Resources are limited by default but you can set them to be unlimited when you create a new game. When you do start running out you should have easy access to tools that make it a non issue to move massive quantities long distance. Both around the planet and across planets, though I have yet to ship things across the solar system. I have the tech unlocked but haven’t needed to do so yet. My ability to research has outpaced my ability to implement the technology - thanks to Factorio for teaching me to over scale everything.
This is one of the bigger changes from Factorio, they don’t
Just the move to 3D and the spherical surfaces changed a number of game play devices, making it a lot more than just an eye candy version of Factorio. It’s definitely it’s own beast, though yes, it draws very heavily from Factorio.
If I was going to start a new game and had to pick one, then absolutely Factorio. It’s had 4 years of constant development in Early Access plus mods and multiplayer whereas this one was just released to the wild. This game however is in much better shape than Factorio was when it was first released, which speaks well to it’s future.
Can you automate the automating in this? I started toying with Satisfactory last week and the lack of blueprinting/construction bots coming to it from Factorio is… painful. Doubly exacerbated by the 3D-ness of everything. Speaking of, how does the whole tiny-spinny 3d world thing work? In Planetary Annihilation, beyond the aesthetic it didn’t really add anything but obfuscation and confusion for me.
Because of the non-grid structure of the game, I suspect blueprints won’t happen because they don’t make a lot of sense. The tiny sphere thing is a big differentiator from Factorio - it gives a constraint on your building that Factorio didn’t have. You can’t “just quadruple everything because space is infinite”. So it does serve more than just aesthetic - though that doesn’t mean it might not still be obfuscating and confusing.
There’s no blueprinting, but there’s lots of copy-pasting of recipes and so on. More than I remember from Satisfactory, but I didn’t get very advanced in that.
Derailing slightly; my main Satisfactory irritation is in things like constructors, which you’ll need a lot of, and 99.9% of the time will inevitably have a splitter at the input and a merger at the output with conveyor belts joining. Despite needing to place literally hundreds of the bloody things in that configuration, I’m made to place and align all three components separately and ‘correctly’, and then must run around it placing the belts. It ends up taking a huge amount of time and isn’t terribly fun.
If the takeaway for DSP is that I won’t face that kind of issue, I’m interested.
Not sure if it solves that situation exactly - not being first person solves most of the issues for me. There is still a lot of placing/aligning, but you’re doing it from a bird’s eye view. Takes time, but not like it does in first-person.
To answer my own question from another thread, yes you do to a certain extent abstract away the avatar later on in the game, though it’s still annoying. Basically, once you get planetary logistics up and running — the nodes that use drones to transport stuff where it’s needed rather than belts — you can take stuff from and place stuff in the nodes without having to travel to them yourself, even from the planetary view. Construction is still local to your avatar, though.
Definitely switch to God mode in the camera options, it makes laying a ton of repeating objects like solar panels much faster, though your original premise is still 100% correct. You are still limited to a generous range around your mech but you can freely move the camera around. Another tip is if you shift right click in construction mode your avatar moves to where you clicked.
New update with something more than bug fixes, this is something I am just starting to need. As you use the logistics system more and more certain inefficiencies were cropping up that this should solve. My #1 desire right now is in place upgrading of belts, assemblers, and sorters.
Hi engineers,
We are bringing one of the promised short-term goals: ‘Framework of logistics management system’ to you in the update today!
[Version 0.6.15.5706]
All types of Logistics Station: Now you can decide a minimum distance for a Vessel to equip a Warper.
All types of Logistics Station: Now you can decide whether warpers must be equipped on Vessels before departure when the minimum distance above is reached.
All types of Logistics Station: Now you can set the transport distance for Drones and Vessels.
All types of Logistics Station: Now you can set the minimum load for Drones and Vessels.
All types of Logistics Station: Now you can choose whether the Vessels will pick up cargos from the Orbital Collector.
Some English item and technology descriptions have been reworked.
I am really enjoying this game. Thanks for the heads up.
I have just finished setting up my first inter-planetary transport system, and I have yet to run into any kind of glitch or obvious bug. This is more stable and polished than most version 1.0 coming out of Early Access.
Finally got to purple research, refactoring some of my more ad hoc production lines along the way, though I definitely still have some bottlenecks. My biggest issue, apart from my initial veins starting to run out, seems to be finding stuff to do with excess hydrogen. Maybe I should have fractionator loops coming off all my other builds.
