Ah, the sweet sound of infinite resources.
Core mining was the first challenge that is unique to the Space Exploration mod. One of the biggest puzzle themes littered throughout SE is dealing with multiple outputs and overflow of surplus resources. If this is dealt with poorly the surplus resources back up the line and halt all production as machines become logged.
In the vanilla version of the game you can set up a production line from cradle to grave without ever having to worry about things that happen in between. Core mining and processing the new resources change this dynamic and throw a bunch of flies into the ointment that need to be dealt with.
We can see here that when core_fragments are pulverized they produce not one, but eight different resources that need to be dealt with, three of them fluids, and the other five raw resources that can be put on a belt and processed elsewhere.
The planet we crash land on is called Nauvis... clearly pronounced "novice". I guess the creator has a sense of humor. Might has well of called it Noob Noob.
In any case, this was not my original solution to the problem. I actually had to refactor it because what I was doing at the very beginning was ridiculous and totally non-scalable. I was dumping everything onto a red belt (twice as fast as yellow) and trying to sort everything on the fly with splitters, warehouses, and filter inserters all over the place.
Honestly this solution is kind of ridiculous as well but it is a lot more scalable than before because of the 4 lane bus-line. 4 lanes of yellow is the standard size for a bus in factorio because it can be jumped across with a single underground belt without having to mess about with too much fuss. I later came to realize that in SE this is not how scaling up is done, because even the ground under your feet becomes a resource. When building in space, one has to built the ground itself with special scaffolding because there isn't enough room up there to build, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Pyroflux
This liquid was new and I had no idea what it was used for. I probably should have looked up what it was used for, because in the beginning of the game I wasted quite a bit of it thinking it was largely worthless. Turns out later in the game it can be used to create steel/iron/copper ingots, which are condensed versions of the plates that are used in all the recipes. Not only do the ingots make it x5 easier to move resources around by rocket or delivery cannon (x10 on belts), but also the efficiency of smelting ingots increases output by 50% on copper and iron, and something like x3.5 for steel, which is an insane bonus because normally steel is very hard to get.
Coal
Another resource that kept stacking up and backing up all my production lines was coal. I was thinking, no problem, I'll rush a Coal Liquification Plant and liquify my coal into oil products. This was also a mistake, because the recipe for steel ingots requires coal. Again, I should have just banked all the extra resources early game so I could use them later. I ended up learning my lesson here eventually and started banking items I wasn't using (like glass). Then like 50 hours later all of a sudden I'd need like a million glass and it would be available.
Water
In the vanilla version of the game water is essentially a free resource that you never have to worry about. You just throw a pump at the edge of a lake and it will provide infinite water without ever running out. The same is true in Science Exploration... assuming the planet you are on has water. If you travel to a planet that doesn't have water there will be a huge warning sign saying there's no water there. It seems like not a big deal until the realization hits that water is pretty important in Factorio and completely taken for granted.
The most efficient form of high energy output in Factorio is nuclear energy. When nuclear reactors are placed next to each other they get a huge bonus. Two reactors placed next to each other each double the output of the other. This configuration of 2x2 outputs the same amount of energy that 12 solo reactors would. Seeing as each reactor pumps out 40 megawatts of power for three minutes straight given a single fuel cell, the above configuration can carry one long past the win condition by providing 480 megawatts of power for 200 seconds straight using only 4 nuclear fuel cells (which are created in batches of 10). That translates to 96 gigajoules of power (1 joule being enough energy to provide one watt of power for one second).
Luckily I had a good nuclear blueprint ready long before I had even started this game. I was wondering if building the blueprint was a waste of time, but clearly not because I've plopped this bad boy down on six different planets so far and an asteroid field in the middle of nowhere.
The challenge with nuclear reactors in Factorio is that "if you don't use it, you lose it". Inserters will automatically insert nuclear fuel into the reactor even if everything is red hot and all that energy will get lost. If your base is only drawing 100MW of power and the nuclear reactors are cranking out 480, they only need to be turned on like once every 10 minutes. Timers and circuits are tricky and super basic in Factorio (just like Minecraft redstone). I'll have to do a completely separate post just on circuit logic alone.
What was I talking about again?
Oh yeah... water. So if you want to use nuclear energy, you need water. The reactors get hot, we use a nuclear heat exchanger to turn water into 500 degree steam, and then that steam is fed into massive turbines that produce a ton of electricity.
Luckily, the SE mod provides a new kind of turbine called a condenser that is only 75% power efficient (draws 80 units of steam per second compared to 60/s) but has the huge advantage of returning 99% of that steam back into water instead of it all being lost. This has enabled me to build a nuclear reactor on a waterless planet (even the 1% loss hurts though) and on an asteroid field that I'll need to mine in the endgame.
In the vanilla version of the game, solar grids like the one above can carry a player all the way to the win condition. You have to build like 5000 solar panels and just as many accumulators to operate during the nighttime, but this is easy to accomplish when a single assembler is pumping them out one at a time over the course of a dozen or more hours.
In SE, solar is really good in orbit (huge x2 to x5 bonuses) or planets close to the sun, but becomes worthless the farther one gets away from a star. In deep space they are only 1% effective, which creates some very interesting problems that need solving and balance to the structure of the game. However, my nuclear power blueprint is so good that I'm basically only using solar in orbit above Nauvis with a 500% bonus that powers all my experiments and advanced science pack production. Everything else uses my super efficient nuclear blueprint.
And even then a few times my bases have run out of nuclear fuel cells. The wake up call is jarring, to say the least. When power runs out on a moon I colonized, the signal transmitter stops working. This transmitter tells delivery cannons on Nauvis to stop firing resources at my outlying bases. When this signal fails to transmit, my delivery cannons on Nauvis spam fire at the base that lost power, and end up destroying a bunch of infrastructure and wasting even more resources. Then I would have to drop everything I was doing, hop in my gas-guzzling spacecraft, and run to fix the problem to get everything working again. I have only just recently fixed this problem and made sure that my bases won't lose power again. Robust solutions are more work and often less efficient given the ideal scenario, but they are almost always worth it in the long-run. This applies to many things other than Factorio.
Solar energy beam
There's even this late-game technology that I've almost acquired that allows you to build a solar powerplant in orbit right next to a star, and then beam the energy to another location or even use it as a weapon against the environmentalists...
Well shit.
I forgot that I haven't even talked about pollution or 'biters' yet. This game very much mimics building something like a computer chip or a piece of software. There are even literal 'bugs' that will attack you.
Boondoggle planet Veden; a waterless deathworld planet surrounded on all sides by enemies.
The only planet-side source of beryllium in my solar system. Deal with it!
It's an ugly planet; a bug planet.
One day I will eliminate all life on this godless planet with my space laser.
Dare to dream.
"The Environmentalists"
It often joked that the bugs in Factorio love the environment, because they only attack you when you create pollution. They also evolve faster and get stronger from the pollution. Yeah, it doesn't make the most logical sense but it's a great game balancing mechanic. This mod is one of the most (the most) well-balanced single-player games I've ever seen.
Because Factorio is actually a lot like creating a real program, the literal bugs can also be viewed as figurative bugs within the software being created. If we try to scale up too fast and throw caution to the wind, the bugs move in and make life hell for us. Again, it's all about creating robust non-fragile systems that can withstand attack from the outside.
Conclusion
Hm, wasn't the name of this post... "I've got to get out of here!" I'm fairly certain I was supposed to talk about the steps needed to build a rocket and get off this damn noob rock. I guess that's just a testament to how insanely complex and time-consuming this game is.
Such is Factorio.
Or as my girlfriend calls it: Fact Potato.
Current approx word count: 5000
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