The mod pack is insanely awesome.

Looking for survival suggestions:

Loaded up with K2SE, default SE settings and then, shortly realized that ammo needs gunpowder?!? Go figure lol.

You start with enough gun powder to make 50 ammo packs, which isn’t much against default bitters. They are mighty bitty and don’t wait for me to reach the basic chem tech for gunpowder.

Is this a skills issue (and I need to keep trying and git-gud) or an ambition issue (and dial back the bitters settings?)

Any suggestions?
Anyone survive to get ammo production going?
Maybe less beer?
The factory must grow!

Hey Moal,

First of all, thanks for the kind words! Really glad you're enjoying ATRM! :)

The early game was mainly balanced around the default Space Exploration settings, which slow down biter evolution quite a bit compared to vanilla.

Personally, I also play with Abandoned Ruins – Combined. Exploring abandoned structures sometimes gives me additional ammunition, weapons and equipment. Of course, getting to those supplies isn't always easy, especially when biters are nearby. :)

Another option, which Earendel has also suggested for more demanding modpacks, is to increase the starting area size in the map generator. This gives you more time to establish your factory before having to deal with nearby biter nests, without reducing their overall difficulty.

I also took a closer look at the actual research requirements after reading your post.

In my current ATRM 3.1.3 K2SE test setup, unlocking Basic Chemistry requires 290 Basic Tech Cards and 70 Automation Science Packs. However, getting the necessary equipment to actually produce gunpowder requires additional research.

That brings the total to 415 Basic Tech Cards and 195 Automation Science Packs (610 in total) for the production chain I checked.

That's quite a bit of research before you can reliably produce your own ammunition!

The limited starting supply is intentional, since I wanted ammunition and its production to feel like an actual industrial process rather than something you can mass-produce immediately. But I also understand that the early game shouldn't turn into a race against the biters just to keep your gun loaded.

I'll keep your feedback in mind and take another look at the early ammunition progression. I don't want to change the balance too quickly, but I also don't want players to depend on lucky loot from ruins just to survive.

Thanks again for bringing this up. Feedback from actual playthroughs really helps improve the mod.

And yes, the factory must grow! :)

Hi MoSII2710,

Keeping the industrial vibe is important.

My solution was exactly what you suggested, make the starting area 600% and keep rolling for a starting seed that gives you great choke points.

One potentially “lore friendly” solution would be to make a special recipe just for those starting spaceship material fabricators you get with the crashed ship, which replace gun powder with coal and sulfur. Set the resource requirements at 2x or 3x normal, and make the cycle time 60 seconds +.

Enough to give the player some trickle of ammo, but “painful” enough that they are encouraged to get the “proper” recipe going ASAP.

I’m assuming that the engineer is coming from the “high tech” which they have lost access to temporarily, and those crash assemblers are irreplaceable remnants of lost tech, so those spaceship material fabricators can make stuff the player can’t anymore. Who knows what technology they can make with the right raw materials…

And what that says about where the engineer came from.

Hi Moal,

First of all, thank you for your feedback and for taking the time to explain the early-game ammunition problem. I really appreciate your support!

You're absolutely right that getting enough gunpowder early on can be difficult, especially with Space Exploration's default enemy settings. Making the early game challenging is intentional, but surviving shouldn't depend on finding enough ammunition in ruins or increasing the starting area.

I've added this issue to our ATRM 3.x backlog, and I'm currently implementing a solution for ATRM 3.1.4.

We're introducing a new, primitive gunpowder recipe:

• 2 Coal + 2 Sulfur + 1 Stone → 1 Gunpowder
• 60 seconds base crafting time
• 200% of normal recipe emissions
• Available from the beginning, but restricted to the earliest assembling machine

With Space Exploration installed, it will use the Burner Assembling Machine. Without SE, it will use Assembling Machine 1.

The idea is to provide a slow, inefficient emergency production method without making the existing industrial gunpowder production obsolete. The regular recipe, ammunition recipes and starting supplies will remain unchanged.

