Manufacturing Profitability

There are 35 items in X-COM that can be manufactured, but if all costs are taken into account, only 14 of them can be manufactured for a profit.

You cannot manufacture an item until you have researched it, so you begin the game unable to manufacture any items at all. Depending on your research priorities, there are several early items that can be made for a profit: Motion Scanners, Medi-Kits, Laser Pistols and Laser Rifles. For more on research times and prerequisites, see Research.

Fusion Ball Launchers and Laser Cannons can be researched in the early-mid game, and are the two most profitable items that can be produced in all of X-COM. Refer to the profit tables for a detailed breakdown.

Calculating profitability

To calculate true (net) manufacturing profit, the following must be accounted for:

Manufacturing cost -- the value shown on the manufacturing screen.
Cost of Elerium-115 ($5k each) and Alien Alloys ($6.5k each), if required. Also, cost of UFO Power Source(s) ($500k each) and UFO Navigation ($80k each) for XCOM craft.
Cost of Engineer salaries, at $25k per month per Engineer.
Cost of Workshops ($35k/month) and Living Quarters ($10k/month) sufficient for the number of engineers employed.

These costs are then compared against the Sell price, to determine profitability.

Startup costs

There is a startup cost associated with manufacturing: 50 Engineers cost $2.5 million to hire and require a Workshop ($800,000 to build) and a Living Quarters ($400,000), for a total of $3.7 million. Workshops also require a lead time of 32 days to build. Since you start the game with one Workshop and 10 Engineers, your first Workshop will only cost $2.4 million to fully ramp up (the cost of 40 Engineers and one Living Quarters).

There is also a time and cost factor associated with researching profitable items -- for instance, Heavy Lasers plus Laser Cannons require an average of 880 Scientist days to research (costing about $900,000 in salary). This is in addition to the 450 or so Scientist days required to research Laser Weapons, Laser Pistol, and Laser Rifle.

Workshop space overhead

Each manufacturing project takes up a fixed amount of workshop space, reducing the number of Engineers you can gainfully employ. With multiple workshops, the impact of this overhead is reduced: two workshops are proportionally 5%-7% more profitable than a single workshop would be (depending on the item being produced), and five workshops are as much as 11% more profitable.

Profit tables

The following is a list of selected items that are popular with players attempting to manufacture items for profit. Note that not all these items actually turn a profit, once all costs are factored in.

Monthly profits, based on a one-workshop operation. Figures in thousands (000's) where noted.

Item	Hrs. per unit	Max Engrs.	Unit sell price (000's)	Unit cost (000's)	Spec. costs (000's)	Gross per unit (000's)	Units per month	Labor cost (000's)	Net monthly profit (000's)
Laser Cannon	300	44	211	182	0	29	107.4	1,145	1,968
Fusion Ball Launcher	400	44	281.1	242	6.5	32.6	80.52	1,145	1,480
Tank/Laser Cannon	1200	25	594	500	0	94	15.25	670	763.5
Motion Scanner	220	46	45.6	34	0	11.6	153.1	1,195	580.4
Medi-Kit	420	46	46.5	28	0	18.5	80.17	1,195	288.2
Heavy Plasma	1000	46	171.6	122	6.5	43.1	33.67	1,195	256.3
Laser Rifle	400	47	36.9	20	0	16.9	86.01	1,220	233.6
Laser Pistol	300	48	20	8	0	12	117.1	1,245	160.4
Alien Alloys	100	40	6.5	3	0	3.5	292.8	1,045	-20.2
Personal Armor	800	38	54	22	26	6	34.77	995	-786.4

Legend:

Hrs. per unit are the number of hours needed by one engineer to build a single unit
Max Engrs. equals 50 minus the amount of workshop space taken up by the project
Unit sell price is what the item will sell for on the Sell/Sack screen
Unit cost is what each item costs to produce, on the Production screen
Spec. costs is $6,500 for each Alien Alloy and $5,000 for each Elerium, if any
Gross per unit is its sell price, minus production and special materials costs
Units per month is how many units a fully-staffed workshop can turn out: 732 hours (30.5 days) divided by Engineer hours per unit, times Max Engineers employable
Labor cost is Max Engineers times $25,000 (monthly salary) -- plus $35,000 for Workshop maintenance costs and $10,000 for Living Quarters
Net monthly profit is Gross profit times Units per month minus Labor cost

For a detailed listing of the profitability of all items in X-COM, with figures for 1 to 5 workshops, download MikeTheRed's XCOM_Profit_Tables.pdf. Or for an Excel (editable) spreadsheet, get XCOM_Profits.xls.

Laser Cannons vs. Fusion Ball Launchers

There is an oddity in XCOM which can make the Fusion Ball Launcher (FBL) appear to be the most profitable item. The oddity is that the first FBL you produce does not require an Alien Alloy (and thus, no Alien Alloy requirement appears on the manufacturing screen). If in doubt, watch your Alien Alloy stores while manufacturing. This oddity has caused a fair bit of confusion; some (particularly older docs) say Fusion Ball Launchers are the most profitable.

