A few rules of thumb to grow your datacenter without going broke — and a troubleshooting table for when things go wrong. 🧠
| Choice | 👍 Pros | 👎 Cons |
|---|---|---|
| Overcommitting servers | Sign more customers with the same hardware | Saturation risk at peak hours |
| Cheap electricity supplier | Lower bills | More, longer outages: you need solid backup |
| Big, dense hardware | Cheaper per unit of capacity | Big upfront cost, more customers hit by one failure |
| Negotiating a higher price | More income per customer | The prospect may walk away |
| Urgent migrations | Fast | Saturates the links on the way |
| Fibre instead of DAC | Long reach, flexible layout | Expensive, optics fail a bit more often |
| Symptom | Likely cause |
|---|---|
| Units degraded right after signing | Server off, not cabled, or saturated |
| The whole network is down | No router, router unpowered, or no Internet subscription |
| The cable refuses to plug in | Different socket families, cable too long for its type (try another type with C), or not enough money |
| An order is "Blocked" | The delivery zone is full: put boxes down elsewhere or install them |
| Can't remove a device | Cords or cables still plugged in, or a failure to repair first |
| A whole rack suddenly switched off | Power overload: the grid shed it. Add transformers |
| Servers slowed down | A room is overheating: add cooling, spread the heat, unplug what's useless |
| Balance melting away | Unused powered equipment, too few customers, SLA penalties |
| A migration never progresses | No network path between the two servers |
| Warning about the loan | Not enough cash at Victor's review |
Yes: the Esc menu freezes everything. Opening the console or the shop does not pause time.
No — untick Tutorial when creating a game to play in sandbox mode: everything is unlocked (except what needs research), there's no loan and no Victor. But the tutorial is highly recommended for your first game.
Only in Story Mode, if you miss three loan repayments in a row — and not even then in Relaxed mode. Otherwise, a negative balance just blocks your purchases and repairs until it recovers.
Esc › Save for a named save. Autosave (Settings › General) saves regularly, when going back to the menu and when quitting, and keeps the last three.
That's expected: balancing changes between versions, and the wiki only gives indicative values. The in-game Help (F1) always matches your version.