Introduction to Corporations

The Corporation mechanic places you in the role of a CEO of a new corporation. You will expand into one (or more) industries, set up complex supply chains to produce high-quality materials and products; hire employees to do research, produce materials and products, managers to oversee and improve the productivity of other workers and a sales team to sell your materials and products to produce a profit.

You will have the opportunity to take up to four rounds of investment in order to rapidly grow your corporation from a tiny startup in your parents garage into a world-spanning capitalist behemoth. Eventually you will take your corporation public and it's shares will be publicly traded on the stock market, and you will issue dividends to your stockholders (including yourself!) to turn your corporate profits into personal wealth.

Overview and Terminology

Corporations have a lot of moving parts, so let's start with an overview of the structure and the general terminology.

Your corporation can have many different divisions. Each division can have multiple offices, one in each city. Each office has a pool of employees which can be assigned to various roles, and a warehouse for storing input materials, output materials, boost materials and products.

Don't Panic

Running a corporation is complex and you'll need to make a lot of irreversible choices before getting feedback about whether those choices were good or bad. It is easy to paint yourself into a corner and use up all your corporate funds creating a corporation that can barely turn a profit. That may sound scary, but DON'T PANIC! No matter what happens, you can always sell your CEO position to some other sucker and start over with a new corporation! This option is available through a button "Sell CEO position" just above the "Unlocks" section in the main tab of your corporation.

How to Read this Guide

If you're completely new to corporations start with the UI and mechanics walkthrough in Chapter 1. Once you're familiar with the basic mechanics you can start thinking about automating parts of your corporation which we'll discuss in Chapter 2.

Acknowledgements

This guide wouldn't be possible without the reference manual written by CatLover I learned a ton from reading it. They have also poured a ton of time and effort into improving the Corporation mechanic and Bitburner as a whole.

Manual Corporation Walkthrough

To get a feel for how your Corporation works it can be helpful to interact with it through the game's user interface first. There are tons of informative tool-tips on different UI elements explaining how everything works.

Creating your (First) Corporation

Head to the City Hall in Sector-12 to create your first corporation. Since it's your first corporation you are most likely in Bitnode 3. If you are you should choose to start with seed money from the government. Earning the seed money to self-fund your corporation under the harsh restrictions of Bitnode 3 takes an excessively long time.

Let's start by taking a look at the UI and what's available after we create the corporation.

The initial Corporation screen gives you an overview of the status of your corporation. Unlike most other mechanics in Bitburner, you can't spend your personal money on Corporation unlocks or upgrades. Instead you can only spend your corporation funds on these things. You always start a corporation with $150 billion.

Right now our Corporation doesn't have any way to make money and it's going to take a lot of investment to start making money. We're probably going to need to get several rounds of investors to raise the money to make our corporation truly profitable. In order to get as much money as possible in each investment round we want to generate as much profit as we possibly can with the funds we get in each round.

In order to maximize our profit we need to produce as many output materials as possible and we need to maximize the quality of our inputs. But that's getting ahead of ourselves. For now, the first step is to create...

Your First Division

In order to start making money we need to expand into an industry to create our first division. Our initial budget of $150 billion might seem like a lot, but it's actually a fairly small budget for how much most things cost in corporations. Because of this we should only expand into one division initially and focus on upgrading it to maximize the quantity and quality of the materials we produce with it.

It is highly recommended that if you are new to the Corporation mechanic you start by creating an Agriculture division first.

To create our Agriculture division click the "Expand" button at the top of the Corporation screen next to the name of your corporation. Choose Agriculture and a name for your new division.

This will create a new agriculture division with one office in Sector-12 and a starting warehouse.

There's a lot of information to take in here but let's start by looking at the Division information in the top left corner. In particular you can see your total "Corp Funds" (which is a pool shared by all your divisions), the Awareness and Popularity which are important stats relevant to how much material or product you can sell, your production multiplier and your research points.

If we mouse over the Production Multiplier we get a helpful tool-tip briefly describing what this important quantity is, and if you click on the question mark icon you can get a more in-depth explanation. The executive summary is that the Production Multiplier directly affects how many materials or products we can produce per cycle.

The most important thing to note is that this Production Multiplier is the sum of the Production Multiplier from each office, but it is a per-division value and it is applied to all offices in your division. The base production multiplier for each office that has a warehouse is 1, so when you have 1 office and it's associated warehouse, your division Production Multiplier is 1. But since the division Production Multiplier is the sum of all office Production Multipliers if we expand to a new city and purchase a warehouse there, our division multiplier will jump to 2 during the next Start phase.

This means the quickest way to increase our division Production Multiplier when starting a new division is to expand to all six cities and purchase a warehouse in each one. Let' do that now.

