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Friday Fun Thread for November 8, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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SE logistics gets a lot simpler once you get antimatter since you can make a minimalist shuttle design, copy/paste it a bunch of times, and then send them back and forth like super large expensive trains.

Leave Nauvis and settle on the smallest non-dry, non-vitemelange moon in the system. You need to build a ground base somewhere, but the planet with a deep gravity well, no special resources, and many biters isn't that good of a choice.

Biters in vanilla are nothing, nothing. Just build walls and minefields. You've got robots for that. It's a set of pretty simple blueprints you copy & paste. Terrain is flat, rocks dynamited.

Finally knuckled down and put together an actually good item quantity balancer (no mods, loads a train car with ~30 different items in specified quantities. Pretty simple. Subtracts what's in the buffer box from what's in the train, turns every negative smaller than -10value into 1, and puts that to the filter inserter. Inverse filter inserter on the other side, with smaller stack, and it does the job.) If you spam this and segment the logistic network (using the same algo) to push non-train stuff out networks and push normal items in, you can expand endlessly.

Hell with that you could expand endlessly even with Rampant as with nuclear shells cleaning up what's actually 'Deathworld squared' becomes a possibility, your wall just has to be high firepower enough to deal with inevitable massive attack Rampant loves to spring at you. Once you have nukes, blasting the entire area around your base with nuclear fire feels so, so satisfying. (have to do this manually, It's way too much of a waste, algo isn't made for nuclear shells).

The only downside is the UPS drops to 10 for 3 minutes every 45 minutes when Rampant is busily moving the kill counter into the half a million range. But the fireworks are epic.

I actually think the no special resources is a point in Nauvis' favor for the main ground base, because it means the core miners give an even distribution of resources instead of overloading you with one thing for export (which is what I want my mining outposts to do, not the main base). But the gravity and biters are points against it. I chose it anyway and tolerated the downsides partly for sentimental reasons, since all my pre-space stuff was already there, but mostly for the respawn. If I make spare space suits for each planet then I can return home by stripping all my stuff, sticking it in a warehouse, and then suiciding and respawning on Nauvis. Makes it way easier to go exploring and building outposts if I don't have to budget for a return trip. I could be mistaken, but I don't think you can do that effectively with other planets, since if I recall correctly, the respawn options are something like (Nauvis, nearest space station, nearest occupied planet) or something like that, which will only work reliably if your chosen base is near (or you have shuttles from Nauvis to the new base I guess).

I chose to move to a moon just to see what happens rather than any well-considered reason, but I think it worked well.

The lack of core miners wasn't an issue given the ease of importing materials (I ran out of local copper and uranium, and local oil was very very insufficient) because the other planets had nigh-infinite amounts of ore. I got copper from the belt, uranium and oil from the oil moon, and all of the advanced materials from around the system. Low gravity is extremely important for using spaceships, as it allows you to use just one fuel tank for a full set of chests (to 300 integrity) and still have enough range to make a round trip.

I hadn't thought of the respawn trick, but I'm not sure if I would use it if I had. It feels like an exploit IMO.