[113:51h] I've been preparing for my adventure by adding a few new things to the Nauvis Hub. I don't know much about Factorio combat, especially the new stuff added by Space Exploration, so I'll be going with the classic laser turrets + artillery, with gun turrets just in case.
Let's see how it goes! I'm taking a save file just in case, haha
[113:57] I've landed on Lilly and I made a quick, walled base with just a nuclear reactor and meteor defences. Remember, this planet has biter meteors so it's paramount that I don't let any meteor through. I've surrounded all of this with laser turrets and walls, and added a couple artillery turrets to destroy the nearby nests.
After clearing up the area, I started putting down the normal blueprints like in every other planet. I've also made a blueprint for an artillery outpost, which I'll paste next to my rails whenever I get too close to biter nests, in order to clean everything up.
Honestly, the last time I played with biters it was just boring. This time, on top of that, it made me feel pretty bad. Using the artillery remote to just completely destroy them five minutes after arriving in their planet just feels so evil. I kinda felt like I was in the IDF...
anyway, I probably won't be talking more about biters in this thread. Just keep in mind that I'll need to clean them from time to time.
[115:06h] I've put down the usual setups on Lilly. First, a proper home base, with rockets and landing pads. You'll see that this one is huge, I'll talk more about that in the future. Sand has two pads because I want to prioritize using sand from outposts before using sand sent from Nauvis. The way the belts are placed automatically does that, the upper pad has a higher priority than the lower.
For nuclear, I've remade the setup. The reactor hasn't changed, but Ive put the refining factories in the middle of the trains to save space, and also aligned the reactors so it looks better.
There's also one setup for rocket fuel. I receive solid RF from Nauvis, but I want to use the light oil that vita produces first, so this is done here.
Finally, the usual core mining setup. Vita has a low mining time (lower than iron/copper, same as stone), so I'll make a lot of core fragments here.
[115:46h] And now the big one: vitamelange itself. Here's the design I've made for it. From bottom to top:
Raw vita is pulverized into nuggets (a LOT of them), making some wood and stone. The wood is sent to a train while the stone is crushed into sand for the next step..
Vita nuggets with sand and a LOT of water are turned into vita bloom.
Vita bloom is smelted with a little vulcanite and it makes vita spice (darker green), with a tiny chance of vita extract (lighter green). This produces some methane gas which is sent to a train.
In order to get more vita extract, I can refine vita spice, similar to uranium. This produces extra light oil, which is sent to a train.
Both vita spice and extracts are sent to trains, as I'll need them on Nauvis.
In the picture you can see a blade pair, which consumes around 2 belts of raw vita and can make 1525 vita extract per minute.
Here's what the entire setup looks like. I looks bad that I say it, but I think it looks amazing. Like I said before, this one looks easier, but the sheer amount of belts each intermediate needs was a big challenge. I wanted to make it bigger but I had to downscale because of that.
Also, note that the methane gas is frozen into ice before putting it on a train. This will make it much more compact to send it to Nauvis, similarly to water.
Anyway, this can produce around 6100 vita extract per minute. This is enough to start bio science, but I'll have to come back soon to expand it - the tier 4 science will need around 3 times this amount.
Fear not though, when I remake this setup it will be with cool tech that hopefully won't take me too long to unlock!
[116:21h] Now I have to quickly return to Nauvis, because another cool trip is waiting for me! During all this time, I've unlocked tier 4 catalogues for both material and astro science.
Here's the setup for the material data cards. Following the trend set by the tier 3s, these are also about shielding. On the left, Particle Beam Shielding Data, which requires some plating as an input (basically, upgraded scaffolding). I'm not using it in my base since I barely move, and I have a jetpack, so I'm just making it in place. There's also Laser Shielding Data, which uses thermofluid, something uncommon in this science.
On the right, there's Electrical Shielding Data and Experimental Alloys Data, which is made with a bunch of plates.
None of these data cards are needed in huge quantities, so one or two machines are enough.
And for astro 4... the spaceship is waiting for me again!
One of the cards is Asteroid Belt Probe Data, which similar to energy 4, requires sending a probe with a silo. This time however, it needs to be sent from an asteroid belt, not the star orbit.
So I went there with my ship and made a similar setup, but with more solar panels since I'm further away from the sun. After coming back, I have 20k data cards!
