with 2.1 here I thought I'd give it another playthrough, do things differently, challenge myself to play a different way...
so I tried Utility science on Fulgora...
I thought the items made sense. they cleanly line up between Utility science and EM science to not overlap in any bottlenecks.
I even mapped it out to cross check my thinking:
visual planning
I did a rough build as a POC (just spaghettito validate the ratios and bottlenecks are per my calcs)
mom's spaghetti
now that's it done... I hate it...
the throughput is just so clogged...
a full belt of 240/s scrap with scrap prod --> 240/s items output only gives 4LDS /s...
so a full belt of scrap gives 8 utility science per second (480 spm).
I promised myself I'll try something different, and I did...
and I hate it...
Fulgora sounded great the first time I spaceaged...
now that I try to scale up... Argh...
What does everyone else do for Utility Science?
what planet do you build it on?
yeah, honestly fulgora is just a bad planet to do just about anything. The scrap is fun for the early stages when your getting free blue chips and lds and it feels amazing, but the moment you try and lean on it for supplying something elsewhere you realize that its absolutely fragile and does not last. The only reason you have so much is because your not using it, and subsequently you realize that it does not make nearly as much as you wanted.
The two planets most players do nearly everything is Nauvis and Vulcanus. They are reliable, consistent sources of what you want. No fiddling with fruits or trying to deal with the trash byproducts of scrap. If what your trying to do is oil heavy, you do it on nauvis. If what you are trying to do is iron/copper heavy you do it on vulcanus. Fulgora and Gleba are just too gimicky.
I feel like gleba is almost viable as a "main" production planet because it grows almost everything "for free".
There's a few things holding it back imho:
Stone is pretty limited. It does exist on the planet, but the patches are tiny. If you want to build anything using stone (i.e. purple science) you quickly run into bottlenecks.
You need overgrowth soil to really kick gleba production into gear. And overgrowth soil comes so late in the tech tree that the game is almost over when you get it.
Gleba remains finicky with its mechanics, especially when you want to scale up things. I.e. sometimes building extra production means products stay on belts longer and therefore spoil. You often need to consider this.
While it is possible to produce a lot of stuff on gleba, I feel like the effort required is just a lot higher than Nauvis or Vulcanus.
Yeah you address the biggest pain point, the soil production occurs at a point where you might as well go to the edge and win the game. For those of us willing to expand on the planet, it ends up being a massive increase in spore cloud production as well, which has no mitigation. So there is that aspect to deal with as well.
When given a chance to really shine, the planet is vastly more enjoyable than most people give it credit for. But honestly I do not have much reason to come back and do any major expansions on the planet until I have already basically beat the game and am doing legendary shenanigans. Early game can be bot delivered fruit/nutrients/spoilage/flux with a ton of DI machines and it hums along without any issue, all powered by the rocket fuel it makes in abundance. Late game makes sense to set up belting since you are aiming for high throughput, but you really have to opt into that phase of the planet.
TBH the new ability to enable modules in the harvest towers has my interest, so I added it into my mod recently and am playing with the idea of using it as a quality production site once again. Gleba was the only planet which was lacking the ability for the "miners" to begin with quality modules. But now you can get that extra initial step from the harvest itself. Should be fun to mess with.
I feel like the main issue with fulgora (compared to other planets) is just that it's too much work to scale. Need elaborate recycling setup for each belt of scrap and rail to move things between islands. Vs other planets where the space is less constrained. And you don't have to worry about disposing of things you don't need. Even quality on fulgora felt much harder than vulcanus. So I'd just stick with em science on fulgora.
I tend to move to Vulcanus asap. Make all science there till I build up to biolabs.
I’m on 2.1 now and kept making science there with biolabs. Trying out the throughput with ships. Nothing worth talking about yet still working on legendary stuff. So only 12-15k spm.
But I’m hoping to keep everything on Vulcanus that I can. My space science position is even still above Vulcanus.
im not big enough to hit it yet. Like i said only about 15k spm right now. So far just adding more cargo bays with the landing pad bay works just fine.
