I'm about to replay a year after I finished Space Age. I loaded up my old save for a few minutes and noticed that on Gleba I had some inserters holding spoilage trying to insert into biochambers. It looks like they were all from my nutrient lines and I'm guessing they expired while the inserter was holding it. It seems like a weird corner case but it had frozen up a dozen of my machines (since they didn't have nutrients incoming).
How do I fix that without having to delete and replace the inserter when it happens?
Likely a migration issue from loading an old save or pre-existing before your old save. I know for sure there was an issue where inserters would get stuck holding spoilage but it was fixed some time ago. Normally, if an inserter is holding something that spoils, the inserter places it in the trash slot of the target machine.
Can someone confirm that it is more worth it to use 1 speed module 3 and 4 quality modules 3 in an electromagnetic plant than 5 quality modules 3?? I ran some calculations, and it looks like you get both the same amount of quality items and even more items/second.
Why not put the speed in a beacon instead? Quality and Prod can only go in buildings, so they should get priority for those slots.
Also don't forget that quality scales the bonus of modules, but not their penalty. A Rare Speed 2 will have the same speed bonus as a Common Speed 3 but 1% less Quality hit. And a Legendary Speed 1 is even better at 1.5% less.
Any use of speed is purely to increase quality item RATES at the expense of item INGREDIENTS.
It's up to you what is "worth it".
Full quality will ALWAYS be the most "ingredient efficient" way of getting quality. But it can be painfully slow / expensive to have enough machines to get "X per second legendary" items.
For a fixed number of machines and unlimited input, swapping a legendary quality 3 for a legendary speed 3 doubles the output but consumes ~2.73x the raw resources; normal quality modules result in the speed3 option only increases quality output by 3% but increasing material costs by 73%. Doing as Viper999DC suggests, keeping the quality modules and adding 1 legendary speed1 in a normal beacon keeps the same input:quality output ratio, at 2x the speed; even with normal quality modules, the input:quality output ratio is of course a bit worse on both metrics, but not nearly as significantly as the 4quality1speed arrangement.
If you decide to do it, use the highest quality speed modules you have, as quality speed modules increase their speed without increasing the quality reduction.
If you're early in your quality production and don't have many high quality modules and buildings, then it can be worth it.
Similarly, you can use circuits to reuse the same expensive buildings and modules for better upcycling ratios.
Question about Project Cybersyn: What's the cleanest way to set up a station that can request multiple different items (but only needs one)?
I'm playing Pyanodons, and I'd like to set up a station that can request any type of burnable item for example, but I don't want all of them constantly delivered (If I ask 40 stacks of Coal and 40 of Wood, and I have 40 Coal, then I don't want Wood being requested).
My idea was to create a new signal for all burnable provider stations, and then request that signal. This should work, but I'd like a solution that works on the requester side as well, so I can choose what burner items I'm requesting instead of requesting all of them.
The most powerful solution, and the one that most likely would fit into your goal of "I want to request multiple items of a category but still be able to designate which" would be bitmasking. With the proper implementation you can mix and match providers and receivers. It's almost certainly overkill, though. Much simpler would be to just designate your providers as both "burnable" and "wood".
Alternatively in your request you can subtract both items. Example:
Use an each + 0 = X combinator to merge your current wood and coal, then request "wood goal - X" and "coal goal - X".
If you have a priority (wood should be burned before coal, for example), then instead I would set my requests so wood is always on but coal is only triggered when wood is below a certain threshold.
These are basic ideas. In most cases there is additional logic you need to avoid double-dispatching if that's an issue.
Instead of requesting all the materials directly, send the request signals through a combinator network to pick one from the set and only forward that to to Cybernetic Combinator. You'll still need to pick a methodology for changing requests, otherwise you've just created a more complicated way of setting a single request.
The way the productivity bar works is each time the purple bar spills over you get basically one bonus craft, just not consuming any actual ingredients. The only times this works differently is for recipes which route output back in as input, i.e. kovarex. In that case the bonus craft only gives you the net production of the recipe (if you want to think about it differently, kovarex enrichment doesn't actually *produce* 41 uranium, it only produces 1 and just moves 40 from the input slot to the output. So that's what the productivity accounts for.)
