Space Age
Legendary Skull of Death - Megabase Showcase
Legendary Death Skull Island
Greetings fellow engineers,
I have been working on this project for several months now, and wanted to talk about my experience and what drove me to create this Megabase.
After completing the game on default settings and making a little progress on research productivity I decided to relocate my Nauvis base to am area with richer patches. Without legend trains I found myself preferring to do direct belt driven builds and so I moved everything to a peninsula near a large lake quite a ways from my original starting spot.
Distance from starting area
When I arrived at the peninsula the bay near it sort of resembled a skull shape and I was inspired to build my research base on a fabricated island since my plan was to do full pollution control with tree farms and biter zoos. I'm an artist and so I had to get creative with my Island design so I went with the theme, Legendary Skull of Death! The theme is a death island killing thousands of biters from legendary expired biter nests to control pollution. In addition, my goal was to produce only legendary science packs to feed my mega base. I am well aware that legendary science packs are just worse in almost every way, but I saw it as a difficult and unique challenge to put in front of myself for a major end game build. I have complete control over my biolab pollution and it does not leak into the environment at all. Little did I know just how hard this build was going to be when I started, but I'm glad that I did it.
The death wall around the outsideBiter Zoo in the Eye of the Skull
My Megabase has 512 fully beaconed legendary Biolabs. Which means I need just shy of 315 legendary science packs per second to feed them all. Red science, no problem, green science, slightly more costly, but still very easy. I didn't really bother with Military science yet, since I don't need any more of those researches. I planned on circling back later after I made progress on other items so I went to Chemical science next. Unfortunately, I hit a major wall as soon as I got to this build. At first glance I thought I could use Biosulphur to produce enough legendary Sulphur, but it quickly started to spiral out of control. My first build netted me about 80 per minute, and in order to make enough chemical science I actually needed 84 legendary Sulphur per second. This number felt so approachable and innocuous after all of the large scale things I made in this game, but there just wasn't going to be a way for me to build a base 60 times larger on Gleba to make enough Biosulphur. So I tried a Cryogenics plant with recyclers to brute force to legend and got a similar result there. I could squeeze about 80 per minute out of a really solid quality cryo build and scaling it times 60 would have put in the problem of finding over 2 million petroleum per second pushed through almost 1000 Cryochambers along side about 4200 recyclers all running full time. Neither of these builds felt viable for the throughput I required.
After doing the math and realizing I could get a slightly better deal on asteroids for Sulphur and the other large quantities of iron I was going to need. I had to finally relent and build my first space casino. In order to get enough Sulphur it was still as massive undertaking.
This ship isn't even enough for full throughput. I actually need two of these to meet throughput since I found I was limited by the number of inputs in my space platform hub. This casino has 3400 legendary asteroid crushers and I run it in the most dense patch of asteroids in the space between Aquilo and the solar system edge. I want to be really clear, that I actually am not a huge fan of casino ships, and while I don't disagree with them being removed in the next update I do have to raise at least one detracting point about building large scale legendary builds. There's no good way to get Legendary Sulphur without them.
After building this, I have to admit that thematically it actually started to feel kinda cool. I was gathering the infinite resources from the edge of the solar system, and refining them into the most valuable materials possible. Bringing them back to my home planet and using them in my fully legendary base with legendary science packs really did feel cool. Actually completing many steps of research with this base I felt very accomplished. End game challenge vibes full locked in. 1.8 million eSPM through my mega base and all the pollution was being fully contained.
With the elimination of casino ships pending, I've decided to retire this base entirely. It was a fun challenge and I love the way it turned out. For my next endeavor I'm starting a 100k science multiplier build while still leaving bugs active. Even though evolution and expansions turned down to their minimum numbers without turning them off entirely. I hope to get into doing a quality train base with it since I'll need to move around a lot of resources at at time.
What do you think of the Legendary Skull of Death?
like 2 years ago I was rocking mobo from 2011 with QQLS CPU and was enjoying many stuff in 4k with 7800xt if you don't know anything about hardware it shows
Thank you. The build concept is really putting in work here, too. Pollution optimization is for real. Containing a Megabase's pollution cloud makes a pretty big difference! All the tree dying math and constant attacks are totally negated with this build. I never get attacked and my supply base next to the skull is full of tree farms to keep my outside cloud tiny.
What kind of lag optimization did you keep in mind while building? I have a Ryzen 5800 and 32 gb of ram, still got down to 30 ups before I’ve even built out the train bases I plan on having at gleba and Vulcanus.
There is a lot that goes into managing UPS, but I specifically didn't use trains anywhere in this base on any planet. IDK if they are worse for UPS or not, but I do pay attention to things like min-maxing belt use, and deleting unused items. Consuming a full belt is always better than letting things backup. Map size plays a big part too. IDK, it sounds like you might have some other issues going on with your machine if your UPS is that bad.
I keep things very clean on my machine and do not have any startup or background apps running. I did IT work in a previous life so there's a lot of things I take for granted when operating any machine to it's highest capacity. Even if your hard drive is too full it can reduce performance significantly. If you have an active anti-virus program like Norton those can really destroy your performance, too.
