Welcome to the warehouse floor! Logistics is a department tasked with the acquisition, organization, and distribution of station resources. Through grit, gumption, and the power of commerce, Logistics ensures that all the other departments are bountiful and well equipped for anything.
Duties
Every station needs a lot of stuff to function, so your job as a Logistics member is to handle that stuff! The purview of the department can be broadly split into three categories: Materials, the station budget, and using that budget for acquisitions.
Materials
All of the techfabs, lathes, and other machinery on the station responsible for providing the crew with supplies don't just make the stuff out of thin air like magic! They need materials like glass and steel plates to sustain themselves, and these will gradually wear thin over the course of a shift. The Science department is especially material-hungry, as the advanced technologies they produce often need exotic metals to be made. Your department also comes equipped with an autolathe capable of creating a large suite of items, which members of the station might approach you about if they don't have access to one themselves.
This is the main purview of your salvage operations, which acquire materials by mining asteroids and scrapping wrecks. Both of these can be done from the vicinity around the station with use of the salvage magnet, but quite often you'll want to leave the station in search of greater finds. This can be done through salvage expeditions, a trip to Lavaland if you're working a shift at Byoin, landing on the Surface if you're working on Glacier, or exploring the assorted debris floating around in space!
Station Budget
Spesos are the result of the Syndicate's long-fought battle to establish a common form of currency between its members. They allocate all of their stations 7000 spesos at the start of each shift, and give them an additional 100 spesos at every 50-second interval. These are your main resource for trading with other Syndicate members, so gathering them through a shift can be useful.
Commerce & Bounties
The main way to get money is to sell things. By visiting the Automated Trade Station (ATS) with a pile of goods, you can sell those goods to off-station groups and take the profits for the budget. You can sell anything and everything you can put in the selling area; the Syndicate is vast enough in scope and esoteric enough in function that finding a buyer is never an issue, though some items might have a value of zero! Logistics employees should be on the lookout for rare and valuable goods that the station may not have need of to ensure enough of a budget remains to be able to order goods when needed.
You can also check the bounty computer to see a list of various orders requested by other interested parties. By printing these bounties out, putting them on a crate, and bringing them to the ATS, you'll receive a hefty extra payout for the station budget! Be sure to scan the crate after depositing the requested items and attaching the bounty label to ensure the contents are valid to turn in.
In order to reach the ATS, though, you'll need to haul your goods onto the cargo shuttle (after retrieving it using the cargo shuttle console in your department) and pilot it there. For more info on handling shuttles, see their dedicated page!
The final method one can employ to raise station funds is through the mail teleporter located in your department. This will spawn a shipment for a randomly selected crew member every five minutes, and your job as logistics is to make sure it gets to its recipient! Doing so successfully will grant a modest amount of money to the station budget, while failing to do so in a timely manner will incur a financial penalty.
The spawn rate for mail can be fairly difficult to keep up with, unless you're a Courier, in which case it's your full-time job. If your department is having trouble making deliveries on time due to lack of staff or lack of spare time, you can always turn the mail teleporter off to pause incoming shipments.
Mail will include one of a variety of different item bundles, ranging from wearables to drinks to occasionally much stranger things. Usually the contents of mail will lack any practical use, though sometimes mail will have something handy inside; characters working certain jobs like Scientists or Medical Doctors can even sometimes be given specific items geared towards their work, like epipens or research disks!
Occasionally, a station might receive priority mail, which has a more stringent timeframe for delivery. On starcup, priority mail is exclusively sent via admin intervention, and will thus have special contents, possibly related to the events of the ongoing round!
Acquisitions
The cargo request console is where you can access an expansive catalog of things you can purchase using the station budget. This includes standard supplies like lights and electric cables, specialty tools like pet carriers, and a lot of fun gadgets and collectibles.
Orders are submitted through the request console, and can then be approved by any logistics staff. This means you do have the ability to approve your own orders, but be sure to wield discretion with this power! Your commanding officers aren't likely to be pleased if they find out you've been frivolously blowing the station budget on exotic instruments.
Once approved (which also sends a notification through the supply radio channel; another reason to be careful of making purchases without telling anyone!) orders will arrive at the Automated Trade Station, the very same place you sell things from! Pilot the shuttle over, pick up your goods, and bring them back to the station to deliver to the intended recipient or otherwise do with as you see fit. Note that certain restricted gear like weapons will come delivered in crates that require appropriate access to open, to try and prevent greedy logistics staff from accumulating hoards of restricted goods.
The full list of items you can order from the request console are as follows:
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Resources
This is an overview of the items, equipment, and tools usually accessible to all Logistics staff on almost all maps. Some of these will have links in their headers to the pages of the items in question, which you can click on for more technical details on how they work!
Machines
Cargo Request Console
The beating heart of your department. Contained within is the full catalogue of items available for shipment, and request forms with fields available for a name (which defaults to yours, but can actually be anything you want) and reason for the request. These requests are then accessible from any request console on the station, and can be accepted by any authorized Logistics staff.
Cargo Shuttle Console
Your station-bound access to the cargo shuttle used to transport goods to the ATS. Useful for if the shuttle is stranded somewhere in space, which it usually is at the start of a shift. For more information, see Shuttles.
Cargo Bounty Console
Displays the bounties currently available to the Logistics crew, and features a built-in printers for the labels so you can attach them to your prepared crate. Note that you can only skip as many bounties as you've completed; you largely have to work with what you're given!
Autolathe
(Temporarily not found on Glacier and Byoin.) Creates all kinds of items, and requires sheets of materials to make them. For a full list of the items you can make with this, check out its page!
