Factorio - a factory building game - now with Space Age expansion

[Ranselknulf]

Tried several more runs, I can get to zone ~15 pretty consistently if I try (and I scum for a good first zone) but not a single attempt where I managed to complete a mission and unlock a warp tech. Problems include:

The mission I did to get the factory floor unlock before now required 213 steel, instead of 153 repair kits. Not having invested 1000+ iron in useless steel, I couldn't get it.

The mission to power the reactor now requires 8 steam engines running full blast for 100 seconds, instead of like, 1 for 50. Despite massively overpreparing for what I expected the challenge to be, I ran out of ammo at about 80% charge.

Runs where every 3rd level was either ocean or barren, preventing me from gathering any fucking resources.

Magical fucking biter swarms of 50+ out of nowhere after total radio silence or packs of 2 at a time for 10 minutes, utterly overwhelming my defenses. Got to watch them despawn in front of my eyes after killing me. That's GOT to be some scripted horseshit.

Respawning to get spawn camped by my own fucking turret, now under enemy control apparently. Sure, that seems fair why not.

Having the warp start itself with a 1 minute countdown when I'm 3 minutes away from the base looking for a mission site.



The concept is so fucking compelling, finding critical random technology unlocks by doing challenging missions on random worlds. But you just constantly get dickpunched when you do anything except farm iron to replace ammo for like 4 minutes and then move on. It takes like 2-3 zones to amass enough resources to attempt a mission and then if it fails you're back to square one with nothing saved up except now the enemies are scaling faster. And now that I've got a handle on the early game it feels really fucking tedious to keep doing it after a run is ruined. When played properly basically nothing interesting happens for the first hour or so.

That's what I like about this game. There is always a trade off for choosing a primary goal, and secondary goals must suffer.

Look forward to trying this soonish.

My only gripe with factorio is the inability to "stack" conveyor belts or pipes. A third dimension to build would be nice. No other 3D automation / "factory" has the depth of factorio though.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Finally got another run going with the basement unlocked. Abusing it much, much harder this time, with power generation, ore smelting, and automated (ish) science all crammed in there to be used until I run out of steam at the end of each zone. I'm now certain there some hidden variation of biter spawn rate in each zone. I've had zones where I can walk around for minutes and find like 3 nests show up later than zones where I can find 3 giant nest clusters on the same screen the same distance away. Just a few zones past unlocking the basement so far and haven't been able to properly abuse it to gather resources yet because of the string of hell worlds, but I've got stockpiled resources and now really just need one good warp where I can haul in thousands of ore and coal and climb the hell out of the vanilla tech tree.

Edit:
ITZ HAPPENING!

I finally got another tech recovered. Two actually; the first was an upgrade for the basement size from 19x19 to 23x23, which is a nice improvement that was mostly QoL, but QoL also saves time, and that matters when the biters are angry. The second was from recovering the car, and gave me a 'boiler room' which for now at least is just another, smaller empty room I can shunt my resources into. For now I'm using it to smelt stuff. Again, not a huge improvement, but it saves some time spent fussing with chests to store everything when hauling in 2 full belts at a time, which means it's safer and more profitable to be more greedy. As a result, I'm now on zone 34 with far, far better tech than last time. Shooting damage 3 just finished, which should let turrets double tap small biters with normal ammo, or one shot them with piercing. This will be a huge efficiency boost on my primary iron sink, letting me focus more on research and devoting resources to missions to get further tech. The warp reactor is the next big one I really want, as it unlocks a bunch more warp tech and allows me to stay in zones longer. Vanilla tech wise, oil is the next big step. I'm dreading trying to do even simple oil refining inside that tiny space, but it'll free me from needing coal for fuel, let me utilize flamethrowers to annihilate biter bases from a safe distance if their targeting is too dumb, and eventually lead towards all the cool high tech shit. I should build a car soon too. Most planets are heavily wooded shitfests but it'll be nice to have the option. Oh, and logistics 2. More QoL that'll make it easier to haul shit in.

 

[Andnjord]

And here is the first (gasp!) of the four space ressources, Holminite for Energy Science!

I'm afraid I ruined the feng-shui of the place by adding a fifth stack of chemical plants to increase production, but oh well, I'll have to live with it.

I have to ship in Crionite and Vulcanite, otherwise the planet has everything needed, except for copper which is in extremely limited quantities so inevitably I'll have to ship in some copper ingots. Oh well, that's why I colonised Zombie, the copper and iron planet first.



