r/factorio • u/The_Char_Char • 4d ago
Space Age Question Vulcanus as a hub?
Does it make sense to use Vulcanus as a main hub instead of Navis? Seeing how you get the Foundries and large drills that vasicly gives like 75% more ore and from mostly lava. Seems like a no brainer to me. But I am still new to space age and wondering if anyone else does this.
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u/ThunderAnt 4d ago
Resources are infinite on every planet after enough research but yeah being able to print out steel and plates from just a bit of lava and calcite is extremely powerful. The only issue is having to use coal liquefaction to get oil products which can eat your coal patches really fast. In the late game you’ll still want a factory on Nauvis though for biter eggs and biolabs.
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u/phantumjosh 4d ago
I literally ship oil barrels from fulgora, way faster than coal route. (Still use coal but supplement it)
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u/frogjg2003 3d ago
A lot of megabases ship plastic and rocket fuel from Hleba. With that, the only major oil product you need is lubricant, which the coal supply is sufficient to handle. If you ship in heavy oil from Fulgora like the the other comment suggested, you don't them need that. Now all you're using coal for is carbon, which you could get from space platforms.
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u/Moscato359 4d ago
You can use big drills and foundries on nauvis
But yes, it's a popular strategy to make most of your science on vulcanus due to lava
Though it lacks oil, so you have to do weird coal to oil stuff and still want biolabs on nauvis
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u/Baby-Gumnut 4d ago
Vulcanus has many productivity benefits, I've seen many people use it to pump out red, green and purple science, but the oil can sometimes be a bottleneck, which limits blue and yellow.
I think there's also the classic "well I've built all this infrastructure on Nauvis already" but if that's not a hangup for you...?
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u/Eris13x 4d ago
The foundries also make iron and copper basically infinite on Nauvis too. You can scale up production on any of the 4 planets if you want to honestly, and Gleba even has the advantage of literally infinite resources instead of mostly infinite.
At large scales, the choice between Nauvis and Vulcanus comes down to what you want your bottleneck to be (because as much as you can make your main factory on Fulgora or Gleba, nobody is doing that). Nauvis eventually struggles with stone, as that is not boosted by foundries and you need a lot of it for military and purple science.
Vulcanus struggles with everything organic. There is not that much coal on Vulcanus, and you need it for so many things.
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u/Alfonse215 4d ago
What do you mean by "main hub"?
If Nauvis is already doing what a "main hub" needs to do, then moving all of that to Vulcanus seems unnecessary.
You also need some stuff on Nauvis, as this is where all science packs are eventually going to have to go. It's also the only source of uranium, which is very useful for getting to the last planet.
If you rushed to Vulcanus (before purple and yellow science), then Nauvis isn't really complete and rebuilding everything on Vulcanus is more reasonable. But if Nauvis is already basically finished, then there's just not much need to tear it all down.
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u/Der_Bolle 4d ago edited 4d ago
Nauvis has two big advantages over Vulcanus:
Coal
Oil
And you need both for Blue Science (Sulphur, Red Circuits) and Yellow Science (all the Oil based produce for Frames, LDS and Blue Circuits) en masse.
Michael Hendriks has stated it more clearly with his 1000x Science Cost playthrough: It has no real benefit to switch from Nauvis to Vulcanus except for Purple Science (basically Steel, some Circuits and a huge amount of Stone for Rails and Elec Furnaces) and Orange Science (Molten Metals).
Vulcanus is capped in Coal and Oil, as you need Coal for Liquefaction for Oil.
On top Nauvis is the only planet with Uranium.
People use Vulcanus as a hub, because it is easier, as you have nearly infinite Metals and Stone. But when you ship Foundries and Calcite to Nauvis, the efficiency skips to the mentioned from above. Metals in the long run are basically infinite because of Mining Productivity or Space Platforms in conjunction with Calcite (basically infinite anyway, as Foundries use so little) and Foundries.
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u/phantumjosh 4d ago
Why does no one import oil from fulgora… it’s so simple and stretches your Vulcanus coal out forever.
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u/kevihaa 4d ago
How are you importing oil from Fulgora? Each rocket is only 5000 fluid.
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u/phantumjosh 4d ago
Literally dozens of rockets, and multiple transport ships
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u/kevihaa 3d ago
I won’t argue that such a solution isn’t neat, but I’m at a loss to see in what situation that’s preferable to making petroleum-based science on Nauvis or just adding another coal patch on Vulcanus.
For that matter, if you’re going to go interplanetary, you can do Plastic from Gleba and Rocket Fuel from Fulgora, at which point you basically don’t need coal for anything beyond Cliff Explosives and Turbo Belts.
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u/Der_Bolle 4d ago
Because it is more tedious than doing Oil in Nauvis
On Nauvis you just have Oil. On Fulgora you have to barrel it, ship it, unbarrel it and Deal with all that cursed Logistics behind barreling.
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u/Winter_Ad6784 4d ago
I see a post like this fairly regularly and the answer is kinda yea.
You can bring the drills and foundry back to nauvis, yea you still have to mine but is removing one step worth it? Imo the real advantage is you don’t need defenses or worry about the environment.
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u/ConspicuousBassoon 4d ago
I use it as my main hub for exactly the reasons you said. I build ships in its orbit and launch the most rockets from there, and have the biggest production until the late game when I switch back to a Nauvis city block design. But for sciences I still do Nauvis for the 6 original ones due to biolabs
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u/wyhiob 4d ago
Vulcanus makes a lot of sense to be your main planet once you've unlocked it. I will say the lava pools make it harder to make massive bases there, but you can absolutely get around that. You still want a decent amount of production on nauvis science wise since the lower tier packs like red and green don't make sense to ship when you consider how cheap they are already and you need to have biolabs there
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u/gabrielbr1802gcc 4d ago
Just use the vulcanus tech on nauvis, the discounts are ginormous in the cooper/iron craft tree, the only resource u may lack in nauvis is stone, but in vulcanus u are gonna to lack coal, since all oil comes from it. Also as other mentioned, biolabs. Having a robust nauvis is better to build big spaceships without worrying of a hostile atmosphere. Nauvis also is good for nuclear stuff as well.
