Timber, cement, steel and hardware are the four construction resources. They are not items in your inventory. A truck, a crate pile or a warehouse holds them as a quantity, measured in cubic metres.
The four resources differ in bulk and price. Timber takes the most space per unit and costs the least. Hardware takes the least space per unit and costs the most.
| Resource | Cubic metres per unit | Weight per unit | Base price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Timber | 0.1 | 25 kg | $40 |
| Cement | 0.05 | 50 kg | $60 |
| Steel | 0.04 | 90 kg | $120 |
| Hardware | 0.02 | 10 kg | $200 |
Base price is the starting point only. A port's live price moves over the campaign, and difficulty scales both the price level and how far it swings. See the table on Difficulty Settings.
Ports sell and buy these resources. Production Sites on the island make them. Trucks carry them. Crate piles hold them on the ground. Warehouses store them. Some structures need them before they can go up.
The port screen carries a Resources tab on both the Import and the Export side, next to the item tabs described on the Importing page.
A resource price at a port is live, not fixed like a shop price. It changes at most once every six hours of game time, and stays inside a band around its base price. The details panel shows whether the current price sits below, near, or above that base.
Pressure from the occupying faction pushes prices up. Resistance control of a port pushes them down. Selling a resource back to a port pays half the going price.
Both import and export run through the cargo store of the truck you are sitting in, not your item storage. A resource is shown disabled with a reason when you have no truck under you, or no room left in it.
Trucks are the only vehicles with a cargo store. A car, an armoured carrier and a helicopter show no cargo action at all.
An ordinary truck holds fifteen cubic metres. The transport versions of the M923A1 and the Ural hold twenty. The Mobile FOB truck holds eight, because it already carries a base.
Sitting in a truck puts a panel on screen with what is aboard and how much space remains. A load that will not fit is refused as a whole cart, with the space left over named in the message. Nothing is ever part-loaded.
Opening a cargo store shows a Take side and a Put side, and a list of nearby places the load could go, nearest first. In Take mode, one of those destinations is the ground.
Sending a load to the ground drops a crate pile in front of you. Dropping a second load near an existing pile adds to it instead of starting a new one.
A pile has no capacity limit. It shows on the map with its contents and its volume, opens like any other cargo store, and disappears once it is empty.
Most structures still cost money alone and appear the moment you place them. The Garage, the Helipad, the Warehouse and the Barracks also want resources, and placing one of those raises a construction site instead.
The money is taken at that moment. The site then stands until the resources reach it. A construction site carries two actions: Requirements shows what it still needs against what is nearby, and Build finishes it, drawing on crate piles within thirty metres and emptying the nearest one first.
Only crate piles count toward a site. A load still aboard a truck, or sitting in a warehouse, does not count. Nothing is refunded if you remove a site, and difficulty scales how much a structure asks for.
A warehouse building holds resources beside the items it already stores, on an action of its own, with no limit on either side. See Storage for how a warehouse holds items, and Real Estate for buying, renting and building one.