What's next? Using that Holminite of course: But first I had to set up a space mall which you can see below in its infancy. I was shipping in everything through one rocket controlled by circuits from Nauvis, but quickly came to my senses and stuck landing pads to receive the ingots from Zombie, far more efficient of a solution.

And here's where I am currently. I've set up everything for Energy Science 1 (at the bottom of the screenshot where the pretty colours are) only to realise that I'm going to have to double it as it is currently painfully slow. After spending so long on Nauvis and the colonies making neat and at scale designs it feels strange coming to space where everything is expensive, space is at a premium and the bewildering array of new recipes are forcing me to spaghetti my way forward and abuse the bots as much as possible. I'll rebuild stuff once I have the space elevator and space rail, but until then it's going to be spaghetti all the way.

It took a while to setup the delivery system from Nauvis and the basis of the mall in orbit, but at least now I can make most of the stuff I need directly in orbit, it’s going to be a lot easier moving forward.

For the other space resources I don’t think I’ll fully process them on site. Iridium because it would take a few too many resources to be shipped in that I might as well ship it straight to Nauvis (after crushing it since if it’s anything like the other space ressources the ore stack to 20 while the crushed powder stacks to 200), Berylium because it’s mined on asteroid belts (or at least so are the quantities I’m looking for located at) and there’s no productivity modules on most space stuff and I haven’t even begun to look at the shitshow that vitamelange seems to be.

 

[Jaedar]

And here's where I am currently. I've set up everything for Energy Science 1 (at the bottom of the screenshot where the pretty colours are) only to realise that I'm going to have to double it as it is currently painfully slow. After spending so long on Nauvis and the colonies making neat and at scale designs it feels strange coming to space where everything is expensive, space is at a premium and the bewildering array of new recipes are forcing me to spaghetti my way forward and abuse the bots as much as possible. I'll rebuild stuff once I have the space elevator and space rail, but until then it's going to be spaghetti all the way.

I strongly recommend to just build it correct the first time, and not spaghetti it. Scaffolding is expensive, but not *that* expensive.
And with the recipies as complex as they are, you're really going to regret having to rebuild it (you have to set it up 20 times total, and it's pretty similar each time, so better to git gud immediately).

You can also scale it a lot with speed modules since there's no productivity in space.

I also strongly recommend making a central thermofluid handling facilty, that you can scale.

 

[Andnjord]

Wise words, but nah, I want a train base in space and that’s just a few techs away.

Hang on.

I’ve actually thought about it and realised I can build a central resource handling facility as soon as I unlock space trains, build properly around that and replace the cargo rockets with a space elevator later on. It shouuuuuld be doable.

 

[Andnjord]

Also, fun way to break a factory:

I accidentally disconnected the resource delivery cannons that were supplying Zombie with nuclear fuel cells materials, which led to power going down, which led to the meteor defence cannons shutting down, which allowed a bunch of bitter meteors to invade the planet, which led me to suddenly being spammed by hundreds of alerts that the furnace stacks there were being obliterated while I was building the space mall.



Also, what I thought would never happened did happen. Zombie did run out of meteor defence ammo and had to be ressuplied to the tune of an extra 10000 ammo packs. Thanks Wube I actually built the system in the first place to handle it, I just thought it would never be needed.

 

[Damned Registrations]

My run has kept going. I've got flamethrowers unlocked now, just waiting for a world with oil to show up so I can abuse them. I've also unlocked another warp tech; the southwest and southeast 'turrets'. The turret itself is fairly useless it's a tiny outpost a ways away from the main platform with no actual defenses. I could use it as an alternate point to gather resources at but the warp gate doesn't connect to it so there'd be little point. However, in the basement layer, it's connected by two bridges forming a square with it at the opposite corner from the main basement. Those bridges have basically doubled the area inside the base, and being big long empty tunnels makes them pretty useful for setting up large amounts of stuff at scale. I've got 3 of the 4 stretches filled already, one with smelters eclipsing my boiler room setup completely, another with assemblers and the last with steam engines and storage tanks. I haven't even researched the 2nd turret yet but that'll add 3 more tunnels; I'm suddenly spoiled for indoor space. I'll probably add some proper automated science to one branch next and maybe make a little ghetto mall while I'm at it.