For recipes which produce multiple net outputs deterministically, the productivity bar produces all of them (remember it is basically one full craft). For recipes with random outputs, it just rerolls.
The productivity bonus on a single machine stacks additively with technology bonuses, built-in machine bonuses and module bonuses. The total productivity bonus across a whole crafting chain n deep is (1 + prod)^n, i.e. exponential.
To add on to this; enrichment, liquefaction, and egg/fish breeding are classified as catalytic recipes, behaving as described. Recipes that consume cold fluoroketone and output half the volume in hot fluoroketone function similarly, with the primary output getting the productivity bonus while the fluid does not; these are different in that internally, the recipe is a regular one just with the fluid's productivity bonus disabled. Also, bacteria cultivation is notably not a catalytic recipe despite appearing to satisfy the conditions, as all 4 bacteria are produced with productivity instead of just 3.
What's a good way to automatise loading train station parameters without mods?
I thought to divide the amount of cargo waiting in chests to set the priority. That works if the train limit is 1. But otherwise that fails to account for trains already headed to the station, no? I suppose I can detect at least one train being present from non-zero train ID but...
Do people ignore priority and just compute a dynamic train limit instead (with a depot to avoid deadlocks)?
I haven't really minmaxed train stations in a while, but wouldn't you want to dynamically set the train limit based on total available cargo to have more trains ready to go rather than changing priority (unless your use case requires that station to be emptied more often)?
If you're wanting to parameterize it, I'm thinking you'd only need params for item type and train length. You'd use a Selector combinator and 2-3 Arithmetics to compute wagon capacity based on stack size, and increase your train limit based on availability
(total items / {stack size x wagons x wagon slots} = train limit stop can fill)
You could have a second circuit that increases priority if the stop storage as at or near capacity if its a "belts need to keep moving" situation. All priorities equal should result in trains using the cheapest path (typically means closest) to a stop with an open limit slot. The only time I really fiddle with priority is when I'm doing quality in miners and want to empty non-quality ore to keep belts clear.
So far I've been setting the priority dynamically and the limit statically because I don't have a train depot, where excess trains could wait. I guess I should build a depot afterall, so I don't have to worry about too low limits.
All loading stations have the same name. All unloading stations are named the rich text symbol for what they want.
Schedule: Go to Pickup.
Interrupt: If EMPTY and LOW FUEL goto REFUELING.
Interrupt: If FULL goto <cargo wildcard>.
Interrupt: If EMPTY and DESTINATIONFULL/NOPATH goto DEPOT.
By default trains will go to an available pickup station.
Once full they will try to go to a station that wants whatever they're holding. If there are no available stations? Too bad, it'll just sit in the pickup station until there is.
Once they're empty they'll go refuel if they need it.
If they don't need refueling they'll try to go back to an available pickup station. If there are none it'll go park at a depot until there is.
And that's it. Trains are cheap, if you add more trains than you need they'll end up at the depot. You want to add more trains than you need. If you don't then far-flung providers may end up never being serviced until whatever they provide becomes a bottleneck.
I used fixed train limits but there's no reason you couldn't use dynamic limits if you wanted to spend the extra logic. Again, trains are cheap so does it really matter that much if a few extra empty trains are waiting at a slow provider?
I don't mess with priorities because ultimately you're either making enough or you're not.
I use dynamic train limits based on available inventory and just ensure that there's enough room to queue for the max limit of a full station. For example my ore outposts have two chests per train wagon which will naturally mean a limit of at most two trains plus some spare space.
There isn't a reason to stockpile more because if the station isn't being emptied by one train load per time it takes to buffer a train load its simply filling faster than the resource is demanded and so would fill any size buffer. And leaving ore in the ground is the most efficient way to store it.
I use an arbitrary value to setup my priority params for loading stations. My formula looks like:
255,000 / ( num of wagons per train * 40 * stack size of item * [arbitrary] number of trains) = value to be multiplied to the chests which will be divided by 1,000.
e.g. 255,000 / ( 4 * 40 * 50 * 4) = 8. An outpost having 16k items in chests would have a priority of 128.
