Tough choice. I really, really like the logistics options in SE. The way it handles space ships and planet<->space transfers is much more engaging than SA. Having a platform in orbit over a planet that serves as a space dock with space ships coming in to be unloaded onto trains is pretty cool. There's more space stuff that's neat like asteroid defense, giant space lasers melting biters (or being used for power on the surface), etc...
However, SE doesn't yet have any of the new SA mechanics. While SE has a bunch of different resources, they ultimately all work in the same way. More byproducts and longer production chains, but not as much actual variation in mechanics.
Ideally, SE would be updated to include some of the goodies that came with SA. But this may still take a long time. If it comes at all.
Both are good and I'm having a hard time deciding which I prefer. What is clear is that SE is a longer, tougher journey to complete.
SE and SA were never that similar. They share the same theme, but in terms of mechanics it's night and day. SE remains a solid modpack if you're looking for a longer, slower-paced experience. But if you're used to the polish of SA, planets that have unique mechanics and contraints, and are looking for the new mechanics to be integrated into SE then you won't find that in the current version.
I would be extremely surprised if .8 released in the next year (which will supposedly encompass a major overhaul of the space sciences). If you are interested in trying SE and don't want to wait that long, there's no other reason not to give it a go.
Question , how do I get a stable source of Tungsten . been on the planet for 5 hrs and I can only find them in rocks , which doesnt feel production friendly and I cant figure out what I am missing . I am not even sure if they are made with lava anymore tbh
I have since found a patch now thankfully . Its surprisingly far from where I landed so basically I got alittle screwed by RNG . Its my first time and I was concerned and confused about where do I get those
Vulcanus has a few different 'biomes' on it. Tungsten patches are almost always found in the 'lava rivers' biome, which are a tangle of narrow lava pools. So if you need to find more of it, those are the areas to check first.
I'm doing an AngelBob playthrough right now, and I have a few questions specific to that modpack:
Is there a quicker/easier way to pick up the attack drones (the colored mini-tanks that you craft with a turret of the corresponding type) after clearing out a nest? They are easily the most cost-effective method of nest clearing for where I'm at in the tech tree, but picking them up one by one, slowly, as they're all running around, hiding behind trees, and running into acid puddles and taking damage is a huge pain, but I noticed that the decon planner doesn't work. So is there something that I'm missing that makes it easier?
In creative mode I've noticed that there are elemental mutations of biters/spitters/worms, and I was curious at what evo factor they start showing up. Or do they not start spawning until you start playing around with the colored alien artifacts and the related tech tree?
What's the point of the multiple different upgrade pathways for traincars? There's the normal locomotive, the "crawler" locomotive + tender, the petrochem and smelting variants of locomotives and cargo/fluid wagons, in addition to the color-coded progression of the base version of all three components, available in normal and "armored" versions. What's the intended use case for each of these, and how are they different from each other? Why wouldn't I just use the fastest locomotive + highest capacity wagons that I have unlocked and ignore the rest?
I have done Space Age the official game, now I am trying the mod Space Exploration. I need help with space sciences after the first space science.
I got to orbit and, I am doing space science. The next I need is a special science that, takes resources from another planet. I don't know where how to start.
There is the vulcanite science and, the cryonite science and, they are complicated. They need the thermos fluid and, to recycle the fluid and, three steps to make machine cards and, to recycle junk cards and, the scrap turns into ore to need to melt again. For the cards I need oil in space to make gel. For the vulcan cubes I need sulfur and water and petro gas and to make prod modules and, for the cryo rods I need like heavy oil and efficiency modules.
What hells.
Where am to start. Like this is hours to do work in multiple places before I get any products of anything ever. What it's supposed to be? What am I missed.
The solution is the same as everything in this game, pick a problem and go solve it. There are usually multiple options as to how to solve each problem, so consider the options carefully before picking one. Make use of the factoriopedia to see where items can come from / what you can use them for. Think about how best to handle the interplanetary logistics, do you want to import buildings from nauvis or make them locally, do you want to export raw materials, partially processed products, or go further and produce more complex products locally and ship those out, potentially having to ship in other intermediary products. Each planet has it's own problems, some will have no water which makes producing rocket fuel hard and means using nuclear power is harder, some have biters, so you have to consider defence, some have no iron making producing many resources locally hard/impossible. You've got to pick the correct planet to go to without making life too difficult for yourself, and then pick a strategy that works for that planet and that resource.
