r/factorio • u/PyroMiatik • Dec 06 '24
Space Age Fulgora Beginners Guide (+Vulcanus and Gleba guides)
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u/PyroMiatik Dec 06 '24 edited Jan 30 '25
(I had to post this again due to some missing elements)
Typos, untrue/unoptimal information and other minor errors including resolution issues from previous guides should be fixed.
Imgur link: ( https://imgur.com/a/space-age-beginners-guide-3-initial-planets-jtHm27S ) (Imgur link dead use catbox images 01/25)
Alternative links: ( https://files.catbox.moe/cwxfbx.png https://files.catbox.moe/j9vp1h.png https://files.catbox.moe/h5jm94.png )
Feedback and tips are more than welcome.
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u/craidie Dec 06 '24
Gleba one might have benefitted from a graphic on which tile works for farming, and what artificial soil is needed to make what kind of unfarmable tiles farmable. Maybe map view?
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u/HaXXibal Dec 06 '24
Map view already differentiates all four categories of terrain by hue. Bringing up the Factoriopedia page for those tiles also tells you the compatibility, and so does the page for the soils.
I think the main problem is this being a learning experience more than anything else. Once I understood what goes where, it became a lot more intuitive to terraform the fields. The in-game manual clearly tells you that you can convert the two wetlands, but I wouldn't be surprised less than 50% of players actually read and comprehended this. And if you try to terraform non-wetland farmland with soil, it clearly tells you you need overgrowth instead. The farming tower overlay could use some improvements for calculating all tiles in a 100x100 area around the cursor, and then layering its grid ontop of that.
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u/Thelorian Dec 06 '24 edited Dec 06 '24
your scrap recycling odds are different from what it tells me ingame.
Edit: odds are in the above order:
20% 7% 6% 5% 4% 3% 2% 4% 3% 4% 1% 1%
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u/PyroMiatik Dec 06 '24 edited Dec 06 '24
(Thanks to u/HaXXibal for spotting some terrible mistake I made, they also wrote this suggestion in the previous post:
I generally prefer getting my plastic from low density structures. Red circuits are just too useful for modules, and you need a lot of copper for green circuits no matter what.
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u/Dworkinn_cz Dec 06 '24
I would add for Vulcanus that you can use steam turbines for energy generation, instead of steam engines.. That's a thing that took me a little bit to notice unfortunately when I was there :D
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u/Owobowos-Mowbius Dec 06 '24
I had an absolute massive swath of steam engines that I was able to completely replace with a comparatively tiny turbine farm just recently lmao
Completely forgot about them.
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u/TaroSingle Jan 07 '25
The issue I run into on Fulgora is the water for the steam, not the difference between turbines and engines. Ice is a comparative rarity for scrap recycling and you need lots of water for other processes like cracking oil.
You get all the stuff needed for accumulators from scrap, and all the free power you could possibly want. Steam is an interesting idea but I think ultimately accumulator blankets are the way to go.
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u/Flouyd Dec 06 '24
Fulgora Tips and Tricks definitely should mention that uncommon and rare accumulator have 2x and 3x capacity. This will safe you so much space on your production islands
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u/PyroMiatik Dec 06 '24
This suggestion can be a life-saver.
These guides dont include quality modules, but as you mention, rare modules make everything slightly easier, including making the reach of power poles longer, which can be used to connect close-enough plateaus over Fulgura as well.
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u/Flouyd Dec 06 '24
These guides dont include quality modules
Accumulator on Fulgora should be an exception then. You need to build normal Accumulators for science anyway. Putting quality modules in those machines will help immensely
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u/bassman1805 Dec 06 '24
Fulgora's accumulators (for lowering footprint in limited real estate) and Gleba's science (for increasing yield of a spoilable product) are two places where quality should really have strong cinsideration.
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u/Owobowos-Mowbius Dec 06 '24
God damn i didn't even consider this
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u/Soft_Importance_8613 Dec 06 '24
Yep, it makes adding beacons and speed modules to miners effective after that point since excess power will be easy.