The zones have gotten a fair bit more dangerous, with stuff like perpetual night worlds with lots of extra biters. Still, sometimes really easy ones show up. A big part of the game seems to be judging how safe the zone is and strip mining the ones where it's viable. Even on a 'safe' world I burn through about 600 ammo to stay the full 20 minutes. Totally dwarfed by the iron obtained if there's a decent patch nearby of course, but when you consider I need copper and coal and stone as well, the margins are still fairly thin. I'm hoping at some point I can stop needing to disassemble my entire surface defenses but there's really no other choice on the nasty worlds; on those it'd probably cost more like 3000 ammo to stay the whole time and I can't produce nearly that much right now.

Still don't have the basic warp reactor tech unlocked. The missions for it aren't that common and when you factor in how many worlds are sketchy and it's actually a total pain in the ass. I had a shot at one but I fumbled it by misjudging the rate I burn through water to generate power. Still, I should be able to do the next one easily enough, my military tech and ammo/grenade situation is in a good place. The best thing about getting it will be unlocking a parallel set of gun damage upgrades that will make my turrets incredibly efficient.

 

[Andnjord]

Surprisingly, I’m finding myself having to revise my annoyance at half the space resource recipes outputting stone and sand as a byproduct.

While there is no way to directly upgrade sand and stone bricks production (the two main uses of stone), a couple of the biggest consumers of stone bricks, heat shielding (used in all the space buildings and space rockets) and indirectly blue chips have an upgraded recipe that quadruples their output per ingredient resulting in a far lesser use of said stone bricks. Furthermore, once you get past the mental block of sending space rockets around carrying nothing but glass (or rather once the cost of sending space rockets goes down enough), that’s another surprisingly large amount of glass made essentially for free.

Given how much of an effort it looks like it will be to keep expanding to new stone mines on Nauvis, I’m actually grateful for all those sand and stone byproducts.

 

[Damned Registrations]

STILL no basic warp reactor tech unlocked. To be clear, this could have been unlocked on the second planet. I'm past 60 now.

Game is throwing more mean planets at me, but the occasional easy one is enough to keep ammo stocked up. I've gotten a few more techs, now up to 3 outposts and I've got an expansion for the basement size. Oil has been acquired, and the flamethrowers are pretty glorious.

I've had 2 chances at the reactor tech since the last post. The first one was obstensibly on a 'normal' planet with 'low' natives, but when I reached the fucking thing, it was in the middle of a large nest surrounded by medium worms. Didn't have time to check but pretty sure some of them were flame proof, or nearly. I seiged the base down with flame throwers, grenades, and suicidal rushes with my machine gun. But by the time I got enough space to set up power generation on the thing, I was nearly out of time. I still could have barely made it, but a fumble on the steam supply caused by an earlier attack from a massive biter that killed half my turrets delayed it just enough to fuck me over. Second chance was on a much easier location, but wasn't given to me until only 4 minutes were left. That's 4 minutes to find the damned thing, walk there, set up defenses and power generation and then it needs 100 seconds to finish doing it's thing. Again, I got close but no cigar.

Still enjoying this despite the struggle. Every new tech feels important, instead of some annoying speedbump on the way to construction bots. Building and dismantling mining operations and defenses under pressure keeps me on my toes, when to leave and how much to risk trying to mine is mostly an interesting choice, and despite the extra room, my base remains a wonderful pile of spaghetti due to time constraints as much as space.

Grabbing new tech is definitely less of a struggle now, sometimes being downright trivial. Though considering I'm at like 8% done or something I'm not exactly feeling safe.

 

[Andnjord]

And Berylium is done!

Even though I do have a planet with decent quantities of beryl ore (maybe 10M in total), the asteroid field that I opted for has patches of more than 100M each, which following from my guideline to set up mines once and never have to think about it again made it the superior choice. Also it was more interesting for me to do something different.

Mining it in space has its own set of challenges given that nothing takes productivity modules there, so it begs the question of what stage of the process to ship it back home. I decided to do the first step on site since it compresses four ores into one powder to save on cargo space. That first step only needs sulfur and iron to be shipped there, sulfur is functionally infinite since it only takes oil and water and iron is used in such limited quantities that it only needs one iron ingot rocket once in a blue moon. I'm also shipping in Water Ice which compresses 1M units of water since it was much easier to just stamp down a rocket landing pad than mining the water ice that is actually right next to it. Doing the other steps over there would have meant using the expensive vulcanite and cryonite without productivity, so off it goes to Nauvis for the rest of the process.

