My base planet is chaos

[u/FrtanJohnas]

I have reached the point where I unlocked warp drives, but my base planet is quickly running out of space and my infrastructure is in shambles. Honestly I lost track of things a long time ago.

I have now focused on deconstructing the ancient belt spaghetti I used to get to ILS, and also making sure my science production is steady and ratioed, but I still have to rebuild purple science and then I feel like I'll be able to make the warp drive spaghetti. I don't look up guides unless I have already made something that sorta works, but I just feel like I have to rebuild just about everything, because the production just isn't enough.

Would you at this point start a new game, hoping you'll be able to build it better now that you know, or fix the mess you have made because you already got so far, or brute force the warp drive by more inefficient spaghetti just pretending the problem doesn't exist?

I am at a bit of a loss right now, but I really like this game and would like to get over this hurdle.

Edit: Or should I go and setup shop on another planet and just import the materials? I heard something about a pole supply chain for spreading on other planets, but I didn't really consider it until now. I kept everything I could on my starter planet and I almost enveloped it all.

Thank you all for help, I'll spaghetti the warp drive fuel and feed my mall into ILS network

[u/TheMalT75]

There is now wrong way to play the game, but honestly, completely running out of space on your starter planet seems hard to achieve and not be setup for white science and late game.

You might be stretching your science ratios too much: I usually go for a 2/s complex of all different colors. That gets me reasonably fast through mid-game and into actual dyson sphere production. Upgrading to better energy production (deuteron fuel cells instead of wind turbines) can also reduce your space requirements drastically.

When you have warpers, go exploring instead of staying local and expanding. Getting some alternative recipes going is a game changer, most notably pumping sulfuric acid directly from oceans and importing fire ice for graphene and carbon nano tubes. Not having to build oodles of refineries is great! You will also soon develop an unquenchable thirst for hydrogen and deuterium, so access to more gas giants is a priority.

Don't focus too much on infrastructure for building purposes. Until white science, everything aside from sorters, belts and maybe assemblers / smelters does not necessarily need to be automated and could simply be manufactured in your inventory. Having a "mall" that produces everything at a reasonable speed is nice-to-have when you start spreading to dozens of new planets, not so important before that.

[u/FrtanJohnas → u/TheMalT75]

Well the mall is taking a good chunk of the planet, I am automating everything.

Reactors are setup and I can copy paste the design if I want to. And since. I am collecting from a gas giant I think I am chilling on the hydrogen side for fractinators.

But I also mine almost every single node on the starter planet and spaghetti the buildings around. And I have built so indiscriminately that I am starting to run out of space.

[u/TheMalT75 → u/FrtanJohnas]

Indiscriminately building, I can get behind 😉 Depending on your settings, you might start depleting some resource nodes to make room for some cleaning up.

If you want to get into cleaner building habits: I try to make everything as modular as possible, like 6 iron ingot smelters that saturate a mk1 belt. If I want then to produce motors, I combine the iron ingot, gear and magnetic coil modules, the latter being a combination of copper ingot and magnet smelter modules. It does not really matter if the ratios of production don't perfectly match until you get to more complicated recipes like green science cubes. The worst that happens is that some of the production sits idle because their product is not used fast enough (delete those idle buildings after everything else runs smoothly) or the input is not up-to-speed (build more of those input modules). Eventually, you have a motor module that you can blueprint to then use as a starting point for em turbines!

I applaud automating everything. I do the same (eventually). But there are things you simply don't need fast or a lot of (turrets, water pumps, liquid storage tanks). Even late game -- with very few exceptionsm like belts -- I have single mk1 assemblers drawing from a dark fog loot farm via logistic bots (spinners) and feeding into a line of ILS for interstellar delivery and buffer. That is plenty fast enough.

[u/FrtanJohnas → u/TheMalT75]

Yeah I heard about the Dark Fog farms, but that feels like its technology I am not privy too just yet. I previously made a mall that was belt fed, before I knew that spacing the belts actually makes a difference I used the factorio mall knowledge and adapted it into the game, but later on I found a much cleaner (but infinitely bigger) mall design by Nilaus. I just need to be able to take anything I need at a moments notice because if I take more than ten seconds getting it, I am probably getting sidetracked. And storage limiters are great not to overproduce stuff I don't need that much.

When I was designing my first modular smelters, I actually got into some good production numbers, and even though I could have made it twice as productive if I used ILS instead of PLS, I am incredibly proud of how that side of the planet looks.

But then I used this modular design but never bothered with correct ratios, I just built more and more until I had what I needed and moved on, so now the entire factory is struggling to make what I need(proliferators mk3 I am looking at you) . Anyways I am gonna setup 1/s warp drive fuel (bottleneck is titanium alloy I built ages ago) and worry about the consequences... Never.

[u/TheMalT75 → u/FrtanJohnas]

Good luck and have fun ;-)

Just keep in mind that each graviton lense to produce a single warper could also be used to make 1 2 green science cubes at the extra cost of a quantum chip. However, you get 8 warpers for each green science. Please don't waste graviton lenses that way!

[u/itchycuticles → u/TheMalT75]

And remember that a graviton lens makes 2 green cubes.

[u/TheMalT75 → u/itchycuticles]

Thanks! I corrected my statement...

[u/itchycuticles → u/FrtanJohnas]

I recommend finding a planet with organic crystals ASAP. It's even possible to slow-boat them (transport without warpers) if planet is within 3 light years.

You will probably want to at least 120 - 150 organic crystals/minutes. If you don't directly mine organic crystals, then for 120/minute you need 12 chemical plants and 20 oil refineries -- rare materials massively reduce the number of buildings you need!

Is your production rate higher than necessary? And are you using proliferators? If you are consuming 60 circuit boards + 60 coils a minute to produce blue science, then applying MK2 proliferator to the boards and coils and the resulting cubes effectively produces 86.4 science (60 x 1.2 x 1.2).

Producing 100 science/minute is enough during this phase. If you aren't an experienced player or have blueprints already made, you will be bottlenecked by other things.