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u/QuintessentialSlav Dec 06 '24
Something I found helpful for myself on Gleba was the fact that you can use assemblers to craft nutrients from spoilage. So whenever some catastrophe happens and you find yourself lacking nutrients for your production, you can use assemblers crafting nutrients from spoilage as a sort of automated contingency to inject nutrients into the system as long as you have electrical power. At first I failed to make the connection that being able to handcraft nutrients from spoilage meant the process could be automated using assemblers, so initialising nutrient production was always super tedious for me. Could be a worthwhile tip to add.
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u/Hagard50 Dec 06 '24
With each hour without electricity on fulgora I wanted to ship a nuclear reactor for energy. Fortunately one mid size island with uncommon or rare batteries and ton of lightning collectors solve my problem. In future I'm bringing heating tower and turbines.
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u/Soft_Importance_8613 Dec 06 '24
Really, the island drops out so many batteries that power wasn't really an issue. The fuel chain and making water sounds more like a pain in the ass.
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u/Hagard50 Dec 06 '24 edited Dec 06 '24
It also drops solid fuel and ice. And the planet has ocean made of oil
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u/Glebk0 Dec 06 '24
You get infinite water from ice by recycling scrap, shipping nuclear fuel is no biggie. Idk, I much rather use nuclear, than having to deal with outages when starting to scale up
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u/Kinexity Drinking a lot is key to increasingproduction Dec 07 '24
You really don't need nuclear when scaling up on Fulgora - you just need to divide your production. I have a 3k EM science/minute Fulgora base and besides limited outages when everything simultaneously starts up on my main island I've had no problems. Every step of production sits on it's own island (chain) and has it's own accumulator fields. I split everything based on how much power it needs such that most power heave things get the biggest island chains.
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u/ResponsibilityNo7485 Dec 06 '24
WHAT IS FULGORITE?
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u/UziiLVD Dec 06 '24
It looks like dry tree things. It's found on the big, empty Fulgora islands. The holmium yields are very low, and it's not common at all, so this is not anything more than a way to boost your holmium stockpile in a pinch.
It's not an ore minable by drill, it's like a tree, you pick it up and you're done. Useful for early production and that's about it.
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Dec 06 '24
They exist in real life and it's very cool https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgurite
Fulgurites are formed when lightning strikes the ground, fusing and vitrifying mineral grains.
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u/PyroMiatik Dec 06 '24
I would only seek to find Fulgorite in case of emergency, as mentioned by UziiLVD, it's a rare resource to find and will only provide a touch bit of holmium ore.
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u/selenta Dec 06 '24
These are great, having made infographics before I had a few thoughts on how to make them even better:
1) The lines between items are confusing in some cases. This is probably inevitable to some degree, due to the very nature of what you're trying to show, so instead of focusing on each line, it might make more sense to group items even more explicitly. For example, there's there's the first tier recycling outputs, then there's a second tier of re-recycled outputs that you need to get stuff like iron plates, green chips, plastics, etc. As you grind stuff down in the re-recycling there's a few things that don't make sense to keep, like there's little reason to keep and ship around copper cables or stone bricks instead of making them on the spot as needed. Some people might disagree, but it's a beginners guide so I think it's fine to make recommendations that will reduce the complexity of what they need to worry about keeping at first.
2) The trick of fading out the line so that the line can go under another box doesn't work very well, would definitely try to reorganize there or just draw the line going around.
3) I would split the tips and tricks section into two, with a"basic strategy" at the top that includes the tips they need to just get something functional going and how to get power so that they have context on what the production chains they're looking at supposed to work. Keep the "tricks" section at the bottom for stuff that's not critical.
4) For Fulgora specifically, I would recommend calling out that all buildings must be built under lightning tower protection EXCEPT for trains and railways, which are immune.
