Castle Quest is great - more in store?

[Neen]

I'm new to the game, bought my copy just after this latest prospecting update. I've just started to hit light automation, with 2 iron drills pumping out more nuggets into a pan than my computer likes to handle. The castle quest, with its huge requirements, feels like the best motivation I've had in the whole playthrough to properly dig into an automation setup. It seems like the game has a very solid base of automation mechanics by now, but not a whole lot to motivate you to want to produce one ton of tomatoes per hour. Doing it for the sake of it is fun, but also disincentivized by the eventual lagging of the game.

Will there be more long-term delivery quests like this added in the future? I feel like players should be nudged towards this castle a little more by NPC dialogue, I had no clue there was actually doors that could open in response to a quest, and was almost starting to feel a little aimless once I had a game-lagging amount of resource nuggets from only the first tier of drills on my starter plot. Maybe introductions to some tools/mechanics/resources can be placed behind certain smaller questlines? (ie. to get a free set of basic farming tools and seeds, grab 30 weight of iron)

[Selphos]

I'm with you on hoping the quest system gets expanded, but lemme give you a small piece of advice if you're running into lag problems with ore: invest in Smelters and Splitter Conveyors as soon as possible. Pieces can't lag if they're automatically melted into the pot.
Unfortunately, I don't think any such convenience exists for farming yet.

[Neen]

Originally posted by Selphos:

lemme give you a small piece of advice if you're running into lag problems with ore: invest in Smelters and Splitter Conveyors as soon as possible. Pieces can't lag if they're automatically melted into the pot.

Can splitter conveyors sort ore? I was considering a probably much worse solution of running conveyors between a series of manual sorters. "Manual" makes it definitely sound like there's a more conveyor-friendly item to use, but nothing in the item descriptions I could find suggested a better automated sorter.

[Selphos]

The way splitter conveyors work is that they have a platform above them where you can drop one or multiple types of ore, such as a piece of iron or the different gem types, and it'll send every piece of that type to the side and the remainder pass through. So in a sense, they do sort materials automatically. Then you just drop a smelter next to the side of the splitter and the matching materials will fall right in.

[Klandor]

Originally posted by Selphos:

The way splitter conveyors work is that they have a platform above them where you can drop one or multiple types of ore, such as a piece of iron or the different gem types, and it'll send every piece of that type to the side and the remainder pass through. So in a sense, they do sort materials automatically. Then you just drop a smelter next to the side of the splitter and the matching materials will fall right in.

Agreed. This works for Raw Ore to deliver a SPECIFIC type of Ore to a Smelter, it works for Raw Gems to send all types of Raw Gems in a different direction, and it works for Polished Gems to send a specific type of Polished Gem (Sapphire, Emerald, Ruby, or Onyx) into a Gem Compressor. To have a full set of the four Gems get compressed, you'll need a set of 4 Sorter Conveyors and 4 Gem Compressors...

[Neen]

I've got my starter base putting ore into smelters automatically now, and I've got a little sorter machine feeding into buckets for the gems, since I couldn't be bothered to totally automate the smallest part of the harvest on a smaller base. Thanks for the pointers :)

[Klandor]

Careful on those Gems in a Bucket. If too many of them are not put through a Gem Compressor you can end up with too many items in the world and it will bring your FPS down to less than 1 and effectively crap out that Save. It's recoverable, but it'll take a LOT of time and effort to do so. I'd HIGHLY recommend getting 4 x Sorters and 4 x Gem Compressors, set them up with a Straight Conveyor feeding into the Sorter system and, one at a time, dump those Buckets (or Pans) onto that Straight Conveyor. This is a known issue with the game and, if you wait too long, you won't like what happens to that Save...