The only real problematic step is the rocket fuel for the rockets, which given I'm shipping in the powder and not the ingots (the ratio is pretty nuts, like 50 powders for 1 ingots if not much worse) I have to launch rockets rather frequently (once every 18 minutes if my math is correct). That would be a big stress on the already depleted oil fields in Nauvis to produce the rocket fuel on top of everything else, so instead I opted to set up a oil station on a nearby moon that has gargantuan oil fields (we're talking 20 000% size).

While I was there I set up sulfur production for offworld colonies to again lighten the load on Nauvis since both Vulcanite and Beryl use a good amount of it.

THE FACTORY MUST GROW!

 

[Jaedar]

Mining it in space has its own set of challenges given that nothing takes productivity modules there, so it begs the question of what stage of the process to ship it back home.

What kind of failure% are you getting on your rockets? Iirc there is a pretty large penalty for asteroid belts.

 

[Damned Registrations]

The run continues. Full disclosure: I did savescum twice so far, when jank controls got me killed by stepping onto the warp platform into 100 evolved biters. I probably could have rebuilt, but I'm not THAT desperate for the claim to a hardcore run that I'm willing to sink an extra 2 hours rebuilding my inventory.


It's not like the game is playing fair either. Pictured here is the path I had to take to retrieve the power generator that flew off at the start of this zone. Without this part, I can't transfer energy to the surface, meaning I essentially can't mine anything or accomplish anything in this zone, since setting up power on site would require way too many turrets to defend. Took me NINE FUCKING MINUTES of running through snow and fighting past giant exploding biter nests just so I could return to status quo. Of course, at this point the zone is a wash because setting up mining this late isn't even profitable. Just a big fucking resource sink on my ammo.

Tech continues to be accrued, however. Once in a while I get a planet like this, with no biters (also no resources, save trees and water) where I can take my time to rebuild my base, get research and crafting done, and resupply the water tanks. Water being an important resource feels weird, but I like it. I'm kind of used to it anyways; I've made a habit of using tanks of steam as energy storage to supply laser batteries and make solar more practical way before acumulators become affordable. I forget the exact math, but a tank of steam blows an accumulator out of the water for energy stored per grid, it's not even close. The drawback being that you need a huge bank of engines to use it quickly enough to supply turrets. Not really an option here.

I've got a few more interesting techs now as well: I can teleport between floors of my base with a menu instead of using the stairs. UI enhancements to show my power and storage situations will come soon. My most recent big deal though is getting my normal ammo turrets to 18 damage. They can now one shot small biters and their variants. I effectively just cut my ammo costs in half. Should extend the viable mining time on each world considerably, and also make a huge difference in the amount of maintenance needed on the walls, now that the little shits won't be able to reach it so easily. Bunch of other incremental stuff too, platform is now bigger than show above, energy transfer through stairs and teleport is enough to power pretty much anything, and I suspect I'm on the verge of unlocking some kind of 'harvester platforms' which sound like something I could fill with miners and drop onto mineral patches, speeding that whole process up immensely. Even if they were just defense and belts, it would still be a godsend. Biggest hurdle in getting resources in this mod is just defending all that shit and weaving the belts where you need them to go. Oh, and I've got rockets now too. Not that useful since my normal gun hits so damned hard and a bunch of enemies are immune to explosions, but it comes in handy for killing worms or bases now and then. Modular armour with shields too; it's good to feel tanky again.

Planets are getting even nastier. Had a fight with a boss biter on an otherwise easy planet that took me like 10 minutes; fucking thing was as fast as a car, hit hard enough to one shot turrets, dealt splash, and had 60k hp. Killing it was insanely expensive and rewarded me with a pile of advanced circuits. Probably a wash on the resources, I'd have not bothered if it weren't in the way of a tech mission.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Nearly at zone 100 now. Definitely feels like the balance is tipping in my favour now, the game hasn't felt this easy since I first unlocked the teleporter gate. The turrets can now generally keep shit off the walls, and even when they can't, the platform is big enough to have layered defenses so I can ignore the damage until I've got some idle time to repair it, and even then I can afford to do so by sloppily patching holes instead of getting everything to 100% health. Had a surprise vistor as I was leaving this zone. Luckily, he was barely able to damage turrets, but sadly I didn't have time to finish him off since I was both low on free ammo and time remaining. He did manage to cause a fair bit of damage indirectly by tanking a bunch of turrets while explosive biters ran in and swarmed them. Part of the mod is that turrets have a good 10-20 second delay after being placed before they can fire, so simply slapping 20 turrets down to wipe out bases or a boss isn't an option. It would have worked on this guy even with the delay, but I had no time. Also, I didn't even get the chance to read his stats until now. Jesus christ, 46 range and he takes more than triple damage from lasers. Still haven't unlocked those yet; I don't expect they'll be very useful compared to the juiced up turrets unless I can get an indoor nuclear plant going.

