Here's a simple breakdown of the meaning of the numbers of the resource HUD:
(https://snag.gy/uJnL0H.jpg)
It's obvious to me what they mean but that's only because I'm the developer. I know that this needs tweaking, it's on the todo list. :)
In Outpost, I remember that when all of the Tanks were at maximum capacity, the resources would pile up at the Smelter or at the Factory. Then, when those ran out of room, the production facility would go idle, signaling a need for more storage space.
The same thing happens in OutpostHD though there are better indicators of when a structure goes idle. The cycle works like this:
Mines produce ores -- ores are stored internally in a resource pool at the mine. Each turn, a specified amount of those ores are transferred from the mine to the smelters where they're stored locally at at the smelter in an ore resource pool.
Each turn, the smelter pulls a specified amount of ore from its pool which it smelts into refined resources at a given rate (somewhere around half... so 10 ore would produce 5 refined resources). But, it must have enough ore to pull... so if there are only 8 units of ore, it won't pull ore for that turn until it has enough (currently it's set at 20). That's why there are some turns when there seems to be no production from the smelter.
Have you designed the Tanks for storing those items only, putting other manufactured items into the warehouses?
Correct -- storage tanks are only for refined resources, not for products. Warehouses are for products like robots, road materials, clothing, medicine, etc.
I currently have 12 and am nearly at capacity AGAIN. Of course, with 6 mines running and 4 smelters, things are looking really good right now.
Might be over doing it a bit there with that many mines and smelters. :)
Both of my UG labs and the UG Commercial are disabled right now, though. Until the Status Report is made functional, I'm down to guessing why. My resource pool is very high, have plenty of power, good food supply.
Probably a population issue. Structures will go disabled if they don't have enough resources and/or people to operate them.
Build at least one university to ensure you have scientists (no universities means only workers which is generally a bad thing).
If you build too quickly you won't have enough people to operate all your structures. And yeah, it's kind of a guessing game at this point. It's something that I hope to have ironed out in the next couple of releases.
I also seemed to have jumped the gun a bit regarding the smelters as well. Once I had them up and running, I did notice that the far-right column now shows how much finished product is in storage there. So, what are the two middle columns for? In fact, I noticed that the status box for each structure shows the same columns but with nothing displayed. Are these just placeholders for when things get closer to complete?
That window is more of a debugging tool for me. What it shows are the two resources pools that each structure may take advantage of. The 'PRODUCTION' pool and the 'STORAGE' pool. It mostly makes sense with Mine's and Smelters which shows the 'incoming' resources (what's in production) versus what's in 'storage' for that structure. What that means is different depending on the structure.
The takeaway from this is that basically, the Structure Inspector window is purely a debugging tool and isn't very useful to the end user. It will either disappear entirely or be completely redesigned in future releases.
I only have one surface Factory running right now, and the only options from it are the digger, dozer, and miner. Do I need to build another factory in order to get the road materials, even though I don't really need them right now?
This is a result of an unfinished game. The surface factories can only build the three robots (though they're capable of building other things too). I haven't enabled the other products yet because the game doesn't do anything with them yet except store them in warehouses. Future updates will fix this.