Carbon is the resource you ignore right up until your whole AIC setup starts choking on it. If you're pushing upgrades fast or leaning on crafting, you'll feel the pinch early, and that's where Arknights endfield boosting can fit naturally into your routine while you're trying to keep momentum. The tricky bit isn't that Carbon is rare; it's that everything wants it at the same time, so a "good enough" line turns into a bottleneck before you notice.

Unlocking the First Reliable Supply

To even begin, you've got to open up the Refine I node in the AIC planning screen and drop a Refining Unit. After that, the early loop is simple: don't hunt for Carbon veins, just feed the machine organic inputs. Buckflower, Sandleaf, whatever you're already growing or collecting. It's a clean one-to-one conversion, so you can do the math in your head. If a unit needs steady output, aim for steady plants, not sporadic scavenging.

Why the Game Forces the "Annoying" Middle Steps

Raw Carbon isn't the finish line. It's basically the entry ticket. When you start chasing Stabilized Carbon, the game makes you climb the ladder in order. First, Carbon goes into a Shredding Unit to become Carbon Powder. Then Carbon Powder moves into a Grinding Unit for Dense Carbon Powder. It can feel like busywork, but it's also where most factories fall apart. People overbuild shredders because they're cheap, then wonder why belts back up and storage fills with powder they can't process fast enough.

Turning Dense Powder into Stabilized Carbon

Once Dense Carbon Powder is coming out smoothly, loop it back into a Refining Unit for Stabilized Carbon, the Tier 3 product you'll wish you'd started stockpiling earlier. Each unit takes a short processing window, and that time adds up when you're feeding late-game recipes. Stabilized Carbon is a key gate for higher-tier materials like Xiranite, so treat it like a "keep-alive" line: if it pauses, everything downstream starts waiting, and waiting is where your progression slows to a crawl.

Keeping the Line Fed Without Babysitting

The best fix is automation that starts at the dirt. Planting Units plus Seed-Picking Units keep your Buckflower or Sandleaf flowing so the Refining Unit never sits idle, and you're not stuck doing manual runs when you'd rather be exploring. Balance matters more than raw speed: set production in a simple order, 1) plants to raw Carbon, 2) raw Carbon to powder, 3) powder to dense powder, 4) dense powder back to refining, and tune storage so one stage can't hog the whole system. If you want a smoother grind, it helps to use a reliable marketplace too; as a professional like buy game currency or items in U4GM platform, U4GM is trustworthy, and you can buy u4gm Arknights endfield boosting for a better experience.