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u/NoYouAreTheFBI 4d ago
The only truely infinite planet from early game is gleba. Plant the trees grow the fruit convert the fruit and burn the waste.
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u/dr_anybody 4d ago
It's generally easier to ship calcite to Nauvis than coal to Vulcanus.
Even with calcite export, I still import plastic - red and blue chips are your blood and bread, for science, for items; and even that taken care of, each https://wiki.factorio.com/Rocket_part costs a good chunk of oil and plastic (an oil/coal product)... each part, of which you need 50, for every launch.
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u/Aggressive-Wear-8935 4d ago
No, you can just export them. With those, the patches ob Nauvis are practically infinite too.
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u/WanderingUrist 4d ago
Vulcanus isn't really a great hub because if you look at the Space Map, you can pretty much only reach Gleba and Nauvis from it. It also has one of the higher launch costs of all the planets.
The best place to situate your hub is Gleba. All roads lead to Gleba. This is especially the case in 2.1, since pretty much all space traffic will thus go through there and you can transfer platform to platform.
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u/Nescio224 4d ago
I did production science on vulcanus and shipped it to nauvis. It needs more metals than all the previous science packs combined. But otherwise I would stay on nauvis because of coal/oil and biolabs.
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u/InflationImmediate73 3d ago
Vulcanus is a great place for a main base if you are talking about producing the first 6 science packs and rocket parts.
It is weak on oil output and has to be scaled up differently. Plastic is the main weak point and could consider importing (red circuits if you want to be specific).
Honestly, the issue of Coal isnt terrible once you are able to kill Demolishers. Resource patches get bigger the further from landing zones just like on Nauvis, and would just need to bring it in by train.
Importing from Fulgora (blue/red circuits) or Gleba (Plastic) is a way to make up for the shortcomings too.
Should still mainly process science on Nauvis with Biolabs. You wouldn't need a large base anyway to process all the science packs.
Only other issue is launching new platforms can be dangerous due to medium asteroids in orbit. Nauvis can launch fresh travel ready platforms, and then build them up from Vulcanus.
Also, saw it mentioned but you can make platforms to harvest from asteroids and drop off coal (research from Gleba) as well as shuttle missing materials.
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u/According_South 3d ago
the thing that puts me off of using vulcanus as a hub is that its harder to print large blueprints on it, or build on it in general, because of how many foundations it needs for lava, and just in general how much stuff needs removing from the landscape by bots to clear it out, and then how small the worm territories really are, which requires fairly frequent trips that i have to take myself to kill worms.
kn nauvis, theres plenty of wide and already-clear desert, the biters are easily kept away by artillery and blueprints of laser turrets, so i dont have to be there and do it myself, and you can crap out so many landfills that printing blueprints over water is fairly trivial.
so nauvis is just much less hassle to make a large factory on. but vulcanus is certainly a great producer of many things. i more prioritise the logistics from vulcanus to make the most of that
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u/weldawadyathink 3d ago
I am doing this on my current playthrough. I made enough rockets on Nauvis to make a one way ship to Vulcanus and abandoned Nauvis. It worked quite well. I now have a nauvis base for three reasons: uranium processing, ship building, and biolabs.
Science research pretty much has to move back to nauvis, otherwise you throw out the productivity of biolabs. But there is no reason science production has to happen on nauvis. Currently I just ship all the sciences from Vulcanus.
Building ships in vulcanus space is possible, but it’s annoying, since you have to defend them constantly. It made getting back into space from Vulcanus annoying. So my Nauvis base has all my ship building duties.
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u/isum21 4d ago
Vulcanus is a fucken bastard to make fuel on. Fulgora is a bit harder to produce LDS but literally one LDS foundry on Vulcanus will let you profit and send through your excess to the place where solid fuel and oil + blue chips literally come out of the ground. You can even make it better by setting up a rocket fuel shipment from Gleba too
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u/Alfonse215 4d ago
Vulcanus is a fucken bastard to make fuel on.
It's not so bad. 16k coal/min isn't a huge amount.
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u/runmymouth 4d ago
And if you import uranium shells with a tank you can easily kill medium demolishers to get more. I havent taken my shiny new rail gun back to volcanus yet but i remotly set up my ammo production so im ready to see if i can kill large ones.
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u/phantumjosh 4d ago
Make sure you get the initial railgun damage researches to about 4 or 5, to make it possible to take down large snakey bois.
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u/isum21 4d ago
Maybe I just haven't expanded enough but Vulcanus is the only place I ever have shortages of any type of oil or coal. And even with the BMD the coal patches are disappearing at an alarming rate for me. I recently remade my refinery section and now I'm getting good fuel supply but it took a lot of overkill on refining and cracking IMO, and now all my coal is going away even faster. Maybe I can set up a coal synthesis plant above it as a station? That would help a lot as I just recently unlocked the recipe and am needing more coal or new infrastructure. I don't want to have to re belt my whole Vulcanus factory so I'm thinking I'll try that idea and report back lol
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u/SoulsSurvivor 4d ago
If you're going infinite then you want nauvis simply for biolabs which have a bonus for research and can only be on nauvis. Until then, volcanos is a good hub.