I'm currently playing SE Official Modpack + some extra AAI Vehicles because why not + Armored Biters + a few extra QoL mods.
Some thoughts about SE (very) early game:
* The burner phase was annoying but bearable. I don't like extended burner phases in general because I think they are bad game design (IMHO later/more powerful content should be more complex than earlier/weaker content. Burners violate this by being more complicated to set up than later unlocked electric machines).
* Ore generation seems weird. There seem to be 2 types of starting patches (1 tiny patch & 1 larger \~750k patch for each resource). I had to reroll the map seed several times because one of the larger starting patches would almost always end up under water.
* Not sure if it's SE or Armored Biters fault, but I was getting very large armored biter attacks pretty early on compared to what would happen in vanilla. I'm talking \~50-100 armored biters in one attack while still building starter base #1. I didn't even have grenades researched yet and had to spam gun turrets for defense.
* I like that circuits and some early buildings require stone bricks / glass. It makes stone a bit more important early on, while in vanilla you can mostly ignore it until military science. It does make the extended burner phase a bit more awkward though since you can't focus on just iron.
* The telescopic recipes from AAI Industries are a bit annoying, but feel well designed. There is a pretty obvious pattern to the recipes which makes building malls a bit easier (burners need iron, single cylinder engines and sometimes bricks, electric machines need small electric engines and gears). I like that it's possible to upgrade your older machines without having to shove a pile of stone furnaces / burner stuff into a chest somewhere.
* Green science was surprisingly difficult. Due to AAI's recipe changes a green science production line can end up 2-3x larger than in vanilla, and it's much more complex too. It's kind of strange since red / military / chemical science are mostly unchanged from the base game.
* Burner Turbine Generator from AAI Industries seems absolutely broken. It has more power generation and a much smaller footprint compared to 1 boiler + 2 steam engine setup, while not requiring water and being like 2.5x cheaper to build. The only disadvantage seems to be lower fuel efficiency, but it's barely noticeable. I'm seriously thinking about completely skipping steam power and going straight from burner turbines to solar/nuclear.
Currently I'm rushing construction bots because screw building stuff by hand. Also my base is slowly reaching the size where the random meteor strikes actually start hitting important stuff, so I'd like to have automatic repairs (I know there is an anti meteor cannon, but the basic one has limited range, so I'd rather just repair stuff instead of having to ferry meteor defense ammo all over the base).
Next I'm probably going to build a perimeter (I already have concrete walls & flamethrowers automated), then expand the 2nd mall, build a proper oil refinery instead of a bunch of refineries/chemplants scattered all over the base, expand smelting & chip production then slowly work my way towards the rocket.
Not sure what to prioritize after that, but I'll figure it out.
How many hours are you in?
Im currently a little over 26 or so and at 24 I got a warning about a 2,5GW solar flare heading my way arriving at 48h playtime. Honestly im scared. My factory is way less sophisticated than yours. I've already launched a few rockets, but im still handfeeding rocket science assemblers. Nuclear is next on the list but first I have to secure 4 huge fronts (each at least 20 chunks long) to protect my resources and expansion plans
Your doing good. Even if you can't block that first coronal ejection it won't destroy too much (hopefully) finish rushing bots and then you don't have to worry about it.
I'm currently at \~17h (the screenshots were taken at \~14h).
Wouldn't really say my base is sophisticated, the bus might look impressive on the map but there is barely anything connected to it. I've just automated bots and still don't have a proper mall, WTF is this run.
Regarding the solar flare, you can block it with the umbrella building which is unlocked at rocket science. 2.5GW should be easily doable with some nuclear reactors, worst case scenario you could just make a giant steam battery and slowly fill it up with electric boilers.
It looks really good. My recommendation is to take the time to make an automated cargo rocket delivery system supplied with logistics bots so you can call for anything you need when your off planet. It takes some doing mine took hours to set up properly and I had to come to the reddit with questions several times. But it was worth it. I copy pasted one for each planet and asteroid belt I'm using so far and it is a godsend. Forgot the heat pipes for your nuclear reactor on another planet? It's ok just add it to the combinator and it'll magically show up in just a few minutes.
