Survive and thrive on your space platform! Unlock new recipes, technologies, and strategies as you manage resources, power, and production in orbit.
Large total conversion mods.
Augmented or new ways of transporting materials - belts, inserters, pipes!
Map generation and terrain modification.
New Ores and resources as well as machines.
Things related to oil and other fluids.
Furnaces, assembling machines, production chains.
Changes to power production and distribution.
More than just chests.
I've played until green sci (pre-oil) so far and encountered some balancing issues:
- Space sci is VERY slow due to ice! I've invested quite a bit into expanding the platform and I'm bottlenecked by ice at around 10spm. Space sci should cost much less ice imo (maybe 5-10) as oxide asteroids are really rare. I only see this issue getting worse after unlocking oil.
- Space platforms are quite expensive, especially on iron. Maybe it is due to me expanding a lot to get more ice but I'd slightly reduce the iron cost on platforms as well. Carbon poses no issue on that.
- Steam power seems obsolete to me as solar is really strong and basically free. Also I don't want to waste my precious ice on that.
I really like the concept of this mod and hope there is more to come :)
Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback, it really helps me see where the balance pain points are showing up in actual play.
Ice / space science: I hear you on the ice bottleneck. Adjusting asteroid generation is tricky in the code, but I do have plans to allow asteroid reprocessing relatively early in the tech tree probably right after green science. That should help smooth out progression and make ice less of a choke point.
Platform costs: The platform is intentionally set to be quite expensive as a limiter, so I don’t have plans to change that. I understand it can feel punishing at times, but it’s meant to encourage careful expansion and resource management.
Steam power: You make a good point here. Solar is available from the start with no research requirement, while steam needs a research unlock and also consumes ice, which makes it less appealing once solar is accessible. I agree it needs a more unique role, and I’ve been considering ways to make it useful beyond simple power generation.
I’m glad to hear you enjoy the concept overall. Balance tuning is a big focus as I keep iterating, so your notes are really valuable.
To give my 2 cents:
I just achieved green science, so not to far yet.
So far I like the concept a lot, but my science is struggling a bit.
-I agree, that Space science takes a bit to much ice, reducing it to 15-20 would help a lot already.
-The Space Platform cost is fine imo.
-Steam power does seem obsolete, espacially with the price for solars. If you want people to build steam, solar needs to be worse and ice needs to be more frequent.
-Maybe reduce the cost for electric circuits research a bit, in the beginning I was powerstarved the whole time while waiting for ice. The experience might be a bit better with cheaper space science, but Factory must grow.
Another thing that might be worth overthinking is the stone situation. Atm I just throw all of it overboard, it's not needed. Adding it into the process would make the game a bit more challenging in the early game (just adding it to a science or space platform recipe could already be enough)
Thanks for the effort
I really like this mod, pretty fun ! My game is ~30h old (with Time controler mod ;) ) and I'll soon unlock thrusters !
I agree with the previous comments, about Ice :
-I made a really big platform only to catch more oxyd asteroids, but it's still not enought ^^'. It's alway the bottleneck, for Ice and then for Calcite, when at blue science.
-Petroleum is very expensive : 35 Calcites to make 100 Oil, then 100 Oil to 55 Gaz, then 20 Gaz for 2 plastics. But 1 asteroid give 2 Calcites, approximately 17 asteroids to make ~5 plastics ? (without water and subproduct cost)
-As a result, the cost of blue science is also very high (2 plastic to 1 red circuit, and 5 red circuits to 1 blue science)
-Steam : never used it. Solar is way cheaper and efficient
-Space platform cost is fine
This mod is really interresting and challenging. With some balancing changes it'll be amazing. Can't wait to see the next updates ! :D
for steam power maybe make it that steam engines have steam input and water output with some % loss so you would still need to ad some ice over time, but it wouldn't be much drain from science production?
I'll continue this thread even if some of what i'll write would be more appropriate as bug reports.
First off: i do like this idea very much and having played seablock am accustomed to some amount of pain with this sort of thing.
However i do believe no one should play this mod past 30 or so minutes in it's current state.
The most obvious problem was already outlined by everyone else: the Ice Bottleneck.
After automating space and automation science, you've basicly seen the mod concept and every further technology only needs more effort, grind and resilience without any actual rewards.
