I played factorio a bit. I liked it, but it didn’t grab me like this game. This is a 3d game where factorio is 2d. Its not just the presentation, its the gameplay that is 3d. In factorio, your factory is just laid out on a 2d grid where as in this one, you can make a 3d network of awesomeness.
Is upgrading the spider bot worth it?
I’ve been playing around with Fortresscraft for the last few days, and mostly enjoying it - but also being a bit frustrated by it. Perhaps I am getting old and and impatient, but I feel that the game does not do a very good job of explaining basic concepts to me.
Currently, my game tip is to “go deeper and find titanium”. So I am digging a multi-lift shaft, but all of a sudden, my suit power depletes so rapidly, that I can’t dig any lower. Does it get abruptly colder at -200 depth? I can’t seem to figure out what the problem is, so it’s pretty hard to solve it.
Do torches consume energy? i have watched a video and seems generate heat.
And whats the purpose of the tiny robot that follow you around, other that being the official cute pet?
I know it has solar panels and a battery, which it will use to restore your energy when it depletes.
Fully upgraded, it significantly increases your energy capacity.
Yes, at some lower level, you get to a super cold area which will drain your suit. You should scan some unknown materials and research them. One of them will be something like cold research and when you research that, you will be able to build a heating element which will almost eliminate above ground energy use for heat and let you survive at lower depths. You will need to build the research lab thing to get this tech.
You can also build a recharging station for it, which you use the E to use it which sends your robot to fully charge itself. It would also be nice if you could remotely tell your robot to do this (from deep underground), but I do not think that tech is available. I highly recommend fully upgrading the robot. It is essentially a large flying battery.
Uh seriously? Factorio exists, and it is awesome. FortressCraft exists, and it is awesome. This is awesome! Two awesome games!
Some genres and game technology for some reason just causes this argument to surface. You are suggesting Doom 2016 shouldn’t exist because Bioshock already exists and they are both FPS. We don’t need another one!
I think Minecraft, with its block based game world, was a very exciting new design that took what Infiniminer started and made a great game out of it. I was excited to see all the new block based games develop because I thought the tech - simple worlds that allow interesting terrain gen and exploration with the all important building and modification specialization was exciting. Instead most people just accused them all of being boring clones. Some were, some where not. But FortressCraft Evolved especially just got this ridiculous brush off.
Same with Factorio, I don’t think it started the automation genre but it sure set the high water mark. Bring on new takes on the forumula PLEASE. I promise I won’t call it a clone, though obviously some people can’t help themselves. FCE is different because it joined the two and created something completely unique. If you discount modded Minecraft anyways, which sprang up near the same time and started in on many of the same concepts. I am very glad both exist.
Yep. You will have to automate a special consumable battery to be delivered to his charging station as well as upgrade his guns, but he will be a good force in the early & mid game.
No, the game is unforgiving and doesn’t do much hand holding. I just strongly felt its worth it to push through that with the massive amount of content in this game. That’s if you like automating things.
Yes. You should see the biome change to the Cold Caverns. It should flash a message and warn you about the cold, but its very easy to miss. You need a special suit heater before spending time in the CC which is under Cold Research. If you don’t have that to research yet make sure you have scanned the blue blocks in the CC.
Titanium is found below the CC so you can continue digging straight through without the suit warmer but you won’t have much time. I think that’s practical (not 100% sure) especially if you are placing the Laser Power Transmitters as you go and bring some batteries to charge up on.
The upgrades for Alvin for solar panels and the battery are highly, highly recommended. Get them ASAP. He will hold a lot more energy and transfer it to you when you need it, greatly extending your exploration reach.
No, they use coal to self craft (hit C). This happens automatically if you try and place one and don’t have any but have coal. They do in fact generate heat which lessens the drain on your battery. Don’t stand too close to them (ie right on top) because this can cause a drain as your suit spends enengy to actually cool you. You can see this all happening in the HUD in the top right.
Thanks. I suspected it was the cold. I’ll start searching for unknowns, since cold tech is not yet available to me. I did build the lab though, so I should be ready once I find it. I just got the coal enrichment plant which should help on research speed once I get around to creating a more stable power supply. Resources are still a bit scarce though… I’m having quite a lot of fun with it.
You will not get the cold tech until you research something from the cold area. For me, i found some cold stone, and then when I researched that, it unlocked the research for the cold tech that let me survive.
Okay guys, so bear in mind I’m in the early game and I’m playing on Scarce (resources and power both). It took a ton of work but I finally have a conveyer (basic, for most of it, unfortunately) bringing some copper in to my hub. I have extractors on coal, tin, and iron, but I’m having to manually power them / pick them up for now.
My iron vein is quite a ways below my copper, but it’s pretty close to the same area. What is the best way to get it up to the surface, is it Lifts? Can you use conveyers to/from lifts? Just kind of wondering how best to get iron ore up to the surface. Resources and power are very hard to come by right now so I don’t want to waste them!
The game has flashed a message at me that I should build some pyrothermic generators. How do those work, exactly? I have coal literally right next to my copper, is there a way I can automate the extraction of coal and power the coal/copper extraction?
