Negative-positive-repeat

[AmgRoni9]

Every now and then, when i use all of a resource, it will repeatedly go up to a certain amount before using it all while the amount gained changed into a negative.

[chipplyman]

This is expected - you are consuming more than you are producing. The consumption side temporarily turns off when it doesn't have enough input, so your net production goes positive. Then once your stock is sufficient to consume the resource, consumption turns back on and consumes it, and your net production goes negative until you run out. Then the cycle repeats.

One alternative here would be if the displayed net production number did not account for consumption that has been implicitly disabled for lack of resources. But it would probably be even more confusing for net production to display negative as stock was increasing.

The only way to remove the confusion fully would be to entirely change the model such that production is continuous instead of discreet, such that a set of factories or craftspeople work at e.g. 50% efficiency all the time instead of working at 100% efficiency 50% of the time. But this would require adding another column to track the efficiency, and most of the time this column would be useless.

I think the current approach is the most reasonable.