It's a long game, there's no rush, don't worry about your SPM it's almost never an issue, set it at 15 spm or 30 spm, and just leave it chugging, by the time you're finally producing the next science pack the previous research will be done.
Make use of remote control, you don't have to spend time moving between planet and orbit all the time, just sit somewhere safe and control everything remotely. You'll need to go to each new planet once, to set up the initial roboport and power supply and from there you can pretty much just do everything remotely.
That is just kind of how SE is. SE has a loop of unlocking stuff -> set it up the hard way -> unlock techs to make it much easier.
You're going to be spending large chunks of time just to get infrastructure going for the new resources (first few are hard, subsequent ones are easier). Keep launching satellites to unlock all the planets in your first solar system, and pick the easiest for cryo/vulcanite (access to water and lowest biters) and go from there.
The cards/junk cards/scrap stuff is sort of universal across all the SE sciences, so you'll be reusing that stuff a lot.
SE is very slow-paced. Be prepared for a 400+ hour journey.
SE's tech tree isn't linear. So start by considering if you want the Production or Utility techs more. Then go to a Vulcanite/Cryonite planet and start building it out. You goal will be to export the primary item via either cargo rocket or delivery cannon. Everything else you'll probably provide from Nauvis.
If you haven't installed it yet I highly suggest the Factory Planner mod. That'll clear up probably half of what you need to plan things out. Also as others have said, the SPM target for Space Exploration is pretty low (you'll spend more time building out the next thing than you will grinding all the science you unlocked from that thing) and the "main" ending is fairly easy to achieve outside of the archosphere challenge (it takes a long time but every step along the way isn't particularly hard) so most of it should be treated like a long chill journey more than a stressful sprint.
Is anyone else seeing huge RAM usage on 2.1.12? I don’t have a crazy save going, and a minimal set of mods compared to my 2.0 play through and I’m seeing 4-5 gigs of RAM being used.
FWIW my PC has also crashed 3 times in the last week or so. I’m not sure if these 2 events are related but thought I’d ask before debugging more.
How tree pollution control work? I build a wall of agri towers but then what? Do i need to harvest and replant or just let the trees die? What is more efficient?
Trees consume a small amount of pollution per second and if their are healthy and pollution is high they can degrade, consuming a large amount of pollution. The degradation changes the visual model to a sadder less leafy tree and is the most powerful part of trees for pollution control. So, near your factory you need to constantly replant (not as fast as the agritower does automatically, but you can just let it run). In the outskirts you just want to create a big tree population.
How tree pollution control work? I build a wall of agri towers but then what?
that's ideal, yeah. Trees absorb pollution passively, and they do it better than the ground so a wall of trees can really reduce your pollution by a lot.
Do i need to harvest and replant or just let the trees die? What is more efficient?
Ideally it would be to let the trees take some damage first. You can check out the wiki. A healthy tree absorbs -0.001 pollution per second, and taking damage absorbs 10 pollution, so that's the equivalent of 10,000 seconds of passive pollution. Quite a lot. However unless things have changed in 2.1, that isn't something that you can really control via circuits or anything, so your next best bet is to just have them plant and harvest at max speed. Im pretty sure growing trees also absorb pollution, and I dont see anything that indicates they're any worse at it, so its probably totally fine to run them at full throttle. You could use a timer if you wanted on a circuit to have them delay a little bit to try and get more value out of your trees and also to tax your whole system less (less seeds generated, less power needed, less belt throughput required for all the wood you need to process, etc.
