Starbud Station's Processing Pipeline: From Raw Flower to Finished Product

The moment we locked in the core concept for Starbud Station — a dispensary simulator, not just a grow sim — the processing pipeline became one of the most important systems in the game. If all you can do is grow flower and sell it, the economic loop is shallow. Players need production decisions: what do I make, what machines do I invest in, how do I maximize margins from the same harvest?

The pipeline gives you those decisions. Raw flower is the raw material. Everything else is what you choose to do with it.

The Four Output Types

From harvested flower, players can produce four processed product categories beyond selling raw. Each requires different equipment, different ingredients, and produces products that appeal to different customer archetypes:

Pre-Rolls are the mass-market option. A Rolling Machine turns trimmed flower into cigarettes quickly — 5 minutes per batch, mid-tier price, appeals to casual and budget customers. The entry point for most players early on.

Edibles require a Kitchen station and food ingredients (butter, flour, gelatin, fruit juice — sourced from traders). Processing takes 30 minutes per batch but produces multiple units from a single input. Brownies, gummies, infused honey — each is a separate recipe with its own ingredient ratios, yield count, and quality modifier. Health-conscious customers and premium buyers gravitate here.

Concentrates are the high-end, high-risk tier. The Extraction Lab costs $8,000, requires solvents, and takes 45 minutes per batch. Yield is low — roughly 0.1 to 0.2 oz of wax or oil from a full oz of input — but the price ceiling is far higher than any other product. Connoisseurs and heavy users specifically seek concentrates. They also require a license to sell legally, which ties into the Heat system.

Topicals are the wellness niche. Salves, lotions, and infused carrier oils target health-conscious and accessibility-focused customer types. Not the highest margins but filling a customer segment that nothing else captures.

Quality Propagation

One of the design decisions we're most committed to is that input quality actually matters all the way through the chain. A lazy approach would be to set fixed quality per product type. We went the other direction: output quality is a function of input quality, recipe quality modifier, and equipment maintenance level.

// Output quality calculation
float CalculateOutputQuality(
    const FProductRecipe& Recipe,
    float InputQuality,
    const FName& EquipmentID) const
{
    float EquipmentMod = GetEquipmentQualityModifier(EquipmentID);
    return FMath::Clamp(
        InputQuality * Recipe.QualityModifier * EquipmentMod,
        0.f, 100.f
    );
}

What this means in practice: a player who invests in high-quality genetics, maintains their grow conditions, and keeps their machines serviced will produce consistently better products than one who cuts corners. And better products mean better prices and more satisfied customers — which feeds directly into the reputation system.

Recipes and Discovery

Players start with two or three basic recipes per product type. New recipes unlock through several routes: traders sell them, NPC mentors teach them at reputation milestones, and rare experimentation events can trigger unexpected discoveries. The Beekeeper NPC, for example, unlocks Infused Honey — a premium bulk product with a $20/oz price point that isn't available any other way.

Each recipe is defined in a FProductRecipe struct — ingredient list, required equipment type, processing time, quality modifier, yield count, and unlock conditions. The AProcessingPipelineManager owns all recipe catalog and production job state, runs the timers, and broadcasts completion delegates that inventory, UI, and the analytics tracker all bind to.

Regulatory Tension

Not all products are equal under the law. Pre-rolls and raw flower are baseline legal. Edibles, concentrates, and topicals all require explicit licenses — one-time building upgrades that cost $1,500 to $3,000. Players can produce unlicensed products and sell them, but doing so generates Heat. Getting caught by an inspector while running unlicensed concentrates is a bad day.

This creates a genuine risk/reward decision that changes as the shop levels up. Early on, the license costs are significant. Players have to decide whether to operate legally from day one, or run unlicensed and take the Heat risk while reinvesting the savings into equipment and stock.

What's Coming

The processing pipeline is in active design phase. Implementation is sequenced with the inventory system rewrite and the machine placement framework. Once the core pipeline is running, we'll be layering in the recipe discovery events, the equipment upgrade paths, and eventually the automation tier — workers and conveyor systems that can handle routine production jobs without the player's direct input.

More detail on that when we get there. For now, the design is solid and we're confident in how it integrates with the rest of the systems.