The dust swirled around the base camp as the last generator sputtered and died. The monitors flickered, displaying critical failure warnings across the board—the power grid had collapsed. Without a functioning power grid in Arknights Endfield, progress grinds to a halt, and your carefully constructed base becomes little more than an expensive paperweight.
Expanding your Power Grid is how you exert influence over the game world, and a constantly growing grid is necessary to tackle the overworld challenges. The tutorial does a serviceable job of introducing the concept, but this guide will help you avoid crippling power shortages.
Power Grid Expansion: Laying the Foundation
Think of city planning. No metropolis can exist without utilities—power, water, transit—so too with Arknights Endfield. Building up your Power Grid is directly linked to base-building. The most important tool for Power Grid expansion is the Relay Tower.
Relay Towers are powerlines that connect your grid to new locations, so you need to ensure that they are connected to formulate your grid. While the process itself is straightforward, the game’s complexity can be a bit overwhelming at times, so let’s break it down.
How to Place Relay Towers
Begin by ensuring you have a few Relay Towers in your Backpack. If empty, visit any AIC (Main or Sub) to craft some. They only require a bit of Origiocrust.
With Relay Towers in hand, identify the area where you want to extend your grid. When placing a Relay Tower from your Backpack, a silhouette will guide you.
After placement, you must connect the Relay Tower to your existing grid. Without this, the towers are useless. Select the Start Transmission option.
This activates a Power Cord that extends from your character. With a maximum reach of 80 meters, ensure your Relay Towers are within this range. Bring the Power Cord to a Relay Tower or an AIC Base already in your grid, and use the Plug Transmission Cable option to interact with it.
This connects the new Relay Tower, growing your Power Grid. This enables you to construct more structures away from your main base and power them with pylons.
This is a repeating process, so expand as often as you wish. If Power Capacity is hindering your efforts, there is a way to increase the maximum.
Boosting Power Capacity: Avoiding the Brownout
Think of a city struggling with peak-hour energy consumption, streetlights dimming and factories grinding to a halt. Most structures in Arknights Endfield consume Power, even when fully built. There is a cap on how much Power is available. Exceed the limit, and your base enters a low-power mode. A Thermal Bank circumvents this limitation.
Thermal Banks use Fuel to generate power, thereby raising your Power Capacity. Fuel isn’t free, however, so you must feed the Thermal Bank to keep it running. Originum Ore works best; it’s common and easy to mine.
How to Increase Power Grid Coverage Area?
In the real world, power companies use increasingly high-voltage lines to cover greater distances. In Arknights Endfield, you expand coverage by expanding the reach of individual relay towers.
Thermal Bank Access: Unlocking the Potential
Before building Thermal Banks, they need to be unlocked in the Basic AIC Plan. If you haven’t used this before, you must progress the Main Quest.
The Basic AIC Plan is where you unlock different base technologies, including Thermal Banks. Open the Basic AIC Plan and find the Power 1 node.
Power 1 gives you Thermal Banks, but requires a Basic AIC Index. This resource is used exclusively for technology, and you’ll need a steady supply.
Acquiring Basic AIC Index: Scavenging the Wasteland
As you progress, you will need a lot of Basic AIC Index. Fortunately, they are not difficult to find. You get them by interacting with VR Simulator devices—they look like yellow foam tube men. On your map, they appear as a broken oval.
Each VR Simulator grants one Basic AIC Index, and maps usually have plenty. If you cannot interact with the VR Simulator, continue the Main Story until you unlock the Basic AIC Plan. How will base-building strategies evolve as Arknights Endfield introduces more environmental challenges?