Haven't really made use of the base stats panel I unlocked recently. It's nice in theory but in practice I do so much hand feeding to make things work I've got a pretty good grip on my stockpiles to begin with. Those it's nice for finding lost stashes I suppose. It's funny, for a normal factorio base with huge lanes 10k plates is nothing. For a base this small with literally one assembler making gears it feels like a lot, but it still vanishes startlingly fast once it gets plugged into all the other things eating it up, like ammo, various components for science, replacing turrets and pipes, and expanding the fluid storage system. I'm getting close to unlocking the tank and power armour (I expect the armour to be a lot more useful frankly; I don't see the tank living long vs these swarms) and even logistic bots are getting close for that matter. Construction bots would be nice for setting up mining in a flash but I suspect I'll have another solution by then. Harvester tech keeps eluding me, but it's only a matter of time. Even fairly nasty missions are doable now with the improved bullet damage and my ammo supplies.

 

[Jaedar]

With the expansion coming soon, I have a confession to make. I've never actually played vanilla 1.0. I beat the vanilla game in like 0.7 or 0.8 or something, but that was before they reworked yellow and purple science. Since then I've only placed total conversions.

So I'm looking forward to the true vanilla factorio experience in space age.

 

[Ironmonk]

yeah, there will be a lot more resources and recipes, probably more than double of what we have in vanilla... using mods that add even more resources/items/recipes will become a nightmare.

 

[Hellraiser]

The last planet is an ice planet with a twist, it's an ammonia ocean world.

Creating water ice islands on a sea of ammonia?



https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-432

A liquid planet
Aquilo doesn't have any land. It has a few icebergs floating around, but the building space is very restricted.


If you use an offshore pump in the ammoniacal ocean you don't get water, you get mostly liquid ammonia but with some ice particles floating in it. You can separate these in a chemical plant. These substances have a variety of uses, but among them is the ability to make Ice platform.


Ice platform allows you to extend the iceberg and extend your build area. Making ice platform can be a slow process so it's good to scale this process while you have spare energy and heat.

---

Freezing and heating​

Heat is the next big mechanic and it's a wonderful twist to the way that you build. Most things on Aquilo freeze if they are not heated.

A collection of frozen machines. Frozen effects are all hand painted by me (Earendel).
It's better and faster to paint snow in 2D than to add a snow layer in 3D, especially considering most of the original graphics have a lot of hand-painted post-production.


Heat is generated by a heating tower, which burns chemical fuels that can be made locally, or the nuclear reactor that requires imports from Nauvis. The heating tower is interesting as a burner because it's more like the reactor, it continues to consume fuel even at max temperature. As well as heating, this can be a good way to get rid of anything burnable, which means it can also be very useful on Gleba.

Heating tower from line art to concept art (inactive and active) by Earendel, to the final graphics by Jerzy.


Both the heating tower and nuclear reactor are heat sources. They spread heat to adjacent entities, but they only need to get the entity up to 30°C for the entity to thaw. This means that in some places like outposts, going for higher temperatures is a waste, so that is one of the reasons we added the ability to read the temperature of heat sources and control them with circuits (FFF-428).


Heat sources only being able to warm adjacent things that touch them is very limiting. Instead you use heat pipes to move the heat around to all the entities adjacent to connected heat pipes (including diagonally). Every entity that needs heat also consumes heat. The effect is minor per entity but can result in a lot of heat loss over long distances, so sometimes you want a hotter heat source so that the heat can travel further.


Heat pipes and heated buildings would melt the ice, so to protect the ice that keeps you floating you can place concrete (or refined concrete) as an insulator. In practice this just means that most entities can't be placed directly on to ice, we don't actually turn the ice tiles into ocean... anymore. That used to be a mechanic, but it was too annoying to deal with when you try to build in an already heated area.

