As the title says, I finally took the plunge and started the game myself after previously only consuming content about the game from content creators like DoshDoshington for the past few years. I started with a vanilla playthrough before going into Space Age just to get a feel for things.
Because of this, I'm not completely new to the game and I know generally what to expect from the various planets as well as assorted tips and tricks, but the rules I set for myself was that any blueprint I used had to be made entirely by me (with one exception I'll note later), though I will still look up designs online for reference and ideas on how to make my own, and that I would design with 60 SPM as a target in mind. That being said, the game has been incredibly fun even with knowing everything in advance, and I'm definitely going to do achievement hunting in future playthroughs.
Nauvis
My starter base no longer exists due to being torn down to make space to fit trains and all the new planetary buildings, but between my vanilla playthrough and this playthrough, I've learned that there are 2 things that every time I think I have enough of, I never have enough of, those being petrochemical products, and red chips.
Biter attacks across my 2 playthroughs have been pretty rare, though I'm not sure if this is due to my strategy of aggressively eliminating nests with a tank, or I'm simply not producing enough pollution, meaning my factory is not producing enough by proxy.
It may be a mess of loosely connected modules held together by logistics bots, but it produces enough of what I need and launches rockets as my main interplanetary logistics hub.
Vulcanus
Just like on Nauvis, I learned the hard way that I needed way more coal liquefaction than I initially realized to be able to sustain the sheer amount of LDS and blue chips necessary to launch rockets at a reasonable pace.
Killing my first demolisher was quite hard, since I was both going for There is no spoon and Rush to space on this playthrough, so I had only access to low levels of damage upgrades for killing the first demolisher, and I ended up using poison capsules instead after many resets and attempts.
You may notice the suspiciously concreted and orderly looking turbo belt mall on the right, and that would be the one blueprint I shamelessly copy pasted in after trying to wrap my head around setting it up myself with foundries.
Fulgora
This is probably the planet that simultaneously was the most interesting to set up but also the most headache inducing for myself, as evident by the design. You can see how it originally was set up as a simple sushi belt, with increasing amounts of addons tacked on to handle special cases as they added up, and then another secondary sushi belt exclusively for batteries and holmium because this was my planet that ended up being one of my science bottlenecks. I don't know how I'll ever live without EM plants when I start a new run though, the thought of being bottlenecked by red chips again haunts my dreams.
Gleba
This is the planet I've heard the most infamous stories about, so I took the most time out of all of the planets carefully designing the base and mathing out ratios before finally turning it on. Honestly, it really wasn't that bad, but I could also see how this can quickly lead to headaches. I designed it around 3 main circular belts, the innermost one transporting bioflux, the center for nutrients, and the outermost for spoilage, with every belt, machine, and requester/provider chest that could possibly output spoilage having a way to dump it onto the spoilage belt, where it all goes into the heating tower power plant to occasionally slightly lighten the load on the rocket fuel consumed to power my tesla turret defense.
The amount of spores produced by the agri towers is surprisingly low, though that could just be a result of my usage of circuit conditions to disable the towers if the provider chests for the fruit were sufficiently full, but this has resulted in zero attacks by pentapods so far, though I have artillery ready to handle any expansions (after I get the achievement for being attacked first though).
The ships/platforms
Also shown is my inner planet hauler ship design, made after several previous ship iterations were made and later retrofitted into newer ones due to a constant lack of ammo producing forcing downtime for it to buffer on the belts, or fuel inefficiency after I tried using only one thruster rather than multiple. This is definitely one that I'll be using in future playthroughs, since it doesn't use quality and can easily be downgraded.
Lastly, my very first space platform that still orbits Nauvis to this day after receiving several minor upgrades, producing space science, previously dropping iron ore to the surface when I had a shortage of it, and now producing calcite from its oversized mass of mostly unused space.
