CONTROL NEXUS & DIJIANG SHIP GUIDE

The Control Nexus is the single most important upgrade track on the OMV Dijiang, and it is also the one most new Endministrators leave half-finished. Every other facility on the ship — the MFG Cabins that mint free weapon and operator EXP, the Growth Chamber that grows your promotion materials, the Reception Room that prints daily credits — has a level cap that is directly tied to your current Nexus tier. If you stop upgrading the Nexus at level 2, the rest of the Dijiang is permanently stuck at the level 2 ceiling no matter how many Aerospace Materials you stockpile.

This guide walks the full Nexus progression from the moment Authority Level 15 unlocks the Dijiang to the level 5 endgame loadout where every cabin is running parallel production. Each section preserves the exact upgrade costs, facility caps, operator base-skill bonuses, and Recycling Station locations from the patch 1.2 era — the same data the established operator roster and build planners rely on. The numbers, the operator bonuses, and the regional station counts have all been verified in-game.

If you are coming into this fresh, the takeaway is straightforward. Push Authority 15 hard, finish Maintenance Progress, and start the Dijiang Upgrade and Maintenance quest chain the moment it appears in your task tab. The free EXP your MFG Cabins generate while you sleep compounds into one of the largest power gains in the entire game, and every day spent at a lower Nexus tier is EXP that is permanently lost. For the first-week roadmap that sits underneath this guide, work through the new-player progression and then come back here once you board the Dijiang.

What this guide does not cover: pre-Dijiang resource grinds, individual operator builds, or the wider outpost economy on Valley IV and Wuling. Those have dedicated pages elsewhere on the site — the Outpost Guide handles outpost production, and the character database handles per-operator builds. Here, every paragraph is about the ship, the cabins, and the operators you assign to them.

Quick Answer

The Control Nexus is the central management terminal on the OMV Dijiang ship, unlocked at Authority Level 15 after the Maintenance Progress main mission. Its level (1 through 5) caps every other facility on the ship — the MFG Cabin slots that produce passive weapon and operator EXP, the Growth Chamber that cultivates promotion materials, and the Reception Room that runs social rewards. Upgrades require Aerospace Materials from Recycling Stations, one Algorithm Expansion Chip per tier from the Dijiang Upgrade and Maintenance quest line, and T-Creds.

Across the five tiers you unlock the Growth Chamber at level 2, a second MFG Cabin at level 3, MFG cap 3 and Reception cap 2 at level 4, and Growth Chamber cap 3 plus Reception cap 3 at level 5. The biggest single jump is level 2 because it gates the Growth Chamber entirely. Assign operators with matching Manufacturing Base Skills for production bonuses, rotate before mood hits zero, and farm Recycling Stations daily — they reset at 5:00 AM and are the only source of Aerospace Materials in the entire game.

What the Control Nexus Actually Does

The Control Nexus is the central management terminal aboard the OMV Dijiang, the Originium-powered vessel in geostationary orbit above Talos-II. As the Endministrator, you use the Nexus to oversee every Dijiang facility, assign operators to production roles, and drive the ship's upgrade progression. The terminal itself sits on the Bridge, separate from the living quarters in the Central Ring and the production cabins in the Working Sector. Every time you log in, the Control Nexus is the screen you open to check what completed overnight and what needs reassignment.

The Dijiang is the headquarters of Endfield Industries and the only orbital vehicle on Talos-II. It was built after the Aethergate collapsed, using rare and non-renewable resources that can never be sourced again — which is the in-fiction reason no second ship is ever coming. Most operators and staff live aboard the vessel, which is why your Reception Room is also the social hub for friend visits, and why operator mood depletes when they work the production cabins for too long without rest. The ship has three primary zones: the Central Ring is living quarters where operators rest and recover mood, the Bridge holds the Control Nexus terminal, and the Working Sector houses the MFG Cabins, Growth Chamber, and Reception Room.

The reason the Nexus level matters more than any individual facility level is the cap rule. The Control Nexus's level caps every other facility's maximum level. You cannot raise any cabin beyond what the Nexus allows, which means a level 2 Nexus with maxed cabins is still capped at level 2 cabin output. That is why every Dijiang priority list — including the farming prioritisation guide — puts Control Nexus upgrades above every other ship-side investment.