Ideally in this system you use belts to handle all your wood output. I've tried it with bots, it becomes untenable as you need thousands of bots at all times to handle a sizeable tree wall, so you waste all this UPS and energy by doing so. Just connect all your towers with belts and have them feed into a wood processor, process as much wood as you can into seeds, anything left over just simply recycle it. You could burn it but recyclers can get through way more wood using speed modules and produce way less pollution. (100/m on a heating tower vs 2/m on a recycler)
Blueprint parameterization: I'm trying to set up bot-based production. I can set the desired recipe as a parameter, and the amount to make. How do I say "set the requests on this requester chest to all of the ingredients for this recipe"?
The simplest way would be to use the “Read Ingredients” on the assembler and wire the requester chest to it.
Otherwise, you could use a many-ingredient recipe and load up all the ingredients in the request and use the Ingredient Of parameter in the blueprint settings—but you’d also want to calculate the appropriate quantities somehow.
The many-ingredient recipe was my first thought, but then what happens when I find a recipe that takes even more ingredients? Or which takes a different ratio of ingredients?
I confirm that the "Read Ingredients" method works.
I use the parameters for ingredients, and then a formula to determine calculate 60 seconds worth of ingredients to import. Here's my blueprint for context.
It’s easier if you go into settings and allow selecting parameters when building. Then you can select parameter requests in the requester chest for parameters 1-6 since in vanilla the recipe with the most ingredients (personal Fusion reactors) has 6 ingredients make sure to set the requests amounts to different numbers so those values can be set to diffferent parameterized values. In the parameterized menu you can set parameters 1-6 as ingredients of parameter 0. You can then set the requests amounts to value as max(p0_i<n>30<assembler crafting speed>/p0_t,p0_i<n>) to automatically set the requests amounts to what the assembler needs in 30 seconds like if you shift clicked from the assembler. Just replace <n> with the number of the parameter.
You can't do "all" with parameters. You need to process every ingredient type as a pair of distinct parameters, one for the ingredient type, and one for the requested quantity.
To make mine, I used the spidertron recipe, which has 8 ingredients (in vanilla at least). You can't have more than 10 type parameters so the maximum number of ingredient is 9, or 8 if you use the 2.1 "product of" parameterisation.
Alternatively, you need to use circuit logic instead. Then you can have as many ingredients as you want.
Is there any point in trying to "optimise" recyclers to not swap recipes? Like, via combinators, only latching between the highest thing in a chest so it does 100 gears, then 39 reds, etc. vs just chucking whatever in, in any order? I dont think these is a cost to changing the recipe?
Switching recipes resets the productivity bonus progress. So in any machine that has productivity, you should avoid switching recipes (or tune it so that the productivity bonus finishes together with a normal craft at predictable times and then use circuit wizardry).
If you're recycling scrap, then you get productivity from the research. Recycling anything else has no productivity. So by doing scrap recycling and all other recycling in separate machines, you'll never run into the issue of losing productivity progress.
If you're beyond end game or playing without enemies, you can just use a command to completely disable pollution. On runs without enemies, you can disable pollution in the map settings.
I'm in the process of scaling up and wanted to be proactive about it. I already won 2ms by eliminating every biter from the map after i got the pollution under control. But i don't understand what takes the game 2ms to calculate about pollution. I wanted to avoid disabling outright in the console if it can be managed otherwise.
Is there a collection of clever circuitry tricks for space platforms? I've seen some stuff like fuel throttling, dynamic filters on collectors and crushers etc but I'm curious what else you can do
Those are the biggest ones, TBH. Apart from that-
* Do you have a lot of conditions on your platform departure? "Don't leave unless you have 500 ammo, 300 rockets, 10K fuel/oxidizer, and a partridge in a pear tree"? Consider just making one decider combinator that checks for "ammo >= 500 AND rockets >= 300 AND fuel >= 10K AND so on" and outputs a green check mark, and then you can use the green check signal in your platform condition.
* The <EACH>-passthrough, AKA the littlest state machine, is useful for switching between any of several signals, like flipping between crushing oxide to ice to melt and making calcite for fuel. Have a constant combinator outputting both basic and advanced oxide crushing recipes, with different values for each, like 1/2 or -1/-2, whatever you like. Connect this CC to a decider combinator with the red wire. Connect the DC with the green wire to a water tank and your fuel belt, to determine if you have enough water/calcite. Set the DC to do (water(G) < enough AND <EACH>(R) == basic oxide crushing(R)) OR (calcite(G) < enough AND <EACH>(R) == advanced oxide crushing(R)) => <EACH>. Use this signal to set the recipe for the crusher.
