Crucible is a high-pressure planet with a crafting chain built around creating metallic hydrogen.
Mods introducing new content into the game.
New places to build more factories.
Transportation of the player, be it vehicles or teleporters.
Armors or armor equipment.
Map generation and terrain modification.
New Ores and resources as well as machines.
Things related to oil and other fluids.
Furnaces, assembling machines, production chains.
Hei there!
After playing a bit on another planet I noticed that my factories in Crucible were not working; then I saw that the skarn patches were depleted, thus stopping all furnaces and machinery.
As I my factory has high demand and drilling non stop, would you consider adding more productivity or less depletion for the patches? Seems strange that with Million of this ore is finishing so quickly. I am using big drill and modules for productivity and speed (legendary) and I have often to move all miners to a new patch.
Or Would be possible to tweak in any way?
I'll look into it; that does sound a bit excessive. Just curious, what's your approximate skarn/minute consumption, and high-pressure science/minute production? And map settings for Crucible resources?
It does feel like skarn deposits are wide but shallow. Even with a couple of hundred level of mining prod, edges were depleting relatively fast on my previous run. I think one of the main culprits is emery production, you do need quite a lot of it and it needs 6 skarn for 1 emery.
i ll have to check, but with all stopped I think data would be not correct. Let me come back to you with some info
I made some adjustments that should improve this in v1.1.14. Skarn richness has a higher baseline and scales a bit more with distance.
Thank you for fixing so quickly. I will test it out soon. Most of my base exploded and I need to restart the production from scratch XD
Btw i checked and i was around 17SPM, not sure the rest of the production
Even with the recent update to ore density scaling with distance from spawn, I think both types of ore patches on this planet probably need a complete re-work on how they generate to be usable for anything other than a little starter base.
For emulsion, I have no request for changes, emulsion works great. Love it. Also obviously lava is free and barely used if at all.
For skarn, even though a more distant patch might have like 4.6M skarn, each individual tile has like 2K at most, most closer to 1.5K, and this is at distances that would require multiple trains to make this single patch a viable option. I'm trying to build a factory that supplies a little bit of exports (laser mk2's, rigor 3's, etc.), but mostly just make science and keep the lights on. just for frame of reference, for 120 science/s or 720SPM, my factory is requiring a near constant input of 4413 skarn/s. 3512/s of that is JUST for emery. I dont have a problem needing this much ore, the problem is even with 1500% mining productivity in my big mining drills, I'm going to go through about half a million skarn every hour (adjusted for mining productivity and resource drain bonus from big mining drills). And with the explosive nature of some of this planet's intermediaries, I really cannot afford to let mining drills run out.
For coal shale, the size and frequency of patches is a joke. It's unusable at scale. For the same factory listed above, the carbon requirements are 2067/s. about 120 of that is reserved for dealing with spoiling denatured hydrogen, but literally all of the rest is just for diamonds. For the machines I have available, that requires 3334 coal/s, and 33338 sulfuric acid/s. The acid is annoying to produce at that scale but manageable, but that much coal from those tiny patches is impossible to sustain. and if I ever run out, kaboom goes the base. My only option is to import all of that carbon from space. Very doable at my point in progression, but a little crazy that I need to import carbon onto a planet with its own coal mines.
I have all default generation settings for crucible, and the only modded recipes from other planets I'm using extensively are mostly all corrundum stuff to make dealing with oil and sulfur easier, plus a couple things from linox that are ultimately not very consequential (better productivity machines for oil cracking, and using lava for rocket fuel, still requires solid fuel, and more compact heat exchangers for the steam and power setups).
Unless I'm missing some obvious step to make all of my coal and skarn last much further, the ore generation of this planet just feels very hostile to any attempt to scale up.
The challenge of scaling up on Crucible is intended to be different from the challenge of scaling up on vanilla planets. The design of the resources on the planet is intentional, and the bottlenecks and roadblocks you're hitting are part of the challenge. E.g. the fact that diamonds are so expensive means that there are multiple ways to solve that problem. You've already found one, which is to import carbon from elsewhere (that it's so expensive on Crucible and so cheap elsewhere makes this a good strategy); there are other solutions as well.
I don't think you are missing anything obvious, though there are some non-obvious things you may be overlooking. The biggest one is the advanced hydrogen metallization technology, which you can unlock with cryo science. If you don't have it yet, it's a game-changer for metallic hydrogen production; and if you do have it, you may still be overlooking some of the second-order improvements it allows for.
Without giving anything away directly (which I'm happy to do, but I won't assume that's wanted), I'll say: to reduce demand on a resource, you should look at both production and consumption. Crucible has a lot of cyclical recipe chains and a lot of alternate ways to produce intermediates; e.g. if emery demand is too high, there are multiple ways to increase supply, and multiple ways to reduce demand. I'll also say: rigor modules are a core part of the planet's design, and can make a huge difference in many places; however, if maximizing rigor was automatically the optimal choice it'd be a boring feature. Also: quality pressure forges are really good, because of the extra module slots (which are even more precious because pressure forges can't use beacons). And the extra module slots also mean fitting more quality modules, so ramping up pressure forge quality is actually pretty easy.
Is it really intentional that you have to constantly move around mining drills after setting up the production? I am fine with coal because it's pretty dense, but skarn is very shallow so even if you are not scaling it requires periodic babysitting, especially before you have ridiculous amount of mining prod. In my k2so playthrough i had around 35 mining prod and big mining drills and had to move my mining setup twice around the patch before even finishing with setting up a proper base because it was depleting pretty fast. The patch itself is a couple of millions but it is over a pretty large area. I would prefer skarn being generated in smaller patches with same amount of ore.