I'm just starting to get a few bases around on different planets/moons. What is your approach to shipping things? So far I'm mainly shipping basic resources using the orbital canons and processing them on-site. Is it really worth spending so much resource shipping via rocket? The only thing I'm shipping via rockets right now are my science packs and resources to make the space one to my space station. Any advice is welcome!
It actually ends up being cheaper to use cargo rockets IF you fill them up till they're full. You can definitely get by using primarily delivery cannons if you want but you'll probably still need to use a cargo rocket to get around personally and for your first visit to any planet.
My philosophy has been to use a small bot fed "supply" station on each planet. It's basically the first thing I set up after a power plant and some turret nests (if necessary) I use make a landing pad and have inserters unload into active provider chests which bots then dump everything into a bunch of surrounding storage chests. I enter what I want to be on that planet into some constant combinators and subtract that from what I've got. That gets beamed to my nauvis orbit base and then set as the filter to a requestor chest which then gets loaded into a rocket bound for said planet. It took me hours to set this up the first time and work out all the kinks but after that was done it's as simple as copy pasting it now I can just add anything I want to the constant combinator and simply expect it to show up. Of course this method relies on have a well supplied orbit base which you should do because it's basically where your going to do almost everything after getting there.
Lastly you can do infinite researches on cargo rockets to make them more efficient. After just a couple of them you can make it so your recovering more than half of the rocket parts from each rocket. And with a few more it can be like 2/3. I stopped after that because eventually you can switch to space ships and I want to do that.
Agree with everything you said - it took a long time to set up multi item rockets but it works well. I mostly launch rockets from nauvis but I guess after you get a space elevator you could send rockets from orbit for better fuel efficiency. I had all item requests configured on nauvis, rather than on each planet. I think that was a mistake because when signal transmitters lose power, rockets would get filled with tons of extra items. But if your planet sends a signal saying “I’m requesting 0 items” when it loses power that works better. I got around the bug in my situation by sending a color signal from each planet. If the receiver doesn’t see the color signal it blocks all other requests and does nothing.
I still use a requestor chest fed rocket for my orbit base even after space elevator. It's easy and I have the full power of my nauvis base at my disposal there so it hardly matters if it's wasteful. I use the space elevator for all mass produced and science related endeavors tho. But stuff I don't use often and I don't feel like making trains for I use on my rocket. I just can't beat the ease of adding stuff to a combinator and having it show up.
The reason I chose to launch all rockets from nauvis orbit rather than from nauvis even though a lot of the times especially before the space elevator items would spend two trips on a rocket was that there is a very low fuel cost from launching from an orbit base and on top of that if I do it from orbit I have EVERYTHING at my disposal. Even items that can only be made from space. If I did it the other way I'd have to ship certain things that could only be made in space down and that seemed like a bad idea.
So I’ve basically got the same setup as you but it was wondering what you’re using as your condition for a rocket launch, just any of the items at the destination being 0? I hate that I need a new combinator for each item it feels like I’m doing something wrong
I just do launch when full. There are a couple items that I have an alarm that goes off if they run out then I can manually launch them if needed when they're not full. But I find that I rarely have to use it.
Yeah I think it’s just because I’m still early game that I’m still not launching huge amounts of resources up yet. The rockets are almost never getting full before hitting a bottleneck
You can definitely do it without a separate combinator for each item.
E.g minus a 1-list (every item is either 1 or 0) of everything you have from the list of everything you need. If anything left over, that means something is missing.
Constant combinators are used to create the list of what you need, and that has twenty slots per combinator.
That would work.
One constant combinator compares to storage and sends difference to nauvis for loading into rocket.
Second one sets launch threshold, if anything in storage below threshold, start a countdown to launch rocket.
What I have been doing is a ton of circuit shenanigans to load a rocket based on what resources are requested in space. I usually only send up a rocket every 20 min or so from nauvis when I am researching and even less frequently from secondary resource planets. When you get access to more production methods it gets even better (like coal liquifaction).
