Arknights: Endfield base building — the AIC Factory, and the four ways it quietly stops

By DayOneFix Editorial · August 24, 2026

You went to bed with the factory humming. You wake up, open the depot, and nothing has moved.

Almost none of those mornings are a layout problem. An AIC Factory stops for four reasons, and all four are invisible until you go looking: the power never physically reached, something upstream filled up and jammed the chain behind it, a mining rig is drawing double for no return, or you pulled out a working line before the replacement was down. Layout is the last thing to worry about. Reach and flow are the first.

The base in Arknights: Endfield is the AIC Factory — Automated Industry Complex, Endfield Industries’ automation layer, and the place your gear, explosives, batteries and tactical items come from. Your combat power sits downstream of it. An idle base is not a skipped minigame; it is a gear supply you turned off.

It is a power-line game

The most-watched single-topic base video in Chinese is not a clever layout. It is 萧然Q’s 「四号谷地 矿点/源矿/紫晶矿/蓝铁矿 拉电线全攻略」 — “Valley IV, every ore node, the complete guide to running the cable” — at roughly 5.9 million plays and 77,000 saves. Six million people watched somebody walk a map placing pylons.

A commenter under 中二の笨笨’s 「终末地以外的基建游戏是怎么拉电线的？」 (about 240,000 plays), asking how other factory games handle wiring, put it better than any guide has: the reason the meme that escaped containment is running power lines is that underneath, this isn’t a factory game, it’s a power-line game.

It got funnier from there. 绯想幻天, a working electrician of six years, made a video reviewing Endfield’s wiring the way you’d review a colleague’s job — about 1.45 million plays and 76,000 likes, with a bio line about watching the grid at work and running cable after it. Top comment, 5,500 likes: we need to talk about their transformers, which work without being wired to anything.

And when 苦力怕到此一游 posted a thirty-second joke titled 「终末地电不够了怎么办？」 — “Endfield, out of power, now what?” — it took about 630,000 plays and 43,000 likes, one of the best like-to-view ratios in the whole category. The answer in the video is “generate some, it’s easy.” The answer in the comments is “what are you standing there for, go build a power plant.” Everybody has had this morning.

Here is what is actually happening underneath the joke. Electricity is distributed from the Protocol Automation-Core through Relay Towers and Electric Pylons to connected facilities. Not nearby facilities. Connected ones. A production line nothing reaches produces nothing, and it will not tell you.

”I have no power” is three different problems

Three questions, in this order, because the fix for each is different:

1. Is it being generated? Supply starts on the PAC side and needs its own production, not a passive stat you level up.
2. Is it reaching? Relay Towers and Electric Pylons carry power to connected facilities. Anything off the network is scenery. In Wuling, the Xiranite Relays and Xiranite Pylons from the Hongshan Academy of Sciences “automatically connect to the existing power grid and supply electricity to nearby facilities” once placed — a real regional difference in how you extend the grid, and the reason Wuling wiring feels less punishing than Valley IV wiring.
3. Is it researched? Facilities are unlocked through the AIC Factory Plan research tree, and some nodes carry a prerequisite mission. Unresearched is not underpowered.

Two official details that exist specifically because players kept getting caught:

• Conduits are distance-limited. Version 1.4 changed conduit connection distance to straight-line measurement and raised the limit from 200 metres to 300 metres. Conduits have an inlet and an outlet, and since 1.4 their connection state saves along with the blueprint.
• Teleporting can break a conduit connection. 1.4 added a confirmation prompt for exactly that. If your line died after a fast travel, that was why.

Also from 1.4: facilities placed outside the Sub-PAC areas — “including but not limited to Relay Towers, Electric Pylons, ziplines, and combat facilities” — can be pulled back to the regional depot with the [Stash] button on the map. Before that, kit you left in an old zone was effectively gone until you walked back for it.

One number we are not going to print. Chinese players report their total power sitting unchanged across many account levels and conclude it is level-gated; English creators name a specific early ceiling in video titles. Neither figure appears in anything Hypergryph has published, and the two communities are describing the plateau rather than measuring it. A number you might build a plan around is exactly the kind we refuse to repeat unsourced.

Stop putting the Mk II rig on every node

This is the funniest thing the Chinese community has found, and the most expensive.

