So I feel like I'm a good 3/4 of the way here. Using minimal help from drops and other planets. I've got a nice coconut nutrient belt going, I can make ethanol and fermentation bacteria if I'm feeding it fish well enough. I've got titainium sludge and methane ships automated perfectly, stacks of activated carbon, tons of diesel powered everything.

Here's where I'm starting to struggle. I can manually make the fermented fish and capture the copper nests and make copper eggs easily enough. But I cleared out all the copper nests near my island. Do they expand the same way biter nests? I haven't noticed any expansion but also haven't been watching for it either. I'd hate to have to make a very long tanker line to transport fermented fish and copper eggs around but that may be what you're supposed to do. Which leads me to my next issue. How do you reliably automate fish breeding? I have tons of nutrients from my coconout farms but would need to manually supply the fish breeder with fish. I set up around 10 long handed inserters on the shore with belts leading to it because I thought inserters can pull fish out of the water but nothing seems to be biting!

And last question! Are you supposed to build your first rocket silo as an electricity powered one? I see there is a diesel dragon rocket but it needs the decomp science to work!

Ok ! Thanks for the help! Very fun mod!

Copper nests:
Idea is that you should find nest naturally spawned next to island, if you cleared too much nests then you will have to travel a bit to find one, then you build platform to them, drag pipe and diesel inserters and you are good.
I like to make copper on site with calciner to make sure eggs don't spoil. Eggs also burn so that should help. You can look for methane patches nerby. Maybe you can drag pipeline to power copper smelting?
Copper spitters don't expand currently.
Pelagos by design don't need a lot of copper

Fish breeder:
Fish breeding is fish positive and nutrient negative which means you can breed fish, then loop back fish and then do something with it. Fish breeding is expensive in nutrients and thats intentional. Fish has long spoil time so properly looped breeder that constantly produce should not die

Self looping setup can look like this

=>=>=>=>=>=>=>=>
^          I
I          v
[Biochamber]

Another things:
- you can place yellow boat and galleon on waterway
- yes you have to use regular silo but you can use efficiency modules

Thanks for the reply!

So I did manage to get my fish production up running by looping two together. I have reliable fermented bacteria and fermented fish producing.

And yeah, now my problem is the spitters. I had a nice cargo ship line to the captive spitter spawner, build wooden platforming around it. Thought I was a genius because i used regular burner inserters powered by the copper eggs to drop off the eggs in the cargo ship. Saw the fermented fish had a MJ value so thought they would power the burner inserter as well, but apparently they can't use fermented fish to power themselves <\3

So I was going to drag a long pipeline of methane to the spawner and power it all that way. But the pipeline is too long, and there is seemingly no way to power a pump without the floating electrical poles researched.

I also kinda got fucked with my map, as there isn't really any islands close to the island I started on. Theres two small islands a little bit to my west, but I have a cargo ship line going through the way I'd have to go and it would be a huge pain to have to redirect all that as well as the infrastructure associated with delivery of its good.

I guess I can ship everything I need to another island and try to find a spawn near an island to make it work. I wish I would have known that they didnt expand because I really thought they did, hence going in a big loop around my base to clear them all out before they encroach on my build. Oh well RIP

fermented fish is "food" fuel type, you can feed any captive spawner with it
similar to how you can use bioflux to feed copper spitter spawners as well

you can place gun turret with capture bullets as safety messure.

you can use lighthouses to discover map, that's why there were added to mod.

also planet idea for base expansion is to use dedicated islands.
So like copper island, sealant island, ethanol island etc.

If you feel that you need more than one island. That is intended way to expand

Also you can Join my discord if you need a bit quicker respond time :D