Putting Everyone to Work

The next thing we want to do is hire some employees. Currently we have space for 3 employees in each office so go ahead and hire 3 employees at every office. Let's also put them to work in "Research & Development" for now to build up some Research Points.

Each industry has their own stock of Research Points. We want to always have a stock of Research Points because having them will increase the quality of the materials/products we create. Eventually, once we've built up enough Research Points we can start to purchase some Research upgrades.

Let's also take a closer look at some of the other numbers in the office section. You'll notice that there are three average employee stats listed.

• Average Employee Morale (Max 100)
• Average Employee Energy (Max 100)
• Average Employee Experience (No Max)

If your employees Morale and Energy are below the maximum value of 100 there's a compounding penalty applied to the base production for that office so it's important to keep those numbers as close to maximum as possible. If both morale and energy are at 90, then there's about a 20% penalty, but if both morale and energy are at 50 then there's a 75% decrease in production.

There are two ways to keep our employees morale and energy at maximum. We can buy tea to increase Energy and we can throw our employees parties to increase their Morale. We can purchase these once each full cycle, so every 10 seconds. Purchasing tea is a flat fee and it increases energy by +2. When throwing a party you can choose how much money to spend per-employee on the party. Spending $10 million per employee will double the current morale, $1 million will increase it by about 10%, $100k will increase it by about 1%.

The other way we can make our employees happy and motivated is by assigning some of them to be interns to boss around. Intern employees also earn experience at 10 times the rate of other employees! Interns are important and they become even more useful when you have more than nine employees and your employees morale and energy starts to decrease every cycle. To counteract this you typically want 1 out of every 9 employees be assigned as interns.

This section is based on this code.

Notice that as you assigned employees to R&D, the display changes from a zero to 0 -> 1. Once the next Start phase comes around in the cycle, this changes to a 1 so we can't instantly change employees from one job to the other, they only switch at the beginning of a cycle.

The Business Cycle

Before we can start producing materials and selling them for a profit we need to talk about the timer bar in the warehouse view. This timer cycles through the same five different phases in the same order. One cycle of all five phases takes ten seconds, two seconds per phase. For the moment we're only concerned with the PURCHASE, PRODUCTION and SELL phases. These phase names are fairly self-explanatory. During the PURCHASE phase material purchase orders are processed and the new materials are stored in our warehouse. During the PRODUCTION phase, input materials are processed into output materials. During the SELL phase any standing sale orders are processed.

Producing Some Materials and Money

Now that we have some employees producing research we can start thinking about producing some materials to sell.

If we look in the Warehouse section we can see the formula for producing materials for the current division. For the agriculture division this looks like:

0.5 * Water + 0.2 * Chemicals = 1 Plants + 1 Food

For right now, the most important thing about this formula is the ratio of the two types of inputs. For agriculture we need 5 water inputs for every 2 chemical inputs.

Let's also talk about employee position distribution we need to produce materials and sell them for a profit. At a minimum we need at least one employee in Operations or Engineering to produce materials and one employee in Business to sell the produced materials. Employees in Operations contribute more to production amount than Engineers do, but Engineers also contribute to the quality of the produced materials so we probably want one of each.

In order to produce materials we first have to buy the appropriate input materials. We can purchase materials in two ways, per second or bulk purchases. Bulk purchases purchase a bunch of materials all at once and they happen immediately regardless of which phase we're in.

Since we have three employees in each office right now, let's assign one employee each to Operations, Engineering and Business.

Now that we've got employees working at production jobs we can create a purchase order to buy the input materials we need. Keep in mind that the purchase order is specified in materials per second. Purchases are only processed once per cycle during the PURCHASE phase and we buy 10 seconds worth of materials during that phase, so the number you enter in the purchase order field will be 1/10th of the amount you actually purchase.

Set up a purchase order for 0.5 water and 0.2 chemicals. To make sure we're not taking up space with materials we can't use, try to set up both purchase orders during the same cycle so neither material is purchased until both material purchase orders set up.

Now we should be purchasing our input materials of Water and Chemicals, and our workers should be turning these into Food and Plants. Now we should set up sell orders for these materials so we don't build up too large of a stockpile.

For now let's quickly set up sell orders to sell maximum quantity we can sell for the market price. This means write the string MAX in the amount field, and the string MP in the price field. Feel free to read the info in the sell dialog box to learn more about how this works.

Now that we're buying inputs, producing outputs and selling them you should be making money! Not very much admittedly, but at least we have money flowing in now.

