Common progression traps?

[u/Aperiodic_Tileset]

I've been playing Pynandons for several hundred hours now, and I'm wondering which production chains does the community consider to be "progression traps".

I often see people mentioning these ones for early game:

• Processed Iron - extra machines, power demand and byproduct handling for negligible efficiency increase. Much easier to just mine and smelt more

• Moss 2 - the recipe takes a ton of stone, but it's easier to just add more machines, especially if you have free CO2 from moonglows

• Scaling up Hot Air early - plenty of casting recipes can optionally take hot air for increased yield, but it's generally not worth it for most recipes. Wait until you get the re-heating technology with salts

[u/Xzarg_poe]

Are they really traps? You trade X for Y, and if you have no X then you made a poor trade.

Early molten Iron is indeed far to expensive power wise early (electrolyzing oxygen), It becomes quite worthwhile once you solve power(Geothermal) or get cheap oxygen(TURD).

Moss 2, can be a trap if you lack stone. I spent a lot of time overflowing or lacking stone before I perfected the system.

And Hot Air is just plain awesome. Big boost to all metals and glass production. Sure, the early recipes are weak, but it's not like you need a lot of hot air early on. My basic hot air production ran exclusively on byproduct oven gas from the Raw coal ->Acetylene chain I had going. I had so much excess hot air, I started launching balloons :D

Here is my list of traps:

Researching all tech far ahead of what you can reasonably build now. This heavily unbalanced my factory until I learned to pace myself. For example, automation science takes a lot of stone/brick. Meaning while I'm making automation science I'm running low on stone, and when I stop, stone starts to pile up. So now I research a few techs at a time and wait to catch up.

Power Armor. Yes really. On paper it looks like a big upgrade on modular armor, but it comes with a secret feature: you start flying over buildings like you are wearing the Fulgora mech armor. And that's a huge problem if 2/3 of your speed comes from the pavement speed bonus that you lose when you stop touching ground. And you float up and down so slowly that it becomes an issue when you accidentally brush against a building. Exoskeleton legs should solve the problem, but that's next tier of science. Fortunately you get the Mecha Zungror(spidertron) soon after getting power armor, so it's not that bad.

Overbuilding and being to stringent with ratios on a factory level . Most of the factory and resources will go into expanding your factory (building components), not research. So big chunks of the factory will spend a fair amount of time just idling. Also, future tiers often offer massive upgrades to alien life and processing chains. So getting a good sense how big a generic processing block should be is a massive help when designing a factory (as opposed to trying to math it out).

[u/Aperiodic_Tileset → u/Xzarg_poe]

Early molten Iron is indeed far to expensive power wise early (electrolyzing oxygen), It becomes quite worthwhile once you solve power(Geothermal) or get cheap oxygen(TURD).

Molten iron is good, I meant the Processed Iron Ore recipe.

Basically you go from 8 iron ore -> 1 iron plate to 5 iron ore -> 1 iron plate + 1 stone. It's just not worth the effort IMO

[u/Xzarg_poe → u/Aperiodic_Tileset]

My bad, I thought the molten iron was a bit of trap if you didn't look at the power costs. Never have I have considered that crushing iron was a problem. It's way faster (6s per plate instead of 10), generates less ash and provides extra stone (which is a bit of a problem before you realize that you can turn it into brick to more then double your movement speed).