There’s a lot going on in my current save but no single thing notable enough to pull out for in-depth analysis so this will just be a general state-of-the-game catch-up post.

Day by day, project site by project site, I get closer to the Supercomputers (And Friends) factory goal. Let’s break down the week’s progress:

First up, I expanded the rail network. I started at the Steelworks (sited at what I refer to as “Coal Inlet” near the northeastern corner of the Rocky Desert) and routed a continuous line (with occasional roundabouts) out to my eventual megaproject build site along (roughly) the eastern portion of the Dune Desert.

I paused at the kind-of-lousy crude oil node cluster along the way to slap down a train station and some oil wells with the intention of using that site to produce all the rubber and plastic that the Supercomputers and Turbomotors and such will need. It’s a terrible place to build, and I’m absolutely certain that the game’s developers crafted that part of the map specifically to taunt the players: “We know you’re going to get desperate enough to tap these nodes eventually. Have fun!” But as I pondered in my Discord server how to build a bunch of refineries and generators in such a lousy chunk of real estate, my daughter came up with a brilliant solution: Don’t. Just… haul the crude oil away to the Dune Desert where there’s copious open space and availability of water to take advantage of some of the fancier petro-processing tricks that water allows. Unlike a power plant situation where the issues that come with using rail transport for fluid goods could be disastrous, this is purely a goods-manufacturing project and the occasional hiccup should barely even be noticed.

With that settled, I immediately progressed onward to my next step… wait, no, I didn’t. I got distracted. By this.

That video details one man’s method of creating a self-contained self-powered drone platform specifically for extracting ore from very remote locations, and it led me down a rabbit hole of trying to build my own version of his idea. In the end I gave up, as the need to carefully measure the fuel headed one direction against the ore you’re trying to mine in the first place could lead to any number of headaches. (Drones are neat, but incredibly finicky in a few important ways.) It’s a fascinating use of the available tech, sure, but not necessarily an actually good idea. But since I had the Blueprint Designer out anyway…

Long story short, the picture above (in poor lighting conditions at a lousy angle, sorry about that) shows a set of stacked blueprints: One base unit which contains storage bins (for buffering material inputs & outputs) plus a power lead, two intermediate units stacked on top of that base, and a top unit containing the actual drone port. Why do this? Because eventually I intend to power my drone fleet with Plutonium Fuel Rods, and one way to keep the radiation hazard under control is to site the ports well away from the actual working spaces. (“Vertically away” is a sufficient form of “away,” hopefully.) Note that yes, this means I need another blueprinted section for fuel rod distribution, to be placed just below the drone port section. I’ll build that bridge when I come to it, as it were.

The neat thing is, I can stack this remarkably high and still connect the conveyor lifts. In the current state of the game (version 1.1 as I write this) you can connect two conveyor floor mounts much further apart vertically than you could normally reach just by extending a conveyor lift from its starting point. You just have to… keep extending it until you reach the other floor mount. It won’t look like it’s working past a certain length until it clicks into place at the end.

Now, if the devs “fix” this I’ll be in a world of trouble. Intermediate blueprint units, I suppose, would be the answer? Hopefully I never need to find out.

So far this weekend the current step in the megaproject involves a Motorworks. The Turbomotors plan requires 8 per minute, so I’m going to make 12. No, wait, scratch that… producing 12 per minute only needs half of what the available copper and iron sources at my build site can provide, so let’s go for 24 per minute instead. The extras can be shunted to “depotspace” or used for some as-yet-unknown other build project, who knows? (Let’s be honest, most of them are going to become coupons via the Awesome Sink.)

Anyway: By this time next week I hope to have the Motorworks finalized and also be producing the rubber and plastic needed for Supercomputers (And Friends). If I’m really industrious I might even get the silica factory running. We’ll see.