This is… not how I expected to spend my Sunday morning.

Please allow me to explain.

Last week I sent up the Phase 4 shipment, and I decided that feat had earned me a few days off. So I didn’t touch the game (outside of the weekly co-op sessions I host) until yesterday, when I basically threw together an addition to my “Expendables” factory to produce and stockpile basic and (more importantly) “homing” ammunition for the rifle. It’s not that I aggressively depopulate native fauna all that often, but when I do I want each bullet to count.

Anyway. Being in Phase 5 means facing a whole new set of challenges, and one of the key ingredients in facing those challenges is the “Strange Alien Matter,” or SAM. Months ago I threw together a slapdash little facility to turn the SAM “ore” into what the game calls “Reanimated SAM,” and no I absolutely do not want to think too long or deeply upon that adjective. This first-tier upgrade to the SAM goes into a lot of endgame processes, and all I’ve been doing with it for months is stockpiling it in a bin (and a Dimensional Depot of course) way off in the southwest corner of the map.

Speaking of Dimensional Depots, those are made with a second-tier SAM upgrade: SAM Fluctuators. Which, for the entire length of this save so far, I’ve been hand-crafting as needed to place new Depot units.

Deeply un-Satisfactory of me, isn’t it?

So I looked at my current stockpile setup, and I noticed that it’s located close to my “starter” steelworks, and I realized that steel pipes are a key ingredient in SAM Fluctuator production, and… well, a project was born.

First I went around and upgraded a lot of miners to the Mk3 model for increased output. Then I rebuilt the steelworks from the ground up, complete with a logistics floor and proper power routing and so forth. Its primary purpose is still to make sure I’m always stocked with Steel Beams, Steel Pipes, and Encased Industrial Beams… but now it also maintains a stock of SAM Fluctuators in depotspace for later build usage. (Hence the image at the top of this post.)

There’s still some work to do at this facility… but none of it is particularly urgent. Also, this only solves my SAM Fluctuator supply needs. I’ll need a whole other project to start supplying industrial quantities of Reanimated SAM for the rest of the game.

Good thing I thought ahead back when I was preparing the Crystal O’s project and routed SAM out of the Rocky Desert cave complex while sourcing the quartz, eh? Go, me!

But for now it’s time to put down the tools and take a breather.