Unlocking the Control Nexus

The Dijiang becomes accessible partway through the main story rather than at the start. To reach it you need to hit Authority Level 15 through main-story progression, node tasks, and Protocol Spaces, then complete the Maintenance Progress mission in Chapter 1 - Progress 2, and finally board the OMV Dijiang via the prompted story sequence. Xaihi gives you a guided tour of the ship and walks you through the Control Nexus interface, after which the Central Dashboard becomes part of your daily routine.

The reason to push this unlock as fast as possible is the MFG Cabin compounding. Manufacturing Cabin production costs zero Sanity and runs whether you are logged in or not, which means every day without an active cabin is free EXP you can never recover. Players who delay Authority 15 by even a week tend to end up noticeably behind on operator and weapon levels compared to players who rushed it, simply because the cabins were idle while they were levelling other tracks. The same logic applies to the Protocol Spaces grind that helps you reach Authority 15 in the first place.

Once you have boarded, the Control Nexus starts at level 1 by default and the first upgrade is gated behind a starter Algorithm Expansion Chip from the opening quest of the Dijiang Upgrade and Maintenance chain. You can begin farming Recycling Stations the moment you set foot on the ship — there is no separate unlock for them. Stockpiling Aerospace Materials in parallel with chasing your first Algorithm Chip means you can hit level 2 the same day the chip drops.

Upgrade Levels & Costs

Each Control Nexus upgrade has the same three-resource recipe: Aerospace Materials from Recycling Stations, an Algorithm Expansion Chip from the Dijiang Upgrade and Maintenance quest chain, and T-Creds. Algorithm Chips are the primary bottleneck because they only drop from specific main-mission rewards — one chip per quest, no exceptions, no farming alternative. The Aerospace Material requirement scales fast across the five tiers, but it is the kind of bottleneck you can attack with daily station runs. T-Creds are almost never the limiter for players doing standard mission progression.

The full material breakdown across the four upgrade jumps is below. Note that Aerospace Material II only enters the recipe at level 3, which is exactly when the daily Wuling Recycling Stations become essential — the Valley IV stations alone cannot supply tier-II material in the quantities the higher upgrades demand.

Each tier also opens specific facility caps, and that is what actually motivates the upgrade path. Level 2 is by far the most impactful single tier because it unlocks the Growth Chamber and raises the assignment limit to three, which together transform what the Dijiang produces per day. Level 3 doubles your MFG output by adding a second cabin in the Multi-Purpose Section, level 4 widens the cap on both MFG and Reception, and level 5 closes out the Growth Chamber and Reception caps at three. The unlocks table below mirrors the in-game upgrade preview screen.

If you have to pick a single rush target, make it level 2. The Growth Chamber is the only repeatable source of fungal growths, crystalline growths, and rare minerals you need for operator promotion and skill enhancement, so every day without a Growth Chamber is also a day where your promotion stockpile is not building. Farm Recycling Stations the moment you board the Dijiang and upgrade as soon as you have the eight Aerospace Material I and your first Algorithm Chip.

Facility Breakdown

The Dijiang has three upgradeable facility types — MFG Cabin, Growth Chamber, and Reception Room — all located in the Working Sector. Each facility's maximum level is capped by your Control Nexus level, which is the reason every other priority on the ship sits below Nexus upgrades. The sub-sections below cover what each cabin produces, how it scales, and the operating considerations that determine your daily routine.

MFG Cabin (Manufacturing Cabin)

The MFG Cabin is your primary source of passive EXP items, available immediately the moment you board the Dijiang. A second cabin unlocks at Control Nexus Level 3 via the Multi-Purpose Section, and production costs zero Sanity — there is never a reason to leave these idle. The three products it can run are Combat Records for operator EXP, Arms INSP Kits for weapon EXP, and Cognitive Carriers for miscellaneous operator upgrades.