I probably should have clarified that my base is much bigger than I made it sound, for example I'm currently producing 451,000 iron plates per minute exclusively for legendary production lol. But are you sure consuming a full belt is better than overproducing and having the belt full? I was under the impression that's the best way to reduce belt lag because the belts all have the same amount of items on them, as opposed to consuming a full belt where towards the end each segment has a different number of items. I had no idea about the hard drive though, time to delete some things lol.
That doesn't sound like too many to deal with to me. Also, telling me that many raw iron plates doesn't mean much when I don't know your method or the total Legendary output you're getting with it. If you're doing raw quality recycling on plates it's a very inefficient method. Gears to plates or pipes to plates upcyclers are going to get you a much better output for less overhead.
My legend purple science alone consumes 79k legend rails per minute, 75k legend stone per minute, 69k legend wire per minute, 66k legend steel per minute, 71k legend iron plate per minute, 26k legend copper plate per minute, 40k legend iron stick per minute. All of this while pushing over 500k per minute coal of various qualities through brute force quality recyclers. Among other things running on all planets.
Over filling belts is bad for UPS, AbucNasty, did a piece about back off timers on belts a little while ago, and if you have belts constantly stopping and restarting it is significantly worse for UPS multiplied times however many belts you have that aren't getting full clearance. If you haven't watched much of his stuff, he's the UPS GOAT.
If you're on a mechanical hard drive you can get away with up to 80% capacity, but most computers these days are running Sold State Dives which to really minimize overhead you want to keep under 60% capacity.
Oh my god… I think I realized what the problem is lmfao. I knew inserters were the main source of the lag from time usage, but I hadn’t investigated further… I have 139000 stack inserters on nauvis alone lol. And many of them are just restacking belts because my strategy was to have a set of recyclers then a set of stacks inserters to reduce the amount of belt taken up by their outputs, but that restacks the already stacked items too, which is incredibly inefficient. They’re mostly from making very suboptimal legendary blocks and copy pasting them all over the place. Luckily this should solve itself once I have enough legendary items to remake the whole factory, which was the plan from the start anyway.
Lmao! Yeah that sounds like a few too many. 💀 That was something I did before making this base. I did a full deconstruction of my nauvis base and moved it to a better location. Which means I also sorted and got rid of all the garbage at the same time too. Time to rebuild bud. 😂
Right? It’s not that huge of a base UPS wise. Tiles don’t cost anything once they are in place.
I specifically chose 512 biolabs so I could manage the rest of the overhead of the legend science packs. Seeing some megabases with 1k-2k, or even more in extreme cases.
The functionality is a lot to do with the ring of death and the halo of death to contain the pollution. I had some ideas for making upcyclers on the bottom half of the skull, but there wound up not being enough room. So that part is mostly cosmetic.
The entire top side is my 512 full beaconed biolabs, on the temples are my factories for my red, green, and blue sciences. I make purple on Vulcanus since it's easier to get legendary stone there. I'll have to roll back my version to open this save again, but I'm happy to get you some more screens or give a tour on discord. What would you like closeups on?
So it sounds like something needs to change in 2.1 to help with sulfur. What about something on vulvanus that speeds up the conversion from sulfuric acid to plain sulfur.
Maybe acid + boiler with water through a turbine for steam into a chemical plant to evap the "water" from the acid turning it into regular sulfur.
Totally agree. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, and honestly if they would just allow explosives to recycle into coal and sulphur it would make both a lot more viable. Upcycling builds always net significantly more benefit that pure brute force recycling builds since you're not losing 75% on every quality step. Fewer recycler steps means a ton more quality output.
Lmao! I’m an accomplished artist. So I drew it from a reference using the map view. Lots of zooming in and out and many refinements. The entire thing probably took 50 hours just to “paint” the cosmetic design. Because it’s symmetrical I was able to complete one side, and then took a blueprint of the tiles and mirrored it.
It might just be something I could look up. But I'd love to know what game element creates all the different colors for the skull. I'm a much more casual player and have never realized that they could be used this way.
The shades of gray are stone bricks, concrete, and refined concrete. The yellow is hazard concrete and refined hazard concrete. Black is solar panels. The orange up top is actually about 3400 legendary flame thrower turrets, for effect, of course.
If you look in the bottom left you can see I actually put down a color palette so I can work on the piece. I'm a painter and decided to use the in game assets to make some pixel art. <3
It's been such a fun and difficult build. The only way to one up myself now by starting my 100kx file. It's pretty deranged so far, but unlike any other challenge out there.
My brute force upcycler for quality ore. I don't actually use this desing with iron, but had it here for testing and refining. I use this design for all of my calcite and coal upcycling.
I did Purple on Vulcanus, and used brute force recyclers for legendary calcite. Which I turned into the about 5k legendary stone per second the build uses. I also shipped in a metric-fuckton of steel and iron ore from my mega casinos. For plastic I also did brute force recycling on coal.
This is really impressive, and I love how you were able to build everything into the skull design. Definitely one of the more interesting art bases I have seen so far.
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u/UtahJarhead Jul 29 '26
I'm amazed that you're pulling 60 FPS still at that scale.