Thanks for developing this mod. I had fun playing it. I played with QOL mods including power armor and a few bots. My experience could roughly be split into a few sections.
0) The Very Early Game
When I realized the warp timer was opt-in, so to speak, I made a big base for red, green, and black science. Honestly, I should have built bigger and stockpiled more, but I got more. In the end, I warped with a steel chest of red science, a steel chest of green ingredients, a lot of copper, and very little iron or steel. Bad planning honestly, and impatience. Especially since the first time I warped back to nauvis I wondered if it was possible to make a base that makes its own bots, would it be possible to fully remote control that surface (since it never gets deleted) and only defend it from normal attack waves from pollution.
1) The Early Game - Misery
This part of the game sucks and is stressful, which I suppose is what you're going for. The platform is too small. The enemies are too strong. The warp timer is too short. Your miners can't get ore fast enough. There is never enough power. There are constantly out of ammo and damaged and destroyed warnings going off. This is only exacerbated by those baby demolishers coming to destroy everything every ten ish minutes. I only managed to get through this section by pausing every five minutes and thinking for 15 seconds on what my next goal is. Thankfully, I managed to squeeze 93k crude oil (I still remember the number lol) out of one warp and limped my way to the blue science era.
2) The Garden Floor - Salvation
Gleba. Ahh, Gleba. The garden floor is hands down the best and most interesting part of the mod. It solves so many things, namely power and water. I was ... okay, at gleba before playing this mod. Now, I can confidently say I'm a master. My playthrough opened up when I decided I could fit buildings on the arable land on the garden floor though that happened later. Regardless, In the beginning I thought all plantable squares were sacred so enjoyed cramming everything into those narrows strips. I used barreled water in the warp chest to put a 160MW reactor on the ground floor. Which enabled me to switch to a mix of laser/gun turret defense to save ammo.
With water + rocket fuel + a steady trickle of bioflux the game was essentially solved. At least one part of it. Resources were still scarce and I was still handcrafting everything and I kept losing turrets whenever the demolisher enemies came around, but it was finally one (big) aspect that was fully and completely automated. It was reliable. I am proud to say my four biochamber agri science setup didn't move once since I put it down in warp 10 or so. That biochamber crafted 44k science packs before I tore it up for a robust beacon setup once I hit aquilo.
This was also when I finally revamped the factory floor to install an itty bitty 20-30 spm of red, green, blue, and black science + labs. All chest fed, but still better than hand feeding.
3) No Way Out - Tedium
Warp by warp passed as I struggled on a frankly miserable SPM to purple and yellow science. My factory floor became bot fed and I figured out the circuit network accumulator to automatically request things in between the floors. I was constantly having power problems from the lasers, but also the advanced buildings. Even with efficiency modules, the interplanetary buildings brought my itty bitty reactor to its knees. This became a teeny tiny problem at points since my water transporting system required power to work.
Anyway. A few points. Fulgora is by far the best transitory planet. The lightning storms and oil ocean provide infinite power and flamethrower ammo for the first 20 minutes or so. After that you have to dip anyway. Scrap also provides resources that are useful generally. Thinking back on it, I don't know why I never used lava. I just went directly to ore+calcite and threw my foundries in the factory floor.
The only interesting things here was a tiny circuit thing I made that automatically swapped my four stressed out foundries to craft whichever raw ingredient I needed with a latch. The rest was just stressful. Looking through my saves, by around warp 50 I had all interplanetary sciences running on the ground floor at ? spm, and was generally researching things at 50 spm (though reliability was poor from resources being low). Circuits were the main culprit and I was chronically low on red circuits since I physically couldn't cram another EM plant into the factory floor (either the space or the power budget)
4) A Long Road - Teslas
warptorio_warp53_nauvisrevampingpower is when I wised up to the proper use of the garden floor. I axed 50% of the garden for a 160MW reactor to double my power. This also coincided pretty closely with ground platform 6 (purple science), and factory 5 which allowed me to cram more production. I also transitioned to prod mods on labs. I also had a goal. Tesla turrets because at some stage the demolishers vanished from the waves and were replaced by stompers and strafers. The research started in warp 55 and took nearly ten warps to finish while I was putting out fires.