 

[Demo.Graph]

Frozen world - as expected. Seaworld - I didn't expect that.
I wonder what enemies will be there. As we obviously won't be able to submerge, there probably will be some version of whack'a'mole of giant sea worms or shit spitting whales or something.

we don't actually turn the ice tiles into ocean... anymore. That used to be a mechanic, but it was too annoying to deal with when you try to build in an already heated area.

On a more serious matter, I think that they won't make it to 2024-10-21 and would release an unfinished version. It's okay since they likely won't drop the development for some years... but still!
More grumbling:
I don't like the concept of a biolab. Tech is already too easy. Adding better bigger lab without DWP* feels meh.
I don't like biological ore production. It would potentially disconnect factory from resource outpost grid, and I think that eXpansion into and eXploitation of exhaustible resources are one of the core mechanics of the game. It's already too trivial to solipsise yourself in your factory without any regard for outside world.

Also, I expect the last planet to be planetopolis and/or irradiated hellhole with RTS robot enemies.
Place your bets, gentlemen!

*Deidre's worm porn

 

[Hellraiser]

On a more serious matter, I think that they won't make it to 2024-10-21 and would release an unfinished version. It's okay since they likely won't drop the development for some years... but still!

Considering some other things mentioned in the FFF blog posts I think they'll probably release an unfinished/EA version (although one more complete than usual). It's clear some mechanics are still WIP or were just reworked very recently. Otherwise they would announce a delay.

Also, I expect the last planet to be planetopolis and/or irradiated hellhole with RTS robot enemies.
Place your bets, gentlemen!

This is the last planet, says so in the first line of the blog post. Gleba, Vulcanis, Fulgora(?), Aquilo and Nauvis. Four new planets plus the old one from the base game.

Also Fulgora/the lightning planet is a ruined/dead alien colony world (possibly also a planetopolis) where you mine the alien ruins. Not sure if they revealed the enemies there, but I imagine it might actually be robots/alien constructs.

 

[Demo.Graph]

This is the last planet, says so in the first line of the blog post. Gleba, Vulcanis, Fulgora(?), Aquilo and Nauvis. Four new planets plus the old one from the base game.

Are you sure? Who the hell reads the intro sentence?
For some reason I had an impression that they're adding several planets you can freely choose from plus one last "boss" planet you access after all the others.
I was probably misguided by wrongly remembering this...

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-401

Surprise! There are 5 new planets in the expansion.

...and some wishful thinking.

Fulgora/the lightning planet is a ruined/dead alien colony world (possibly also a planetopolis)

It's obviously not a planetopolis, so it's not good enough!
But okay.

 

[Hellraiser]

I was probably misguided by wrongly remembering this...

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-401

Surprise! There are 5 new planets in the expansion.

...and some wishful thinking.

You definitely misremembered that as immediately afterwards that blog post makes it quite clear the fifth one is a reworked/updated Nauvis from the base game

So yes, the new planet Nauvis is similar to the 1.1 version of the map, but there are some substantial updates. Hopefully this is a surprise for you, because updates to the base map weren't planned at all. It just got harder and harder to not make changes after getting more experience with the other planets and seeing things that were missing or broken.

 

[Demo.Graph]

I had such a great game-design pattern in my mind that I decided that it should be true. Consider.
Each planet is, obviously, should be a puzzle with varying rules, because adding more of the same is shit and meh.
Devs went exactly this route.
- Gleba has fading items (MTG jargon here) and manageable (bio-only) pollution,
- VulcanUs has zero aggression (territorial worms) and mass production puzzles,
- Fulgora has Dune-like plateau construction, trash and [unknown enemies],
- Aquilo has "floor is lava" (backwards) and [unknown enemies].

What we don't have is alterable map (like lava tides, on-the-clock meteor storms and other time-based puzzles) and really aggressive enemies.
In my mind these things organically combined into some boss AI that you've met on the last planet. You will land on it and find yourself on timer to complete a game ending something as more and more defense systems activated to wipe the floor with you. Then you fail and go back to your previous bases to prepare some more and try again.
It would've been a really different experience compared to inherently static nature of all the other Factorio planets. See? A real and proper boss planet.

