"End Game" base building

[Kevlan]

Now that we have the ability to collect tokens my "Must build bigger to go faster" instinct has kicked in, just like it did in Factorio, Satisfactory, etc. Has anyone else been trying to build to see how to improve their "TPM" (Tokens Per Minute)?

Just for reference, here's what I have done - I'm open to suggestions!

First of all, the baseline - T2 drones, T3 drills, T2 gas extractors. It helps if you have breathable air, but not 100% required.

I have found tt seems to have work well to make two bases, a few hundred yards apart.

One simple square base (2 stories, ~4X4), which I call my "factory Base". The upper floor is nothing but lockers that request almost all of the items from drones and a bunch of Silk Generators. The lower floor only has auto-crafters that assemble all of the items I need, both for tokens and for building - All of the rods, fertilizer, mutagens, bac samples, bio nuggets, pulsars, circuit boards, motors, HQ food, T2 drones, etc. Basically, if you can build it (within reason) I make it in this base. Each auto-crafter is, of course, set to supply the item that it creates.

A few hundred yards away is my main "living" base. It has several levels, lots of glass, plants, crafting and labs, biodome, etc. This base also has 40-50 chests that request all of the base items and finished items. I use this when I want to expand - Build more drills, heaters, shoot some rockets, add more miners, more power, etc. Keeping this base separate from the "factory base" means that Auto-Crafters won't be stealing raw materials from my "stuff for building" chests. I prioritize my living base chests higher than the factory base (and trading rockets) so that they fill first.

Between the bases are the outdoor raw materials. Beehives, LOTS of outdoor farms, T2 gas extractors for methane / nitrogen, etc. In the nearby lake are alge generators and lake water collectors. Everything (that can be) is set to provide the item it makes to the drones.

Then, of course, there's the miners. You need to locate all of your uniquely-placed resources (Irridium, Uranium, Supers, Osmium, Zeolite, Supfur and Aluminum) and make sure your base is about in them middle. I have about a dozen T3 miners in each of the areas (except Aluminum which has 4 and Zeolyte which has about 18). Normal minerals you can mine anywhere (again with T3 miners) - I have ~6 iron and Silicone and two for the others.

All of this "Feeds" a bank of trading rockets. Right now, I'm up to 7. These request the appropriate items from the drones, with a priority of -1.

One thing I struggled for a while with was honey and bees. I hadn't ever used a Shredder, but that turns out to be essential since you produce a lot more bees than you need since each hive supplies both bees and honey. I have a chest in the "living" base where I request bees for general use. I also have a shredder that requests bees, with a priority of -1, so it gets filled last. When the shredder is full - Zap and the surplus bees are gone. it feels pretty brutal, especially in this day and age, but there isn't a lot else to do with them and you rarely need them for construction or rockets.

I have noticed that token values are very skewed to certain things. Pulsars take just a few items to create and are worth 25 tokens. Individual bars take 9 items and are worth 5-6. Circuit Boards are also cheap(ish) to make and are worth 25. Once I stopped sending bars up in the rockets my tokens earned went WAY up. I now only send up pulsars, circuit boards, food, bacteria samples and cloth.

I have, however, hit the wall with circuit boards - They require mushrooms and there is a finite supply of seeds. I have about 10 farms of them, and can't find anymore, so that might be as much as I get. Pulsars are better bang-for-the-buck anyhow.

I'm at the point where my "Living" base is stocked enough that I can build pretty much anything I want without any crafting. This morning in one session of a few hours I launched 12 rockets, built 10 drills, 6 heaters and added a bunch of miners and gas extractors and about a dozen fuel generators. Pulsars will scale however I want them to, so I keep expanding their base footprint.

Why all of this? I had enough tokens (from running overnight) for 20 frogs, 30 butterflies and 20 tree seeds to bump up my terraforming. I can ALMOST see that 100ths place ticking along.

Edit - This isn't intended as a boast or anything. I'm just having fun seeing how hard I can push the game and trying to work my way to bigger and better things. We all play differently, and I just happen to like to build big bases like this in various games and work out optimal configurations.

[Pesky]

You asked for suggestions. I suggest you stop playing. The target you're trying to reach is intentionally set ridiculously high, to stop players reaching it. When there actually is a level after frogs, the lower limit for it will be reduced to a more practical number.

[Markus]

Another suggestion: I don’t want to read a book here 😉

[Rhaane]

I read most of this then my eyes glazed over. The title should be "I wanna boast about my overproduced setup and need a reason to do it". Good job, you win. Keep doing what ya doing!

[CrazedBumblebee]

Yes.
I actually started building an Analyzer for the game so that I could figure out all of my drone paths, travel times, supply & demand, to figure out where I might be over or under producing.

It took a turn, and it does everything except for the original intention at the moment.

