Is there a way to speed up construction?

[brocoli_cuit]

The lag is killing me. When I put down a blueprint, I take a book. I'll have to keep moving my mecha to enable the lazy drones to reach their target. After a few pages and a few minutes, the blueprint will be finished. There is no way I'll use a planetary blueprint, it will take hours for the drones to build it. I have already reduced the frame rate to 30, and dropped the resolution to 1400X900 or something. Is there a mod to get more drones, or to speed things up? As it stands, there is no way I will have the time and patience to build even a ring of the Dyson sphere. I miss factorio's drones and roboports. Scaling up wasa breeze, while here, it is a pain.

[Coops]

Don't use massive blueprints? At least not early in the game.
Research more drones and drone engines.
Play on a faster computer?

I realize that it's just the way I choose to play, but using blueprints makes the game a cut and paste exercise and not a factory building game. What satisfaction can you get by not solving challenges? Not flaming you, play the way you want, just my lone opinion.

[Dirkels]

Upgrades are your friends here, both to give you more drones and to make them fly faster. However it does make the drones use more energy so make sure you have enough energy in your Mecha to power them.

[kris44dad]

Originally posted by brocoli_cuit:

The lag is killing me. When I put down a blueprint, I take a book. I'll have to keep moving my mecha to enable the lazy drones to reach their target. After a few pages and a few minutes, the blueprint will be finished. There is no way I'll use a planetary blueprint, it will take hours for the drones to build it. I have already reduced the frame rate to 30, and dropped the resolution to 1400X900 or something. Is there a mod to get more drones, or to speed things up? As it stands, there is no way I will have the time and patience to build even a ring of the Dyson sphere. I miss factorio's drones and roboports. Scaling up wasa breeze, while here, it is a pain.

Turn off rendering of the spheres in game from the sphere editor panel. That may help

[josmith7]

Construction speed is controlled by 4 items - and 3 of them you can improve through research or planning.

* Drone range -- that's fixed (outside of maybe some mod I'm not familiar with)

* Drone speed -- research into the Upgrade 'Drone Engine' can drastically increase their speed -- eventually up to level 26 (drone speed 75 m/s) --so they can fly out, build the thing, and fly back to you much quicker than their glacial early-game pace.

* Drone number -- initially you have only 3 drones. Research into the Upgrade 'Communication Control' can boost that up indefinitely (though I've noticed the game didn't seem to use all my drones once I had 60+). But more drones means more things get built at once.

* Energy -- if your mech runs out of power the drones only move one at a time and only at their initial glacial pace; that cripples your building speed. Make sure you've got enough fuel, or are within range of enough Wireless Power Towers to keep your charge up. And of course research into the Upgrades 'Mecha Core' (store more power) and 'Energy Circuit' (get power from fuel faster) can both help here.

But even with very fast, very numerous drones, construction is still much faster if you walk/fly around so they don't need to fly more than, say, 1/4 of their build distance -- otherwise the back and forth flying time really slows things down.

----
But since even letting the drones fly out to build range massively slows down construction a mod that just allowed them to fly at planetary distances might be more annoying than helpful; unless you wanted to drop a planetwide blueprint and then go do something else for a hour or so. You'd want a mod that also either made them vastly faster, or vastly increased the number of tasks they could do before returning so you didn't have to wait for them to fly halfway round the world and back all the time.

[Kyrros]

Originally posted by josmith7:

* Energy -- if your mech runs out of power the drones only move one at a time and only at their initial glacial pace; that cripples your building speed. Make sure you've got enough fuel, or are within range of enough Wireless Power Towers to keep your charge up. And of course research into the Upgrades 'Mecha Core' (store more power) and 'Energy Circuit' (get power from fuel faster) can both help here.

This is the HUGE one. It was a pretty profound change that the devs just kinda stealthed in a year or so ago (used to be Drones would 'pull' what power they needed at launch and fly full-speed the whole time, and you just wouldn't launch individual drones until you have enough power for each launch). Most people haven't even noticed the change, or haven't made the connection/correlation with low Icarus mech energy and hugely slower drone speeds.

Drones draw power while IN FLIGHT - the longer they stay in flight, the more strain on your mech's power they put, individually. Stay close to them, move with them section by section, and keep a wireless power tower or two down while you move (pick them back up as you move out of charge range). Even if you aren't suffering from power issues, just moving with them as the build sections at a time, you'll see a vast improvement in build times almost immediately as that cuts down on dead flighttime as well.

Also, drone upgrade "Communications Control 3" will literally double their effectiveness, as they go from carrying one item to place at a time, to carrying 2 at time.
"Communications Control 6" will double it again (+2) to make it a total of 4 items they can carry. Huge bang-for-buck return on those two specific upgrades, the sooner you get those two, the more effective the rest of your other drone upgrades will be.

[MrFox]

Upgrade all your drone stuff. My mech currently runs 40 drones