I am pre-cryo science, working my way through all of the tier 2 planets, so advanced hydrogen metallization is unavailable to me at the moment (trust me I've peeked ahead and it looks great). I've also done plenty of messing around with the cyclical chains and choosing my modules carefully (especially in pressure forges, I've found use cases for eff, speed, prod, and rigor all in the same factory which is actually crazy impressive from a design standpoint), but the issue I keep coming back to is skarn mining drills. The issue is emery, and to a lesser extent, rubies.
My emery is getting split about 3:1 alum to rubies, with a little extra for mall stuff. Alum is required for emulsion processing, and since everything requires buckets of oil, water, and hydraulic fluid, I need alum. Rubies have only 2 recipes, and are mainly required in bulk for science. I am using both recipes (found rigor modules in the emery production means needing less emery down the road for ruby synthesis), and so I'm stretching my emery as thin as I can, but I still need a lot of it. Emery itself, has 4 recipes, but all 4 require skarn. the vast vast vast majority of my skarn is going towards emery production. there is no alternative to skarn for this planet. Yes I could min-max my imports and use space mining to get all of my water, iron, copper, sulfur, carbon, etc. and only use skarn for bricks, concrete, and emery (which would be ridiculous of course), and that wouldnt even shave off 25% of my skarn usage.
There is a direct production line of skarn -> science. This line is unavoidable. Skarn patches are extremely thin. This is also unavoidable, as skarn mining patches are (as far as I know) the only source of skarn in the game (I'm not counting rocks). I'm honestly very whatever about the coal mining because you can import carbon relatively easily from space or vulcanus or wherever, skarn patches are the reason I came to this thread lol. I shouldn't have to have legendary mining drills with 5000% mining productivity on a planet that's pre-aquilo to avoid needing to babysit drills on non-starter ore patches.
Also I realized halfway through writing this I totally neglected gemstone synthesis productivity, which would probably ease up the carbon requirements a bit, but it doesn't solve my skarn issue because most of my emery is going to alum, not rubies.
Possible solutions/fixes/changes/whatever:
Most of the challenges, roadblocks, head-scratchers, etc. for this planet are actually very good (I was totally shaking my fist at the screen about not being able to use beacons for a minute but I just had to scale up bigger), but skarn mining doesnt feel like a challenge, it feels like a chore. It just needs a little tweaking. Thanks for responding, and dont feel discouraged by any constructive criticism I (or others) may give. If we're here, it's because we like the mod and want to see it be even better.
Is it really intentional that you have to constantly move around mining drills after setting up the production?
The problem of skarn being wide but annoyingly shallow was improved in 1.1.14, and even though it's still sometimes annoying I think its present state is a reasonable tradeoff. Because it is actually intentional that setting up initial production involves frequent (often annoying, unfortunately) babysitting of shortages and backups! Basically, every design decision of the planet is constrained by the fact of metallic hydrogen explosions; and the worst-case scenario (from my perspective) is a player being introduced to a challenge by their seemingly-stable build suddenly exploding. In other words, it's better to already expect resources to sometimes run out when designing a metallic hydrogen build, because the punishment for flaws in metallic hydrogen builds is so severe. This does mean that there's some extraneous friction for players who don't need the reminder, unfortunately; the improvement to skarn richness scaling with distance is meant to compensate for that to an extent.
The degree to which other features of the mod should be constrained by the harshness of the metallic hydrogen learning curve is obviously subjective, but I lean strongly towards over-preparing the player.
I shouldn't have to have legendary mining drills with 5000% mining productivity on a planet that's pre-aquilo to avoid needing to babysit drills on non-starter ore patches.
Yes, this is definitely true; and it also sounds like you definitely aren't missing any important alternate production paths or anything like that.
I'm using way more alum on hydraulic fluid than emulsion
This is interesting because (at least before advanced hydrogen metallization) I usually find the opposite. Although maybe it's because the hydraulic fluid cost of processing skarn to emery is skewing the costs more when scaling up; but this also means that lowering hydraulic fluid demand modestly should have an outsize impact on lowering emery demand. If a significant portion of your hydraulic fluid is going towards diamond synthesis, gemstone synthesis productivity will probably help a lot. If it doesn't help much let me know, because that's the only missing piece of the puzzle, as far as I can tell.
Thanks for all the thoughtful feedback, it is super helpful!
I am making about 424 alum/s, and about 118/s of that is going to emlulsion, the rest (about 307/s) to hydraulic fluid. More than half of the hydraulic fluid is being used for diamonds (about 9.7K/s out of a total of 15.2K/s) so hopefully gemstone synth prod will alleviate that slightly, but it still has the same issue with the drills. I will definitely be putting like all of my high-pressure science straight into gemstone synth prod lol.
Okay I've done some more testing and analysis, and I think I do need to adjust either the emery from skarn recipe or the alum recipe. One of the changes for Crucible 1.0 (probably changing emery from skarn to use hydraulic fluid instead of acid) tipped the balance a bit too far. I'm still working out the best way to adjust things so as to make a meaningful improvement without overcorrecting; ideally, every new player should still run out of alum at least once before designing a metallic hydrogen build.
Alum per emery is boosted by 50% in v1.1.19.