It will show you how many t1 and t2 drones you have, both active and idle. As well as show you all of your supply and demand paths, what things they're coming from (including the name tag you provided) and where they're going.

But i've not yet added in calculation for drone travel time, or resource production vs demand (I have it on a previous version but I need to redo it because it was taking in to account all possible recipes and telling me I needed 4000 of each ore extractor).

If you wanna play around with it, you can just open up the link and drag & drop your save file on to the page to see everything there is to know about your save game, but knowing how to make your base more efficient isn't included at the moment. I'll probably make more changes after the next game patch.

http://www.cubedweb.net/PlanetCrafter/Analyzer/

There's probably some bugs, especially on the Inventory/Craft pages, but i've tested with multiple saves from initial start to 9999ETi and it seems to work well. Let me know if you have any issues with it, or suggestions.

I did this because I too have 9 Space Trading Rockets, 7 Pulsar Quarts Auto-crafters right next to them to ensure they're constantly filled, and 184 Ore Extractor t3 (and 36 Gas Extractor t2) to make sure they don't run out of resources. But it's not quite enough, especially if I use any of those resources to make other things.

I do get rockets launching every minute or two, and sometimes multiple at the same time. I rarely have more than 3-4 rockets on the ground and sometimes the platforms are completely empty.

But i'd like to get to a point, likely in the next big patch at least, that a rocket lands, fills within about 30 seconds, then launches again.

There might be some limitation on the drone functionality that stops that from happening, but i'll probably add something like a crafting planner.

Specify how many of what item I need and how frequently, so that it can tell me how many of each thing I need to build to support that. This will likely be better than using my actual save game and trying to calculate where i'm falling short, because 99% of the time my autocrafters are idle, so I can ignore their potential resource draw but my analyzer can't for the purposes that I want.

[Kat Ballou]

@Kevlan: Your post was good timing because I'd been trying to figure out whether to build a new base in a different location so that I could utilize the larger living spaces and the autocrafters. (I'm at end-game too and actually took a break from the game for about a year while I waited for all the updates and then jumped back in using my previous save.) My problem is that I love the waterfall area and had started a 2nd base there but that was before drones. Since that location is so far from the various mines, I don't think it will be very efficient for the drones, so I don't think I'll put my automation in that location. I'm only using 2 rockets full of PQ, but already have more terra tokens than I need, so I don't really see the point of expanding the number of rockets. I've bought all the blueprints that are currently available from the trading port, as well as all the frog eggs and butterfly larva that I want, so the extra tokens will just be for use when and if more items are added to the trading port in a future update.

I would love to see pics of your base. I struggle with build ideas, not just in this game but in other building games as well. I've watched a lot of Youtube vids and it seems like a lot of people put their crafting area outside over the water, but I prefer to have as much of my base as possible inside so I'm not having to dodge all those meteor pieces that end up blocking the foundation pieces. I don't mind that my drones have to bring the algae inside rather than having the autocrafters use it directly from the algae generators. Maybe that's an error on my part. I'd be interested in your take on that.

Thanks for your post. I hope you'll provide more information about what worked and didn't work for your build.

[XB]

My basic design that I stole from a streamer - Make a bunch of 3x3 rooms connected by 1x1 rooms. On the walls place a bunch of T2 storage. In the center of the room place 8 autocrafters. You should have enough storage to provide the ingredients for the 8 autocrafters and the final products. This seems to work well for me because I have about 1600 T2 drones. The thing that slows me down is the finite amount of mushroom seeds. I'd be willing to pay 10K terratokens per mushroom seed if I could buy them. I'm currently at 1.05P.

[ferk57]

I would suggest moving automation and crafting areas away from you main base. With the amount of things going on it really starts to kill the frame rate in the late game.

here's my crafting area on the flat area above the canyon.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3012614640

[CrazedBumblebee]

Originally posted by Kat Ballou:

I would love to see pics of your base.

How about a video of mine?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIrfv7JyZqI

The first 30 seconds should suffice. The rest is waiting around for my rockets to auto-launch.

[Kat Ballou]

Originally posted by CrazedBumblebee:

How about a video of mine?

The first 30 seconds should suffice. The rest is waiting around for my rockets to auto-launch.

I found that to be extremely interesting. Why did you decide on 9 trade rockets? What are you planning to do with all the extra terra tokens? I only have 2 trade rockets and already have everything from the trade station, plus a bunch of tokens that I guess I'll just hold until more items are added in a future update.

I've noticed that a lot of people put their autocrafters and storage outside like you did, but I don't know the reason behind it. I prefer to have everything inside so it doesn't get blocked by meteor fragments during those frequent storms. Is there any reason NOT to put them inside? Or is it just a matter of personal preference?

Thanks for the video. It helped a lot.

