It's a big universe out there, and there are other ways to leave the solar system. Several new destinations with new machines, technologies, and unique processes
Mods introducing new content into the game.
New places to build more factories.
Changes to enemies or entirely new enemies to deal with.
New Ores and resources as well as machines.
Things related to oil and other fluids.
Furnaces, assembling machines, production chains.
Posting my first thoughts and feedback for future revisions. Have also played the other new planets mods and those devs found this type of post useful, hopefully it is here as well. Added the mod onto a ~400 hr SA save with Maraxsis, Cerys etc. enabled so very late game. Main point of friction was with not being able to automate research to / from the nanite space platform. Overall I see a lot of imagination and ambition with this mod which is excellent.
Looking at research:
-Railgun ammo research enabled before making any nanite science. Should probably be unlocked afterwards.
-Unknown key technology-name.overclock-module
-unknown key entity-name.conduit, I have Maraxis installed which also has a conduit item, possibly related?
-Unknown key space-location-name.mirandus-a
-Unknown key technology-name.prototype-mech-armor
-Unknown key technology-name.antimatter-robots
-A few other names / entries not mapping in either the tech tree or recipies in factoriopedia. Will report these as they come up. Circa also seems to be named railworld in the science and a few other spots, imagine this is a holdover from before it was named.
-Had to look at overclock modules side by side to see that the benefit is no speed reduction and no pollution at the cost of much higher power. Name makes sense now that I think about it but at first glance I thought it was just a work in progress clone of a productivity module.
Neumann space platform:
-It took me a few minutes to figure out how the nanite extraction milestone tech was activated since it's when you hook a pipe up to the offshore pump. I had a pump directly into a gravity assembler and was wondering where the recipe was.
-No storage options for nanites? No chests bc gravity, no landing pad bc gravity, just throw nanites into space to get enough for the milestone research? Can't throw into holes or off the edge. Cerys does this on a planet with some kind of flag, could reference them if this is a desired feature.
-No way for the player to store items on the platform when they go to leave? Using rocket silos as chests but not doable long-term due to cargo limits. Had to either send buildings etc. back to my ship or place them on the platform to return to my ship.
-No way to automate deliveries (no cargo landing pad?)
-Seems like the only way to actually consume science currently is to drop it from the ship manually, then insert into labs by hand. Can't automate due to no landing pad or even requestor chests to delete cargo pods by hand. Is the intention to send nanite science off-platform with a rocket? Would need away to automate parts for it and the only recipe that can be made natively is the nano rocket parts, which is locked to Vulcanus. Shipping in parts would be fine if there was a way to drop them.
-What's the intended way to do science? Space science seems impossible bc no asteroids, shipping offworld w/ shipping rocket parts in? Runs into the same issue as above where there doesn't seem to be a way to ship science onto / off of the "planet" automatically.
-Seems like some buildings (gravity assemblers and barometric vices so far) aren't affected by beacons and have no module slots, is this intended?
Nix:
-Ice XV spoils 7s but science craft time is 15s, I imagine you're supposed to direct insert and use circuits to only create as needed? Pretty cool. Set up a basic "enable if science crafter has less than 2" but a more advanced combinator setup will be required to make sure both other ingredients are present.
-Really like the idea of Aquilo + mixed patches + more solid materials so you have to get creative with belts.
-Kind of feeling the overhaul mod effect of lots of intermediates that are only used in 1-2 recipies. Not a huge fan of this personally, but if it's desired then I'll get through it.
-Two hour day/night cycle took me by surprise, I guess you're supposed to get liquid heating towers / heat exchangers / steam turbines set up in the first day? Was able to drop in legendary buildings for everything from my sky mall, but if someone was building on-planet and didn't get set up in time I could see them having to sit around for an hour or two before they got power back.
-The only solid requirements for vices are in the base game so a player could ship in all legendary materials and make legendary ones for free. Could require a solid resource from the planet to make them more effort?
-Pyrolysis research makes a unique item instead of carbon? Does this factor into another crafting chain? Don't see a use for this as the only place with wood (Nauvis) also has plenty of coal. Maybe it's useful on another planet or just thrown in to make Gleba start easier, will see (update - looks like it might be useful with the grass on Circa?). Haven't given this a ton of thought but it seems like making carbon would just be simpler.
-Diamond and stone brick rocket limits (1k and 500) are high enough that shipping them in and combining on site feels way easier than dealing with mixed mining etc.
Mirandus:
-Really like the shattered planet x Fulgora vibe.
-Looks like there may be an attempt to make accumulators mk2/3? IDK if from this mod or some kind of conflict but the recipe just returns a regular accumulator. Might be some other bug / conflict with my other mods.
-Didn't know about the new asteroids at first so I had to reload from a save due to not having them in my weapons' target selection. Maybe some kind of tip / hint that there will be new asteroids?
-Will need to make a separate ship for this so I'll get to it later.
Circa / Railworld (diff name in space map?):
-Seems like the construction robot enemies use the laser ammo / damage type, which means they get your laser research damage %.
-Mashing two planets together like this is neat, will see how it works out.
-Breaking for a bit here, will add more thoughts as I go.
Sorry to butt in, but I noticed you mentioned Cerys, have you ever gotten an error during boot about lightening values being null? I look on that page and couldn't find it, and the mod tends to return that when J add any other planet mod, this one included
I've never had any loading bugs with Cerys, but the Discord server linked as a homepage for that mod is very active and has a bug reports channel. The mod is also updated frequently so I'd suggest making sure you're using the most recent version of the mod.
Thanks, this is great feedback. Some of this is placeholder and unimplemented, I wanted to start playtesting before I finished polishing.
Thanks, this is great feedback. Some of this is placeholder and unimplemented, I wanted to start playtesting before I finished polishing.