Optimizing Our Sales and Production

We started with conservative values for the amount of input materials we're buying so we can be sure we're consuming all of them during the PRODUCTION phase. However, even with no production boosting we should be able to increase the amount of materials we buy to produce even more. Try experimenting with buying different quantities of input materials, just remember to keep the water and chemicals in the proper proportion.

We can also try to optimize our sales by increasing the price. If you have a good amount of Research Points stored up you should be producing slightly higher quality outputs than the base quality inputs you are buying from the market. With 2k Research Points and one Engineer I'm producing quality 6.98 Food and Plants with my Agriculture industry. This means we should be able to sell our Plants and Food for slightly above market price and increase the profit we're trying to make. This is slightly more complicated than just setting a very high value though. First, we probably want our sell price to still be related to the market price so we should use a formula. Let's start by changing our sell price in one office to be MP+10. This should improve our profit a little bit.

Chapter 2 - Getting Started Automating

Now that you've gotten some familiarity with the basic structure and mechanics of your corporation you may have noticed that parts of it can be fairly click-intensive to manage by hand.

The solution to this is to start creating scripts to automate the most tedious parts. This immediately presents an issue however, because the Corporation interface functions cost a lot of RAM to use. If you're just starting in Bitnode 3, you can only run one or two corporation functions in a script before your script can't be run on your home computer without upgrading!

Because of this it is helpful to focus our scripts to use as few Corporation APIs as possible.

Ideas for Incremental Automation Scripts

• Employee Morale and Energy Maintainer Script
• Set All Cities Buy and Sell Amounts
• Fill Excess Warehouse Room with Boost Materials
• Manual Production and Sales Optimizer

Employee Morale and Energy Maintainer Script

Simple script to purchase Tea and throw parties every cycle if the morale and energy are significantly below 100%.

Set All Cities Buy and Sell Amounts

Simple command line utility to set the buy amount or sell price and amount for all cities in a division at once.

Fill Excess Warehouse Room with Boost Materials

Simple script with React UI that has a slider to control the percentage of the warehouse to fill with Boost materials.

Use naive iterative algorithm to figure out optimal boost material ratios.

Manual Production and Sales Optimizer

Create a small React UI with sliders to control the quantity of materials purchased and the rate above market price to sell them at.

Progressive Enhancements

• Record the amount sold per-cycle and adjust to automatically produce that amount.
• Predict the amount of outputs we will produce

Glossary

Corporation

Your corporation is an umbrella entity which all your different divisions are nested under. There are also a number of feature unlocks that apply to your entire corporation, and upgrades that affect every office or warehouse in every division.

Unlocks

Divisions

When you expand your corporation into a new industry you create a new division. Each division can have up to six offices, one in each city. Every division has specific stats visible in the interface. They are visible in the same screen as the office information but are not specific to a particular office.

Offices

Each office has employees and a warehouse.

Warehouses

The warehouse for a specific office has a certain amount of storage space, and it can hold materials. The kinds of materials that appear in the UI are limited to the relevant input, output materials or products for that industry, as well as the boost materials that all industries can use.

Employees

Employee stats are tracked as averages. Employees have three stats: morale, energy and experience. You can assign employees to different positions.

• Average Employee Morale: Max 100
• Average Employee Energy: Max 100
• Average Employee Experience: No Max

Positions

There are six different positions you can assign employees to.

• Operations: Increases production quantity
• Engineer: Increases production quality and minor increase to quantity.
• Business: Increases the number of materials/products you can sell per cycle.
• Management: Increases bonus for Operations and Engineer employees
• Research & Development - Generates Research Points, minor increase quality of output materials and products.
• Intern: Increased experience gain and improves average morale and energy for the office.

Corporation Funds

Investors

Materials

There are numerous different types of materials.

Input Materials

Input materials are the materials a division will consume in order to produce output materials or products.

Output Materials

Output materials are produced by your division during the production phase.

Boost Materials

Products

Corporation Phase Cycle

Corporation repeatedly cycles through a sequence of five phases. A full cycle takes 10 seconds. If you have bonus time accrued this cycle will only take 1 second per cycle.

Every Phase

A lot of values update at the beginning of each phase:

• Employee experience increases
• Production Multiplier is recalculated

Start

Many corporation actions only happen at the beginning of the START phase including:

• Tea and Party increases to employee average stats

Purchase

During the purchase phase all standing purchase orders for input and boost materials are executed.

Production

During the production phase input materials are consumed and output materials or products are produced.

Export

During the export phase, if you have purchased the Export Unlock material export orders between your offices are processed.

Sale

During the sale phase all standing sell orders for output materials and products are executed. Depending on the price you've set to sell at and a variety of other factors you may not be able to sell all the products you've produced in a single sell cycle.