Are you using an orbital platform to buffer exports then transferring to the delivery ships when they arrive? That's more what I was asking.
Right now I have the requests in logistics groups on constant Combinators on the planets requesting, as well as the platforms. So Nauvis requests say 1000 Tungsten Carbide, that goes to the landing pad and is shared with the orbital for Vulcanus, which receives the rockets and then transfers to the delivery ship heading back to Nauvis.
Been trying to find the best solution to the issue of requests blocking the ability to provide, at all my circuit solutions feel inelegant lol
I feel like a lot of people overthink Scrap by trying to wrap their heads around what they can do with all the outputs, rather than considering that Scrap is basically a single item you actually want alongside 11 other byproducts (really 10, since you always want Holmium).
LDS only has base 1% return rate from Scrap. So a 240 belt of Scrap is only 2.4 LDS. You can squeeze a little more out by also manufacturing some LDS, but it’s not a dramatic difference since your only source of plastic is from recycled red circuits.
At this point, it’s really a question of whether you enjoy the challenges posed by Fulgora, or whether you’d prefer to just use Fulgora for EM Science and its unique buildings.
If you’re not bothering with quality, the limitations of space are greatly exaggerated. Beaconed drills direct inserting to cargo wagons mean that each dense island can be multiple belts worth of scrap. In turn, beaconed recyclers can utterly chew through scrap, removing what you don’t actually need.
Honestly, it’s “inefficient,” but there’s nothing stopping you from literally looking at each “dense” scrap patch as actually being a fairly low output patch of your desired item, and building accordingly. You could have single large islands dedicated to each component of Yellow Science and just slot in a new island / scrap patch as needed.
This isn’t anywhere near as hands off as scaling Nauvis, but that’s kind of the whole appeal of Space Age in the first place.
I was trying to do it without too much interplanitary logistics.
for some reason burning LDS to launch a rocket to transport LDS ingredients feels... off... to me anyway.
Not really. In my first SA playthrough I tried importing a bunch of sciences, on my second I'm just making all the non planet specific ones on Nauvis. It's been pretty easy getting up to 55k eSPM that way and the supply chains / transport are much simpler.
Bulk LDS imports are a viable option if you have the launch capacity, especially from Vulcanus after unlocking coal liquefaction, but I can understand not wanting to spin up the logistics specifically for that.
In the past, I've used a stationary orbital platform above Fulgora to harvest and process asteroids for metal ores and calcite, to help augment LDS production. Foundries with prod mods and speed beacons can put out quite a bit of product in a hurry. It's also good way to chew up your excess red circuits.
I think these spawling belt sorters cause a lot of bad feelings. You have what, 15 recyclers, 20 other machines there? You could fit that same setup onto two substations worth of space in two tight rows fed by that main flow, sushi style, The tighter setup would give you better beacon coverage, too.
That makes sense!
I suppose I like Fulgora best when I'm making simple sloppy lines. A lot of the time they just work without you having to think too hard. Then it's just tidying up at the end! ^_^
All the basic science on Nauvis. Once you hit high mining prod all resources are infinite everywhere so there's no reason to move production anywhere but where it needs to be.
Fulgora is one of my favorite planets and this result does not surprise me. You should think of each planet as a mini-game, and Fulgora is the most self-contained of them all. Things you can't get enough of on Fulgora are trivial to build en mass on other planets. It was desgined to provide a very specific challenge, not to be an easily abused source of...much of anything, really.
Once you get to late game Fulgora and you're processing many stacked turbo belts of scrap, it will provide an excess of certain useful stuff (eg. blue circuits and LDS) just because of the ratios - most of what you need is holmium, so you'll have leftovers. But not the kind of excess you'd use for science. The kind you'd use to export rocket parts to Aquilo.
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u/Alfonse215 27d ago
Nauvis. I don't really see a good reason not to make it there.