Remember: It's still Aquilo. Get ready for the long haul.

Mod is still being adjusted; feedback welcome.

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, and 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.

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.

(NOTE: Any Planet Start does not yet rearrange orbital asteroids, but this is in progress.)

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.

• Concrete can be directly crafted from ice if you know how to make concrete; this doesn't apply to refined concrete and it takes double the 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!

• 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 units (buoy / dissipator) when you're starting from scratch.

• Burner mining drills no longer freeze.