With the jetpack and oil processing unlocked, there’s nothing else I can unlock at my tier until I get refineries and plastics online.
I really should fix my encased beams before I go on this trip. But I really don’t feel like it. But it sure would be nice to come back from this adventure to a full storage of encased beams.
Blah.
Ok, I was just being silly. All the iron ore I need, all 240 per minute, I can get from 4 normal nodes that are along the road I built from the 2nd coal to my steel mill.
Okay, hot damn–I got my basic factories, my storage, and my assembler factories up and running! And while there are a bajillion conveyors going back and forth, at least they’re pretty organized. Could be better, but it’s the best I’ve ever done, full of stacked belts and belts attached to buildings and ceilings, and most construction hidden behind walls.
Next task: tear down the old factory, and build the manufacturers in their place.
Got my steel production doubled last night, 480 coal and ore coming in every minute. I can spit out a steel beam every second now.
In a crater near the 2nd coal node I tapped, I found 3 limestone nodes for the full 360 I need for 8 constructors making concrete. I unfortunately realized this after I hooked up lines for 240 of the 360 limestone per minute I need, but I’m sure I’ll find a use for the extra limestone eventually.
In the meantime, I am making concrete remotely and bringing it in for encased beams. That’s the final step of the project, and will wait until I play next, as I sadly ran out of time to finish.
Once the encased beams are coming in, I’m headed for oil.
I just got the heavy oil residue and diluted packaged fuel alternate recipes last night. I can now tear down my current oil setup (basic setup for rubber and plastic) and create a fuel generator setup that should provide enough power to last a while. I can then take my time going to nuclear.
So I made the journey to a bunch of oil, put on a couple little islands by a big sea.
I’ve got 3 nodes worth 240+240+120 or 600 crude oil per minute.
The recipe chains are very interesting. And super expensive to run so many refineries.
So my strategy is:
Get there, build a preliminary setup to get the rubber and plastic I need to get petroleum power. This step requires disconnecting everything from my power network except the petroleum plant and the coal plant.
Come back with the tech and resources needed to build fuel generators and hook up the fuel to them.
Find a way to get rubber and plastic back home (or maybe I’ll build a new rubber and plastic factory out here - really depends on how much I need them for)
The Zipline is a great way to get back and forth now that I have the big power cables and can hang under the whole route. I really didn’t understand their purpose so far when using the regular poles. I saw a YouTuber travel incredibly fast with them by jumping off at every pole and grabbing the wire again on the other side, but I couldn’t manage that.
WHAT!!
Fuel generators make 250 MW of power (to coal’s 75) per 20 fuel?
If I make fuel I can power 2 generators off a single power plant, AND it makes plastic to boot!
UNLIMITED POWER!!!
(I am sure my power expenditure will expand, like an ideal gas, to fill the available capacity)
Just wait until you nonchalantly throw down a factory that takes 300 MW because you just don’t feel like rerouting your train, and that’s a little one.
One of these days, I need to go walkabout and cap all of the geysers. That’s another 6500 MW for free! Don’t need it now, but I’m running out of mini-factories to build. The only significant ones are heavy modular frames and motors - both solved if I stop being lazy and just run the train spur back to my starter base. Once that’s done, the real work begins - managing the train dropoffs and building THE factory.
Oh, and the architecture. Functional is only half the battle.
It may be waaaay too late last night, but my mission is complete. I have an operational system out in the oil field, making plastic, rubber, and fuel. I’m getting 3800 power now, far beyond the 1200 or so I had previously.
I also unlocked the remaining tier 5 techs.
My most urgent priority is to stop the plastic and rubber from piling up, since if they fill up, I will lose power. Might be worth setting up overflow sinks just in case.
But obviously, I need a long term use for them. I think it’s about time for an Electronics factory. I don’t know if I have any Caterium near my oil, but if I do I might just set up one there. But if I don’t, and I suspect I don’t, it may be time for trains.
Other projects I’m thinking about:
Liquid biofuel would be kinda cool, might make the jetpack worthwhile and will help with truck routes. (I think trucks may still be handy after I get rail, I don’t want a train stop at every single tiny factory).
Once I can make computer parts, I can research Summersloop overdrive. I’ve been saving up slugs and alien bits for when I get Summersloops up and running, so I should get tons of power shards. Between that and Mk 4 belts, I should be able to redo some factories for 100% efficiency, with component overflows going to storage and then to a sink.
At that point factories should start feeling more permanent, I think. And I should have a huge influx of AWESOME store tickets. I can hopefully start building with aesthetic in mind.
If you’re in the spot I think you are, based on your earlier description, there’s actually a pure caterium not too far away.
The only downside to liquid biofuel is it can’t be completely automated. You CAN sloop every step, though, to turn one animal remain into something like two stacks of liquid biofuel. It’s probably still my favorite jetpack fuel - it lasts SO long.
So, if you go inland from the sea where I am, there’s these massive cliffs with winding passages through a maze of caves and crevasses. I found a pure Caterium node at the top of a cliff, but I’m not sure if I want to deal with this rough terrain…
If I do decide to deal with it, I’ll probably build big sky bridges between the cliff tops for my conveyors, trucks, and trains to run on rather than dealing with the maze below.
Making progress on Phase 4:
That’s my main factory. There are a few subfactories for power, aluminum, fuel/rubber/plastics, reinforced plates, and some other things.
I think I can just delete the coal plants at this point. Mostly just taking up space. I have 10 GW total but use less than half on average. And there’s still room at the oil plant if I really need it.
General layout strategy is that most belts, etc. go below the floor. Lifts bring items up to the appropriate point. Higher-tier items tend to be on higher floors, but there are exceptions. Most manufacturing happens in closely-connected clusters with the throughput matched via slugs or somersloops.