But I got Teslas.
Of course. My reactors were less then pleased by that, but still from this point on, the enemies were a joke. With a tesla tower in each corner and one in the middle, I don't think I lost a single building from this point on.
5) Quality Beacons
Well. That's it. Defense was sorted. Power was sorted. Production was slow, but mostly stable. I spent most of my time on nauvis since I found it was the most stable planet for gathering resources. At some point I did kovarex, but mostly I just waited. At this stage, most research was in the thousands and I didn't have biolabs yet (don't ask). While I did, I discovered that beacons could have quality modules. .... and that quality beacons have extra module slots.
Naturally, I made a casino. Tried to use the asteroid tech, but it only sorta worked. Asteroids just didn't spawn enough and I was forced to do a standard from q1 upcycler. Which... was also a lot of waiting since I didn't have much space. That was warp 71.
warptorio_warp74nauvisresourcestarved:(
warptorio_warp78_vulcanuspanic = Spawned on top of demolisher territory.
warptorio_warp82_garden2 almost complete = On warp 82 I got garden floor 2 and doubled power. Still think that was the best part of the mod. I toyed with the idea of bacteria->ore, but scrapped it since I didn't think I was farming enough to make a dent in my resource demand. I maxed out mining prod around this point as well)
warp 84. Collect resources.
warp 87. Collect resources.
warp 92. Ground platform 7 complete.
warp 97. Ground platform 8 complete + defenses in place.
warp 99. Ground platform supports all interplanetary sciences, extra power, and resource storage
6) Win?
The last fifty warps were fairly mundane. Maybe even tedious. Teslas trivialize all enemies, and also the one enemy that probably could have done something wasn't spawning. It was only small and medium wrigglers and biters and spitters. + the occasional stomper. Dunno why, but at some point I looked up and kinda felt like the waves were easier rather than harder. Regardless, I wasn't noticing them. It took me 7 warps (100-107) to make the defenses (laser+tesla) aquilo capable, then one 40 minute romp to that frozen butthole of the solar system and I researched everything else (after leaving aquilo).
By this point, I had my fun. I had epic beacons. The factory was pretty, though bot based. Warp 111's save is called warptorio_warp111_winquestionmark. Cuz I looked at the final research and mostly got confused. Keep in mind, I hadn't seen a single promethium asteroid by this point, and the recipe for artificial promethium seemed ultra-tedious. I was also getting thoroughly tired of just waiting around. Maybe I was playing it wrong, but I basically had nothing to do. I just needed to move the miners each warp and then twiddle my thumbs for 20-30 minutes while doing minor errands, then repeat. It would have taken another five hours to 'win' which would mostly involve standing around for buffers to fill, then go to fulgora for infinite power and tough it out at 2k SPM for 10 minutes or so. To put it simply, I didn't think the waves could be tough enough to make it interesting.
I'm guessing that asteroids ramp up as the number of warps increases. Or maybe after you research aquilo? I don't know, but I suppose this is the feedback section.
1) The garden floor was awesome. The fact it solved (permanently) one of the five (power, resource acquisition, resource processing, research, defense) pillars of the factory was hella fun. Especially when I iterated and improved the systems and upgraded the floor.
2) Asteroids should be the infinite resource solution, but there is no way to control them or design around them. My suggestion is physically have the warp platform have a schedule. Like make it a proper space station. Or make 'deep-space' a location by itself. I dunno. I got frustrated that nothing I could do would ever mean I don't have to run around like a headless chicken placing miners.
3) Just one warp chest for mining was annoying at best. I resorted to having a blueprint that shoves ore into an active provider chest for cases when I spawned on an ore patch. In hindsight, I should have included ore/resource ingress belts into mass storage on all four corners. But I never did that. Shrug.
4) The enemies felt bugged. Up until warp 50, they were uber-hard. Then I barely noticed them except when they broke a power pole to my miners and I had to panic run over there to keep things alive. I played on default settings if that matters.
So yeah. That was my 35 hour playthrough. Thanks for making/updating the mod. I had fun.
p.s. Would my remote control nauvis idea work? I think you can tap oil in under 20 minutes.