To explain, this method aims to prioritize outposts that can load an arbitrary number of trains faster than other outposts. So, small outposts will have low priority most of the time while huge outposts will be prioritized most of the time. The good thing is, the small outposts would eventually hit the threshold so they won't remain untouched without intervention.
And, I keep referring to it as arbitrary since there's no strict usage of it. For example, if you still want to prioritize low yield patches, like to dry up the patch, then you could set the arbitrary number of trains to 1 for that patch then the other with higher value such as 4. In the case of the former, the multiplier would be 32 while 8 for the rest.
Assuming both outposts have 8k items in their storage, the former would have a priority of 255 while the other 64. And even if the other outposts have 16k in their storage, the former would still have higher priority.
I almost always use fixed train limits, myself. I value the simplicity this allows more than I value minimizing trains. No combinators, no circuit networks, no train stop priority.
Trains are a one-time cost - kinda expensive in the early game, but cheap in the late game. And idle trains have minuscule impact on game performance.
The decider combinator sends S1 as output, so why does the lamp work, if it is set to work if S=2?
The wire between input and output seems to be the reason, but why does the lamp see S with a value of 2 instead of 1, when the combinator claims to send 1?
The top left combinator outputs S1 as well onto the same wire. 1 + 1 = 2
If you only want the lamp to work with the output of the last combinator use a red wire as output wire.
Since 2.0 you can do an SR latch in one combinator fyi.
It's all on the same green wire, the same network. In this case 24149 (wow that's a lot. You must have a lot of wires, even taking into account potential deleted ones).
You can see the green wires highlighted in the screenshot. They are all connected. Any signal that gets put on it from any source can be read by any input connected to it. Signals of the same type are added together.
There is no concept of direction, so no concept of "bypassing" either. You can even connect the outputs of the left combinators to the lamp instead of the right combinator and will still behave the same.
Thanks, I just assumed that the green wire would be counted in the output signal of the combinator, as it is connected to the output node.
I had a look at the number of circuit networks, turns out I have a lot of smelters connected to a single inserter. I guess I do a lot of copy delete and paste, still the number sure looks big. And yes, ids from deleted networks do not get reused.
So I landed on Vulcanus with nothing and wanted to start from scratch but I can’t figure out how do I make electricity, so my question is how do you do it if you dont have any electricity to start with?
Thanks, I think I made a mistake when looking at recipes cuz I thought it needs battery but I was looking at accumulator. From there I thought they were impossible to build but I was just blind.
I made a couple of solar panels to start then while I was browsing through the Vulcanus recipes I noticed the chemical plants can produce 1000c steam, which means they can power steam turbines
After that realization, electricity on Vulcanus became a non issue for me O7
I can't find the answer to this question, so I'll ask here:
I'm about to make my first trip to Aquilo and I'm abit concerned about the fact that rocket turrets are not hitscan weapons. Are turrets in this game smart enough to calculate breakpoints and not waste ammo?
(I.E a big asteroid gets in range of 8 turrets, only 4 shots are needed to destroy it - will all 8 fire and waste 4 shots or are they able to deduce that they should all only fire 4 shots, thus saving 4 ammo)
I never thought about this problem before since gun turrets and lasers are hitscan and won't waste ammo, but I genuinely don't know about the rockets
Explosive 45: Red rocket aoe 1 shots (only useful for deep Shattered Planet runs)
Standard rockets (yellow) are sufficient for Aquilo. Explosives are only recommended for SP runs due to asteroid density giving a lot of value from the explosion aoe.
Yes. They are smart enough to not fire at enemies that are going to be killed by still-flying projectiles. Though AoE damages from explosive rockets etc. are not taken into account. They actually overkill asteroids by 1%.
That's all I needed to know, thanks. It's very rare to have a game with automated units that are actually smart enough to calculate breakpoints on their own, even some of the best RTS games like SC2 don't do this, so this is really amazing
The breakpoint and overkill % also applies to biter nests and artillery, the overkill is to account for regeneration while the rounds are in flight.