I would actually argue that there is no significant Problem with Ice in the early game. You would expect the Issue to arise with consuming more ice relative to the other resources while that drop is the rarest. However you can use the additional carbon stone and iron to build up platforms belts and asteroid collectors to actually increase production. Ignoring the crawling research. However even the logistics upgrade (belt unlock) is too expensive, resulting in too slow of a start.
Once you get to red and green science and set up automatic voiding for ores, carbon and stone research can actually go quite fast for a while. That's because those sciences don't consume ice, balancing the scales a bit. Once that is achieved however there isn't much to do. After you surround the base with collectors there is only one way to gain more asteroid chunks: expanding outward where the spawnrate generates denser asteroid fields.
That's very boring to do, but it's the only way to do increase any production because at that point basicly ALL imortant upgrades are waaay to expensive.
Does not matter if it's advanced labs, chunk reprocessing or advanced crushing. 1000 and 1500 science cost respectively is not a reasonable price point at that stage of the game. This price may be the vanilla variant (i'm not even sure of that) but there that's researched with planetary logistic. In the end I expanded outward and built 600 or so asteroid collectors to get 54 labs working. But at that stage i was only at 1/3rd of that.
Now that i covered what the gameplay loop is reduced to, what can you realisticly do with just the unlocks from space red and green? You can get red belts, steel furnaces, combinators, fast (and if you squint a little even mass) inserters. That's all the usefull techs you get before you must grind.
The mass inserter is relatively useless this early because you don't actually have access to red chips yet... or for a while but normally the upgrade itself should yield a stack increase for all inserters. NOT IN THIS MOD, the author forgor. All your inserters will always be capped at 1 hand size makeing everything slover then you expect, except the green "mass" inserters with a glorious hand size of ONE (1).
Detour over.
Now you can spend 2165 science on techs that get you productivity modules to reduce the cost of reprocessing from 1000 to 858 science worth of ice.
Or you can invest 1000 science on reprococessing up front to get a bit more ice from the otherwise overflowing chunks to help with the rest of the above mentioned cost.
Both these techs are strictly required for the conecept of this mod to work. But after haveing played it i would suggest treating getting one of those techs as your win condition. Only pain ahead.
Now the real issues begin. The base lab only supports those first 3 sciences and the normal lab costs another 1500 packs. Which is insane. Because you cannot scale up to a large base. And you've already suffered through 2k science grind. You're not even bottlenecked by ice anymore, just by the general amount of all asteroid chunks. To actually start using chemical science you must've worked through 4665 science which are 38875 ice and 5362 ice-asteroid-chunks (In sum around 20k of all the chunks just load a new game look around the empty space station and imagine waiting for 20 THOUSAND chunks). Even after the first 1500 and reprocessing unlocked, getting to 80/min is very optimistic which means needing to wait for hours on research finishing. At that point i was at 130 ice chunks/min just continually expanding the collection spires.
Additionally there are missing dependencies within the tech tree: military and chemical science can be unlocked before the advanced lab, leaving the science unusable with additional 1500 science to invest just to use them. Just backtracking and then discovering that pricetag just feels mean and hurtful.
I conclude: at the very least the advanced lab should not exist. The space lab should take all science.
Alright you've managed to unlock the lab and use your blue science, what do you get? NOTHING
There are technologies to unlock the rocket engines to get to other planets (1k science each ... of course). Those prerequisites take space red green and blue science ... 975 packs of them. Vanilla cost you think? WRONG for whatever lunatic reason the mod author does not just enable existing recipes on the new space assembler. Understandable they might want changes. But instead of importing an existing process and making just the relevant change they take it upon themselves to define every process from scratch. This is very bad because the mod will become unmaintainable and mistakes are expensive.
One such mistake ist the recipe for chemical science. In vanilla it cost 3 red chips (+ others) to get 2 chem science packs. In this mod however it takes 5 red chips (+ others) with each process yielding only a single science. Red chip cost more than tripled (the other ingredients don't matter that much, it's about the ice). This is horrendous because oil products can only be derived from calcite which only spawn from advanced ice crushing. However this reduces ice availablity two-fold, you spawn less ice per process, and have a worse chance of reusing the ice chunk.
To sum it up each blue science cost 70 calcite which production yields only additionally 105 ice instead of 250 that those same ice chunks could've made. And blue science cost additionally ice and water for the synthetic oil itself. This simple trick cuts down your ressource yield to 40% (by 60%). You now get much less then half of the previous output on a mind i remind you INFLEXIBLE RESOURCE SUPPLY. That is even ignoring the base cost of metals and carbons.