小四妖妖灵’s video is titled 「是谁还在用二级矿机挖一级矿？能劝一个是一个」 — roughly “who is still running a tier-two rig on a tier-one node? I’ll talk one of you out of it if it’s the last thing I do.” It has about 850,000 plays. The top comment, at 6,300 likes, is the whole answer, and it is the kind of thing you would never work out by feel:

• Both rig tiers transmit wirelessly. The Mk II is not saving you a belt.
• The Electric Mining Rig Mk II draws double what the basic rig draws.
• Extraction rate is set by the density of the node, not by the rig on it.

So the Mk II on a basic node buys you nothing and doubles the bill. It is not a small leak either: a clip from MR流星飞’s stream — a creator with millions of plays on his own blueprint videos — is literally him puzzling over why a viewer’s power draw was so high, then spotting Mk II rigs parked on basic ore and letting it go.

Label this one honestly: the doubling and the density rule are community measurement, not published mechanics. They matter enough to act on, and two independent creators arrived at the same conclusion, but Hypergryph has not printed either figure. Check your own rigs rather than taking our word or theirs.

Then there is the other direction, which is the best cautionary tale in the whole category. From the same comment thread, 871 likes:

When I worked out my Mk II rig on basic ore was drawing double, I remembered the portable miners don’t need power at all — so I walked the entire map swapping every rig for a portable one, and pulled up all the pylons along the way and took them with me. Next morning I looked at my production line and it was fast asleep.

He fixed the power bill by removing the power.

Water is the other half of this. Version 1.1’s water overhaul brought Hydro Mining Rigs, and the community verdict travelled fast — 莫要轻言旦古 titled it 「该把谷地的矿机全部淘汰了!武陵的水驱矿机耗电更少!」, scrap all your Valley rigs, the Wuling hydro ones use less power (about 115,000 plays), and MR流星飞’s 1.1 water update video ran to about 360,000. There is even a genre of reminder video: 爾e’s 「睡前检查一下你的水驱矿机，不要让它偷懒！」 — check your hydro rigs before bed, don’t let them slack off — at around 200,000 plays. Hydro rigs depend on the water actually arriving, which is the same reach problem in a different pipe.

The clog: two communities, one trash bin

Here is the convergence that convinced us this is a mechanic and not a matter of taste.

In Chinese the word is 爆仓 — a depot or buffer hitting its cap. When an output has nowhere to go, the machine stops, and everything feeding it stops behind it. It is silent, it is upstream of where you notice, and it will take your battery line with it if the battery line shares a depot with something that overflowed. 金乌___ buries the warning in a blueprint description read by nearly a million people: sell the premium injections first, because if that stock overflows it jams the battery line outright.

MR流星飞’s 1.4 build — about 2.95 million plays, 90,000 likes — is sold on the phrase 「爆仓自动处理」, overflow handled automatically, and the description explains that one whole outpost in the build exists as a bin that destroys surplus so nothing can ever back up.

Now the English side, independently. KyoStinV published a companion blueprint at about 137,000 views called, in his own words, the Overflow Protector or Trash Bin: it “will protect your base from Clogging when your items reaches depot limit.” EODGamer’s guide is titled “Factory Always CLOGGING? How To Unclog & Optimize Your Factory.” NITrogen’s is an “Anti-Clog / Overflow System” promising no more factory shutdowns.

Two communities that do not read each other, both independently building a bin whose only job is to throw things away. When that happens, it isn’t a play style — it is the game telling you something. A full buffer is a stopped factory. If your base died overnight and the power grid looks fine, go and find what is sitting at cap.

The blackout that eats itself

The worst failure mode in Endfield is a loop. A player posted it as 「让人想不到的终末地毁号方式」 — the account-ruining method nobody sees coming — at about 158,000 plays: mid-way through copying a base guide, they dismantled the battery production line. The stored batteries drained. And there is no bench-craft and no shop for batteries, so there was no power to restart the line that makes the power.

The comments are three other factory games filing the same incident report — Create, Dyson Sphere Program, Satisfactory — each with their own version of the spiral where the thing that generates the fuel needs the fuel.

The rule that falls out of it is short and it costs nothing: place the replacement before you remove the original. If you are rebuilding for a new blueprint and it says to clear the base first, keep enough charge in hand to cold-start it, and do the power line last.