Man, modders are great. Just woke up and saw 0.0.3 addressed several of these points. Definitely understand that in alpha / beta some stuff won't be implemented.
Few more thoughts, will spend some time on the Mirandus ship today.
-Tried to set up Neumann rockets to use the nano recipe, looks like the new pressure req is 0 hPa while the "planet" has 3000 hPA so they only show as craftable on a player space platform per factoriopedia.
-Can I only make one antimatter thing? Got one really early on and no more after ~25k crafts. Maybe need to use it in a bot to get another? Neat ultracube-ish thing for making science if so.
-Nyx science doesn't seem to have a use long term - only infinite research is more dark matter which isn't useful if you don't need it for something else (and antimatter for bots I guess).
-Saw that the quantites spoil into each other in a loop, neat idea for items in flux conceptually.
-Lamps on Nix seem odd - placed them and they're not turning on due to it technically being daytime, but it's still dark. Longer day / night cycle means it's still dark but technically day? Player can force them on I guess.
-Circa what's the purpose of the military scrap? Stone + bullets / walls for defenses + rails for railworld train? Recycling the toolbelts for carbon fiber might be worthwhile from a quality angle. Long term I'll probably come back here to see what's useful for quality stuff.
-20 hr day / night cycle on space platform? I assume you're supposed to drop dark matter / other fuel in or something but 20 hrs is crazy long. Could make a strong argument that reading the wiki entry is expected though.
3rd set of notes, I've unlocked everything and gotten a few levels of each infinite research so will probably be putting this mod down for now. Lots of interesting things and definitely looking forward to revisiting it after a few more updates.
-120 mirandus asteroid chunks for the processing recipe seems like a lot. Maybe add asteroid prod research to the recipe? Added legendary prod 3 to chem labs, foundry, and quantum stabilizer in other steps and machines are still idle most of the time. Running back and forth between Nix and Mira at ~350 km/s is getting about 10 SPM with legendary prod modules on everything. Don't think it's possible to scale up too much further without doing a really wide custom platform.
-Mira asteroid capitalization is off, lower case first characters on big / medium
-Mira asteroid chunk name displays as unknown key from small mira asteroid entry
-Thorium cannon shell recipe is unknown key in research tooltip
-Looks like I got another antimatter thing, must have just been unlucky or the ingame number is rounded up due to significant digits
-Looks like mirandus asteroid chunks stack to 50, is this intended?
-Feels like precursor machines research should depend on high-speed processors in the tech tree since the item is required to build them
-Quantum stuff was daunting at first but short spoil times mean I can just produce one type (settled on the holmium one) and run a sushi belt loop through for the rest. Not very scalable but it works.
-Spoiling science is fine but it inherits freshness from the quantum stuff so it's usually ~50%. Will definitely need automated shipment with Neumann before I build out a full factory.
-Mildly dislike the 20h day/night cycle on Neumann, want to go onto other stuff and am forced to sit there and manually drop ice to melt for water / stuff to use for power. Dropped a fusion reactor down eventually but I was hoping to get enough conduits that I could power the base off of them.
-Neumann conduits don't show power output in factoriopedia, not sure if that's fixable but seems like it should show and possibly also scale with quality. They also have some kind of onscreen popup when you click on one ingame as well, not sure what's up with that. The new description helps explain what they're for.
-Added speed modules directly to gravity assemblers and they don't seem to have changed the crafting speed per tooltip.
-Thruster prod research only applies to the basic recipes, not the advanced ones with calcite
-Unmoduled grav assemblers making space platform takes a loooong time given the 50 platform req for science. Not terrible but if modules / beacons worked it'd help. Scaling up here is also tough. Started making gravity assemblers towards the end but decided to not build out a full setup yet.
-Ended up dropping a ton of cargo pods to Neumann and am using them as chests, works ok once set up but definitely not a permanent solution.
Can I only make one antimatter thing? Got one really early on and no more after ~25k crafts
The intention is for it to be very scarce. You can use it (and consequently consume it) to make bots that require no power, or you can use it as a (reusable) catalyst for a much simpler anomaly science recipe. It is possible that it is slightly too rare. The current probability is .0001, I'm going to 10x that to .001
Quantum stuff was daunting at first but short spoil times mean I can just produce one type (settled on the holmium one) and run a sushi belt loop through for the rest. Not very scalable but it works.
This flexibility is one of the intentions of the system
120 mirandus asteroid chunks for the processing recipe seems like a lot
This is probably a holdover, it was originally an ore. I'll improve this. The current burden is unreasonable.
Spoiling science is fine but it inherits freshness from the quantum stuff
it spoils into itself, feel free to optimize that however makes sense to you
Ended up dropping a ton of cargo pods to Neumann and am using them as chests
This is hilarious and I love it. I'll take a look at chests, I didn't expect it to be such a pain point.
Circa what's the purpose of the military scrap?
I had originally envisioned circa being much more violent, but it ended up not being that. It may in the future.
I like the idea of having a large amount of (useless in bulk) equipment coming out of the ground. Feel free to recycle it, and abuse it for quality.
I also wanted to make walls and rails available to encourage trains.
Lamps on Nix seem odd
given how the day cycle works, I don't think that there's much I can do about this without doing some scripting, and I'd like to stay in system bounds as much as possible.
I'll also take a pass on day/night and planet properties. Nix should be dark most of the time. Circa should always be day. Neumann should be in "space" (and therefore probably also always "day"). Everything else is not intended.
Thank you very much for documenting your experience. All of your feedback is very good. Things I didn't comment on explicitly you can probably expect to get implemented or looked at.
Thanks! Glad to know my notes were helpful. Looking forward to picking this mod up again in a month or two once it's further along.