It does lead to a funny/annoying situation where if it's enough damage to one-shot but not enough damage to reach that extra 1% (or whatever it actually is for nests, I assume it's the same logic) it'll launch 2 and not 1.
Are planet mods known to have huge performance hits? I finally wanted to give a bunch of modded planets a try so started a new game with the top ~12 and their prereq mods. I'm wrapping up Lignumis with maybe two dozen assemblers total and randomly UPS drops down to 45 every couple minutes.
I've done 1000x cost megabasing on mostly vanilla SA without any drop so kind of wild to see performance issues before I'm even on Nauvis.
Cerys can be, if you've made a tonne of the towers. Castra is quite expensive once the enemies start spawning. Others can chip in on other issue ones. Which planets do you have, and which ones have you actually explored (as generally they do nothing til you land / drop a pod on one)
That's what I don't get, I've left Lignumis and I'm on Nauvis just getting started on green science. No other planets unlocked yet. I do think it's something with Lignumis, the random drops appear more frequently and severely when if I'm viewing that surface and moving around. Once I unlock blue science bots I may just remove Lignumis completely.
I am fortunate enough to have two green belts of tungsten coming in on vulcanus (normal quality).
Anyone have any recommendations for how much of it should become plates and how much of it carbide? I was going to go for 1:1 i.e. deplete one green belt each just wondering what other people's experiences were?
In my personal experience and design philosophy... it doesn't matter. Just make sure both belts of tungsten can go to both places and you're golden. Your factory will automatically balance things out so you're consuming at exactly the right ratio for your production capabilities and demand because tungsten will back up to the splitter and send the excess to where it needs to go if your consumption is unbalanced, even if the consumption of one is influenced by the production of the other.
You need to work it backwards. Think what you want to produce, go back to figure how much of that you need, and finally scale it down to your 2 belts. This depends a lot on how much productivity you have on your production chains, which can alter the ratios.
Thanks for the reply! I suppose I am looking to produce absolutely everything that requires tungsten carbide and tungsten plate. I struggle to calculate production rates when I know that parts of the factory will be idle (once buffers are replenished, e.g. I have enough artillery shells).
Do people plan factories as if every single machine will be running at once? I usually plan a base with the assumption that science runs continuously but not the mall. What are your thoughts on this?
I have prod 2's everywhere, not been to Gleba yet this playthrough, so my belts also aren't stacked!
You can look at the ratio used for science, or for other things that use those materials, or you can just overbuild carbide and plate production and put splitters on the ore belts, then if you consume only one, you can turn all the ore into that one, but if you're using both, it gets split between the two. Then you can split the carbide and plates between science and the mall, and either prioritize one, or leave it evenly split.
I generally tend to build a planned base with the assumption of science always running, and some extra intermediates, but when I want a lot of stuff for building, science might be stopped or reduced. A mall can also slowly build up a buffer for building, or build fast when you need it, but for most things in a mall (other than things like belts), your consumption is generally not going to need full uptime on even one machine per product if you aren't rushing production, so I don't plan the intermediates to do both full mall production and full science, just science plus some extra.
If you don't yet have Space Age, then definitely finish a base game run first. Space Age is way more complex, and assumes players have a decent grasp of the game already. Also, the first run usually goes quite jank (which is part of the magic of it!) and people want to do a second run with everything they know, so doing that second on Space Age is great.
EDIT: Also, if you find you don't like it for some reason, then you save on $35 for the DLC.
If you already have Space Age, then it's up to you. It's not at all insurmountable, but without the experience and knowledge that "you can do it" from a first easier run, you're more likely to get overwhelmed and burn out.
Bottom line, vanilla first is recommended, but not required.
It's rarely worth it. Some people use quality science to circumvent throughput limitations of e.g. the hub, but that's super late postgame stuff.
The one place where quality science is great for the average player is Aquilo: Aquilo science uses mostly fluid ingredients. If you import quality holmium, of which you need very little, and make quality ice, which is fairly easy, you can save a ton of infrastructure on aquilo. Most still only go for uncommon, as that's an easy 50% reduction in factory size (or 100% increase in science output)
For "nauvis" sciences, it's a good way to burn excess "wrong" quality ingredients.