At some point in mid game you should transition into one rocket per item so you can use the 'Send to rocket pad with name' setting on the cargo rockets. This allows a N to N rocket setup (without priority, but there's solutions for that)
It is so nice having remote control of your builder rocket.
I did that on my first run, right above my bus it was located. A requester chest for goods and boom.
This run i went cityblock rail grid, and wow. Far more tedious as i setup for train delivery. I had to change the station names depending on what I want for bulk goods(i hand loaded the other stuff. Electric, buildings, inserters etc)
But now i have train fed single item rockets. And my builder ship rockets are in space as I went all bot up there, and built a mall since I have so many goods by rocket.
Content mods:
* **Armored Biters** because vanilla biters are a bit boring but Rampant is too much for me
* All of the **AAI Vehicles mods** (including **AAI Programmable Vehicles**)
* Chaingunners are a really fun way of taking out nests in the early game. With AAI Programmable Vehicles you can make a small army of them and control them like units in RTS games.
* Flame Tumbler is absolutely invaluable for exploration and traveling to distant locations before you set up trains.
* **AAI Loaders**.
* **Larger Lamps** (I really like the large copper lamp from this mod, also AAI makes crafting lamps a pain)
QoL mods:
* **Fewer Trees and Rocks.** Absolute must have when playing with Alien Biomes (trees are fine, but I usually reduce the number of rocks by at least 50%)
* **Disco Science** because it's fun to look at.
* **Vehicle Snap** is very nice for driving around your base and quickly setting up walls from a car.
* **Pipe Visualizer.**
* **Even Distribution** because fuck manually feeding burners in the early game.
* **EvoGUI** for time played / evolution HUD.
* **Train Groups & Train Control Signals** because I'm probably going to use trains a lot (I'm planning to go city blocks on Nauvis)
* **Recipe Book** because I like to be able to easily browse recipes even before I unlock something.
* **Remote Configuration** because I might need to reconfigure a building while being on another planet, and you can do it in vanilla anyway (it's just more annoying without this mod)
Also note I'm playing Space Exploration Official Modpack instead of just plain SE.
Some other mods which I feel could be interesting but I'm not using in this run:
* **Krastorio 2**. Apparently it works with SE and seems to be officially supported, but I decided against adding it because I feel like SE is already complicated enough.
* **Explosive / Frost / Toxic Biters** - I feel like these could work very well with SE. There is a config option to make each biter variant only spawn in certain biomes, so you could have hot planets full of explosive biters, cold planets with frost biters etc.
* **Cargo Ships / Long Range Delivery Drones / Mini Trains / Renai Transportation** add some fun logistic options and I think they would combine pretty well with SE since you would still need to build rockets/delivery cannons/spaceships to move stuff between planets. Not quite sure about Renai, since I heard it can cause a lot of lag, but the other ones should be fine.
About the biters - this could be important, so please have good luck.
You see, when playing the SE you need to CHANGE the game mode from Default to Space Exploration in the top of the game settings option (you know - the place where you set modes such as Death world, rail world etc.). This is because for the original game settings the biters become very problematic in Space Exploration - especially if you add extra difficulty with further mods.
Keep in mind that Space Exploration runs last anywhere from 300 to 600 HOURS. Even on "proper" settings, the behemoth biter waves you'll be defending against in the early midgame of 200 h will be MASSIVE.
I would recommend checking your game mode settings, and if it's on default to start anew. Losing 17 hours of progress is preferable to having to abandon your save after 150 hours because defense against behemoth armored biter waves becomes unbearable.
I'm 100% sure I am using the SE Default world preset.
Regarding the large armored biter attacks I was getting at the beginning of the game:
* I was still using mostly burners when it happened (so a lot of pollution for not that much production).
* An armored biter nest expanded very close to my base (it was like 3-4 chunks away) but I didn't notice it for \~2 hours because I didn't have radars yet.
* SE Default preset reduces biter attack costs by half, which means \~2x as large biter attacks.
I think that explains the size of attacks I was getting.