Your suggestion about using the crashed spaceship fabricators also helped shape our discussion, even though we eventually decided on a more generally accessible solution.

The changes are intended for the upcoming 3.1.4 test version, so they still need to be verified in actual gameplay.

Thanks again for pointing this out and helping improve ATRM. Feedback like yours is genuinely useful, especially when it highlights problems that aren't immediately obvious in a late-game save.

Cheers,
MoSII2710

Edit: now implemented :)

Hi MoSII2710,

The next thing I’ve noticed is the use of aluminum. It is in very high quantities, and in use in some questionable places.

Steam engines definitely should have iron plate, no aluminum at all.

The first engine should be metal, though I guess the conveyor belts could use aluminum, any industrial belts I’ve seen use metal.

Maybe the automation cores? (No real world comparison so that’s a flavor thing)

About 5 hours in, I was using 113 aluminum plate per minute, but only 30 iron plate. Was making more belts per minute than iron plates. Lol.

Looking at my map, there is too little aluminum ore to mine compared to how much it will be used, and looking at the core mining recipe it has the default iron and copper ore as top products but the aluminum ore is very small compared to the apparent usage I can expect.

Would be good to at least “sort of” balance the ore coming from deep core based on expected usage.

Happy to see aluminum used in electrical stuff.

Noticed aluminum plate snuck into the “Text Plates” mod, the copper letter had aluminum as the material instead of copper.

Hi Moal,

Thanks for your detailed feedback! You raised some very valid points about the heavy aluminium consumption in the early game.

I've taken a closer look at the recipes, including their intermediate ingredients. It turns out that aluminium isn't the only factor here. Brass also plays a significant role, while iron is barely used in some early production chains.

One thing worth mentioning is that iron becomes much more important later in the game, especially through steel production. A large portion of the iron demand eventually goes into steel, which is needed in significant quantities for advanced machinery, infrastructure, and other production chains.

So the overall balance changes quite a bit as the game progresses. Aluminium is heavily used early on, while iron and particularly steel become increasingly important later.

Still, I agree that the early game could use a better distribution of materials. Rather than simply replacing aluminium everywhere, I've started adjusting some recipes to give iron a more meaningful role while keeping aluminium and brass relevant.

The first changes are already implemented in ATRM 3.1.5 TESTING:

Transport belts:
- 1 iron plate + 1 motor → 2 transport belts

Steam engine:
- 12 iron plates
- 3 gears
- 3 electric motors
- 2 flywheels

Aluminium and brass remain part of the intermediate components, while iron is now used for the structural parts.

We're currently testing these changes in K2SE, and the first results look very promising.

I haven't changed the automation cores or core mining output yet. I'd like to see how the new balance works in actual gameplay before making further adjustments, especially since increasing aluminium availability could also affect the later stages of the game.

Thanks again for taking the time to point this out. Your feedback has been genuinely helpful in identifying where the early-game material balance could be improved!

Edit: now implemented :)

Hi MoSII2710,

Following observations with these map gen settings
K2SE Default, modified:
Enemy Expansion on, but Cooldown sliders maxed
Evolution on, but numbers are 1, 20, 2 (so half default)
Pollution on

I also had the power overload mod, and some other stuff on top of the standard K2SE, and turned up the "realism/complexity settings" for ATRM in the mod menu where ever possible.

The early Gunpowder recipe works wonders, but its use must be tempered. The pollution it makes is crazy, and since those burner assemblers are 0.5, the total time is 2min per gunpowder. anticipate it being harder with full default spread rate, would need player feed back to confirm.

NOTED: * the dependency, you can run SE without AAI industries (which give the burner assembler), probably move the dependency from SE to AAI industries to determine which assembler to use. otherwise no early gunpowder recipe.
* the meteors point defense ammo is coal and steel plate. either that is a rail cannon, or it needs some proper propellant in the recipe. excuse me while i stock up before the recipe gets "fixed"

managed to get the tech to make the first chemical plant, looked at the required components, and had to put the game down and get a beer. my word that is nutz. then looked at the standard chem plant, and called it a night with some Whisky. I shudder to think what is in store for the future. That said I did turn up the difficulty settings in the mod menu, so its self inflicted.