Recycler
Salvage missions typically result in finding a lot of useless junk items, but they can all be fed through the recycler to be turned into usable materials! You can also throw whatever other garbage you find throughout the station in here too.
Mail Teleporter
Receives a delivery for a randomly chosen staff member every five minutes. Deliveries can take the form of either letters, which can be stashed inside of containers, or big parcels, which must be carried in both hands. You can turn off the mail teleporter using its context menu, which pauses all incoming deliveries.
Ripley APLU
(Found on Omega, Loop, and Packed.) Short for "Ripley Autonomous Power Loading Unit," this chunky mech suit can be installed with a hydraulic jack, allowing it to pick up and carry up to ten large items—lockers, tanks, and the like—for bulk transportation. Some stations will start with one, but if you aren't working on any of them and are in need of some heavy-duty equipment, the Roboticist has the tools to make one themselves!
Salvage Magnet
Sometimes found near the salvage equipment area, but sometimes located outside the airlocks depending on your station. Clicking on it brings up a menu that allows you to choose from a list of available magnet targets, and gives you a vague idea of what to expect from them. Choosing one will spawn the object in the vicinity of the station.
Mass Scanner Console
This is usually located in the vicinity of the salvage magnet, because it's how you locate the debris after you pull it in! It can also be used to locate other random bits of space debris floating around your station, which can serve as additional targets.
Mining Shuttle Console
These consoles will bring you to a special map designed for long-term mining operations; in Glacier's case you visit the planet's Surface, and in the case of all other stations you take a trip to the volcanic area affectionately named "Lavaland" by generations of crew. Both locations have outposts that act as home bases and can serve as useful hideouts for non-mining business in a pinch. Check out their respective pages for more on what to expect!
Salvage Expeditions Console
(Not found on Glacier or Byoin.) Similar in function to the salvage magnet, this console provides you with a set of what are essentially mini-dungeons for salvaging. Once you pick one, the console will provide you with a coordinate disk that you're meant to insert into the console of the cargo shuttle to unlock the expedition target as an FTL target—it can't be accessed by any other means.
Ore Processor
Once you're done with your mining trip, all of your raw ores can be deposited here to be turned into workable sheets! An upgraded version, the industrial ore processor, can be built by the Science team to produce more materials during the refining process.
Vendors
Salvage Vendor
[table go here]
Gas Tank Dispenser
(Not found on Glacier; the atmosphere is perfectly breathable there!) [table go here]
LogiDrobe
[table go here]
CourierDrobe
(Temporarily only found on Glacier and Byoin.) [table go here]
Salvage Specialist's Equipment Locker
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Logistics Wardrobe
(Only found on Glacier and Loop) [table go here]
Others
Ore Box
(Not found on Packed and Saltern.) Large amounts of ore can be stuffed into this box, making it very useful for particularly intensive mining trips.
Paperwork Supplies
Every Logistics department comes equipped with assorted pens, folders, and stacks of paper. You're probably the most conducive department to handing people forms and paperwork, so make the most of it!
Random Crates
At the start of each shift, a random assortment of crates will spawn within the logistics department. Some of these will be empty, with randomly chosen styles as determined by EmptyCrateSpawner, but others will be selected from LowValueCrateTable. These are likely to be more materials, but could be any other number of potentially useful things!
Loose Materials
Most stations will have an assortment of loose materials ready to be inserted into the autolathe. They are currently distributed as follows:
- All standard maps except Packed and Omega have 30 sheets each of steel, glass, and plastic available.
- Loop has an additional 60 sheets of steel, 30 sheets of glass, and 30 sheets of plasteel.
- Packed just has 30 metal rods.
- Omega doesn't have any outside of whatever you might gain from the random starting crates.
Other Departments
Engineering
While they have their own well-stocked supply of basic materials like steel or glass at the start of a shift, engineering is likely to come to you seeking more if things like meteors or explosive accidents have punched enough holes into the station. They also might approach you with requests in service of other construction efforts, like shuttle building or creating new structures.
Medical
Even though the chemistry lab usually ensures a degree of self-sufficiency from the medbay that won't necessitate your department's intervention, sometimes there's either not enough staff or too many ongoing disasters. You can provide resupplies of base chemicals as well as medkits and other healing tools, which may also be essential if the medbay can't be reached.
Science
Will often be your primary beneficiaries throughout a shift. Making advanced tech requires many materials—often rather unusual ones not found on the station itself—and you're the only people with tools designed to acquire them.
Security
There's a wide array of weapons, armor, and other equipment relevant to security available through the request console. If a zombie outbreak, hostile contact with nuclear operatives, or a disaster of similar scale is present or imminent, and the armory is either unavailable or insufficient to deal with the threat, security may come to you seeking more gear. In dire circumstances, salvage specialists can also make for potent combatants with their equipment, and may be enlisted to help with certain threats.
You are also a very ripe target for corporate sabotage. Not only can the request console supply someone with nefarious purposes all kinds of tools, but you have ample access to combat equipment and spacefaring gear by way of your salvagers. The security department will have ample reason to keep their eye on you, for all the good or bad things that might mean for you.
Service
They likely won't need you for anything over the course of a typical shift, but you have access to restocks on crucial resources like drinks for the bar, ingredients for the kitchen, cleaning supplies for the janitor, or seeds for botany. Many bounties will also ask for items these jobs can produce, so feel free to ask if they want to be assigned some tasks!
You may also receive requests from crew members for personal reasons: Someone looking for materials to do some redecorating around the station, a musician wanting new instruments for performing, a clown seeking props for a comedic routine, and many others. Feel free to be proactive in offering certain things, too; everybody loves a gift from logistics, and you have the power to facilitate all kinds of fun situations and prompts!