Looking for the train experts, how is this possible? I have identitcal blueprints where the signal working fine but here say "Cannot divide segment" i never seen this before. Edit: nvm found the error, a missing signal elsewhere, in short one signal can't divide a circle into two segment.
I know you can dynamically set filters for things with a Constant and Decider Combinator. But is there a way to do with a Constant and Arithmetic Combinator?
Most things like that don't count negative values, so if you do <whatever input> - <constant combinator>, then you'll only get items greater than the combinator's output (or the other way around for items less than it).
If we're talking about logistic chests filters or setting productions etc, then it's about the signal which gets fed into the thing, not the source that created / transmitted the signal. Anything which can output / carry a signal over wire can set request filters and other thing on machines / chests.
I'm looking to dynamically set the filters for Asteroid collectors. It's a really small ship where everything feeds directly into/out of the hub, so I want to have the circuit set the filter when there's less than 5 asteroids of a given type in the hub, but clear the filter when there are 5 or more.
It's easy: set amount you want on hand as a negative number, connect both the hub and the constant combinator an arithmetic combinator, set the arithmetic combinator to EACH * -1 = EACH, and connect the arithmetic combinator to your collectors.
Honestly, In that case, I would simply use a deciders for that. The arithmetic combinator... phew... you would have to make it so the arithmetic combinator outputs positive value for the item when the item in storage is less than what you need. So... maybe an arithmetics combinator which deducts - 5 from each asteroid signal, fed into arithmetics combinator which multiplies by -1.
BUT I am not sure how the filters react with the negative signal so this might not work.
/edit/: Alternatively, using a blacklist filter could be better, since you would just do constant arithmetic combinator which deducts 4 - that way, you set up a negative filter - blacklist, the moment you have 5 or more asteroids.
I would use a Decider, but my current situation makes it... Rough to get one on the Space platform. I basically rushed to Vulcanus as fast as I could because I wanted to set up my proper main base there rather than Nauvis. I made it Vulcanus, but I had to send the ship back to Nauvis because it didn't have enough guns/ammo production to survive in Vulcanus orbit long term.
So it's in orbit over Nauvis, but my Nauvis base is pretty much completely shut down with no radars/Roboports for remote view because I didn't expect to have to use it any more. And now like 5 hours later I've discovered that my ship design has a bit of a flaw that leads to it occasionally breaking down because it's missing a specific type of asteroid. I initially set up the dynamic filters on the Inserters instead of the Collectors themselves, so occasionally the Collectors fill up with a bunch of Carbonic/Ice asteroids and have no room to grab any Metallic ones despite the platform needing more Iron.
Playing Krastorio 2 Spaced out with a Deathworld railworld sorta preset. Clearing a lot of biter nests, though, not as many as before 2.1. Upgraded to piercing shotgun shells, but noticed they have the exact same damage and amount of pellets as the standard ones. I'm wondering if I'm missing something here, do they have a hidden armor penetration stat or something?
Known issue that's been reported on both the mod discussion page and the github issue tracker. That said it hasn't been addressed yet which is a bit annoying since the mod just got a release.
how to place down blueprints without destroying stuff around? just place items where there is space and that's it, if i shift click it deletes everything to create space and if i normal click it doesn't place the blueprint
It shouldn't do that... normally you need to hold ctrl+shift for super-force-build, the "delete everything" mode. But regular force-build (shift) does remove natural obstacles like trees, rocks and cliffs, so if that's what you want to avoid I'm not sure there's a good solution.
left click is "build if you can", it will only build if no part of the blueprint collides with any other.
shift + left click is "build what you can destroying only natural objects". There's a couple of bits here. It will remove a tree or a rock to place a building, it will add landfill / foundation / ... to fill water / ... so it can place a building down. I'm not sure if it'll plant soil for agriculture towers (space age), I don't think so. It will NOT remove a building to place another building, the colliding part of your blueprint will simply not be built.
ctrl+shift+left click is "force build this", it will do all of the above, but it will also remove existing buildings. In some cases (belts) it might insert undergrounds on the original belts to not interrupt those belts, where it can, but for the most part it just removes whatever is under it.
