grid, and interact with it using the Plug Transmission Cable option.
This will connect your new Relay Tower with the rest of your base, effectively expanding your Power Grid. This, naturally, allows you to construct additional structures away from your main base, and power them with pylons.
As a core expansion mechanic in Arknight: Endfield, you can repeat this process as often as you like to expand as far as you want, as long as you have not hit base capacity. Now, if Power Capacity is getting in the way of your expansion efforts, there is a way to increase the capacity maximum.
How to Increase Power Capacity in Arknights: Endfield
Most structures in Arknights: Endfield require Power to function, even if fully built. There is a limit on how much Power can be used at any given time, and if you exceed this limit, your base will basically shut down into a Low Power state. You can build a special structure called a Thermal Bank to overcome this limitation.
Thermal Banks generate power by consuming Fuel, which increases your Power Capacity. However, Fuel is not free, and must be inserted into the Thermal Bank to function. The best source of Fuel to use is Originum Ore, as it is extremely common and easy to mine in excess.
How to unlock the Thermal Bank in Arknights: Endfield
To start building Thermal Banks in your base, you must first unlock it in the Basic AIC Plan. This is a mechanic that is not unlocked at the start, so if you’re not sure what it is or how to get it, simply progress the Main Quest, and you’ll earn the ability to use it.
The Basic AIC Plan is where you unlock various technologies to build in your base, and the Thermal Bank is one of the said technologies. To unlock it, open the Basic AIC Plan and look for the Power 1 node in the tree.
Unlocking Power 1 gives you access to Thermal Banks, which will allow you to build and place them in your base. However, you’ll also need to use a Basic AIC Index to do so. This particular resource/currency is exclusive to unlocking technology in the tree, and you’ll need a lot of them as you progress.
How to get Basic AIC Index in Arknights: Endfield
As mentioned, you’ll need a lot of Basic AIC Index to upgrade your base as you progress through Arknights: Endfield. Fortunately, they aren’t difficult to obtain. To get them, you must interact with VR Simulator devices in your area. These look like yellow foam tube men and appear as a broken oval on your world map.
Simply interact with the VR Simulator to get a Basic AIC Index. You get only one Basic AIC Index per VR Simulator device, but each map tends to have a healthy share of them scattered around it. If you cannot interact with VR Simulator, all you need to do is progress the Main Story until you gain access to the Basic AIC Plan mechanic.