The MFG Load stat determines your production queue size, and higher cabin levels raise the MFG Load cap. That means each Nexus tier that lifts the cabin cap is also indirectly increasing your daily throughput. Focus production on whichever EXP type your roster actually needs — weapon EXP tends to be the bigger bottleneck in mid-game because every promotion ladder demands fresh weapon levels, while operator EXP catches up faster from main-story rewards alone. Players running the meta picks from the operator tier list almost always run weapon EXP in one cabin and operator EXP in the second once both cabins are unlocked.

Growth Chamber

The Growth Chamber is unlocked at Control Nexus Level 2, after completing Dijiang Upgrade and Maintenance II and reaching Exploration Level 3. It cultivates rare materials that are otherwise difficult to farm in the open world, which is why a missing Growth Chamber is the single biggest reason early-game players stall on promotions. The three product categories are fungal growths for operator promotion, crystalline growths for skill enhancement, and rare minerals for weapon advancement.

The cultivation loop runs in five steps. First, you collect rare growths and minerals from the open world during exploration. Second, you extract seeds or cores from those specimens at the Growth Chamber, which consumes the original material. Third, you plant the seeds into available Growth Slots. Fourth, you wait — the timer is real time, not synced to Sanity or Authority, which is why the chamber rewards consistent daily login over burst sessions. Fifth, you harvest the upgraded materials when the timer completes. The most punishing mistake here is extracting seeds before saving a specimen for an upcoming promotion, because extraction permanently destroys the source material. Always check your roster for an imminent Elite 1 or Elite 2 promotion before queuing extractions, especially on the rarer minerals.

Because the Growth Chamber runs on real-time timers, always keep something growing — even low-tier materials are better than empty slots. Make harvest-and-replant part of the same daily check you do for Recycling Stations and MFG Cabin reassignment.

Reception Room

The Reception Room is the social hub of the Dijiang. It lets you interact with visiting players, exchange clues for credit rewards, and showcase your operators, and its level cap is tied to Control Nexus Level 4 (cap 2) and Level 5 (cap 3). The three primary activities are Clue Exchange — collecting and trading clues with friends for credit rewards, with completed sets awarding bonus payouts — Friend Visits, which let you travel to other players' ships via the TP Point so that both the host and visitor earn rewards, and Operator Display, which is the visible showcase for visitors.

Most players underuse the Reception Room because the per-visit reward looks small, but the compound payout over a month is in the thousands of credits and arrives for almost zero effort. Add a single friend visit and a clue trade to your daily routine and the credit budget for the build planning side of the game gets noticeably easier.

Operator Assignments & Mood

Every Dijiang facility benefits from assigned operators, but the bonus is conditional on the operator having a matching Manufacturing Base Skill. Those base skills unlock through operator promotion at Levels 40, 60, and 80 — which means the operators you have already promoted for combat are usually the same ones who become base-skill anchors. The full operator-by-operator bonus table is below; this is the master reference you check whenever you swap a team in or out of a cabin.

Operator mood is the limiter on every assignment above. Operators assigned to facilities gradually deplete mood while working, and when mood hits zero they automatically leave to rest in the Central Ring, halting their production bonuses until they recover. The single biggest mood mistake is waiting until an operator burns out to swap them — by then you have already lost hours of bonus production. Rotate operators proactively before mood drops, and keep backup operators ready so each cabin never goes a full cycle without a buff.

The seven Clue specialists below collapse the Reception Room's targeted-hunt assignments into a single quick lookup. If you are missing one specific clue type for a set, swap the matching specialist into the Reception Room and the rate-up will close the gap inside a few cycles.

The Battery Strategy (Control Nexus)

The Control Nexus is your most important room because it dictates how often you have to swap operators out of every other cabin. Its Mood Regen aura applies ship-wide, so a strong Nexus team extends the work life of operators in Manufacturing, Growth, and Reception simultaneously. The gold standard is +16% Mood Regen, which means slotting Lifeng, Da Pan, Snowshine, or Fluorite as your primary anchors. When those operators are tired, rotate in the +12% tier — Avywenna, Perlica, Alesh, Estella, or Catcher — so the regen aura never disappears. The single hardest rule here is: never leave the Nexus empty, even a low-level regen buff extends every other operator's work window by hours.

