Alien Alloys
General Information
Alien craft are constructed from special alloys with unique properties. They are extremely light and durable, and can be moulded by electro-magnetic methods. This material can be reproduced and used in many kinds of manufacturing processes.
This item appears in UFO: Enemy Unknown. For the Terror from the Deep equivalent, refer to Aqua Plastics.
Additional Information
Alien Alloys require 100 man hours to build, and $3,000. You can also obtain them from Alien Bases and UFOs. They can be sold for $6,500.
How Alien Alloys Are Calculated
The total amount of alloys you can get is based off the number of objects/walls with the MCD alien alloy flag set divided by 10 for UFOs. For example, let's take a look at the Small Scout. If you add up all the tiles with this flag, it comes to 13 (see picture to the right). Divide that by 10 and drop the decimal and there's your 1 unit. If this divisor were not in place, you would literally recover thousands of units for the larger UFO's. In the case of an Alien Base, the amount of alloys you recover is the total number of tiles with the MCD flag set to this type divided by 150. So even though an alien base is much larger than a UFO, the amount of alloys you can recover is less.
Tips & Tricks
- This stuff is the scrap-metal resource of X-COM. Even a moderately successful commander should have heaps after recovering a few crashed UFOs, so don't bother making any. Concentrate more on turning it into Personal Armor.
- When you accumulate a lot from missions, don't hesitate to sell chunks of it off. It's a little more convenient to sell them off in big lumps, rather than a bit at a time.