Meteor Recovery

Aquilo has no native mineral resources to leverage, but the rupturing of the shattered planet scattered meteoric chunks across its surface long ago. The deposits consist primarily of carbonic and metallic asteroid chunks, with a trace of promethium; in the long run, you can utilize surface-installed crushers to maximize productivity, but there's also a new, more rudimentary Aquilo-exclusive recipe that breaks the chunks down into the basic slate of resources.

Your initial deposits contain a workable amount of meteor chunks, some of which are on your precious bit of solid ground, but if you want long-term extraction, you'll need to dredge the depths. Creating a cargo boat is your best bet if you are starting on Aquilo or haven't planned ahead, but it's also possible to run elevated rails to deposit sites for rapid transport and easier offloading; the tricky bit is that, since asteroid chunks don't stack effectively, you'll want to set up your processing at least partially on-site.

On rare occasion, it's possible that fluid vents will carry up chunks on the ice. Surface-level deposits (including your starting one) have a higher proportion of surviving promethium.

Promethium Thermalization

Those chunks aren't just good for fancy-pants science. With a bit of careful coercion, they can be made to radiate a relatively weak but steady flow of heat. Two different varieties of thermal unit become available to craft after you smelt your first lithium plate from the natural deposits. Both of these occupy one tile, yield input-free radiant heat, and require one promethium chunk to do so.

The thermal buoy pictured above is less expensive (only requiring iron sticks and pipe added on), but can only be placed on water and can't be cardinally adjacent to land. Each buoy yields 160 kW of heat energy.

Thermal buoys, while primarily intended for heating floating equipment, can be used to heat structures built on ice platforms. The key word here is that surfaces may not be cardinally adjacent; the pipeline example below is a simple use case, but if you arrange things in a clever manner, you can create whole floating manufacturing complexes in conjunction with Dredgeworks' floating belts and inserters.

The thermal dissipator, the counterpart for purely land-based operations, is pricier (requiring steel plates, iron sticks and lithium plates) and can be placed on any non-meltable solid ground, with the only restriction being that it can't be in heating range of another dissipator. While the encasement necessary to make it surface-safe also reduces its raw heat output (120 kW of heat energy, 75% of the buoy's output), it's nice as a straightforward way to heat your initial machinery, as you get some lithium from mining initial ice formations. Once you have production of raw lithium online, it can also be useful to get heat to places heat pipes have an awkward time weaving into.

A config option is available if you would like to allow putting multiple dissipators next to each other, but a better way to get more heat in isolated positions is quality; like other heat-producing devices, the thermal output will increase with quality, and unlike other heat-producing devices, there continues to be no fuel requirement.

Heat Conduit (Optional)

If you'd like to speed up your heat pipe infrastructure build-out when starting from scratch on Aquilo, heat conduit can be activated in mod settings as a way to streamline the process. When activated, heat conduit is unlocked with promethium thermalization; using a promethium chunk alongside the usual heat pipe ingredients, you can substantially improve material efficiency, receiving an amount of pipes you specify in settings for one promethium chunk plus the normal cost of one heat pipe.

This isn't without caveats, though; Aquilo's atmospheric conditions are necessary to keep the conduit stable (preventing it from being used on other surfaces) and the conduit can only carry heat up to a cap of 400 degrees, preventing these heat pipes from operating the higher-power steam turbines. The recommended yield is 10 pipes per batch, but you can set it to yield up to a full stack if you want.

Aquilo start?

Yep. Aquilo start, if you want it.

The mod integrates with Any Planet Start, and will allow you to seamlessly select Aquilo as your starting planet if you wish to inflict it upon yourself. The technology tree has been readjusted to move an assortment of critical infrastructure (including concrete, the heating tower and dredging hardware) forward in the progression in the hopes of, combined with the mod's other add-ins, making the start merely slow instead of arduous.

As of 0.2.3, Planet Picker start is also supported at a basic level, but it is not recommended if you do not intend to use the multi-planet aspect of Planet Picker; the adjustments made for Planet Picker are much more rudimentary. You'll have to turn on Aquilo as a start option in the Planet Picker settings (Mod settings > Map tab > Enable starting on Aquilo).

Only one alternate starting planet mod should be active at once.

Big asteroids are not present in the planet's immediate orbit in Aquilo starts, but still exist in the travel path; to facilitate navigating this, rocket turrets are given an alternate recipe using low density structure in lieu of carbon fiber. Supplying them with rockets is a slightly more complicated question without advanced asteroid processing (you may want to ship up explosives).

Assorted Adjustments

Adds a rudimentary generator (also available as a standalone mod), the Stirling Generator, to make the process of getting electricity off the ground much simpler. If you don't want it to disrupt your vanilla electrical progression when starting elsewhere, a config option is available to make it require lithium plates.
Concrete can be directly crafted from ice if you know how to make concrete; this doesn't apply to refined concrete and it takes 20% more time to craft, but it'll get the ball rolling.
Ammoniacal ocean destroys items dropped into it, making discarding of unnecessary byproducts a lot less of a headache. Be careful, though; your freshly seafloor-drilled asteroid chunks will happily tumble right back into the ocean if you have their output pointed the wrong way! Can be turned off in config if you like.
Assembling machine 1 now requires 70kW of heating energy, down from the 100kW all 3 assemblers have in vanilla, making factories much more practical to heat with thermal dissipators when you're starting from scratch.
Burner mining drills no longer freeze.

Heating "Hard Mode" (Optional)

If dissipators feel like they trivialize your heating a little too much, the "Heating energy rebalance" config setting is for you. It adjusts the heating energy of a few key machines to make their heat requirements a much more relevant burden. This is not recommended if you do not explicitly want the additional difficulty; your heating towers WILL be hit harder by this.

The below list shows a 'before and after' of vanilla and adjusted heating energy values, in kilowatts. Highlighted machines have received a particularly heavy heat requirement, with bolded ones intended to be impossible to heat with exclusively base-quality thermal dissipators.

Assembling machine 3: 100 > 150
Pumpjack: 50 > 200
Electric mining drill (incl. seafloor): 100 > 200
Chemical plant: 100 > 200
Biochamber: 100 > 250
Electromagnetic plant: 100 > 300
Roboport: 300 > 600
Oil refinery: 200 > 1000
Big mining drill: 200 > 1600
Rocket silo: 300 > 2500

Beans Mode (Probably Don't)

For a much more vanilla experience of crashing on Aquilo, beans mode de-enhances the Aquilo start experience when used with Any Planet Start. This is not recommended for general use, and I am not certain it is possible to escape with the setting active.

The tech tree adjustments have been pared down to what should be the bare minimum necessary (see 2nd list).
Modded equipment (thermal units, Dredgeworks' floating equipment, and the stirling generator) is entirely removed. Underwater deposits must be mined by placing a conventional drill at the edge of their area, and shattered meteor no longer yields promethium.
The crude rocket turret recipe is no longer available, and Aquilo's orbital safety is not modified.
The burner mining drill is no longer exempt from heating.
Ammonia ocean item destruction is deactivated, regardless of separate setting.
Crushers can't be placed on Aquilo's surface.

Tech tree adjustments:

Concrete is now unlocked by crafting stone brick (the concrete from ice recipe is still available, to avoid a deadlock).
The heating tower is now unlocked by crafting concrete.
Steel processing is now unlocked by crafting 25 iron plates.
The solar panel is unlocked alongside steel processing.
Ice melting is unlocked by default.