When I left things off last week I was on the verge of actually beginning construction on a Rocket Fuel power plant, with a bonus bit of Smokeless Powder production so I can get a munitions factory going elsewhere.

As of last night I do, indeed, have an operational Rocket Fuel power plant. Just… not the one I started out building, at the location I started building upon.

Let me try to explain.

I debated which path to Rocket Fuel I would take. My first thought was to simply use the Nitro Blend Fuel alternate recipe: Regular Fuel, Nitrogen Gas, Sulfur, and Coal. This recipe cranks out 150 cubic meters per minute per blending machine of highly effective power-generating material in exchange for one second-level material and three first-level materials. (Which is to say: Fuel is made directly from Crude Oil, while the other three ingredients are basically “right out of the ground.”)

After some discussions with my son about the relative merits of a couple different plans centering on the fact that there’s a whole bunch more crude oil on the map than there are good sources of sulfur, I changed builds: Plan B uses the Turbo Blend Fuel alternate to make Turbofuel, which when paired with Nitric Acid makes Rocket Fuel. One simple post-processing step? Uses far less sulfur? Sold! I consulted the wiki and the SCIM website and the Tools website, picked out a worksite, built some prerequisite supply sites (Nitrogen Gas bottled for efficient transport by rail, Iron Plate for making Nitric Acid) and got started building a power plant.

You can sort-of-see the progress at the top of this post, if you ignore the attempted tilt-shift visual effect. That shot comes from earlier in the build, though. I got about half of the machinery placed and belted and piped and powered before everything slammed to a halt as I prepared to make the Nitric Acid to pair with the Turbofuel to produce the Rocket Fuel.

Problem is… I didn’t check available recipes in-game before launching this build effort. I don’t have access to Nitric Acid! That’s unlocked by the Particle Enrichment milestone at the Hub… and until I have enough power to build big complicated factories to make certain higher-end equipment, I won’t be achieving that unlock. Cart, meet horse, please don’t get in front of said horse.

Ah. So, I fell back to Plan A, which meant coming up with a whole other worksite. (I was not, absolutely not, going to tear down everything I’d already built. I’ll simply have a second group of 100+ generators powered by Rocket Fuel when the time comes. There’s zero downside here!)

As an aside: I’m sure you’re wondering, haven’t we already built a really big power plant not that long ago? Yes. We have. That’s part of the stair-steps progression system of the game, though. You build The Biggest Thing You’ve Ever Done (So Far) and marvel at how great it is, and by the next Phase shipment stage you’re thinking, “Crap. That’s nowhere near enough. Now what?” The game then helpfully provides at least one big (and more complex) solution to your new problem. It’s good game design! I think. Probably.

(Technically the “next solution” to the power problem is Nuclear. We’re not touching Nuclear for a good long while yet. Two Rocket Fuel power plants should be enough for the upcoming slew of factory build projects.)

The good news for me is that there’s a place on the map where Crude Oil, Coal, Sulfur, Water, and Nitrogen Gas can be sourced locally instead of having to ship one or more of them in: The “Blue Crater” zone. Where both luckily (such a place exists!) and unluckily (the place has a bunch of other crap in the way!) I already had a presence due to the Phase 3 parts production complex.

After much fussing and fiddling, including a bunch of inelegant pipe-and-belt runs around the lake perimeter, I achieved three goals:

1. Enough Rocket Fuel to provide for over 100 Fuel Generators. Given that each Fuel Generator is worth 250 megawatts of power… yeah, you can do the math.
2. Also enough Rocket Fuel to get bottled in aluminum containers so that I can kick off a drone fleet and keep my Jetpack supplied with… extremely effective go-juice. (Holy moly, you’ve gotta be careful with that stuff or risk making a Pioneer-shaped smear on the ground. It’s called Rocket Fuel for a reason.)
3. Enough Smokeless Powder (made from sulfur plus the waste product of the Rocket Fuel recipe added to some Heavy Oil Residue) that a modest munitions factory is now achievable. Explosive Rebar, anyone?

So… what’s next? I need to make a lot of what I call “Tier 8 Products”: Cooling Systems, Fused Modular Frames, Turbo Motors, plus a few other things that go into those things (Radio Control Units, Crystal Oscillators, High-Speed Connectors, etc). It’s time for a really big “fancy parts” factory. I’m thinking… it’s time to head out to the Dune Desert.

After that? Probably the Phase 4 shipment project. Probably.