Laboratory Earth I can't make progression

[Beez]

so i can't collect rewards for the earth branch of the lab now that part of progress is starting to matter a lot for where i am at i need a fix for it. i can collect rewards for everything else but i can't increase my resistance or damage output for earth.

[bluecat]

if you're drilling while compressing for earth the drills will lower your compression

you should do earth experiment for this order
drill until you can't prestige anymore
drill some more
stop drilling and compress, slow and safe if you're not watching it
claim rewards

[FDru]

This had me stuck for awhile too. Turns out you need to drill til you have 50% of the mass than what you need for a reward, then switch to compression (so about 27.5M kg mass for all the modules).

The things that confused me were that prestige and rewards are from different things, and that drilling completely wipes out all of your compression so it's kind of pointless to compress unless you have enough mass for any rewards you want.