Out of curiosity, for those who finished, how many hours?
40-45 hrs for the first ending. A few more for the second. Still working on the third, but I’m guessing around 60 total.
47 hours for me. Which, holy crap, means I’ve averaged more than three hours a day since I bought it. It definitely sucked me in.
heh, I’m at 61 hours but as reported in my previous post I’m only at 91%.
You are much more detail-oriented than I am. On my third (and final) base move, I made a four-story base, with a domed living room at the top. A couple hours later, I looked at the living room from an angle I hadn’t looked at it from before, and saw that it was severely off-center. “Oh well,” I shrugged, and zipped off to the portal generator.
My bases are generally utilitarian, with not a ton of thought to aesthetics. If I cared more about their appearance and style, I would’ve had a much longer playthrough.
Guilty as charged. The irony is that I don’t decorate anything. Like if you look at my raft build, there is pretty much zero decoration anywhere. It’s a purely utilitarian, minimalist design, which is also true for my planet crafter base. It’s just that I’ll happily spend hours and hours carefully deciding exactly where everything goes to make it as minimalist and utilitarian as possible.
This is no joke. I guess the great barrier to this strategy is the 1900 energy the portal uses.
Within minutes of exploring my very first portal wreck I had accumulated fuses and tokens worth over 16,000 trade tokens. I very quickly had the 25,000 tokens needed for my domed living quarters, so I’ll have that once the trade rocket gets back. Portal wrecks are making my little pulsar quartz trade pipeline seem kind of pointless.
Also, I learned via an accidental button press that you can “eat” trade tokens to cash them in immediately, which helps save inventory space while exploring wrecks. Previously I had been placing them on my trade rocket to be exchanged.
I haven’t bothered figuring out where my save files are or how to reload to a previous point. I’ll need to do that before I choose an ending so I can see them all.
Right on the money. 60.1 hours for all endings (and all Steam achievements).
I thought so too, but if you reload your save you’ll end up right back at the launch computer, so you can go off and pick a different ending. It’s still helpful to back things up, but you don’t need to do that to get all the endings.
One of the endings is just the obvious one from the start of the game. There’s another that will arrive as a message. The last you might be able to puzzle out on your own, but I needed an external hint (see my spoiler post above).
I’m closing in on mammals, but decided to start a new game in the waterfall location. I shouldn’t have an iridium problem early, but I’ll probably have to go wreck/container hunting later for rods - the only places to mine iridium is the other side of the map.
As it looks now, it’s a depressing location, especially compared to the central area I ended up making my base in during the first run. But I’ve got windows that will be pointing right at the waterfall when it starts up.
I do want my logistics network back already, though. I miss all those drones.
One tip for the early game is to try to not open chests until you get some terraforming stages under your belt. For me, the two most relevant items of interest are uranium and fuses. You can see the full loot table if you scroll down this wiki page to the blue Treasure Crate part (not the craftable storage chest) and expand the loot table.
But just in terms of uranium and fuses, it looks like so:
| Stage | Uranium | Fuses |
|---|---|---|
| Barren | very rare | never |
| Blue Sky | rare | never |
| Cloud | uncommon | never |
| Rain | common | never |
| Liquid Water | common | ultra rare |
Fuses never improve beyond ultra rare, but only one type of fuse can drop during liquid water, then two types during lakes, three types during moss, etc… The wiki table shows four types of fuses can drop during flora and trees, but then the variety goes back down after that. I’m not sure I believe that.
I will be starting over myself probably in a week or so. I just now finished redesigning my storage layout. It was like a 10-hour ordeal with much of that time spent outside of the game playing around with arts and crafts. My current design has 16 lockers on the ground floor, 32 on the second floor and another 16 on the third floor. And the two Auto Crafters I squeezed in can draw from all 64 of those lockers. (Of course they are all large lockers; we don’t need no stinking blue chests! But I also ended up not needing any of those super large ones you get from trade rockets.) I did not realize that Auto Crafters can pull from the floors above and below, but it turns out they can.
Right now I’m finalizing my entire base design, adding a second drone station and drones to fill all those lockers, a second trade rocket, and redistributing my grass and flower spreaders. Then animals and fish and frogs and insect building placement, then I’ll be restarting.
