You start on a 25x25 tile landfill island surrounded entirely by lava. There are no ore patches, no trees, no water — just your starting equipment and a chemical plant. Everything has to come from the lava.
Requires Space Age.
How it works
Instead of mining, you extract resources by processing lava in chemical plants:
- Lava → Stone / Coal / Iron Ore / Copper Ore
- Lava → Iron Plate / Copper Plate / Stone Bricks (unlocked via research)
- Lava + Coal → Steam → Crude Oil → everything downstream
- Stone + Sulfuric Acid → Uranium Ore
- Lava + Coal + Stone Bricks → Calcite
Electric mining drills are removed from the tech tree — they serve no purpose here.
Land is the other scarce resource. The only way to expand is by researching island expansion technologies, which grant landfill. Every tile matters.
Science packs
LavaBlock adds several new science packs alongside the base game ones:
- Lava Science Pack — the core pack, crafted from lava-derived materials
- Military Science Pack 2 — advanced military research using railgun ammo, tesla ammo, artillery shells, uranium, and electromagnetic plant
- Circuit Science Pack — electronics-focused pack using electronic circuits, advanced circuits, and processing units
- XP Science Pack — earned automatically through crafting; feeds into the XP Lab
- Pyroclast Science Pack (Space Age) — crafted on Pyroclast using obsidian, lava, and advanced electronics
Pyroclast (Space Age, WIP)
Pyroclast is a hyper-volcanic planet reachable from Vulcanus. It has higher gravity and pressure than Vulcanus, and a completely lava-dominated landscape.
What's on Pyroclast:
- Minable volcanic rocks (huge and big variants) yielding stone and ores
- Sulfuric acid lakes — pumpable with offshore pumps
- Molten Iron Geysers and Molten Copper Geysers — extractable with offshore pumps; cluster size, frequency, and richness are adjustable in map generation settings
- Demolisher territories
- Obsidian — a volcanic glass mineral extracted from lava in chemical plants, used for Pyroclast Science Pack
The connection to Pyroclast runs from Vulcanus.
Starting kit
- 1 chemical plant
- 1 solar panel
- 1 small electric pole
- Some iron gear wheels and pipes
Steam power research is unlocked at the start so you can get power running without needing coal first.
Credits
The fluid lake tile implementation (sulfuric acid lakes on Pyroclast) was adapted from Corrundum by Zach Kolansky, used under the MIT License.