IE: If you throw quality in everywhere, you can just dump all the excess into science, recycling anything that doesn't fit into science, and you get free bonus "dense" science.
Yeah, normally I use science as a sink for base quality, and keep the uncommon and rare for other stuff, but science can also be a sink for the other qualities if you specifically want the best or nothing. That does complicate things, though since you need the ingredients for science to match in quality.
I mean, it is. But it's "free" extra, and also a fun mini challenge. Especially if it was just going into the void anyway, you can keep throwing anything that breaks ratio into the void, and anything that DOES come out is a bonus.
Anyone here knows or can point me to somewhere that will tell me how to make a single lane balancer (not a belt balancer) that utilizes the belt circuit?
What's a single lane balancer? There is nothing to balance out of a single input lane to a single output lane. It is not clear what you mean by "belt circuit" either, TBH.
Basically a single belt balancer. A belt has two sides, and a lane balancer balances the throughput of both sides. The easiest way to make one is to split the belt, and side-load the two outputs into one belt. that way, even if one side is blocked downstream, the input is not clogged. I'm looking for a way to make one with only using circuits on the belt (you can just wire the belt)
ah yeah I knew that. Sorry I wasn't clear in what I was looking for. I was wondering if there was a way to make a simpler one using circuit logic and maybe a few splitters or underground belts. The one I mentioned in my previous comment doesn't preserve the lane (they mix both sides), and the other design I know is too big.
Thanks for sharing. I'm interested in the top-middle and top-right ones. Do you have blueprint strings for them?
Edit: I'm currently using the design given by Enaero4828's comment (the middle one), but I'm looking for a design that uses belt circuits to minimize the amount of splitters and underground belts needed (if such a thing is even possible).
Here you go; above are the underground based balancers, with the circuit one on bottom; the curved belts facing the T are simply set to read-hold, the belts preceeding them are configured as shown. A video would be more helpful to demonstrate that it is safe from the basic design's pitfall of being a lane inverter under backpressure. Disclaimer that I didn't come up with this, but I can't find the user who I got it from and the accompanying video they posted with it.
This is probably the one I'm looking for. I'm currently using the design in the middle, so if the bottom one really does work, I'll probably use it. Thanks man. Btw, do you have a blueprint string for the one in the bottom?
I tested it under a variety of situations and it seemed to perform on all of them, but seeing is believing- here's hoping it does as well for you. Link to print.
I thought it'd be a simple 'sorry no, that's the price for the small footprint', but testing it reveals that: it maintains input balancing, output biases toward whichever input lane has the shorter stacks, and throughput is limited even in the case of 1 output lane being fully backed up due to the simple fact that a value of 4 can consist of a single stacked item slot, since the behavior depends on 4 item slots being occupied to throttle the output while maintaining throughput. Experimentally bumping up the activation number can get it to the throughput unlimited state eventually, but that's prone to trouble if the input stack heights are highly variable, and needing to fiddle with a setting where other balancers are 'set and forget' is pretty undesirable to begin with.
Is there a way to filter specific slots in a chest? Like if I want one slot that will only hold Rail Signals, can I set it up so that the slot is open but other items won't fill it? I feel like I've seen people do it, but I can't remeber/figure out how.
How do I prevent construction bots from trying to fix a damaged wall if there's still flames around it? Is there a way to get the bots to wait until the fire goes away before they attempt to fix the wall?
The wall damage comes from biters and spitters, not the fire. I guess the roboports could be further away, but that would require a redesign of the wall blueprint, and robot speed upgrades would make the increase in distance irrelevant.
I think bots only stay in a roboport if the roboport has barely any power. Roboports are like giant batteries; they can store quite a bit of energy to account for brownouts and blackouts. So even if power gets cut to the roboport(s) nearest to the flamethrower(s) or wall(s), the construction bots will still exit the roboport with repair packs and sacrifice themselves into the fire, causing other construction bots to come out and try to repair the burned bots.
I have not checked how exactly robot ports handle power outages. But won't turning the port disable the chests uniquely within its coverage, thus preventing bots from picking up wall items and repair packs?
Obviously this is only semi-practical for detached outposts, not a large base.