D’oh! I remembered last night that rockets can trigger iridium showers. And being right next to the volcano, there’s a plethora of the super alloy needed to trigger them. That should solve the problems with iridium until I can at least get ore extractors down. Still going to be a hike until teleporters/drones.
I don’t have rain yet, but I have a few nuclear generators up and running, and storage “floor” with individualized chests for when logistics can begin. I’ve been focusing on making sure I have 8 of each terraforming device, updating to new tiers as they unlock. Biomass is starting to unlock with grass spreaders, so the complicated part is about to begin, but water will start filling in soon. I’ll have beachfront property instead of living next to a Sarlacc pit!
Someone on Reddit posted that they missed out on pulling some of the fuses from chests because they waited until too late to start opening them.
I replied along the lines of really? I was skeptical that you get fewer types of fuses in later stages of the game.
It was then pointed out to me that the cheaper fuses are the ones that stop dropping: heat, pressure, plant and oxygen, which are all 2500 tokens each. The only ones that do keep dropping are production and energy, which are worth 5000 and 6000 tokens. And since you can exchange them freely with trade rockets with no loss of value, it now makes sense to me why some of the fuses stop dropping later in the game.
I confess I’m a little frustrated. I finished the game last Saturday night. Then I started a new game Sunday morning (named it “Recidivism”) and have been in my second playthrough ever since. I keep waiting for it to get boring so I stop playing, but the game loop remains completely compelling and delightful on a second playthrough.
When will it end???
Ha!
I’m still finalizing my base design. Currently trying to figure out exactly how much HQ food I need to auto-produce to keep my 15 animals fed.
I’m very excited to restart into an efficiency run (not a speed run) but I want to capture a quickie base tour video first. Problem is that my first try was 10 minutes long, which is way too long. I’d really prefer to keep it under 5 minutes, but there’s just so much to show!
Best I could do was under 8 minutes: (Been working on this for two days!)
Finally got the willpower to push into actual animal “farming”. I haven’t unlocked the animal shelter yet, but work proceeds apace.
My understanding of optimizers and fuses, aided by EllisDee’s work on power, is the optimal number of terraforming equipment is eight, with optimizers and fuses multiplying the outputs. So I have eight of the T3 tree spreaders, T5 heaters, and T5 drills running. As I find more trade tokens and fuses, optimizers get added and numbers go up. I also realized I really didn’t launch many rockets, maybe 6 or 7 total. My rocket engine production has outpaced my circuit production in my neverending chase of MOAR DRONES, so I have an entire large locker of extra rocket engines waiting to shift this planet’s orbit. I’ll try to match the eight machines for now, then see where things stand.
I still haven’t launched any GPS or map rockets. Pretty sure that’s just a lost cause for me. I’ve got a pretty good understanding of the map layout at this point, and there’s enough landmarks to judge position and direction, even without the compass chip.
On my first playthrough, I put my main base way to the north near a lovely waterfall --and way the hell away from everything else, so that my drones took forever to cross the map. On this playthrough, I’ve put everything in the desert near the starting location, because almost everything you need (except obsidian) is in a cave nearby. I’m getting close to drones for this playthrough, and I think it’ll work beautifully with my base as the center of a spoked wheel.
The rockets are great, and I definitely recommend them! They’re fairly cheap, and they give enormous bonuses to everything. I’m aiming for 6+ rockets for each thing, with fewer drones.
And the map is really good, as it helps to identify caves that might otherwise be overlooked.
I didn’t bother to win. Once my base was complete and the base tour video captured, I was too excited to start over with my efficiency run.
Fun fact: The resources scattered around the ground are, in fact, randomized.
I had planned out this perfectly timed first two trips outside of the landing craft. Spent over an hour on it, in fact. Then I went to record just those first two trips as a temporary thing so that I could refer back to it once I finish my first hour+ long section. But when I restarted to record, all the resources were in different places. Doh!
Unfortunately I think that means I’m going to have to save and reload immediately in the video run to lock in the resource distribution. But that’s okay; I did the same thing with my subnautica base race.
EDIT: Which reminds me, props to the developers for making it so very fast to load a game. Love it.
Oh, I’m at the point where the main cost for rockets is the time to gather the materials and run just outside to my launchpad. There’s going to be so much iridium and uranium lying around the next time I play.
Which would make a nice mod - T3 drones that will pick up loose materials. Not go mining, but cleaning up after a meteor shower would be nice.