I was over producing hydrogen by a massive amount because I overproduce all oil based products so that was something I struggled with all the way up to strange matter and green science. Now I am net negative for my hydrogen rate but I have so many stacked storage tanks I am a ways off from needing something like a gas giant collector.
Knowing what I know now I would have started burning it all off using thermal generators to a large scale early on instead of so much solar and wind, just to not have to deal with it. Then when you start needing hydrogen in very large quantities you go plunder a gas giant.
Last night I just started the initial phase of my Dyson sphere, launched a few nodes, and will soon start up the swarm which can now permanently attach to the structure. I know lots of people start a lot earlier with the swarm for extra power generation, but I hate the idea of solar sails expiring. The game has a lot of different options for power generation so I went with those instead, right up to fusion. I still haven’t done very the last option that isn’t beaming energy from the sphere, because it requires a partially working sphere.
I still haven’t been outside of my solar system, despite having a working infrastructure for warp generation, because I remap my caps key to ESC lol. I could disable that, and probably will, because it could be another week before they drop the key remap update. I can see myself being pinched for resources very shortly once I start scaling up the Dyson sphere production. Plus all the rare resources out there can greatly speed up and simplify some production lines.
If you do the ring around the equator of solar 6 or so times then yeah, you won’t have much power issues until you start working with large amounts of logistics stations. Those things can eat up power like crazy if you let them. Then you can also start shipping power off planet using accumulators and all that power becomes just a drop in the bucket.
I watched that but he doesn’t really solve his hydrogen overflow, he just postponed it a tiny bit. Fractionating stills do a 1 to 1 conversion of hydrogen to deuterium, which you won’t need to use in large quantities for awhile, unless you go very heavy into fusion energy. Which the hydrogen/deuterium requirements were the least of the issues with that, you need titanium alloys and super magnetic rings, each of which is a pretty resource intensive component to build.
Green science is the other heavy user of deuterium, but I am far more limited by other components than hydrogen and deuterium so far. Again, if that changes, I can always reap the hydrogen heavy gas giant we all start with.
It was far more annoying to have to deal with the massive quantities of hydrogen I built up in the meantime, and that’s taking into account a larger fractionating still setup than what he has. Now instead of drowning in hydrogen, I am drowning in hydrogen and deuterium.
Like you mentioned above, I’ve been burning it for energy.
What I did was have 3 splitters. 1st splitter combines and prioritizes Hydrogen to red cubes and overflows to the next splitter. This splitter combines hydrogen and Fuel with preference to Hydrogen and goes to the last splitter. This combines the splitter above with crude with preference on the second splitter (not crude).
The idea is this: If research is saturated then send H to burn else burn Fuel ( fuel also has a preference splitter before this sort to be used for manufacturing). Fuel rarely backs up mid game but it is a relief value. Too much fuel and no H. Too much H and no fuel. This tends to balance out. The crude is used if all else fails, I still have something to burn for power. Especially since crude is free and never runs out as far as I can tell.
I played around with this a lot and it seems to work well. No backups unless self inflicted.
Its pretty cool to look at when there is no load. They kind of handshake back and forth to keep the flow going.
It’s better than what I did, which was to just keep stacking tanks of hydrogen.
I just finished consuming the last of my hydrogen - when I ramped up the strange matter production for green science and fusion canisters it went pretty quick. So now I need to start in on the gas giant to collect more hydrogen, which is amusing for how long it was a thorn in my side. I would definitely not worry about saving excess, you are going to have to go grab tons of it eventually. Wasn’t worth saving.
Of course when I ran out of hydrogen I ran out of deuterium which tanked my fusion energy source, but no big deal, my nascent Dyson sphere is already providing almost 200+ MW theoretical, which worked out to more than enough for my current needs. Except I put my ray receivers on a pole that has more than 12 degrees of tilt, and it’s now winter, and I am receiving exactly 0 energy. I could build a redundant system on the other pole, but now I am eyeing an ice planet on my outskirts that has less than a degree of tilt. But then I have to ship the energy back… which means more accumulators and logistics and power usage and wooo. Yep, loving it.
Beautiful game, below is a screenshot of the first section of the sphere going up as it floats near a mining colony of mine.
There is another thing I started to do. I build my expandable production lines laterally not longitudinally. This keeps perfect alignment of the facilities and belts. If you built out longitudinally alignment can get wonky when you when you cross major lines of latitude.