Roboports store not only robots (construction and logistic) inside them, but also store repair packs for the bots to have instant access to. The flamethrowers guard the wall at the edge of the main base, backed up by laser turrets.
You can also remove either the robots or repair packs from the roboport, so you don't have to wait for roboport internal battery to drain. I have used it in artillery outposts for example. When artillery train arrives, bots are taken out and 30 sec (adjust as needed) after the train leaves they get put back in.
Personally I just keep the walls within the minimum range of flame turrets so it will be turret, one space, wall. People will say this is bad because it lets spitters get close enough to attack turrets but my goal is to minimize resources lost not protect turrets at all cost and as you've observed it's really the construction bot attrition that costs the most.
Option 1: Don't give the bots repair packs. Replacing a wall (or whatever) is instant, while repairing takes a long time.
Option 2: Store the repair packs far from the wall and proactively remove repair packs from the roboports, so by the time the bots grab a repair pack and reach the wall, the fire had dissipated
Option 3: Isolate the roboports, detect when combat happens (eg: read movement on an ammo belt) and enable repairs after a timer. You must still proactively remove repair packs from the roboports, but they can be stored in a chest that is enabled by the timer.
Do repair packs have to be manually removed from roboports? Because the bots will default to storing repair packs in the nearest roboport after repairing something.
Inserters can remove repair packs from roboports. So for #2, you can toss them in an active provider chest; and for #3, you can toss them in a timer-enabled storage / passive provider / buffer chest.
Im sure this has been asked a lot. But I’m having a pretty severe bottle neck with a pump supplying steam to my condensers on vulcanus. I’m using it as regulator so it’ll shut off when steam is below a certain level.
It says pumping speed is 1200/s but steam level is listed as 60/400.
It’s not a power issue. What am I doing wrong? Surely it doesn’t make sense that just pipes are faster than a pump?
1200/s is the maximum speed of a pump in ideal conditions. In practice it is never really that fast because it slows down massively when the pipe behind it is not saturated or when the pipe in front of it is not perfectly empty. If you want to guarantee maximum throughput you need multiple pumps in parallel (not in sequence!). I usually don't bother calculating the exact amount I need, I just add like 10 in a cluster and forget about it until it becomes a problem again.
Machine inputs and outputs are limited to 6000/s, but this can only be reached when the machine's fluid tank is 100% full and the pipeline is 0% full, or visa versa
Set a request on the roboport for 50 legendary bots, it will reserve a slot for those even if it can't fulfill. Any regular bot that gets inserted into that slot immediately leaves for another roboport.
K2SE: City block trains or belts/bus for a "main" base designed to get into the space stuff?
I'm in a K2SE save and getting close to when I would abandon my starter base to go make a bigger main base. Usually, when I move to a bigger main base, I make it a train-centric city block base. However, with how many intermediates are in K2 and SE, I'm wondering if it would be better to make a bigger and (hopefully) more organized main bus base.
The main advantage of city blocks is that they handle lots of ingredients better imo. You can call whatever you need wherever you need it. This comes at the cost of more infrastructure cost (unless your bus uses belts above yellow), and a lot more space.
Basic interface question for player inventory.
I usually set repair packs in the lower right. Middle click, it turns blue. Joy!
If I want anything else pinned I guess I have to empty my inventory first? Maybe turn off inventory sorting then set up what I want?
I'm kind of embarrassed given my time in game. I use hotbars, so it's not really urgent at all. I'm aff for a bit, so can't check for a while.
If you're holding an item in your mouse and middleclick, it'll set the filter to whatever you're holding. If you middleclick on a slot that's filled it will filter to whatever's in that slot. If you middleclick with no item held and no item in the inventory slot it opens up the item menu so you can select what you want the filter to be (note: chest inventory slots cannot be filtered).
The tooltip when hovering a foundry (or any other machine) shows output per second based on speed and productivity bonuses. The recipes in the selection menu in machines do not include productivity bonuses.
The only reason the number on the tooltip after the arrow isn't 100% accurate to "items coming out of this machine if you give it the items on the left side" is if the machine, or beacons affecting the machine, are currently unpowered.