Why the biggest blueprint channel refuses to publish a max-speed base

梦轩dada’s Valley IV base guide is the most-watched Endfield base video there is, at roughly 8.9 million plays; the Wuling one adds another 5.7 million. So when he posted 「基建作业也有毒攻略？为什么我们没给满速作业？」 — do base blueprints have bad advice too? why didn’t we give you a full-speed one? — around 537,000 people wanted the answer.

His own pinned explanation, at 2,300 likes: the point of publishing an early, a mid, a late and a graduation layout is that each one meets the demands of the moment and hands off cleanly to the next. Drop a finished max-speed line into an account that cannot feed it and you get a build that is short of this and short of that, permanently. The goal, in his words, is the version that requires the least thinking, not the one with the highest theoretical throughput.

The top comment, 3,800 likes, is shorter: don’t worry, wake up to a grid-wide blackout once and you’ll understand why not to run flat out.

That is the single most useful attitude adjustment on this page. Throughput you cannot supply is not throughput. A slower line that never stops beats a faster one that browns out at 4am and is still down when you log in.

The official names, once

Everything above is easier to search once you know what Hypergryph calls it. Four parts, and the fourth is the one that decides your week:

Goods ride the Logistics System. Liquids and gases travel separately, in pipes — 1.4 added a visual showing where the flow currently is between start and endpoint, which quietly tells you that pipe fill is a state you can be sitting and waiting on.

Gas is the newest layer, added to the Wuling AIC in 1.4 along with its AIC Plans: Gas Extraction, Flow Rate Adjustment, Gas Reactor Globe, Gas Dispersal, Gas Reaction, Gas Purification, Fluid-Gas Transmutation, Solid-Gas Transmutation, Gas Storage, and Gas Filling and Separation, “along with the corresponding AIC facilities, simulations, and system blueprints.”

Two things follow from that last clause. The game ships its own blueprints. And no blueprint made before 1.4 can contain a gas facility, because gas facilities did not exist. Version dating is not a formality here.

If you would rather reason about a chain than copy one, there is a first-party tool: Database → Item Files → Production Chain, which gained a zoom control in 1.4 so a whole chain fits on screen.

Valley IV and Wuling: what a blueprint assumes

Two regions matter for building right now. Their official English names are Valley IV and Wuling — the ones Chinese guides call 四号谷地 and 武陵.

• Valley IV is Chapter I’s region.
• Wuling is Chapter II’s, and by 1.4 it covers Yinglung Pass, the North Wuling Exclusion Zone, Wuling City, Marker Stone and the Test Area.
• Since 1.4 there is a permanent activity, [Main Mission Early Unlock: Wuling]: finish Chapter I Process II: Remediation Progress and you can accept Chapter II early. Chapters run concurrently, and “you may return to Valley IV at any time.” Most Wuling enemies scale to your Exploration Level.

And the sentence that decides whether a copied blueprint pastes at all, straight from the official [Homecoming] notes:

“Upon entering Wuling and placing the Protocol Automation-Core, a batch of AIC facilities will be unlocked and provided in advance… These facilities are not yet usable in Valley IV, and can only be used there after you research the corresponding AIC technologies in the Basic AIC Plan.”

A Wuling blueprint is not automatically a Valley IV blueprint. That is a rule, not a bug.

Region progress has its own ceiling too: Regional Development Level is capped, and Hypergryph raises the cap version by version — 1.4 raised Wuling’s, along with the Depot Node cap in the Test Area and the Environment Monitoring cap at Marker Stone.

What 畢業基建 actually means

The four characters on every thumbnail are 畢業基建 — a “graduated” base. Worth being precise about.

It is not an official state. There is no completion flag, no achievement, no published definition. It is a community goal: the base runs unattended and makes everything I need, so I never touch it again. The related phrase you will see in title after title is 摆完挂机 — “place it and go idle” — and that, not efficiency, is what most players actually want out of a factory.

The nearest official yardsticks are the Regional Development Level cap, the AIC Factory Plan tree, and per-facility caps like the Depot Node’s. All three move every version, which is precisely why graduated bases get rebuilt every version too.

Before you paste anyone’s blueprint

Blueprints are a first-party feature, not a community workaround. The official gameplay copy tells you to “follow blueprints or build freely,” the game ships system blueprints, and Hypergryph’s own channel advertises the workflow as copy, paste, box-select, save, share.