Please no Let’s Play links, unless it’s a good one. Most of them have make me want to claw my eyes out after listening to them nattering on about inane bullshit for 10 minutes at a time. I just want a quick primer. :)
Plentiful is a slog, scarce is something else. You are going to have quite the uphill battle here. You very much might want to restart on plentiful. I promise you still have 100+ hours of gameplay on plentiful. If you do restart, think long and hard on permanent day too. I went with it and kept myself sane.
So you have lifts which are good for yourself, and cargo lifts which are good for cargo. If you can build cargo lifts already sure, use those, but you are probably going to have to start with conveyors. They have no issue going straight up and work a treat. If you are below a certain depth watch out for filchers by checking conveyors every once in awhile.
The generators, aka PTGs are going to be your main power source for awhile. Automate coal first and get a line of coal running into your base so you put a bunch of PTGs down and power everything else by using lasers to transmit the power. To bootstrap your power place a PTG, a battery, hopper, and an extractor down next to a coal vein. Quick charge the battery which starts the extractor which feeds the hopper which feeds the PTG which feeds the battery. Then you can run a conveyor of coal back to your main base and set up more PTGs there to generate all your power.
After that you can make the choice to generate bars at the mining operation site or send the ore back to base via conveyor. I would make a beeline for the upgraded smelter and induction caps ASAP but uh, that’s a slog on plentiful. Goodluck on Scarce!
Thanks, Gendal! I’m having fun right now on Scarce but if it becomes tedious I will for sure keep your advice in mind and restart on Plentiful!
Cargo lifts require a ridiculous amount of iron. I have not built them yet, but according to the wiki, the rails need 4 iron per rail, and you need 2 rails per depth. So if you want to goto -160 (where I found lithium) you need 160 x 2 x 4 = 1280 iron bars just for the rails alone.
Ill definitely use them, eventually, but so far I am using conveyors for both of my deeper ores. It seems those critters that eat ore spawn on level 80 or below. Fortunately my iron is on level 80 and close to my main shaft so I do not need much protection there. Lithium is a bit different so I have a few turrets protecting the shaft. Now my 4 base metals are automatically streaming into my smelter. I am sure in a while ill have a tun of iron so I can use the lifts for the deeper ores. I think ill try and find nickel and titanium so I can make more smelters and the better lasers.
Anyone know what triggers the space debris stuff that nets you tuns of research points?
Cargo lifts are great but right - I didn’t use them for iron and lithium until late game. You do indeed need a very large amount of iron for all those rails.
You need a surprisingly few amount of turrets to protect the conveyors, just something to be aware of. They can and do shoot through walls with no problem. Just be aware there are consequences to not protecting those conveyors - not going to spoil it other than to say it led to one of my favorite moments of the game.
So, I can see how this grabs people, but I am struggling with it. I am watching Direwolf20’s series to get the hang of things, and the ease of which he was able to make the research capsule things by just using self crafting, versus how I seem to have to make them with a ton of machines is a real road block. Am I missing something? I finally got enough to make the lab, but now I just need more and more of them for research. Meanwhile, I now have about 600 of each ore that I can’t smelt, because I only have the one smelter. Either I am missing some important little hurdle to overcome here, or balance is a little out of whack…And let me set the stage here, I have 5 drills, drilling all 4 initial ores and coal, all of them are wired to power. I’m just spending most of the evening now staring at the smelter, waiting for bars to pop out.
So one of the tenets of the game is that if you are sitting around waiting, watching for anything more than a minute - then you are doing it wrong. This is one of the first points I struggled at, because I didn’t want to use the basic smelter either.
Fight that urge - you should be making more basic smelters and use those to speed things up. Soon as you can invest in the upgraded smelter, it can use induction caps to massively speed things up and it’s easy enough to swap out later.
You will need massive amounts of of all the bars so it’s not like you can go overboard here. You will also need massive amounts of the research pods, so automate the heck out of that as well. Sure you can get a little jump start doing it manually, but that’s not a long term solution and quickly becomes untenable.
Here is my research area to give you an idea of the end game but my beginning looked a lot like this as well (just a helluva lot more PTGs). You can shorten this in almost half if you want but I like the extra hoppers that back up so if I need something random like 100 lithium coils later chances are I have a backed up hopper ready to go.
The basic smelter recipe still has a ?? listed as one of the components. So I still just have the starting smelter.
I may have to resort to a wiki somewhere?
[EDIT] Apparently I am missing a resource. I will have to go on a hunt.
As I pointed out in the OP the wikis still suck. There are some people actively working on fixing them up but in the meantime feel free to ask here. I know how frustrating it can be.
Here is the recipe with everything listed:
And here is a shot of 2 of what you are likely needing to go find. You shouldn’t have too much difficulty finding them.
Is it just me or can you not stick images in the hidden spoiler?
The hidden spoiler worked for me =) Thanks for the help!
Those are the blur spoiler - there is a hidden collapsible spoiler that seemed more appropriate for the screenshots but the image never actually hides under it.
Also the new patch should be coming out today or tomorrow. It has some massive speed improvements (which are only important in the end game really) and the beautiful ambient occlusion effect. MVPs for the patch would either have to be nano disintegrators (a one time use 3x3 digger for getting through ores) or being able to superbuild conveyors. No more placing long lines of them by hand!
Oh and workshop mod support too, how could I forget that.
