Upgrading buildings generates free construction parts.

v0.4.11

Build a building. Upgrade it, demolish it. You now, for free, generated a bunch of construction parts a tier higher with zero expense other than unity. Can farm >1000 parts in minutes with no building cost.

Build a concrete mixer: 40 T3 Construction Parts

Upgrade it: 20 T4 Construction Parts, 40 T2 Electronics.

Demolish it: 38 T4 Construction Parts

Congratulations you just profited 18 T4 Construction without having to actually build them.

This allows you to completely bypass the T2 and T3 maintenance requirements for building T4 construction parts. Dump a couple hundred unity into upgrading Cement mixers and you've just farmed yourself 1000 T4 construction parts in a couple of minutes.

No need to run robo-builders:

No need to run a datacenter:

Suggestion: Make building demolitions refund the materials that were actually used to build them.

Could just be a simple flag. "was this building upgraded? if yes, use alternate material refund schedule".

P.S: This also applies to other building upgrade chains.

This is something I have noticed and have used to quickly get parts I needed for a project. Though, you don't make them for free. You pay Unity and you lose 3% of your building costs if you have the two Deconstruction Efficiencies researched.

You still use the same amount of parts to make the next level of parts, you just use Unity to make them now instead of waiting.

For a basic example, Build a small storage. It costs 30x Mk1 Construction Parts. Upgrade it to a Lvl 2 storage. The upgrade costs 15x Mk2 Construction Parts and 15x Mk1 Electronics. When you demolish the new Mk2 Storage, you receive 29x Mk2 Construction Parts. The 15x Electronics you used in the upgrade combined with the 30x Mk1 Construction Parts, to make 15x Mk2 Construction Parts as that is the recipe to make Mk2 Construction Parts. Meaning, you effectively paid the 30x Mk2 Construction Parts needed to make a Lvl 2 Storage, only in a few steps and for some Unity and a slight loss of efficiency to have it now and not wait for a building to make it.