Version 1.5, per the [Dreamscape of Wind and Snow] DEV Comm of 22 August 2026, sharpens both ends of it:

• [Continue Placing] — a toggle that keeps you in Construction Status placing facilities, ornamentals or plots back to back, as long as the items are in your Backpack.
• Box selection shows the cap live. Exceed the blueprint saving limit and the screen now displays your current count against the maximum in real time, so you can shrink the selection “without having to reselect.”

That second one is a quiet admission of the most common blueprint failure: you selected more facilities than one blueprint can hold.

Here is the thing nobody warns you about, visible in the blueprint descriptions themselves: these things get hotfixed. MR流星飞’s 1.4 build carries a dated changelog inside its own description — a belt tile added to fix destruction speed on one day, a recipe-lock startup failure patched the next, a copy-logic fix for hidden conduits after that. A code you saved a week ago may be a code its author has since replaced.

So, the checklist that decides whether a layout can work for you at all:

We do not reproduce anyone’s layout here, and that is deliberate. Those Valley IV and Wuling graduation builds with millions of plays are their creators’ labour, placed tile by tile and tuned over hundreds of hours, then patched afterwards for free. Redrawing them in English would be taking the work and leaving the credit. Go and watch theirs. This page is for understanding what you are looking at when you do.

FAQ

Why did my Endfield factory stop overnight? Four usual suspects. Power never reached the facility — electricity goes from the Protocol Automation-Core through Relay Towers and Electric Pylons to connected facilities only. A depot or buffer hit its cap and jammed everything feeding it. A conduit connection broke, which fast travel can do. Or the line is running faster than its inputs can supply, which browns out under load. Check reach and check for anything sitting at cap before you touch the layout.

Should I use the Electric Mining Rig Mk II everywhere? No. Community measurement, widely cross-checked but not published by Hypergryph, is that the Mk II draws double the basic rig while extraction rate is set by the node’s density rather than the rig on it. On a node the basic rig can work, the Mk II is a doubled power bill for nothing. This is the single most-shared base mistake in the Chinese community, at about 850,000 plays on one video alone.

Why do I keep running out of power? Because “not enough power” is three problems in one coat: it isn’t being generated, it isn’t reaching, or the facility isn’t researched in the AIC Factory Plan yet. Check reach first — an unconnected building is not a shortage.

Why did my production line stop after I fast travelled? Teleportation can break a conduit connection. Hypergryph added a confirmation prompt for it in 1.4, which is about as close to official acknowledgement of a common mistake as you get.

How far can conduits reach? Since 1.4, connection distance is measured in a straight line with an upper limit of 300 metres, raised from 200.

What does 爆仓 / clogging mean and how do I stop it? An output that fills its depot stops the machine, and everything feeding that machine stops behind it. Both the Chinese and English communities independently converged on the same answer — a dedicated bin that destroys surplus so nothing can back up. Either build one, or make sure the items most likely to overflow get sold or exchanged first.

Can I use a Wuling blueprint in Valley IV? Not automatically. The official [Homecoming] notes say the AIC facilities granted on entering Wuling “are not yet usable in Valley IV, and can only be used there after you research the corresponding AIC technologies in the Basic AIC Plan.”

What does 畢業基建 (“graduated base”) mean? A community term for a base that runs unattended and produces everything you need. Endfield has no official completion state for a factory. The nearest published yardsticks — Regional Development Level cap, the AIC Factory Plan tree, per-facility caps — all move every version, which is why graduated bases get rebuilt every version.

Why do my blueprints fail to save? There is a limit on how many facilities one blueprint can hold. Version 1.5 adds a live counter during box selection showing your count against the maximum, specifically so you can adjust without starting over.

What changes for base building in 1.5? Per the official [Dreamscape of Wind and Snow] DEV Comm of 22 August 2026: a [Continue Placing] toggle for placing facilities, ornamentals and plots back to back without leaving Construction Status, and the live facility counter during box selection in Batch Select Mode.