You might think space science is expensive because each cost 25 ice. Well each chemical science costs an equivalent of 158 ice.
That's why this mod is so deceptive: those 975 science packs for all blue science research required for rocket engines have the ice cost of 975 white science and blue science worth additional 6162 science.
And the grind continues, as contrary to red and green science, there is absolutely nothing of worth coming out of blue science.
You could invest the high cost for electric furnaces hopeing to save on carbon and reprocess more chunks to ice. But at this point you need Sulfur for chemical science anyway so that's worthless. Or you could get the selector Combinator if that tickles your fancy.
No other rewards for your time and effort.
That leaves us with the obvious first choice for any blue tech in any run: advanced oil processing ... except the mod author forgot to bless us with the cracking recipes, so we can't use light oil ... AT ALL. And heavy oil is only needed in lubricant, beeing useless otherwise. So you're stuck with EVEN LESS gas then you should get AND must manually expand storage or void the fluids OR stay on the even worse basic processing. A world of pain. I miss Angels Petrochem, that one worksas intended.
Now there isn't an actual win condition. The last remaining milestones are to build purple science (cost explosion like with blue science applies) and research blue belts for 3 fucking THOUSAND (3🖕K) science. That's even 10 times the amount from vanilla space age.
Or you could set yourself on traveling to a planet. Your options are Fulgora or Vulcanus Orbit as for some unknown reason Gleba cannot even be researched. At least those techs are comparatively cheap (1k no blue). Now if you've built wide for more chunks, you'll need to deconstruct all your collectors belts and platform and you'll run out of space in your hub. (You can use the inventory of collectors as chests, which helps).
You'll encounter a new problem: you've built a large space station which needs much thrust, but the oxidizer process is way less efficient as in vanilla and you'll need additional sulfur. So you don't have enough thrust and move slow, but you need a bunch of iron, sulfur and even water for fuel. Your first tank brings you more then halfway to your destination and the default accelleration brings you the rest of the way.
However in this mod, for whatever reason, there are no damage upgrades ALMOST ALL YOUR IRON GOES STRAIGHT INTO BULLETS. You arrive in a new orbit and discover that shooting down asteroids for chunk reprocessing can be resource negative, because your damage is just so bad. Without electric furnaces and productivity modules i'd be softlocked in orbit of fulgora.
You'll inevitably take some hits and you'll discover that anything that might've helped you is unavailable: there are no walls to absorb hits, there are no repair packs to buff out the damage. And there is no tech for robots, and thus if buildings die they leave no ghosts and nothing will be automaticly replaced.
So much PAIN - I actually reached a character limit with this rant, can you believe that?
Speaking of wich, you can't actually land on Fulgora even if you've researched it. Landing on a planet would've been nice so i'm curious enough to travel to Vulcanus on wich you can actually land and be stuck there.
Collecting a rock even unlocks the trigger tech ... but it yields no results. You can't get mining drills or anything else. You're truly stuck there with nothing to do. For some reason Vulcanus is the only Planet that's not required for the ominous Aquillo research i don't know what's going on there. Collecting a rock even unlocks the trigger tech ... but it yields no results. You can't get mining drills or anything else. For some reason Vulcanus is the only Planet that's not required for the ominous Aquillo research i don't know what's going on there.
Metal asteroids gives way too much copper initially making upgraded crushing variant pointless.
The upgraded metal chunk crushing could be a secondary source for calcite.
Steam power is literally useless, a good idea generally is to trade complexity in production chains for explicit value.
You could unlock an alternative space science recipe that takes steam instead of ice for significantly less water cost. (Maybe 500 Steam)
Synthetic Oil needs a rework. I'm thinking roughly 10x output for the same input or a completely different approach. Maybe a way to get calzite from stone or from the metallic asteroid chunks. And there needs to be a way to use light and heavy oil
Lastly the new space entities are nice, assembler lab panel and oxidizer but please attribute the original author(s).
I know at least the oxidizer is made by user/Hurricane046 and his only demand for his awesome models and animations was to be accredited.
All in all i did have some fun with this, but more often than not felt disrespected by the cost curve.
Sadly i've looked through the code and conclude that I don't think this mod will ever be a polished experience.
Rant over - thank you for the effort put into this idea