I strongly suggest people learn about sushi belts when making their mall. Thank God for the updates to allow belt read all setting.

Getting that first chem plant online making "environmentally friendly" gunpowder was glorious. well worth the effort. i swear having 32 burner assemblers making "dirty" gunpowder nearly doubled my factories total pollution output (for a lousy 16 gunpowder/min). My Rifle magazine production was getting mighty close to my consumption rate thanks to biters objecting to the pollution.

I think on standard biter expansion rates, it will be very challenging with default biter settings. hats off to people who take that challenge. This might end up being a setting (easy / default / default). the only change needed is the pollution multiplier as well as cycle time.
Easy: 10 second craft, 1x pollution
Default as is.
anyone with a biter heavy game will want to change that setting to easy, as the pollution generated could easily spawn more biters than the gunpowder "suppresses".

(probably not related to the ATRM mod)
another thing i noticed while exploring the map for ruins (installed the ruins mod) . I took a screen shot of the starting map from map generation. comparing, it looks like where ever a ruin was spawned, it deleted any biters that were spawning in that area. in that case, i have a much easier time, since it effectively makes you start with even fewer biters than a normal default would.

Note: an hour exploration confirms, far far fewer biters than expected. not that I'll complain considering the complexity, paired With SE reducing resources no Nauvis, so I'll need to expand heavily and fight biters anyways.

Note Note: found a radar in a ruin. there are no biters anywhere other than a few at the start. just ruins as far as the eye can see.

Hi Moal,

First of all, thanks again for the detailed feedback! I really appreciate the time you're putting into testing ATRM, especially with such a challenging K2SE setup.

Your gunpowder observations are particularly interesting. I checked the numbers, and you're right: with a crafting speed of 0.5, 32 burner assemblers produce exactly 16 gunpowder per minute.

The primitive recipe was deliberately designed to be slow, inefficient and polluting, mainly as an emergency option before proper chemical processing becomes available.

However, you've got a valid point. If producing enough ammunition to defend your factory creates more pollution than you can reasonably deal with, the balance might have gone a little too far. :)

I'll take another look at the crafting time and pollution multiplier. Your suggestion for different difficulty settings is worth considering, although I'd prefer to find a reasonable default balance first.

One small correction regarding AAI Industry: Space Exploration already requires AAI Industry, so the burner assembler should always be available in a normal SE setup.

I also understand your point about meteor defence ammunition. That's something worth reviewing for recipe consistency, although I'd rather not change SE's recipes without checking their intended progression first.

Now, about those missing Biters...

I actually did some digging into Combined and the Abandoned Ruins Core, and found something interesting.

The Core has a cleanup function that removes existing entities before placing a ruin. Unfortunately, this includes Biter nests and worms if they happen to be inside the ruin's placement area.

So yes, ruins can indeed remove some enemy nests during map generation!

However, this only affects relatively small areas around individual ruins. It shouldn't explain why there are hardly any Biters across large parts of Nauvis, or why some players report finding none at all.

I also checked Combined for anything that could disable enemy spawning or interfere with map generation settings, but couldn't find anything suspicious.

You're actually not the first person to report unusually few or missing Biters. I've heard similar observations from two other players, so I'm definitely keeping an eye on this.

Your maximum expansion cooldown settings might explain part of the situation, but they wouldn't explain a lack of initially generated nests.

For now, I can't say whether the ruins are responsible, whether another mod is involved, or whether it's a combination of settings.

If you still have your map exchange string and active mod list, those could be very helpful for reproducing the issue.

And I had to laugh at your description of the first chemical plant. I know ATRM can get a little excessive with its production chains, especially when all the complexity settings are enabled. :D

Thanks again for all the testing and detailed reports. It's really helpful to see how these systems behave in an actual playthrough, rather than just checking whether everything loads correctly.

Keep the feedback coming!