I haven't fully finished the game, but I have launched multiple rockets and am a few levels deep into most repeatable research.
My first attempt failed fairly quickly, because I couldn't leave the platform to complete any of the missions without my defenses getting overwhelmed. Digging through the mod settings, I found the option to have the first few missions already completed. With that ticked, I was able to start my second attempt.
The early game:
The beginning is a purgatory of burner mining drills, stone furnaces, and handcrafting. The moment you land on a new map you have to immediately find iron and coal to start making ammo while squeezing in research whenever possible. Always managing your resources allocation was pretty fun. Making sure that the defenses hold up when you go to complete a mission or getting greedy and then being warped to a world without iron or water nearby is all good stuff. What happened to me was that the warp timer started to outpace my own progress. The longer I stayed on a map, the less profitable it became because of all the ammo that was needed to keep the biters at bay, and at some point I started to run a deficit. It came to a head and my whole base got overrun.
The mid game:
But it didn't really matter. At that point in the game, I had unlocked all the floors, and defending the warp platform itself is kind of pointless. Why bother. Heck it saved so many resources that would otherwise have been spent on ammo, wall replacements, et cetera. Instead, I just waited at the start of a new world for a minute or two for all the biters on the platform to despawn, snuck out and ran away as far as possible to place down my harvesters. Turns out that if you stay out of the platform pollution cloud, then you don't get attacked all that much. Sometimes I was able to stay for the full max warp duration without issue. Made going out to complete missions much easier too. Only the vehicle and robot sheep thingy mission need to happen right at the start of a new warp if I wanted to have a chance at it. Actively disengaging from the mod's core mechanic felt like the optimal play.
Late game:
Three big things come together that make the mod a breeze. Nuclear power, logistic bots and the super beacon on the factory floor. Even with efficiency modules, I needed to have one harvester mining coal most of the time to keep the lights on. Having nuclear power helps both, by freeing up that harvester and therefore massively increasing the resources you actually want, but it also gives you the electricity to power the other two. Logistic bots are a no brainer. You have very limited space and nothing is more space efficient than logistic bots. But the biggest game changer is the beacon. I researched it as far as I could before space science and had 50% productivity and only -15% speed, including the labs! That increased my output by magnitudes. I went from being permanently resources starved to swimming in them over the course of a few hours.
End game:
At this point I reconquered my warp platform, because why not? I moved the smelting from the harvester floor up to the factory floor to take advantage of the beacon as well. That was a bit odd, because the harvester floor only got big enough to support a full smelter stack not much earlier. So yeah, that floor only has a few belts on it now. With fully equipped warp power armor, and a wall made out of uranium ammo gun turrets, laser turrets and flamethrowers, the biters weren't a threat anymore. No, but the biters had an ace up their sleeve. Instead of killing me they went after my UPS. The lag became unbearable after only around 20 mins or so. Anyway, the mod throws one last challenge at you. Rare metals. It takes a while to find them and they are embedded in normal resource patches. No problem, just slap down the harvester and filter them out on the belt, right? Well kinda. You can only find them on very hostile worlds. These are worlds that you don't want to launch rockets on (kind of spoilery, so I'll leave it at that). So unless I had a lot of space science banked up, I had no way of spending my resources on these planets, and my storage ran full, so I stopped mining the rare metal as well. My solution? Place individual miners on the few rare metal nodes, have a few dozen chests at the ready, dump all the unwanted ore in them and just leave them behind when I warp again. This still took time however, and before I even had a decent amount, the UPS slowed down to a crawl. So I have to warp again and praying that it won't be one of the planets without rare metals (even when setting the destination, it feels like a ~50% chance?). To finish the game you need a LOT of rare metal... yeah no. That is what made me quit.
Final thoughts:
Some of the missions felt a bit odd. The Boiler room missions and the warp platform missions are basically the same. Same with end game missions and the factory floor missions. A bit more variety would do wonders, especially as some missions scale much better than others. Getting resources in the late game or providing power? No problem. While escorting a robot felt more still like a challenge at all stages of the game. The bosses were also a bit weird, because they are basically untouchable until you have MK2 power armor and once I had warp power armor they were weak. Overall, I enjoyed the early game and the late game the most. The mid game was just a lot of waiting around, and the end game was too much grinding. (or my pc just sucks, idk. Ryzen 7 & RTX 2080). Also, what is the point of the turrets? It gives you space on the factory floor, which was great, but the warp platform aspect of it seemed somewhat pointless, or am I missing something. Anywho, was a fun mod and very different from the usual!