The bottom floor is the most spaghetti-like, partly because I can’t run belts under it, and also because it has some setups I haven’t bothered to clean up yet.
I’ve been doing a lot of exploration recently. I just have the basic rebar gun, but it’s served me well so far against pretty much everything I’ve run into. Some of the big spitters take like 6 shots though which is annoying.
There’s something hilarious about gliding towards a herd of the hogs, shooting them from above and following them as they flee like Sarah Palin hunting moose from a helicopter.
This was frustratingly complex but I now have 25GW of power plus as a byproduct 120 rubber and 80 plastic per minute which I’m just sinking for now.
4 oil nodes - 2x 240 and 2x 120
66 refineries
64 packagers
19 water extractors
96 fuel generators
Jayzus. I was happy I had about 20 fuel gens going. I’ve been considering wandering over to the southeast corner where there’s coal, sulfur, and oil for another power plant. By my math, the one pure oil node over there with coal/sulfur/water/nitrogen/bit o’ iron can run about 50 fuel generators with only 22 refineries/constructors/assemblers/smelters/blenders. Everything’s right there.
I lied. There’s 3 pure nodes there, plus another 2 normal and an impure. 200+ fuel generators should be easy without any overclocking.
My wife has blueprinted a big box that she just builds over hostile fauna, then drops an explosive through a hole in the roof.
I saw people talking about all sorts of clever counters like that to monsters (another is building an equipment workshop which is closed on 3 sides but has a window so can act like a bunker). So far, I didn’t really get it.
But today I ran into a couple of these “Nuclear Hogs” people talk about, as well as a pair of giant spiders that can spit poison clouds. And dang, even with parachutes and a billion explosives, that was tough. I get it now!
I have been utterly hooked on this game for a few weeks. It’s one of the best games of all time. it has so many good design features and so few flaws. Really, you can play it multiple ways and it’s still a fun game. I tend to be a rush through progression sort of guy, I want to unlock everything, so my factories are a bit quick and ugly but functional enough to get me where I’m going. My friend who’s got a similar hour count to me is still on tier 3 when I’m on tier 5 because he spends his time making really nice, efficient, good looking, balanced production lines. Neither style is right or wrong, and the game caters to both equally well.
It’s a pretty good world to roam around and explore. The movement system is fantastic and you wouldn’t think that would be the case in a factory building game, and it’s certainly not realistic with the unlimited momentum and tons of air control, but it feels very satisfying and quick to traverse the world when it could otherwise be a slog.
And I love that it lets you be as sloppy or clean as you want. It will warn you if what you’re building is going to clip with something else and look ugly, but allows you to do it – a good compromise for people who want to get everything perfect versus people who don’t mind if their belts clip into each other a little bit.
There’s very little busy work - there’s plenty of work, but for example they could’ve chosen to make resource nodes deplete and made you run around and replace that resource, so you’re basically just maintaining what you have rather than expanding, but they didn’t do anything like that. Really, nothing in the game is punishing. No time pressure, work at your own pace, play however you want, and yet challenging and satisfying to get things done. The game doesn’t bog you down in inventory management either, when it definitely could. It gives you plenty of slots and the dimensional portal system makes it so you’re not constantly running back and forth because you forgot a few cables to build a new power plant. If anything, actually, it may be a little too generous - in late game I’ve gotten lazy about setting up supply lines for a few low volume items and I just pull them out of my magic inventory and load them in the machine. Not ideal, I know, but it works well enough for stuff you only have to top off every hour or two. I need to move away from doing that. I think a good compromise would be to allow manually loaded dimensional portals but not ones that allow you to restock them with a conveyor.
Very few complaints. The combat that makes higher level enemies bullet sponges is just kinda tedious. And it seems so obvious to me that you should be able to put a splitter or merger in an already existing belt and have it snap in place and be useful but it doesn’t work like that. It looks like it does, but then you just have the original line running through the splitter/merger with the intersecting line doing nothing. Otherwise I can’t really think of anything.
Eh, it’s all part of the automation. They could have made them more expensive, though. Or maybe progressively more expensive–each one takes 50% more resources or something. So the first few are cheap but you either have to make choices or ramp up production to get everything supplied.
Works just fine for me. It doesn’t snap to grid unfortunately, but it does split. One downside is that when you upgrade a belt, you won’t necessarily catch the portion inside the splitter. So sometimes you have a slow belt and it isn’t obvious why.
My main complaint about the game is the relative simplicity in factory setups and lack of advanced automation systems. A smart/programmable merger would be a welcome addition.
And a relatively minor complaint–it should be possible to hang conveyors from ceilings at different distances without extra effort, just like you can place conveyors over the ground at various heights. It’s possible with the stackable hangars, but it’s annoying.
Finished Phase 4. Particle accelerator blew the breakers–I knew it was a beefy boy, but it was sucking down 6 GW with a full 4x somersloop! And >10 GW at 150%. Doubled my oil plants to 24x (at 200% each) and am in the process of tripling them. Maybe I should convert them to turbofuel, too. Seems like that roughly doubles the oil efficiency, assuming I have some coal/sulfur nearby.
Should probably go for nuclear now… but man, that looks like a complicated setup to have a zero-waste loop. Uranium->uranium waste->plutonium->plutonium waste->ficsonium, with a zillion intermediate products. Gonna take some time to even sketch out a complete cycle.
There’s so much to go wrong I wonder if I should dedicate the fuel plant solely to driving the machinery of the nuclear plant, and then only use the nuclear output to drive the factory. That way, a blown breaker in some unrelated part can’t take down the nuclear reprocessing cycle.