Wayward is underselling the risks of clusters a little here. If you are going to trade a lot of goods through a single hub, you have to be sure that you can protect that hub from attack. Archives (foundations) are not directly analogous- If an enemy knocks out a foundation while you're AFK, a few worlds will lose a few TLs before you log back in, since it takes a while for planets to regress in TL. On the other hand if you lose a hub that's supplying everything to everything you will have really serious issues on every high-TL planet that the hub supplies since they can't adjust their economies fast enough; you're likely to see resource shortages which can cause deaths and civil wars. That's why Wayward likes to put hundreds of thousands of Gorgos on every hub, which may not be an option for you if you're pursuing a strategy that's not starship-centered.Wayward Device wrote:Trade clusters work by having a trade hub and foundation next to each other and importing/exporting with maximum efficiency. You need luxuries for your TL10 production worlds, so you raise you consumer goods autofacs to TL8 which gives the best ratio of luxuries produced, as a TL10 CGA world need more luxuries so they can export less even with the higher production. You can raise your CGAs to TL 8 in a meshnet, but then you need to start using archives to avoid having 5-15% of a world's production spent on tech improvements and if you are using archives you may as well learn how hubs work and make clusters.
One more quick warning about trade hubs- they don't seem to export trillum if they're being supplied by only one extractor. Connecting a second trillum extractor resolves the problem. I have also seen this happen with luxury goods and jumpship components.