Related

• Endfield beginner mistakes: the ones you don’t feel until later
• Endfield 1.5 release date and countdown
• Endfield 1.5 [Dreamscape of Wind and Snow]: what the DEV Comm confirms
• The Liino banner: deadline and verdict
• Endfield codes and how to redeem them

Sources

Official. System definitions and official English names — Automated Industry Complex, Protocol Automation-Core, Logistics System, Power System, Relay Towers, Electric Pylons, Splitters, Depot Bus, Xiranite Relays and Xiranite Pylons — plus the “follow blueprints or build freely” line are read from the official Arknights: Endfield site, its Gameplay and AIC Factory Intro sections and Lore database, and from Hypergryph’s own AIC Factory: Blueprint clip for the copy-paste-box-select workflow. The conduit straight-line change and the 200-to-300-metre limit, the teleport confirmation prompt, remote stashing outside Sub-PAC areas, the gas AIC Mode and its ten AIC Plans, Regional Development Level and Depot Node caps, the Production Chain zoom, the Basic AIC Plan requirement for using Wuling facilities in Valley IV, and the [Main Mission Early Unlock: Wuling] activity are all from the Homecoming Version Update Notes and the Homecoming Core Chapter Version DEV Comm. [Continue Placing] and the live blueprint-cap counter are from the Dreamscape of Wind and Snow Version DEV Comm of 22 August 2026. “Let your industrial capacity power every exploration and battle” is from the Steam store listing, which credits Hypergryph as developer and GRYPHLINE as publisher. Valley IV and Wuling are Hypergryph’s own English names, not our translations. Hypergryph’s version notes do not name the mining rigs; Electric Mining Rig Mk II and Hydro Mining Rig are the in-game English names as they appear in the corresponding AIC Plan node and quest coverage from English-language creators.

Community, named and counted. Play counts as measured 24 August 2026 and rounded. Power routing as the central problem: 萧然Q, 「四号谷地 矿点/源矿/紫晶矿/蓝铁矿 拉电线全攻略」 (BV1pdBfBeEDm, ~5.92M plays, 77.2K saves); 中二の笨笨, 「终末地以外的基建游戏是怎么拉电线的？拉电线的意义？」 (BV18SzUBDEW2, ~244K plays) and its top comment; 绯想幻天, 「6年老电工娱乐吐槽终末地拉电线」 (BV1ohzvBxEe8, ~1.45M plays, 76K likes); 苦力怕到此一游, 「终末地电不够了怎么办？」 (BV1THBcBrEwk, ~633K plays, 43.7K likes). The mining-rig mistake: 小四妖妖灵, 「是谁还在用二级矿机挖一级矿?能劝一个是一个」 (BV1jAzuBSEGe, ~849K plays) — the doubled draw, the wireless-transmission equivalence and the node-density rule come from its top comment at 6.3K likes, and the portable-miner over-correction from the reply at 871 likes; independently, a stream clip of MR流星飞 tracing a viewer’s excessive draw to Mk II rigs on basic ore (BV19ccDzmEN5). Hydro rigs: 莫要轻言旦古 (BV12FckzjEQB, ~115K plays), MR流星飞’s 1.1 water update (BV1riwbzMEnv, ~363K plays), 爾e (BV17kcCzqExz, ~204K plays). Overflow and clogging, cross-verified across two communities that do not read each other: MR流星飞’s 1.4 build (BV1dLKG6GEgA, ~2.95M plays, 89.9K likes) and its description of a dedicated destruction outpost; 金乌___’s blueprint description warning that overflowing injections jam the battery line (BV1yfczzuEaA); on the English side, KyoStinV’s Overflow Protector / Trash Bin (~137K views), EODGamer’s unclogging guide (~27K views) and NITrogen’s anti-clog system. The battery death spiral: look希望 (BV1GtS4BXEvZ, ~158K plays) and its comment thread comparing the loop to Create, Dyson Sphere Program and Satisfactory. Against max throughput: 梦轩dada, 「基建作业也有毒攻略？为什么我们没给满速作业？」 (BV1s66gBTEyT, ~537K plays), his own pinned reply at 2.3K likes and the top comment at 3.8K likes; his Valley IV base guide (BV1cTzPBkEmL, ~8.94M plays) and Wuling guide (BV1iDz3BxEYS, ~5.70M plays) are the most-watched base videos in the category. Blueprint hotfixing is read directly from the dated changelog inside MR流星飞’s 1.4 description.

Boundaries. Everything attributed to the community above is labelled as such in the body wherever it could change what you build. Two figures are deliberately absent: the total-power plateau reported in Chinese threads and named in English video titles, which appears in no Hypergryph publication, and any absolute wattage for the mining rigs — we give the community’s ratio and tell you to verify it yourself. No blueprint layout, blueprint code, facility placement, coordinate or build order from any creator is reproduced on this page. All sources checked 24 August 2026.