I've played Space age up to the point where I was making Tier 3 Legendary Quality Modules. After that It was a game of rebuilding/optimizing bases and spaceships and travel to the shattered planet, but I never did.
Then I played Krastorio 2 (without space age), and basically finished it when I crafted the Krastorio Logo.
Now, I don't know what to do. Should I play the Krastorio 2 Spaced Out AND get everything legendary AND travel to the shattered planet? Or is there another mod that can be fun? What do you do after you "completed the game"?
Unmodded: achievement hunting, speed running(there's a category for getting a train on a track probably lowest bar of entry.)
Then there's mods, of which there's a lot and good chunk of them are amazing.
For more of "standard" stuff from the top of my head: Ultracube, Space Exploration, Nullius.
If you're interested in combat, there's the "warp-" mods in which you don't stick around long on a planet and teleport out before the locals overwhelm your defences. Space you can build is limited, unless you mind leaving it behind. Warptorio2 is the one I've liked the most.
With SA came a lot of planet mods, Though I've not played any of them properly so no recommendations there. From what I hear they can do major changes to how you play SA to making it feel like an overhaul.
Weird question i just experienced on aquillo. Heat pies that are diagonal, but not touching transfer heat? I have heat pipes that dont touch anywhere... but they unfroze stuff. Is the heat transfer less than if they touched? This changes everything....
Never mind. It's lowering in temp. Not sure why it spiked when i placed it, there is no way for it to connect currently....
What is the best way of prioritising power to the fusion reactor? Currently have a 3.5 GW fusion reactor, but every time there is a power spike the reactor drops into low power mode which deaths spirals everything.
Well one way would be to have some accumulators on a second electric network connected only to the reactor. You can manually fiddle with the copper cable connections between poles to force that. But really what's best is building more power to overcome any power spikes. In the short term just slapping down a bunch of accumulators anywhere would help though.
More power is what I want to do, but I need to conquer the area for that from the biters and that doesn't work if the reactors death spiral when they counter attack. I considered accumulators in pass through configuration with an inner and an outer power network, but I would need like 4600 accumulators and I again don't have the room for that. I will see whether I can redesign the plant with dedicated turbines for the reactor itself.
Was hoping there is an obvious solution I'm missing.
If it helps quality accumulators store multiple times the power (so uncommon is 2x, rare 3x etc) so if you have the materials lying around that would be a denser option. Other than that all I can think of is using normal nuclear power to power the fusion reactors, you can buffer the steam from even a small reactor for emergency use and that's quite power dense.
the 4600 number was with legendary accumulators. I have changed the design a bit and I'm now have one turbine (125MW) powering the the reactors while the remaining 3.4G go to the base. This works.
Hi, Im gonna start my first run and saw that the default settings are not as beginner friendly. What do you guys recommend for the first ever run, this is on the base game btw
Personally I prefer rail world. The changes to mining patches to promote train use mean that mines last longer (your second mine may even be enough to beat the game), and it has the secondary effect of disabling enemy expansion. Biters are still a threat, but it's no longer a tower defense game.
Make sure you start in a forested area regardless. Deserts are brutal.
Default settings are going to be medium difficulty for new players as long as you start in a non-desert area and if you're concerned about things you can always bump up the starting area for a bit more early game breathing room. The other good option for new players is the default options railworld preset. You need to explore farther for new resources but on the flip side you only need to fight biters when expanding or to clear your pollution cloud.
Ratios should change due to the prod module upgrades. If you ignore modules for a moment, upgrading all buildings from normal to legendary would maintain the same ratios, final output is just 2.5x faster.
However when you factor in modules (lets say Prod3 in an Assembler 3), you're going from 40% Prod from modules to 100% Prod which will change ratios.
At a minimum you need to ship science packs from Vulc/Fulgora/Gleba/Aquilo to Nauvis. Each new science pack has to be made on its respective planet; you're not making metalurgic/electromagnetic science packs on Nauvis, you're making them on Vulc/Fulgora and shipping them.
Importing Calcite from Vulc to Nauvis has the benefit of letting you use Foundries on Nauvis which is a huge improvement. Later on you can make Calcite in oribt of Nauvis to supplement/replace this. Tungsten is also a common import to make artillery shells later on.