Without requiring the alloys, the FBL would be about 2% more profitable than the Laser Cannon. However, when the Alien Alloys are taken into account, it falls well behind Laser Cannon. Due to the micromanagement needed to repeatedly restart manufacturing versus the very small gain, few players will build one FBL at a time -- thus, the Laser Cannon is the most profitable item "in real life". Anyway, now you know... and it's your choice. :)

However, the relative cheapness of Alien Alloys (assuming one is successful in tactical missions) may render this a moot point. Every UFO recovered (landed or shot down) yields from 1 to 200 units of Alloys, depending on type of UFO and its condition. This can accumulate quite rapidly, especially if one is raiding Supply Ships for Elerium (141 units of Alloy per ship).

Laser Cannons are also more readily researched than Fusion Ball Launchers. The average research time needed to produce Laser Cannons is 1330 hours (26.6 days for 50 Scientists), whereas Fusion Ball Launchers require 2080 hours (41.6 days). Furthermore, about 1/3 of the time needed for researching Laser Cannons is spent researching Laser Pistols and Rifles, which you are likely to research early on anyway.

Notes, Tips, Tricks, Etc.

The maximum number of engineers you can assign to a project, equals the number of engineer hours it requires. In other words, the game "enforces" that you can only build one item per hour, at most. Example: You can only assign 60 engineers at most to work on a plasma pistol clip, which requires 60 engineer hours. The tables above don't take this into account, but then, small-fry products are usually not made by a large operation, anyway.
You cannot have more than one project of the same type going at the same base. (This otherwise might've been a way "around" the limit of one per hour at most.) However, you can make that thing at some other base.
Excess/wasted Workshop and Living Quarters are only a miniscule part of your costs. Example: A large operation (four workshops) might have 184 engineers instead of the optimal 194 for Laser Cannons (because of an occasional need to drop back and making flying suits, craft, etc. - it's a balance of constantly wasted space versus occasionally wasted engineers). The "wasted" 10 WS and LQ spaces only cost $9k/month ($45k*10/50), which is only 0.11% of the $8.3M/month that the 184 engineers make when producing LCs.
Likewise, profits generally scale linearly according to number of workshops (two full workshops make only a little bit more than twice the profit of one full workshop, etc.). Many projects only require a handful of workspace requirements, and are almost totally linear. However, some projects have a large workspace requirement, such as the Laser Tank (25). With only one workshop, the Laser Tank only makes 39% of the profit that Laser Cannons would, whereas they make 64% of Laser Cannons with five workshops. The real reason they do so poorly with one workshop is much less due to the wasted overhead of workshop and living quarters; it is mainly because you can only assign 25 engineers with one workshop, versus 44 for Laser Cannons.
Those who know XCOM, know that it suffers from integer truncation in a number of places. This could've hurt profitability badly if it occurred there; for example, if an item needs 100 engineer hours but you only assign 99, it might've taken twice as long, and halved your production and profit potential. Fortunately, this is not the case with manufacturing; it does not truncate production time this way.
There is an exploit that lets the sneaky make items for free - but only one at a time.
Another exploit involves transferring staff at the end of the month to avoid salaries. Eliminating salary costs makes Laser Cannons about 50% more profitable to produce.
Factoid 1: The Heavy Plasma Clip is the most unprofitable item to make, due to the facts that it can be quickly made, but requires 3 Elerium. Be careful what you ask for!
Factoid 2: Strange as it may seem, XCOM craft are not the most unprofitable items in the game, even though they are very expensive to make, and you can't sell them. (High cost, zero sales.) This is because craft take a long time to make, whereas other items can be made quickly, but incorporate expensive components. Their extreme costs override the fact that they can actually be sold. :P

Bugs

In UFO: Enemy Unknown (and most likely all the other XCOM and TFTD versions) you can overflow the variable that holds the number of engineers. It is stored in a single byte, along with much of the data in the game, so if you get more than 255 engineers at one base, the number will wrap around. Instead of storing the correct number of engineers, it will divide the number by 256 and store the remainder. If you get exactly 256 engineers your base will have 0. If you want to play the game fairly, make sure there is never more than 255 engineers at a base. If you don't mind exploiting the bug to make lots of money, then read on.

The easiest way to start this is to assign your engineers to build something. Wait until you have enough living quarters, and then buy enough engineers to have exactly 256 (costs $12.8 million for all the engineers, so save up to get them all in 1 month and not pay any salaries). Once the 256 engineers have all arrived, the game will call it 0. You won't need to house them any longer. You won't need to pay their salaries. You'll just need workshop space for them. There is a second bug in UFO: Enemy Unknown where it only makes sure you don't allocate an engineer when you have 0 available engineers. It doesn't stop you if you have a negative number of available engineers. If you have 10 engineers building a Laser Cannon and 0 engineers at the base, you will have -10 engineers available for manufacturing items. THE GAME WILL NOT CARE HOW MANY ENGINEERS YOU ASSIGN AT THIS POINT. Your only limitation is how much workshop space you have. If you build 17 workshops at one base, it can produce a Laser Cannon, a Fusion Ball Launcher, and an Alien Alloy every single hour. Personally, I recommend having most of your bases with the folling: 1 Access Lift (needed), 1 Living Quarters (for soldiers), 1 Hanger (with Avenger), 1 General Stores, 1 Mind Shield, 1 Hyper-Wave Decoder, 1 Psionic Laboratory, and 26 Workshops. You can then manufacture 1 Laser Cannon and almost 1 Tank/Laser Cannon every hour (skip the hanger for 1 every hour). These only require money to build (watch that because if you run out and all production stops, you can't allocate any engineers) and produce large amounts of income.

Manufacturing Profitability

Contents