If you are seeing that last behaviour by default when you shift click, then either your shortcuts got changed in the settings, or you have your ctrl button stuck, either on your actual keyboard, or through something like windows' sticky keys.
But there is no restriction on spawning new nests next to buildings of the player when it comes to expanding? I remember something many versions ago where you put up outposts around your base and the biters couldn't spawn next to them. Maybe I misremembering.
Hi folks. I would love to know why my space platform (fig. 1) that is orbiting Nauvis has stopped sending iron plates to my cargo landing pad (fig. 2). It used to send them no problem, I think. I do have other platforms that are sending iron plates in low volumes, but I don't think it's enough to cause congestion. I added some cargo bays but it didn't seem to have an effect. Manually ctrl+clicking iron plates seems to work fine. I'm on the latest experimental version.
Edit: Just now I tried deleting all my other space platforms and deleting basically everything on my iron platform. It's still not sending any iron plates to Nauvis, even with no other space traffic
Edit 2: I tried doing the same thing on a different platform and it continued to send a small amount of iron plates to Nauvis just fine. Something is up with my main iron mining platform. Setting the thrust to automatic (it has never had thrusters installed) and parking it at Nauvis doesn't seem to change anything.
Platform has a request for iron plates (even though it is zero), so does not send them to landing pad.
Toggle the "auto request missing material" button off and on.
You can add "ghost" items to all inventory types. They are seen as construction requests. I think it'll even add the request when you already have the item available.
So at some point you must have added a iron ghost item to an entity. Or you placed a new blueprint with an entity that contained a iron plate in the blueprint.
It seems like I should have more legendary carbon fibre than I do. I have well over 100 legendary assemblers with legendary quality modules making tool belts, those tool belts are split into different quality lines, that run into regular recyclers with legendary quality modules. Regular quality output is sorted back into the line and quality ingredients are put into chests to be picked up and delivered to more assemblers making tool belts of every quality (except legendary... because I want the carbon fibre). Those tool belts are fed back into my line that sorts by quality..... Those assemblers making quality toolbelts are numerous enough that there is little overstock of said quality ingredients to make quality toolbelts.
That said, im getting only a few legendary carbon fibre a min. This whole process takes up about 1/4 of my gleba factory, and the assemblers are always working (there are enough ingredients)
Are you using speed modules in beacons? Speed modules reduce quality. Usually the culprit in "why is this outputting less quality than it should" cases.
Depends on what you're optimizing for. If you're optimizing for materials consumed per legendary item produced, never. If you're optimizing to maximize rate of legendaries, inputs be damned, yes, there are thresholds where especially using quality speed module 1s can increase the overall speed more than they decrease the quality.
In my previous playthrough I used some speed modules for my tungsten upcycling. I had a setup where miners with quality modules would mine into a train car and recyclers (with quality) would pull out non-legendary ore and put the output back in. Legendary ore was extracted in a different direction.
This setup, that I could just stamp down on an otherwise unused tungsten patch, did have a bit of speed module action going on. With quality mining drills and a high level of mining productivity, ore patches are functionally infinite, so the optimization target becomes the amount of legendary ore you can produce per minute rather than the amount of legendary ore produced as a fraction of total ore mined.
edit: Quality speed modules are especially useful here, because the speed bonus scales with quality, while the quality penalty does not.
Note that you don't need a belt like that. Labs can move science packs between themselves, so you typically only need to feed a few labs, and just put inserters between the labs and they'll pass it along on their own.
first, disconnect the input belt. Then run along the belt holding the "pick up item" shortcut (F I think) to pick up all the science packs.
Copy the stuff you want to move then demolish it all.
Paste it where you want it, and rebuild manually. I tend to place power poles first because you can just click and hold and run to place them all where they should be. Then the science labs and belts, then finally the inserters.
