I’ve been playing in a world for 30 hours and I’ve just automated cryonite rods. Will I beat the game in that world this year?
@Jwags Yeahh I’m about 90 hours in and I’ve automated tier two biological, energy and astronomic science and tier one material science. I haven’t played in two months or so and I’m not sure how busy I’ll be at university. I’m also not sure how much longer my spaghetti can take me through the game since I don’t use trains or circuits. How far are you through?
@JoeTarr Please consider my "no" vote an incentive to push on and take my mana. Finishing space exploration is one of the most memorable gaming experiences I've ever had :-)
I beat it with a buddy in late 2021 and it took ~320 hours. Since then I think they've changed the mod so that some recipes are simpler but the overall resource requirements are higher. Now we're doing a playthrough where we decided to not use delivery cannons (we just thought setting everything up via rocket shipping would be funny, I guess) and we're trying for the secret victory. So far we're at 507 hours and counting, but I think we're getting very close!
My big takeaways are:
automating interplanetary shipping in a failsafe way is critical. Set up logistic networks to fail into a safe condition (DON'T fire the delivery cannon if the power is out at the destination!)
Beaming energy is way better than trying to produce fuel on the ground.
Cleansing a planer of biters via auto-glaive is the ultimate form of automation
When settling a new planet it's such a relief to have spare cargo rocket production capacity at home for when you need more stuff.
Trains on spaceships are cool visually but terrible for throughput. Send stuff to orbit via elevators+trains, but load+unload the cargo onto spaceships using bots.