In the span of a week I went from “just barely making steel beams and pipes” to “just barely making plastic and rubber.” Which doesn’t sound particularly impressive, I admit. Let me put it another way: I went from building my first coal-power generator facility to being on the verge of building my first fuel-powered generator facility… in one week.

Among other things. Let’s get this progress post under way!

The main achievement, of course, was getting Phase 2 sent up to the orbital platform, which unlocked a bunch of new milestones including petroleum processing, improved conveyor belts, and the Jetpack. Technically I have access to the monorail milestone but until I have plentiful, reliable fuel power there’s no point fussing with it. Here I am, working the process… more or less.

Getting black powder automated allowed me to start arming myself with explosives, which I used to finish gaining access to the previously-inaccessible SAM node in that cave near the Hub. Yes, I now have Dimensional Depot technology, with one depot each attached to most of my production lines. I also unlocked the first speed and stack size upgrades to bring them to what I consider the bare minimum level of usefulness.

Among the milestones I unlocked is the blueprinting system, which I promptly used to make what is now one of my standard items: A power tower placed on a 2×2 1m foundation base. This allows me to expand in whichever direction I want at fairly decent speed (well… all things considered) and simply zipline back home again when I’m done. Why the foundation base underneath? So that when I later want to “pretty up” the power tower emplacements I’ll have something to snap stuff onto. The tower supports themselves have no snap points, and trying to slide and nudge things into place after the fact is utterly annoying.

The exploration/expansion process with these power towers goes something like this:

1. Pick starting location, get blueprinted tower-with-foundation placed to start. Hook up to an existing nearby power pole.
2. Climb to the top, use the upper connector point to initiate building another tower Somewhere Over That-a-way. If the terrain at the target point allows for it, place this new tower off to the side of the desired location.
3. Zipline to the new tower, place blueprinted tower-with-foundation at the actual desired location, and remove the temporary tower. (If there wasn’t room in the previous step for a temporary tower, just remove & replace. Placement is trickier at ground level but sometimes it’s the way things have to be.)
4. Climb up new tower-with-foundation and connect its power line to the previous location’s tower.
5. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It’s a bit fussy but the results are set to last for the rest of the game, with the later option to add as much or as little additional decoration as desired.

Another fun thing you can do is to make branching points by adding another tower-with-foundation nearby at the same height but turned 90 degrees, then use the walkway plating to connect their upper platforms. That’s right: The walkway pieces snap to the tower platforms!

(Why not just branch the new tower chain at a slight angle from the one emplacement? Because the game’s supposed ability to “follow where the player’s aiming” at zipline branch points is… not terribly reliable. If I want to change directions I can just hop off at my branching-point platform. Problem: Solved.)

The first use of this technique in the current game was getting from the grassy starting area near my newly-revamped Hub building (see image above) up to what I call the “Oilands,” which is indeed where I built the aforementioned plastic and rubber starter site. It’s enough to keep me supplied in buildables for now, and it allows me to unlock more milestones.

This morning, as a bit of a side project, I unlocked the Explorer (my favorite vehicle that doesn’t run on rails) and took it out to the Dune Desert (with a side jaunt to parts of the Spire Coast) to hunt for crashed drop pods and their ever-so-useful hard drive contents, with a bonus haul of some of the available Mercer Spheres. I’ve processed a few of the drives… though the results have left a lot to be desired. Of the four completed scans, only Caterium Circuit Board had any appeal, the rest are banked to prevent their results from showing up in future scans.

(Coated Cable and Insulated Cable back to back? Seriously, game?)

While out on my exploratory jaunt, I observed some amusing behavior from the local fauna. I have creature hostility set to “retaliate” because otherwise I’d still be fighting my way up the coastline, and “creature combat” is far & away the least interesting part of this game’s design. Nobody told this Alpha Stinger that my vehicle isn’t a threat, though:

No kidding, I turned around to get into my vehicle after picking up the Mercer Sphere at this location and the spitter was just… shoving the Explorer sideways, repeatedly forcing it up onto two wheels. It gave up after a dozen meters or so, but for a moment it looked like the little dune buggy was going to get flipped right over.

Which then came even closer to happening when a nearby Gus (our pet name for the giant spindly-legged blob creatures) tripped over the Explorer which had been shoved into its path, resulting in the vehicle going up on its forward chassis for a couple of seconds and providing Gus with an elevated, if brief, viewpoint on its surroundings. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that the spitter was setting Gus up for a pratfall…

I don’t record my sessions and today’s a rare occasion when I regret that. It was hilarious!

Anyway… next up: I build a starter fuel power facility… followed by a very big and complex fuel power facility. That’s right, I’m going to try out the Diluted Packaged Fuel trick for the first time ever. Wish me luck!