8 Pro Tips to Supercharge Your Energy Income in Screeps

8 Pro Tips to Supercharge Your Energy Income in Screeps

Energy is the lifeblood of your Screeps empire. It fuels every action, from spawning creeps and building structures to defending your territory and upgrading your Controller. Hitting an energy income ceiling is one of the most common roadblocks players face. If you feel like your growth has stalled, it’s time to optimize your economy.

This guide covers 8 essential tips, from fundamental principles to advanced strategies, to help you dramatically boost your energy income.

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1. Specialize with Static Miners and Haulers

One of the first and most impactful changes you can make is to stop using general-purpose worker creeps. A single creep with WORK, CARRY, and MOVE parts is inherently inefficient. When it’s mining, its CARRY parts are idle. When it’s hauling, its WORK parts are useless. You’re paying for parts that aren’t being used half the time.

The solution is to specialize your creeps into two distinct roles:

• Static Miners: These creeps are designed with WORK parts to harvest source and MOVE parts to get into position. They sit directly on an energy source and do nothing but mine continuously. Some players put one ‘CARRY’ part on them to let them repair its own container.
• Haulers: These are logistics creeps, built with CARRY and MOVE parts. Their only job is to pick up the energy dropped by miners and transport it.

This division of labor is the foundation of a scalable economy.

2. Expand with Remote Mining

Once you’ve optimized harvesting in your home room, you’ll quickly hit a hard cap. A standard room has at most two energy sources, limiting your income to 20 energy per tick. To grow beyond this, you must look to near, neutral rooms.

Remote mining—sending your miners and haulers to harvest sources in nearby rooms—is the single most effective way to boost your early-game energy income. More sources harvested means more energy for your empire.

3. Build Infrastructure: Containers and Roads

To support your specialized creeps, you need infrastructure. Containers and roads are non-negotiable for an efficient operation.

First, build a container next to each energy source. Your static miner can drop energy directly into it, which prevents the energy from decaying on the ground and creates a large buffer for your haulers to draw from.

Next, build roads connecting your sources to your storage. Roads make the fatigue generated by movement by half. This is a critical mechanic, as it allows you to build more efficient haulers. On a road, a creep only needs one MOVE part for every two CARRY parts (2:1) to move effectively, compared to the 1:1 ratio required on plain. This translates into massive savings across all three major resources: energy, spawn time, and CPU.

4. Optimize Your Logistics: Don’t Over-spawn Haulers

A common mistake is to think more haulers is always better. In reality, you should not spawn more haulers than you absolutely need.

Haulers are expensive. They cost a significant amount of energy and spawn time, and they consume CPU for their entire lifetime. An idle hauler waiting for energy is a drain on the very resources you’re trying to accumulate. Precision is key. Calculate the exact number of hauler CARRY parts required to service your sources based on distance and output, and spawn just enough to meet that demand.

5. Choose Remotes Wisely

The single most important factor in choosing which room to harvest is proximity.

Your miners are relatively cheap, but the cost of hauling energy over long distances is significant. The farther your haulers have to travel, the more energy, spawn time, and CPU they consume. Always prioritize harvesting from the closest remote rooms first, expanding outwards until you’re capped by spawn time or CPU.

6. (Advanced) Harvest Source Keeper Rooms

Once one of your rooms reaches Room Controller Level 7 (RCL 7), you can unlock a new tier of energy income: Source Keeper (SK) rooms.

Sources in these hostile rooms are 33% richer, regenerating 4,000 energy every 300 ticks instead of the standard 3,000. As an added bonus, the hostile Source Keeper NPCs that guard these sources drop energy in their tombstones when killed.

To operate here, you’ll need to spawn a dedicated combat creep from your RCL 7 room, typically with ATTACK, MOVE, and HEAL parts, to roam the SK room and keep it clear.

7. (Advanced) Implement a Hauler Pool

As your logistics network grows, assigning dedicated haulers to a single source becomes inefficient. You can’t perfectly match supply and demand (e.g., a source might need 2.5 haulers), and creeps often waste their final ticks when they lack enough TTL for a final round trip.

The solution is a hauler pool. Instead of dedicated assignments, you treat all your haulers as a single, uniform group. A central system dynamically assigns any available hauler to any container that needs servicing. This provides incredible flexibility, reduces the total number of haulers needed, and minimizes waste. While more complex to code, the efficiency gains are enormous.

8. Monitor Everything with Visuals

You can’t optimize what you can’t see. Screeps provides excellent tools for monitoring your economy at a glance.

• RoomVisual: Use this to draw information directly in your rooms. Create a dashboard showing the status of each source, assigned miners and haulers, and more.
• MapVisual: Get a global overview of your remote harvesting operations.
• creep.say(): Have your creeps report their current task or status. This is invaluable for debugging issues with history.

Good monitoring allows you to spot inefficiencies and fix them before they become major problems.

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By implementing these strategies, you can transform your economy from a bottleneck into a powerhouse. What are your favorite tips for boosting energy income? Share them in the comments below!