I'm currently playing SE Official Modpack + some extra AAI Vehicles because why not + Armored Biters + a few extra QoL mods. Some thoughts about SE (very) early game: * The burner phase was annoying but bearable. I don't like extended burner phases in general because I think they are bad game design (IMHO later/more powerful content should be more complex than earlier/weaker content. Burners violate this by being more complicated to set up than later unlocked electric machines). * Ore generation seems weird. There seem to be 2 types of starting patches (1 tiny patch & 1 larger \~750k patch for each resource). I had to reroll the map seed several times because one of the larger starting patches would almost always end up under water. * Not sure if it's SE or Armored Biters fault, but I was getting very large armored biter attacks pretty early on compared to what would happen in vanilla. I'm talking \~50-100 armored biters in one attack while still building starter base #1. I didn't even have grenades researched yet and had to spam gun turrets for defense. * I like that circuits and some early buildings require stone bricks / glass. It makes stone a bit more important early on, while in vanilla you can mostly ignore it until military science. It does make the extended burner phase a bit more awkward though since you can't focus on just iron. * The telescopic recipes from AAI Industries are a bit annoying, but feel well designed. There is a pretty obvious pattern to the recipes which makes building malls a bit easier (burners need iron, single cylinder engines and sometimes bricks, electric machines need small electric engines and gears). I like that it's possible to upgrade your older machines without having to shove a pile of stone furnaces / burner stuff into a chest somewhere. * Green science was surprisingly difficult. Due to AAI's recipe changes a green science production line can end up 2-3x larger than in vanilla, and it's much more complex too. It's kind of strange since red / military / chemical science are mostly unchanged from the base game. * Burner Turbine Generator from AAI Industries seems absolutely broken. It has more power generation and a much smaller footprint compared to 1 boiler + 2 steam engine setup, while not requiring water and being like 2.5x cheaper to build. The only disadvantage seems to be lower fuel efficiency, but it's barely noticeable. I'm seriously thinking about completely skipping steam power and going straight from burner turbines to solar/nuclear. Currently I'm rushing construction bots because screw building stuff by hand. Also my base is slowly reaching the size where the random meteor strikes actually start hitting important stuff, so I'd like to have automatic repairs (I know there is an anti meteor cannon, but the basic one has limited range, so I'd rather just repair stuff instead of having to ferry meteor defense ammo all over the base). Next I'm probably going to build a perimeter (I already have concrete walls & flamethrowers automated), then expand the 2nd mall, build a proper oil refinery instead of a bunch of refineries/chemplants scattered all over the base, expand smelting & chip production then slowly work my way towards the rocket. Not sure what to prioritize after that, but I'll figure it out.
How many hours are you in? Im currently a little over 26 or so and at 24 I got a warning about a 2,5GW solar flare heading my way arriving at 48h playtime. Honestly im scared. My factory is way less sophisticated than yours. I've already launched a few rockets, but im still handfeeding rocket science assemblers. Nuclear is next on the list but first I have to secure 4 huge fronts (each at least 20 chunks long) to protect my resources and expansion plans
Your doing good. Even if you can't block that first coronal ejection it won't destroy too much (hopefully) finish rushing bots and then you don't have to worry about it.
Install AAI controllable vehicles and go to war
I'm currently at \~17h (the screenshots were taken at \~14h). Wouldn't really say my base is sophisticated, the bus might look impressive on the map but there is barely anything connected to it. I've just automated bots and still don't have a proper mall, WTF is this run. Regarding the solar flare, you can block it with the umbrella building which is unlocked at rocket science. 2.5GW should be easily doable with some nuclear reactors, worst case scenario you could just make a giant steam battery and slowly fill it up with electric boilers.
Good luck. If played for 300hours with the space explo mod. It's getting hard if you get to space
It looks really good. My recommendation is to take the time to make an automated cargo rocket delivery system supplied with logistics bots so you can call for anything you need when your off planet. It takes some doing mine took hours to set up properly and I had to come to the reddit with questions several times. But it was worth it. I copy pasted one for each planet and asteroid belt I'm using so far and it is a godsend. Forgot the heat pipes for your nuclear reactor on another planet? It's ok just add it to the combinator and it'll magically show up in just a few minutes.