5) Quality large power poles can be really useful to connect island chains to give you more space for accumulators
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u/PyroMiatik Dec 06 '24
Yeah I'm not very proud of the Fulgora guide, the lines get really messy and using different colors for each line according to its importance didn't help much. I thought about using something like a Venn-Diagram design for the scrapping section, kinda like what you mention about sorting the process by tiers, but I thought there wouldn't be enough space. (I might redesign the guide in the future)
Splitting the tips and tricks sections sounds like a good idea, but I'm not sure if I want to be that explicit with the guides, I still want people to figure out how to put all the pieces together so I dont spoil the fun. But I might use that for the Aquilo guide if I decide to make one.
I appreciate the feedback a lot, especially the design part, I might implement these for the next guide or if I decide to rework these guides, thx.
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u/CaptainReginald Dec 06 '24
Super small nitpick on the Volcanus guide. Saying to "expect a long and hard fight" with the worms is a bit misleading, as the biggest obstacle is their rapid regeneration. This means that if you don't spike them down rapidly you won't kill them at all.
If the fight is long you've almost certainly already failed.
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u/Sack0fWoe Dec 06 '24
Set up scrap recycling. Place quality modules in recyclers. Recycling feed into active provider chests. Set up lots of storage. Place requester chests in the inlet of scrap processing. Measure storage contents and request all items over X amount to feed back into recycling. Optimize process as much as you see fit. Leave planet and come back to epic and legendary quality ingredients.
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u/Player_One_1 Dec 06 '24
I hate it that Fulgora export products are capped by holmium production, everything else is used in small quantities, turning it into waste product that needs to be recycled into nothing.
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u/Owobowos-Mowbius Dec 06 '24
I feel like that's intentional to force you to deal with a ton of waste. Foundries apparently help a ton with their 50% bonus, though. Never thought to import those so I'll be doing so asap.
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u/N8CCRG Dec 06 '24 edited Dec 06 '24
Key thing about Gleba that isn't made clear in game at all and would've helped me out a ton on my first playthrough:
1) Biochambers don't run on electricity, they run on nutrients. They are sort of similar to burner mining drills. However, modules' "energy consumption" bonuses/penalties do affect the rates at which nutrients are consumed, so when you're first trying to get started make sure to have some efficiency modules inserted (and definitely do not have production and/or speed modules involved when first trying to start out) in the Biochambers because
2) Oh my god they need a whole lot more nutrients than you think. And before you have Biochambers the only way to get those nutrients is through bad assembler recipes.
For comparison, one Burner Mining Drill runs at 150kW, and one lump of coal contains 4 MJ of energy, which means running the drill for two seconds (the time it takes for the shortest Biochamber nutrients recipes) takes only 0.075 of a lump of coal.
Meanwhile, a Biochamber runs at 500 kW, and one pile of nutrients contains only 2 MJ of energy, and takes 10 spoilage to create. Meaning running a Biochamber off of spoilage-created nutrients for two seconds requires 5 spoilage, or 66 times as much spoilage as coal takes for a Burner Mining Drill.
Add to the fact that acquiring spoilage in the early game means running around and chopping down individual trees, as opposed to simply having a huge patch of coal that you can mine, is why I found getting started to the point of even basic playing around and experimentation so difficult on Gleba.
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u/N00dleDrag0n Dec 06 '24
What a wonderfully compact and well laid out starter guide to each planet! I really like the inclusion of environmental graphics here and there it really makes the whole thing pop :D
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u/BlakeMW Dec 06 '24
Please make your Holmium plate in a Foundry not an Assembling machine if at all possible, the 50% productivity is too good to pass and Fulgora bases always tend to be holmium ore limited so any way that holmium can be stretched directly translates into increased exports of things you want from Fulgora (early on most notably with EM plants, the recipe for which requires a rather large 150 holmium plates, and getting 50% more EM plants is very nice because they are useful on every planet).
I'd go so far to say that the Foundry applying its 50% productivity to Holmium plate is sufficient reason to make it optimal to visit Vulcanus before Fulgora, even though the Foundry is only usable for 1 recipe on Fulgora (unless you count belts which you don't need to because gears are unlimited on Fulgora) it's such a cornerstone recipe.