Manufacturing: The Pure XP Build

In Manufacturing, you almost always want to focus on either Operator EXP or Weapon EXP in a given cabin rather than mixing them, because the EXP bonuses stack additively and only apply to the relevant product type. A pure Operator EXP cabin stacks Laevatain (+30%), Ember (+30%), and Zhuang Fangyi (+30%) as the core, with Wulfgard (+20%) or Xaihi (+20%) as the flex slot, for a total bonus in the +80% to +110% range. Laevatain and Zhuang Fangyi both also reduce Mood Drop by 18%, making them excellent anchors that keep the cabin running unattended. A pure Weapon EXP cabin runs Pogranichnik (+30%), Gilberta (+30%), and Perlica (+30%) for +90% production efficiency — the single highest stack available, and self-sustaining because Gilberta and Pogranichnik both cut Mood Drop.

Growth Chamber: Resource Matching

The Growth Chamber is unique because each operator's bonus only applies to one specific material type, which means you have to swap the team whenever you change crops. The reference table below shows which operators stack on each Growth Chamber output and the maximum bonus you can hit by combining them.

Yvonne, Antal, and Catcher each offer -18% Mood Drop on the Growth side, so even when you are growing minerals instead of fungi it can be worth swapping one mineral lead for Yvonne to keep the room running longer. Tangtang also provides -18% Mood Drop, which makes her an obvious anchor for extended Vitros growing sessions. The trade-off is always production speed versus sustainability — for long offline stretches, sustainability wins, because a paused cabin produces zero.

Reception Room: Speed vs Hunting

The Reception Room has two viable modes. Mode A is Fast Discovery, where you stack Ardelia (+30%), Estella (+30%), or Rossi (+30%) for raw Clue Efficiency — combined with their Mood Drop reduction, the cabin can stay seated for a long stretch while generating clues sixty percent faster than base. Mode B is Target Hunting, which you use when you only need one specific clue to complete a set: swap one of the speed operators for the matching specialist from the table above (for example, slot Ember in place of Estella if you are missing only Clue 4) and the rate-up does the rest.

The Stay Forever Efficiency Math

To keep a cabin running the maximum possible time without intervention, you stack Mood Drop Reduction operators with strong Control Nexus Mood Regen. The Eternal Manufacturing Cabin example combines Pogranichnik (-18% Mood Drop), Gilberta (-18% Mood Drop), and Snowshine (-14% Mood Drop) inside the cabin while the Nexus runs +16% Mood Regen ship-wide. That stack makes operators lose mood so slowly that they can often work for two to three days straight before needing a break, which is exactly what you want during weekly login patterns. The Xaihi and Perlica flex deserves its own callout: Perlica can buff your Nexus (+12% Regen) or your Manufacturing (+30% Weapon EXP), so use her in Manufacturing only when you already have enough regen coverage in the Nexus from operators like Lifeng or Da Pan.

Recycling Stations

Recycling Stations are the only source of Aerospace Materials in the entire game. They cannot be crafted, dropped from enemies, or obtained through any other method, which makes consistent daily collection non-negotiable for any player chasing higher Control Nexus tiers. Stations are identified by an owl-like creature wearing a yellow box perched on top, they reset daily at 5:00 AM server time, and they can be upgraded with Stock Bills to increase yields and unlock Aerospace Material II drops. Upgrading stations also boosts your Regional Development Level, which is a side benefit that pays out across the outpost economy.

There are fifteen stations spread across Valley IV and Wuling, broken down by area below. Valley IV has the bulk of the stations and the easier early-game traversal, while Wuling is essential later because it is the only region whose stations can yield Aerospace Material II in volume for Level 3+ Nexus upgrades.

Upgrade priority within the network is straightforward: hit Valley IV Hub stations first because they sit closest to fast-travel points and have the best time-to-material ratio, then push the Wuling stations once you need Aerospace Material II for Level 3+ Control Nexus upgrades. For the Stock Bill economy that pays for those upgrades, see the Outpost Guide — it covers the regional production loops that feed the Stock Bill stockpile.

