I’m choosing to look at the upsides, here.

As of midday today I make the parts required to place the fastest belts the game has to offer. (Once I can unlock them… 10,000 iron plates? Really, game?) For bonus points I would also like to note that I’m nearly finished making all of the Nuclear Pasta I’ll ever need in the entire game, at which point I’ll be able to repurpose that entire massive copper ingot setup from a couple weeks ago.

I’ll unlock those Mk6 belts eventually.

This week’s project centered on getting “on-hand” supplies of Time Crystals and Ficsite Trigons, both of which get used for a variety of endgame items & projects but (especially relevant to my immediate needs) join together to make the 1200-items-per-minute Mk6 belts. I didn’t get that far in my last save; I made Time Crystals but didn’t even produce Ficsite Ingots before giving up and starting this save. So: Uncharted territory, ahoy!

Looking over the options for Ficsite, I settled on the most efficient option: Aluminum + Reanimated SAM. It gets the best bang-for-your-buck, despite it seeming rather more expensive due to the whole “aluminum is made from a relatively rare ore” thing. The simpler Ficsite option is iron, which sounds obviously better at first until you realize it requires a crapton of iron and gives you much less Ficsite. For now I’ll kick things off with the aluminum version and see how things go from here. (Again: Uncharted territory for me.)

First up, I built a couple of Reanimated SAM sources that I could retrieve via drones. One is located at the NW corner of the map at the entrance to the Rocky Desert’s long cave complex, and the other… well.

It’s a particularly unwelcoming location, but there aren’t very many pure SAM nodes in the standard map so you do what you must.

(At some point I’ll probably come back and stick some pixel art on the walls. Or something.)

Then I just needed a good location with ready access to bauxite, coal, and water. Turns out there’s a nice spot in (roughly) the south central part of the bamboo forest. Handy! A bit of railroad construction work later, plus laying down a couple of instances of my aluminum ingot factory blueprint, and the Time Crystals And Trigons site was all set.

What next? Well. For all that I just completed a fancy power plant almost exactly one month ago, one of my goals for this save remains: I want a nuclear-powered drone fleet. And that means nuclear power. Besides which, I’m reliably informed that some of the endgame production requires ridonkulous amounts of juice and my current headroom isn’t exactly massive. So… it’s time to find somewhere to place down a nuclear power facility. I’m thinking of building it out in the sea off of the northern coast of the Rocky Desert. Because to hell with that swamp, am I right?

And for a little while longer that means I’m in familiar territory again, taking yet another stab at a nuclear power facility, before I truly start tackling the endgame machinery. Wish me luck, eh?

(For the record, I considered using a different title for this post: Let Trigons Be Trigons. Did I choose wisely or poorly?)