Welcome to a Shattered world

Your platform has fought through tooth and nail, battered, but far from broken, you are loaded to your heels in all sorts of machinery, everything you could fit for your long, long trip to the furthest reaches of the known beyond. But you have finally arrived at your destination: the long forgotten world which has no proper name, called simply the Shattered Planet.

Launching your pod from the platform, it descends into what you quickly find to be cloudy cover, but this is no regular cloud. It is cosmic debris that has accumulated into a strong and sizable ion storm. Landing upon the surface, As your pod breaks open, the ion storm quickly strikes at your person, almost draining all your shields. There is no time, you place down a Lightning Collector as fast as you can, and for now, you're safe.

Finally taking a much needed rest, you look in the distance and take in the world around you. The land masses are scattered, small but plentiful, and you can see rising plumes of differing vapors. Though the world is shattered, it appears the core is intact enough to provide a gravity field, able to keep many of the chunks in its influence and from floating off.

Examining the resource vent, you see that your current equipment, as strong as it is, is too big to fit upon the seam, and your smaller miners are not powerful enough to drill into the strong promethian landscape. However, the rocks that litter the surface abound are full of resources, and your equipment is able to dismantle the impurities. No usable promethium traces can be found on this rocks, only with the chunks of landmass that will become your foundation.

You can still hear the railguns and rockets of your platform above fighting hard and desperately to protect its cargo, there is no more time, as your equipment begins to come down, you know it is time to do as always. Produce, exploit and build.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHem8vdBygw

A broken world, but pulls the universe together

The Shattered Planet is fragmented, essentially the idea is that it combines a mechanic from almost every planet featured in the game. Its land is spread out, but plentiful. Your main method of expansion is going to be the ever useful Space Platform. Your method of power comes from the ion storm that is localized around the area, similar to Fulgora. Your resources come from helpful resource nodes in the form of asteroid chunks, which is reminiscent of gathering asteroids. Finally, melting them down and actually putting them to use reminds you of Vulcanus.

Almost every major item featured in Space Age can be made on this planet, as getting here can be quite tough. It would be a shame to run out of turbo belts and not have a way to locally create them. Need lightning collectors? It can be made. There is no shortage of resources on the Shattered Planet despite its namesake.

The only real challenge in-so-far as resources is concerned... is getting them at first.

Resources

There are only five main resources found on the Shattered Planet.
- Carbonic asteroid chunks from resource nodes.
- Metallic asteroid chunks from resource nodes.
- Oxide asteroid chunks from resource nodes.
- Promethium asteroid chunks from resource nodes.
- Uranium ore from the starting island.

These chunks will provide you with everything you need, including new recipes to process them, in order to get everything you need to make progress. But for a breakdown:

Carbonic chunks will grant you access to carbon and sulfur.
Metallic chunks will give to you copper and iron ores.
Oxide chunks will grant you ice to be melted down into water, and calcite to assist with smelting ores.

Promethium and Uranium however, are special. Promethium asteroid chunks can be processed- only on this surface- into Holmium ore, and the new Promethium Ore. Promethium ore can be processed into many things, but its main purpose to be used to craft new machines which unlock the planet's true processing tree.

Uranium is special in that the beginning patch you land with... is the only patch of minable uranium you're going to have. Thankfully, it's plentiful, but the entirety of your research is going to be centered on this one patch, so do not stray too far away from it. Or do, you can build trains out here, so maybe spreading your base out to focus on producing specific resources isn't a bad idea.

Unlocking promethium plates grants you access to the ability to make these four specific buildings. These buildings I call the isotope handlers. They are going to assist you on this planet for both handling your isotope production, and likewise management of it. There are actually seven new buildings in the mod, but I will not be showing them off.

The first of these buildings is the RTG- er, the Recipe Transformation Gin. Utilizing the intense ionic nature of the storm surrounding the world, and the radiactive isotopes, we can bombard specific resources with radiation to break apart its molecular structure and reform it into something similar. For instance, you can transform Steel into Tungsten, provided you feed the structure the appropriate isotope. Many otherwise unattainable resources are acquired with this device.

The second is the Isotope Seperation Facility. It can take decayed fuel cells, and fish from it various isotopes the cell contains. Generally, you will be given four different isotopes to manage, and each can be crafted into a new type of fuel cell. Generally you will start this process using your uranium.

The third structure shown is the Decay Hastener. Throw a fuel cell in here, and it will be quickly decayed so it can be reprocessed. This is really its only use.

The final structure featured here is the Isotope Management Cloche. Its main purpose is to mix various isotopes into a new form or more so, melt isotopes from their solid forms to their liquid forms. Each isotope can be melted for liquid storage if you so prefer.

There are a few more buildings, but you'll discover those as you move forward.

Conclusion

The Shattered Planet is my ideal ending Space Age, but for some it could be the ending of the original solar system, and represents the break from our known world into the unknown, into something lost... the Lost Beyond... or perhaps into another solar system where a whole new set of more challenging worlds await!

Beating the planet means researching the "Lost Beyond" technology. There is no real scripted conclusion, which seems rather anticlimatic, but others might want to make dependencies on this planet, so forcing an end to the game would be rather counterproductive, and overall more trouble than it's worth given the game basically ends at the Solar System edge anyways. I'm also still relatively new to modding Factorio, so I don't have a greater understanding as to how modifying it works. As such there are a few oddities like the original Shattered Planet built into the base game still being present, but no longer reachable.

I hope you all enjoy this mod!

Recommendations:
It is recommended to play this with the Fusion Robots mod as they will be invaluable to your experience.

Compatibility:
Compatibility is being constantly worked on. Fluids. If you are just playing with the Shattered Planet, all gases like Oxygen, Hydrogen, etc. are treated as gases and the mod comes with its own way of handling them.

MARAXSIS/MULANA/PARACELSIN CONSISTENCY!
If you have mods enabled that add their own versions of new fluids featured in this one, this mod will prioritize using the former over its own for a more pleasant and consistent Factorio experience!

Credits:
- TheFoundry members for their help
- Malcolm Riley: For unused textures, notably the fluid textures that I used as bases for the many fluids in the mod.
- PreLeyZero: For the various Exotic Industries textures that are present for the machines and a few highly edited item textures.
- AMHunter: For the kitbash of the Isotope Mixing Cloche
- Hurricane046: For the Arc Furnace building.
- Music present is created by the Cryo Chamber team, who allow usage of their soundtracks in non-profit projects.
- Sounds for some machines are from Mekanism for Minecraft under the MIT license.
- JayTheCoder for the new resource node graphics.
- Earendel: The mod uses a Space Exploration building as a necessity as well as one item icon.
- VortiK: Creator of the mining drill graphics used in the mod from "https://mods.factorio.com/mod/vtk-deep-core-mining?from=search"