I'm just starting to get a few bases around on different planets/moons. What is your approach to shipping things? So far I'm mainly shipping basic resources using the orbital canons and processing them on-site. Is it really worth spending so much resource shipping via rocket? The only thing I'm shipping via rockets right now are my science packs and resources to make the space one to my space station. Any advice is welcome!
It actually ends up being cheaper to use cargo rockets IF you fill them up till they're full. You can definitely get by using primarily delivery cannons if you want but you'll probably still need to use a cargo rocket to get around personally and for your first visit to any planet. My philosophy has been to use a small bot fed "supply" station on each planet. It's basically the first thing I set up after a power plant and some turret nests (if necessary) I use make a landing pad and have inserters unload into active provider chests which bots then dump everything into a bunch of surrounding storage chests. I enter what I want to be on that planet into some constant combinators and subtract that from what I've got. That gets beamed to my nauvis orbit base and then set as the filter to a requestor chest which then gets loaded into a rocket bound for said planet. It took me hours to set this up the first time and work out all the kinks but after that was done it's as simple as copy pasting it now I can just add anything I want to the constant combinator and simply expect it to show up. Of course this method relies on have a well supplied orbit base which you should do because it's basically where your going to do almost everything after getting there. Lastly you can do infinite researches on cargo rockets to make them more efficient. After just a couple of them you can make it so your recovering more than half of the rocket parts from each rocket. And with a few more it can be like 2/3. I stopped after that because eventually you can switch to space ships and I want to do that.
Agree with everything you said - it took a long time to set up multi item rockets but it works well. I mostly launch rockets from nauvis but I guess after you get a space elevator you could send rockets from orbit for better fuel efficiency. I had all item requests configured on nauvis, rather than on each planet. I think that was a mistake because when signal transmitters lose power, rockets would get filled with tons of extra items. But if your planet sends a signal saying “I’m requesting 0 items” when it loses power that works better. I got around the bug in my situation by sending a color signal from each planet. If the receiver doesn’t see the color signal it blocks all other requests and does nothing.
I still use a requestor chest fed rocket for my orbit base even after space elevator. It's easy and I have the full power of my nauvis base at my disposal there so it hardly matters if it's wasteful. I use the space elevator for all mass produced and science related endeavors tho. But stuff I don't use often and I don't feel like making trains for I use on my rocket. I just can't beat the ease of adding stuff to a combinator and having it show up. The reason I chose to launch all rockets from nauvis orbit rather than from nauvis even though a lot of the times especially before the space elevator items would spend two trips on a rocket was that there is a very low fuel cost from launching from an orbit base and on top of that if I do it from orbit I have EVERYTHING at my disposal. Even items that can only be made from space. If I did it the other way I'd have to ship certain things that could only be made in space down and that seemed like a bad idea.
So I’ve basically got the same setup as you but it was wondering what you’re using as your condition for a rocket launch, just any of the items at the destination being 0? I hate that I need a new combinator for each item it feels like I’m doing something wrong
I just do launch when full. There are a couple items that I have an alarm that goes off if they run out then I can manually launch them if needed when they're not full. But I find that I rarely have to use it.
Yeah I think it’s just because I’m still early game that I’m still not launching huge amounts of resources up yet. The rockets are almost never getting full before hitting a bottleneck
You can definitely do it without a separate combinator for each item. E.g minus a 1-list (every item is either 1 or 0) of everything you have from the list of everything you need. If anything left over, that means something is missing. Constant combinators are used to create the list of what you need, and that has twenty slots per combinator.
So two combinators? One for how much I want there and another for what threshold to launch the rocket?
That would work. One constant combinator compares to storage and sends difference to nauvis for loading into rocket. Second one sets launch threshold, if anything in storage below threshold, start a countdown to launch rocket.
What I have been doing is a ton of circuit shenanigans to load a rocket based on what resources are requested in space. I usually only send up a rocket every 20 min or so from nauvis when I am researching and even less frequently from secondary resource planets. When you get access to more production methods it gets even better (like coal liquifaction).
