Salvage Quickstart

Story

You were surveying the asteroid belt of this system when a freak collision crippled your spacecraft. You managed to make it to an escape pod as your ship broke up around you, and have landed in one piece on the surface of this Earthlike world. But you aren't safe yet.

The wreckage will likely land nearby, so watch your head! If you make it through the aftermath unscathed, salvaging the wreckage will make your survival and eventual escape from this misbegotten place much easier.

Gameplay

You start surrounded by the falling wreckage of your spaceship. If you survive the immediate fires, and the possibly even more deadly resulting forest fires, you will find advanced tools that will help you with the mining and smelting of the burner phase, and a set of construction bots to help stand up your early base.

Design Notes

You got to this planet somehow. That implies a highly advanced technological civilization. Why shouldn't you start with a bit of that advanced technology?

In this mod, you start the game with a limited number of extremely powerful devices salvaged from your crashed spaceship: a mining drill, an electric furnace, and a roboport with its set of advanced construction robots. All have an internal fusion power supply that can supply its own needs without electricity or fuel provided from the outside.

I intended each of these devices to do the following:

• Reduce the tedium of the early game
• Still incentivize the player to build additional infrastructure as quickly as possible.
• Give a taste of the toys that await at the bottom of the tech tree.
• Never become useless.

Practically speaking, the roboport and construction robots are
significantly better than the construction robots you can eventually
research. However, they provide and use much less power, making the
starter roboport less effective than normal roboports once you have
access to them. The starter robots can use normal roboports, but you
start with a limited number and can never get more. Losses to biters or
carelessly thrown grenades will deny you their use forever.

The mining drill and furnace are very fast, but have a limited inventory
and do not output to belts, initially requiring players to manually remove
and feed ore to maintain throughput. They can be automated with inserters,
but there is very limited space for them, severely restricting throughput,
although they get better as inserters improve.