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PaperclipPerfector  16hr ago (text post)   614 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 22, 2024

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I don't get to play as much as I'd like these days, but I got a spaceship sorted out after three iterations of redesign, and sailed easily to Vulcanus. I came down with a pretty good selection of material to work with, and the last few nights have been figuring out the basics of the new environment in the landing zone. I made the annoying mistake of building my first dozen smelters using an assembler rather than the first smelting machine, but it's a minor hiccup and I'm getting my bootstrap base built now. Coal liquefaction is going, but I'm handicapping myself by trying to run the oil system off orbital ice rather than acid neutralization; this makes everything slower until I can get launch capacity back up and build a serious orbital ice farm. If worst comes to worst, I can always cannibalize my ship for the purpose, but pushing through the production chain the normal way seems doable at the moment.

I've unlocked orange science, and the obvious next step is to start worm hunting to expand my buildable territory. My current plan is to build a tank and a bunch of piercing shells; even with the constricted environment, it seems like it should be pretty easy to kite the worm while the cannon grinds it down. I really appreciate how they've added and expanded more "breakthrough" moments in the game's design, where you can see a goal that will significantly change what you're doing, plan how to achieve it and execute the plan; right now, that's securing minable tungsten so I can stop relying on the bits and bobs from harvested surface rocks.

I started messing with quality on nauvis, but that's on hold while I deal with the million things that need to be built-out on Vulcanus. I'm salivating over the launch capacity available there once I get a proper factory set up.

Man, you're importing water on Vulcanus? I think you should get acid neutralization soon. Maybe when you start harvesting calcite?

I tried leading the demolisher around by the nose, but I couldn't pull it off. Their lava geysers always got me eventually. In the end I just put down turret pods in their territory and let nature take it's course. I've heard other people have great luck with mines.

I basically completely abandoned the original planet for Vulcanus. The only thing it's missing is Uranium, and I'm not really missing it with 400% solar efficiency. I even got everything so automated I can completely manage it remotely to keep that factory growing while I bootstrap Gleba.

Man, you're importing water on Vulcanus? I think you should get acid neutralization soon. Maybe when you start harvesting calcite?

The ship I arrived in is still in orbit, and its eight asteroid collectors pull in a fairly large amount of ice while it's just sitting up there idling. It's pretty easy to periodically drop the collected ice from orbit and load it into the cracking plant. I'm a sucker for free resources, and it seems like acid neutralization is intended as a significant sink for both acid and calcite; if I can work around that step, it looks to be a free and very large productivity bonus right off the bat, with the bonus of giving me an excuse to lean into orbital infrastructure. It'll be a bottleneck until I get launches going again, but with the launch capacity Vulcanus offers I'm looking forward to building the mother of all space stations.

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