Part of me always wants to cheese one system or another in this game. The “New Clear Plan” pre-1.0 save was an attempt to build a permanent facility for crafting space elevator shipment parts starting in, like, Phase 2. It’s brilliant, right? If I put in all the effort now I won’t have to do anything later! But… in the early phases a lot of the stuff which makes big complicated builds workable just isn’t available yet. I was trying to build Notre Dame with mud bricks and straw.
I spent part of this past week doing something like that again: I wanted Dimensional Depots and I wanted them now.
You can imagine how well that went.
For good or ill, I picked the grasslands starting area when launching this new save. Ten in-game hours later and I mostly believe I made the right choice given my long-term goals… but the location comes with some hefty downsides. Sure, there’s actually enough iron and copper and limestone and yes, even coal and caterium within reasonable distance to get things rolling. (The nearby sunken lake with the four normal coal nodes makes a great Pioneer’s First Power Plant site.) And there’s no such thing as a perfect starting zone to get a jump on aluminum, which is fine because that’s a mid-game product anyway, all the bauxite nodes being located in the dangerous central zone of the map. This is just plain solid game design, and I respect that.
My frustration is instead with SAM, the “strange alien matter” which makes all the fun alien tech tree research results possible. You need to mine it, you need to process it, and you need to automate that processing. Great! Let’s go get some! Hmm, where do we go…
… no, not the nearby long meandering Stinger-infested cave (is there any other kind though?) whose entrance is at the edge of the world, blocked partway in by poison gas pillars. I need explosives to deal with those, and explosives means steel products, and I haven’t done that yet.
… no, not either of the nodes in or near the “blue crater” area, one of which is in a hard to reach cave (forget automating anything there for a long, long while) and the other’s surrounded by more poison gas emitters.
… no, not the one hiding in the rat’s nest maze that is the “jungle spires” area, that I had to give up on locating after a quarter hour of frustration.
Wait. Is the game trying to tell me that I’m not supposed to get at this stuff until I’ve started building steel products and have automated black powder and such? Do I actually need to… do things in a sensible order of progression?
Seems fake but okay.
I mean: I could work my way around the map to the “crater lake” area, I know there’s a cheap, easily-accessible node in the middle of one of those lakes. It could be done. But I’d be running power poles for an hour just to get there from my current built-up area.
Ugh. Fine. I’ll do things the “normal” way. See? I even built a steelworks.
Next up: Unlocking explosives. I’m tired of poison gas pillars.