The other cards are Micro Black Hole Data, which has just a 20% success rate, Zero Point Energy Data, which is made from Negative Pressure Data (from tier 3), and Dark Energy Data, which is made both from that plus Astrometric Data (from tier 1). Such cool sounding names, these must be very important!
[116:43h] Now It's back to fixing shortages. All the material science production has made me run out of testing packs, so I duplicated my design. However, shortly after I ran out of plastic. I upgraded this one since I already had two copies. With this new one, production went from 19.7k to 60k per minute, nice!
[116:58h] Now I'm short on sulfur. Truth is, vulcanite needs quite a lot, and prod modules also eat a ton of it. So I made a new block, which ups the production from 14.2k to 36.4k.
However, all of these expansions made me short on petroleum, so I duplicated my current design. Shortly after I was missing crude oil, so I went and added wide beacons to all my existing oil fields.
[117:34h] Finally, I was short on data cards. So I made new designs for it: Polished data substrate: from 6400 to 12900 Blank data cards: from 1632 to 3264.
Honestly I'm not even sure why I need so many data cards, in theory most of them are recycled. I guess that I'm using so many that this is just the small amount of cards that are lost, but still, it's a lot more than I expected.
[118:14h] Everything is ready to start working towards bio science! However, this one is the most complex to do. Basically, before I can even start with the tier 1 data packs, I need to build a bunch of setups, which I collectively call "the biostuff loop".
It consists of a few things that all feed into each other, and the extra is what can be used for the data cards and other things.
I've made a diagram so you can easily see the dependency graph. Basically, biomass is made from nutrient gel and bioculture. Bioculture is made of genetic data, biosludge and nutrient vat. Nutrient vats are made of nutrient gel. Nutrient gel and genetic data are made of biosludge. And finally, biosludge is made with biomass!
So, where can I begin? Fortunately, I have around 250k biosludge saved from recycling. If I hadn't, there are other ways to make a little biosludge, like using wood or fish, but they are inefficient.
There is yet another issue. I haven't shown my norbit base in a while, but in the 2x5 rectangle where I want my bio science to go I've put other things.
This was a planning error of my part, not because I hadn't though of it, but because I thought I'd be able to remove it before this point. However, I've been researching the required tech for 5 hours and while it's kinda close now, I need to find an alternative. So I'll put the blocks for the tier 1 data cards somewhere else, temporarily. Ouch 😓
Anyway, here are the setups for the tier 1 data cards. I'll be moving them to their correct spot as soon as I can.
On the left there's biochemical data, which uses vita spice. It produces dirty biosludge and dirty water, like the majority of bio cards. I also have genetic data here, which is the most important card in the whole bio science, because it's part of the bioloop. It can be made really quickly so just a couple machines are enough even though it's needed in huge quantities.
On the right, there's biocombustion data, which burns biomass with plasma, and biomechanical data, which uses lubricant for... things 👀
For now only genetic data will be working, since the others need inputs from the bioloop, but aren't part of it, so they have lower priority receiving them.
[118:51h] Continuing with the loop, here's the blocks for nutrient gel and nutrient vat.
Nutrient gel actually has two recipes, one with coal and one with methane. The methane one is more efficient, and I nearly went to grab methane from space until someone told me it's a trap: since it uses less biosludge, there's some advanced materials that become positive in biosludge, which can lead to deadlocks when all the biosludge storage fills up. So I went with the coal one.
Nutrient vats are pretty simple, just some iron and glass with the nutrient gel. What's annoying about this one is that it only stacks to 5.
[119:24h] The next step is making biomass. This is a fairly slow recipe, so I've put two blocks from the get-go. I've also put biocultures in the same block since a single machine is enough to feed all of it, and it's not used for anything else.
I've put two stations for nutrient vats, because their tiny stack size means trains have to come here all the time. For the same reason, I've put two warehouses of buffer in the output, since biomass also stacks to 5.
And again, here I've also put maximum priority to the train stations with inputs that are part of the loop. I really don't want it to deadlock and to have to fix it somehow.
And finally, I'm closing the loop by adding a biosludge block. Like I said before, biosludge has many recipes: it can be made from wood, fish, vitamelange or recycling, but these are all meant to jump start the system. The most efficient one by far is the one that uses biomass, which is what I've done here.
So, after being careful with my biosludge spending, I managed to get everything here running, and after a while all the buffers in the loop filled up, and there was some biomass available to send to the other three data cards.
I'm getting close to my first bio science, but before that, there is something much more important that I need to talk about...
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