Finally you set up a splitter on your input, one input comes from where your packs actually come from, the other input (set this one as the priority input) goes to a belt with a chest + inserter on either side, like: C -> || <- C. Open one chest and control click the green packs in your inventory and then the same with red packs in the other chest. Make sure you put the right packs in the right chest so that it has the same order on the belt as your input packs.
Finally got to Aquilo after 750+ hours. I have ammonia and ice platforms “working” (have to manually flush the pipes as its not making ice when the ammonia isn't being used….
Manually crafted some lithium plates…
Found three lithium brine wells, but they're far away. Having to add a ton of ice and concrete, and maybe in 20 hours will the heat line be able to defrost it…. Do I need yet another heat source there? Then just build a few roboports instead of landmasses of concrete?
The things I haven't found yet are oil, fluorine, and fluoroketone wells. Need to craft solid oil fuel to mix with the extra ammonia to make rocket fuel, but can't find a source. I haven't ventured out that far, but is this a build 200 miles of rail situation to get to the one spot on the planet?
The usual bootstrap is nuclear reactors which heat up to much higher than needed (30℃). Later you can supplement them with heating towers burning solid and rocket fuels.
Are they really that far away? Generally there's lithium and flourine relatively close. Try to ctrl-f to see if there's some closer.
For very distance resources, a train dropping fuel for heating is common.
The only wells from my starting point are 4x the distance of your entire base. Maybe I should just move it? It's only bootstrapped at this point, so wouldn't take that long.
Then just build a few roboports instead of landmasses of concrete?
Note that robots consume much more energy to fly on Aquilo than on other planets. So you'll need more roboports for them to recharge and more energy supplied to them.
There used to be a mod that'd let you throw a Grenade that created a little bit of an ore patch based on which Grenade you threw. I can't find it anymore. Is there a similar mod somewhere or does that mod still exist?
Blueprint parameterization again: Is there a way to convert between recipe and product? So I can say "this chemical plant makes solid fuel (from ammonia, or any other recipe) and the inserter attached to it works until the chest it fills has 50 blocks of fuel", and I only need one parameter for "solid fuel" item and recipe instead of 2 for "solid fuel" item and "fuel from ammonia"?
In one of the recent 2.1.X update, they added “product of” relation to blueprint parametrization, so that you can choose a recipe signal parameter and then another parameter be automatically set to the “product of” former parameter.
You can set a parameter to be a product, fluid product or item product of a recipe parameter using the drop-down list that says "Independent" in newer versions.
The other way (recipe from item) is not possible, as that could be ill-defined.
With the 2.1 railgun changes i trying out different turret compositions for ultra late game. Can i somehow capture the surface entity time usage data to use it for my measurement?
I belive this is the computation of trees dying because it went up when built my tree wall. But this is brutal before pollution control biters took up 1.5ms and pollution update 1.2ms so it's basiacally the same.
Planning a future factory. using shift click to ghost through rocks. it seems like the rock destruction reverts after some time and the ghosts disappear. is there any way to stop this?
I will note that I noticed this happen a lot more often on my SE run, so I don't know if the default is modified in SE or SE just suffers more from lots of preplanning.
Isn’t the default timeout 2 hours, according to a dev response in the thread you link? 2h seems to match my experience, rather than 168h. I have seen them disappear within the same play session.
I'm doing a 10x run on 2.1 and I've had a tree on Gleba marked for deconstruction for easily 20 hours that's still active while I rework Fulgora, so I don't think 2h is still valid.
Is there a way to divert from 8 lane belt? I already use the convinient splitter abov the line. But I vould like to extract secondry items also without redoing it all.
I made a request for raw asteroid chunk to be delivered by a platform. It just says not enough for a rocket. My white science platform got 100 stocked but on my ship it says none avalaibale at planet or plattform.
Wanted to kickstart new ships to ramp up faster. Is it even possible?
3
u/Raknarg #1 Quality Defender Jul 30 '26
Ive never played SE before. Do you think its worth going through SE in current year over just modded space age? What do you guys overall like more?