But, alas, it seems that the dreamer can only dream of so much and can go fuck himself.

 

[Andnjord]

And here is Iridite done! Just Vitamelange left to do!

Eeeeeexcept probably not because doing the crushing off and the rest on Nauvis means the process would need one rocket delivery every five minutes running at full speed, something that's a little too much for me to accept. I'll let it run while I do other stuff and see if I do actually use its full capacity, if that's so I'll move the whole production back to the planet it's mined from which would cut the rocket rate to...one every hour instead of the current twelve. I'll keep the facility on Nauvis in case I'll need the extra production though.

But in the meanwhile, the space station is achieving maximum spaghetti entropy but it doesn't matter. It's making Material Science 2 which will unlock the Space Elevator, so soon work will begin on the Real Space Base (tm)!

It is seriously abusing bots in order to function (there is robot attrition in this mod so they're dying like flies) but somehow it manages, even if barely.

THE FACTORY MUST GROW!!!

 

[Damned Registrations]

Welp, game decided to bend me over. Biter boss showed up and wiped out my entire surface platform. 100k hp, munched through turrets and walls like nothing. The worst part is I got him down to just 8k life before needing to retreat. If I'd killed it I'd have probably gotten like 200 chem science and a bunch of other nice shit, which is why I didn't just bail immediately on seeing him. 20 turrets with ~150 ammo in each... that's 12000 iron plates just for the ammo, never mind the turrets, or the time investment to build and place everything. Ugh. Then, after doing that, I get fucked a few zones later by an early uncontrolled warp out. I'm not in the base, don't have the teleporter, and I have 40 seconds to get back. I make it, barely, but there's no time to clean up my mining operation. ~30 mining drills and another dozen turrets with 100 ammo each, gone.

Thankfully, the game at least didn't fuck me over with the zones themselves, giving me access to the iron needed to replace all that shit. I even got a nice new harvester tech. Another one I'm way behind the curve on and should have had 70 zones ago, this lets me build stuff on a platform in the safety of my basement, then warp the whole platform and everything on it to the surface wherever I want. The platform is currently way too tiny to dump a whole mining operation at once, but I could fit a roboport on here, which I recently unlocked, and use it to flash build a base with a blueprint that feeds the belts back to the platform, which is connected to the base if I'm not mistaken. And aside from that, I can fill the platform with turrets and dump it next to a biter base or boss to blow it the fuck up, without the summoning sickness they normally have. Would have been a huge game changer before I got all these damage upgrades; at this point anything I can't handle without turrets would mulch the turrets anyways. Still, this is huge for mining efficiency, and it's only the lowest level of the tech. I'll get 4 of these platforms, and they'll get bigger. Explosive rockets are mine now too, making larger nests manageable if they're in the way of a tech mission. Next upgrades I'm pining for are just more internal space upgrades so I can properly automate resource collection. Currently it's getting shunted into chests that I have to ferry across the base. Doesn't take too many trips with my inventory size, but still annoying. Need to collect oil again too, as I burned through my stockpile making plastics and solid fuel, and I'm currently sitting on a half built power armour that needs lubricant I can't make. Oil is frustratingly rare, especially patches large enough to be worthwhile.

 

[Andnjord]

Oh hell yeah.

Started designing the exchange system between the two. Yes, you can actually send the normal trains into space but that hurts my sense of aesthetics (I have modded space trains for that) so I have to switch them up ayways. Furthermore there is a cost everytime a train takes the elevator, so I might as well try to reduce the amount of train journeys as much as possible. And finally I wanted to do something silly like that and it's been fun figuring out the logic system to make it work.

 

[Jaedar]

Started designing the exchange system between the two. Yes, you can actually send the normal trains into space but that hurts my sense of aesthetics (I have modded space trains for that) so I have to switch them up ayways. Furthermore there is a cost everytime a train takes the elevator, so I might as well try to reduce the amount of train journeys as much as possible. And finally I wanted to do something silly like that and it's been fun figuring out the logic system to make it work.

You're going to use a single train?

I just treated space and ground as a single giant train network, with lots of trains going up and down. It was a bit annoying to set the destinations, but that was it. The cost to send up trains is like 0.2 cables for each locomotive, and 0.1 for each wagon. Compared to the constant drain of 4/minute, it's really cheap. Single train works though.

Also, it seems space age embargo has dropped, so best be careful of spoilers for the next week.