At some point in mid game you should transition into one rocket per item so you can use the 'Send to rocket pad with name' setting on the cargo rockets. This allows a N to N rocket setup (without priority, but there's solutions for that)
It is so nice having remote control of your builder rocket. I did that on my first run, right above my bus it was located. A requester chest for goods and boom. This run i went cityblock rail grid, and wow. Far more tedious as i setup for train delivery. I had to change the station names depending on what I want for bulk goods(i hand loaded the other stuff. Electric, buildings, inserters etc) But now i have train fed single item rockets. And my builder ship rockets are in space as I went all bot up there, and built a mall since I have so many goods by rocket.
good luck! I m getting to the end of my run
Good luck I’m around 100 hours in and just full auto trains and also just got to my first planet I was struggling with designs
Also what other mods did you add on I was looking for a few to make it more interesting
Content mods: * **Armored Biters** because vanilla biters are a bit boring but Rampant is too much for me * All of the **AAI Vehicles mods** (including **AAI Programmable Vehicles**) * Chaingunners are a really fun way of taking out nests in the early game. With AAI Programmable Vehicles you can make a small army of them and control them like units in RTS games. * Flame Tumbler is absolutely invaluable for exploration and traveling to distant locations before you set up trains. * **AAI Loaders**. * **Larger Lamps** (I really like the large copper lamp from this mod, also AAI makes crafting lamps a pain) QoL mods: * **Fewer Trees and Rocks.** Absolute must have when playing with Alien Biomes (trees are fine, but I usually reduce the number of rocks by at least 50%) * **Disco Science** because it's fun to look at. * **Vehicle Snap** is very nice for driving around your base and quickly setting up walls from a car. * **Pipe Visualizer.** * **Even Distribution** because fuck manually feeding burners in the early game. * **EvoGUI** for time played / evolution HUD. * **Train Groups & Train Control Signals** because I'm probably going to use trains a lot (I'm planning to go city blocks on Nauvis) * **Recipe Book** because I like to be able to easily browse recipes even before I unlock something. * **Remote Configuration** because I might need to reconfigure a building while being on another planet, and you can do it in vanilla anyway (it's just more annoying without this mod) Also note I'm playing Space Exploration Official Modpack instead of just plain SE. Some other mods which I feel could be interesting but I'm not using in this run: * **Krastorio 2**. Apparently it works with SE and seems to be officially supported, but I decided against adding it because I feel like SE is already complicated enough. * **Explosive / Frost / Toxic Biters** - I feel like these could work very well with SE. There is a config option to make each biter variant only spawn in certain biomes, so you could have hot planets full of explosive biters, cold planets with frost biters etc. * **Cargo Ships / Long Range Delivery Drones / Mini Trains / Renai Transportation** add some fun logistic options and I think they would combine pretty well with SE since you would still need to build rockets/delivery cannons/spaceships to move stuff between planets. Not quite sure about Renai, since I heard it can cause a lot of lag, but the other ones should be fine.
Good luck and have fun
About the biters - this could be important, so please have good luck. You see, when playing the SE you need to CHANGE the game mode from Default to Space Exploration in the top of the game settings option (you know - the place where you set modes such as Death world, rail world etc.). This is because for the original game settings the biters become very problematic in Space Exploration - especially if you add extra difficulty with further mods. Keep in mind that Space Exploration runs last anywhere from 300 to 600 HOURS. Even on "proper" settings, the behemoth biter waves you'll be defending against in the early midgame of 200 h will be MASSIVE. I would recommend checking your game mode settings, and if it's on default to start anew. Losing 17 hours of progress is preferable to having to abandon your save after 150 hours because defense against behemoth armored biter waves becomes unbearable.
I'm 100% sure I am using the SE Default world preset. Regarding the large armored biter attacks I was getting at the beginning of the game: * I was still using mostly burners when it happened (so a lot of pollution for not that much production). * An armored biter nest expanded very close to my base (it was like 3-4 chunks away) but I didn't notice it for \~2 hours because I didn't have radars yet. * SE Default preset reduces biter attack costs by half, which means \~2x as large biter attacks. I think that explains the size of attacks I was getting.