I don't think this is a spoiler for anything.

After probably 200 hours of spaghetti and space trains, space base is online and no longer a hand-fed kludge and I am going to be doing more research next session than in the past month or more. So I looked at what's left.

I've finished Space Exploration before. So I know what naquitite is. But what is deep space ore? Is this something found in the same places, but you need more research to process it?

Usually the factoriopedia is pretty good, but here it doesn't help me.

I think the most important lesson I've taken away from this mod so far is that you need to be planning for forever, or you will be rebuilding stuff, so my question is basically whether or not I should be planning for using a lot of this deep space ore or if it is somewhat optional? (enriched gold is a shitty ingredient, and I'll need to substantially rethink my final ground upgrade if I need to do anything with it other than turn it into gold ingots)

The information is actually there, it's just non-obvious in places.

Deep space ore is from 248k. It's acquired as a launch product from deep space probes. It's required to make the color pack and color data items that are necessary to make the 248k element, which is required to make the intergalactic transceiver, which is required to do the spaceship victory. I honestly don't know how to quantify the amount you'll need.

Okay. Thanks.