Social Features

The Dijiang has several social features that provide daily rewards for almost no effort, and the players who skip them quietly fall behind on the credit budget that the rest of the build economy depends on. Friend Ship Visits let you travel to other players' Dijiang ships via the Reception Room TP Point, and while visiting you can provide Production Assists to their facility cabins for temporary manufacturing speed boosts. Both the host and the visitor earn credits from each interaction, so it is genuinely a positive-sum action rather than a one-sided favour.

Clue Exchange complements that loop. You collect clues from Reception Room activities and trade them with friends, with completed clue sets awarding bonus credit payouts. The trick is to assign Estella, Ardelia, or Rossi to the Reception Room for a +20% to +30% Clue collection bonus, which compounds with the daily exchanges to keep your clue board moving fast. Credits earned this way flow into the Credit Store, and over the course of a month the compound value is in the thousands of credits for under a minute of daily effort. The Stock Redistribution Guide covers more passive income strategies that pair well with this loop.

Beyond the main facilities, the Dijiang also houses the Operator Contact Terminal — where you increase operator affinity through gifts and conversation — Tactical Training, which is combat practice via Lil' Dodge for rewards, and the Protocol Exchange, where you trade Protocol Exchange Certificates from Outpost Orders. None of those are part of the core daily routine, but each one is worth a weekly visit because they all output materials that intersect with the cabin economy you have already built.

Common Mistakes

The single most expensive mistake is delaying Control Nexus upgrades. The Nexus gates every other facility, so a delayed Nexus means no Growth Chamber access and limited MFG Cabin capacity — and every day at a lower tier is permanently lost passive EXP. Prioritise the Dijiang Upgrade and Maintenance quests the moment they appear in your mission tab, even if it means deprioritising side content you would otherwise want to finish.

The second mistake is letting operator mood hit zero. At zero mood, operators stop working entirely and produce nothing until they recover, which is a far worse outcome than swapping them out a few hours early. Rotate operators preemptively rather than reactively, and keep at least one backup operator per facility ready to take the seat the moment the primary lead's mood gets low.

The third mistake is ignoring Recycling Stations. Skipping even a few days creates a noticeable Aerospace Material deficit, and because those materials gate every Dijiang upgrade there is no alternative source to recover from a missed week. Add station runs to your daily routine alongside Sanity spending and the deficit never appears.

The fourth mistake is leaving MFG Cabins idle. Production costs zero Sanity, which means an idle cabin is pure opportunity cost — even suboptimal production beats nothing. Check the cabins whenever you log in and reassign any completed runs immediately.

The fifth mistake is extracting seeds without saving materials. Extraction in the Growth Chamber consumes the source material permanently, so before you extract a rare mineral or fungus, check whether you actually need that specimen for an imminent promotion or skill upgrade. Losing a rare mineral to careless extraction is one of those mistakes you only make once because of how much it stings.

The sixth mistake is skipping friend visits. The per-visit reward is small but the compound value over a month is several thousand credits for under a minute of effort per day. Even one visit per day is worth the time investment.

The seventh mistake is upgrading facilities evenly instead of prioritising. Spreading upgrade materials across all facilities simultaneously slows your overall progression because each cabin needs critical mass before its bonuses pay out. The correct order is Control Nexus first (it gates everything), then Growth Chamber (promotion materials are the biggest mid-game bottleneck), then MFG Cabins, then Reception Room.

Quick Reference Checklist

The checklist below summarises the Dijiang progression into four phases. Tick items off as you clear them — the persistence is per-browser, so refreshing the page does not reset your progress. Use this as the daily-action reference once you have absorbed the rest of the guide; everything in the checklist maps back to specific sections above.

Frequently Asked Questions

That is the complete Control Nexus and Dijiang ship playbook — five upgrade tiers, three production cabins, one master operator-assignment table, and the daily Recycling Station loop that funds it all. Once your Nexus is sitting at level 5 with both MFG Cabins, all three Growth Chamber slots, and the maxed Reception Room running in parallel, the natural next steps are the Outpost Guide for the surface-side production economy and the operator tier list for picking the next promotion targets to keep the cabin teams sharp. For broader build planning that ties operators to weapons and gear, the build hub is the page to bookmark.