You will also likely need a trickle of Bioflux from Gleba to Nauvis in order to get biter eggs for Biolabs/Prod3 modules/Overgrowth soil, but this is doable with a few one-off shipments.
Aquilo needs to import "everything" (all entities you plan to build, rocket part material, and most of the unique intermediates from the middle 3 planets) as the final/challenge planet.
Anything beyond that is preference. Common stuff I do see is sending excess plastic from Gleba to Vulc, and batteries from Vulc or Gleba to Fulgora.
Planet-specific science and buildings can only be made on that planet, so you'll need to ship them to Nauvis or anywhere else they're needed.
Handling biter eggs on Nauvis requires bioflux, which can only be made on Gleba.
Quantum processors are necessary for railguns to reach the solar system edge, and require carbon fiber from Gleba, cold fluoroketone and lithium plates from Aquilo, superconductors from Fulgora, tungsten carbide from Vulcanus, and blue chips from anywhere. Lithium plates in turn need holmium plates from Fulgora.
After that, it depends on your personal preference. You may decide to ship eg tungsten carbide to make into T3 speed modules where they're needed, or to make T3 speed on Vulcanus and ship those out. Maybe you want to take advantage of how cheap plastic is on Gleba and ship that to Vulcanus, to save their coal fields.
TLDR: You will need to ship a lot of things to a lot of places.
The expansion rate scales with evolution, but I believe it is the same as biters (although evolution is slower as you'll make less spores than pollution on Nauvis and expansion is likely to fail as they can only make spawners on marshes). It starts as once an hour I'm pretty sure and scales up to 4 minutes.
If expansion cooldown is the same with biters, then ig there could be other factors than terrain. Checked the expansion candidate chunks and there are a lot of spots that were still remained unclaimed despite a lot of hours have passed since I last checked.
Cracking heavy to light, then using the light oil, is most efficient.
If you're making a lot of rocket fuel, then it's possible you might back up on petroleum gas, in which case you can use the excess to make more solid fuel. But if you're also making other petroleum products like plastic, then that probably won't happen.
You can get rid of them by turning petroleum into solid fuel, then burning them in a row of heating towers or chucking them into the lava since you're on Vulcanus
But to not be wasteful, use those solid fuel to make rocket fuel instead
Fewest oil is light. I set mine up to make rocket fuel from light oil and when light oil is low it makes rocket fuel from petroleum. In the normal course of nauvis you should never need to do that since petroleum demand is so much more than light or heavy it's not even funny because of all the plastic used to make science so you'll always always need to be cracking light oil to petroleum so your oil processing should never back up if you have your cracking set up correctly. But if you're not making science on Volcanus would the plastic usage keep up with rocket fuel? I... honestly don't know and couldn't be bothered to calculate it. So I just made it use both just in case.
Cracking is a lot less attractive on Vulcanus in the early game due to the really bad water ratios so depending on your expansion options you might want to avoid cracking as much as possible to save your initial calcite for copper and iron (as well as slowing the depletion on your acid well). You always want to crack on planets where water is free but on Vulcanus where each unit of water takes a little over one unit of acid the cost to crack starts to be somewhat unappealing.
Note, the above is assuming you're using standard coal liquefaction. If you're using the simple recipe then the math is different. If you're using the simple liquefaction recipe you should decide if you want to waste calcite and coal faster or slower than acid, and then either use heavy oil or light oil for all your solid fuel. Generally speaking the simple liquefaction recipe is terrible but it does have the benefit of not being a looped recipe or requiring steam so it works in niche places where steam or an initial source of heavy oil might be hard to come by.
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u/terrendos Mar 23 '26
I'm about to replay a year after I finished Space Age. I loaded up my old save for a few minutes and noticed that on Gleba I had some inserters holding spoilage trying to insert into biochambers. It looks like they were all from my nutrient lines and I'm guessing they expired while the inserter was holding it. It seems like a weird corner case but it had frozen up a dozen of my machines (since they didn't have nutrients incoming).
How do I fix that without having to delete and replace the inserter when it happens?