[CrazedBumblebee]

Originally posted by Kat Ballou:

Originally posted by CrazedBumblebee:

How about a video of mine?

The first 30 seconds should suffice. The rest is waiting around for my rockets to auto-launch.

I found that to be extremely interesting. Why did you decide on 9 trade rockets? What are you planning to do with all the extra terra tokens? I only have 2 trade rockets and already have everything from the trade station, plus a bunch of tokens that I guess I'll just hold until more items are added in a future update.

I've noticed that a lot of people put their autocrafters and storage outside like you did, but I don't know the reason behind it. I prefer to have everything inside so it doesn't get blocked by meteor fragments during those frequent storms. Is there any reason NOT to put them inside? Or is it just a matter of personal preference?

Thanks for the video. It helped a lot.

I played so many times with huge bases i could walk around. But it wasn't very flexible, and once i got breathable atmosphere wasn't really needed.

Everything gets mined and stored next to the crafter, then they craft and ship to where they're needed. Which in some cases is right next to it and used by another crafter. So this works for me, and yes meteors do sometimes get in the way, but you can stand on top of them and interact (I've been working on creating a compact storage facility using that idea), so it's not that bad.

I just find this much eaiser to build, i don't have to keep making bigger buildings or moving things around.

The 9 rockets was because my autocrafters were full and i was getting TT quite slowly. But now i have about 80k, so i guess im good for the next update.

[Kat Ballou]

Originally posted by CrazedBumblebee:

I played so many times with huge bases i could walk around. But it wasn't very flexible, and once i got breathable atmosphere wasn't really needed.

That's a good point. I might have to rethink my building strategy. lol I guess we get used to doing things a certain way and it's hard to change the implementation, but you're right that a build like yours would be much easier to do.

Is one T2 storage locker per ore/item enough? I would think that even with the huge number of drones you have, they would have trouble keeping the lockers stocked up enough to supply the 7 PQ autocrafters. How many ore extractors do you have for each ore type?
I have between 7-10 for each, but it seems that's where my bottleneck is and the drones are often waiting for ore to transport.

[Pesky]

T2 storage lockers are overkill for anything except a player who is playing the game just to accumulate riches. There's no point in them for anyone just trying to 'win' the game. This isn't really a factory game, it just supports that approach for people who want to build a huge Evil Genius factory.

[Kat Ballou]

Originally posted by Pesky:

T2 storage lockers are overkill for anything except a player who is playing the game just to accumulate riches. There's no point in them for anyone just trying to 'win' the game. This isn't really a factory game, it just supports that approach for people who want to build a huge Evil Genius factory.

Whoa, that's a bit of an over-generalization, isn't it? If T2 storage lockers had been available when I first started playing, (which was when the game first came out), I would have used them then because one regular locker was never enough when I was crafting. There's nothing worse when you're in the mood to craft a bunch of items to help raise your terraforming level than to run out of ore and have to go running around collecting more resources. Many of us that play these type of games tend to be a bit of a hoarder when it comes to resources, but that's fine. There's nothing wrong with playing the game however you enjoy the game. There were no "riches" to accumulate really until the trading update, so I think it's unfair to label everyone as trying to "win" the game for just wanting to have plenty of resources on hand to play the game however they want to play. This isn't a game that has "winning" as an object. There's no competition, no leaderboard, no winners/losers. And it's one of the things I love about the game.

[Toasty]

Kevlan, wow we have done almost the exact same thing with some slight differences. I was driven by fighting against the bottle necks in making 2 circuit boards non-stop for 7 rockets, as you mentioned the problem you eventually run into is mushrooms for bio nuggies. I was lucky and got a few extra seeds from the new "shuttle" crash event before it's frequency was nerfed.

I scaled up because it was something to do and i find this game very relaxing.

[CrazedBumblebee]

Originally posted by Kat Ballou:

Originally posted by CrazedBumblebee:

I played so many times with huge bases i could walk around. But it wasn't very flexible, and once i got breathable atmosphere wasn't really needed.

That's a good point. I might have to rethink my building strategy. lol I guess we get used to doing things a certain way and it's hard to change the implementation, but you're right that a build like yours would be much easier to do.

Is one T2 storage locker per ore/item enough? I would think that even with the huge number of drones you have, they would have trouble keeping the lockers stocked up enough to supply the 7 PQ autocrafters. How many ore extractors do you have for each ore type?
I have between 7-10 for each, but it seems that's where my bottleneck is and the drones are often waiting for ore to transport.

I have:
* 23 Zeolite Ore Extractor t3
* 35 Uranium Ore Extractor t3
* 25 Osmium Ore Extractor t3
* 32 Methane Gas Extractor t2
* 52 Iridium Ore Extractor t3

I'm usually low on Zeolite or Osmium, and sometimes Methane.