Not Enough Silicon

[Acedias]

There doesn't seem to be enough silicon (and I am playing 'rich resources')

I'm so far out from my base it takes ages just to scroll there.

I found a plateau with 2x 6000+ deposits this morning and it was gone in an hour.

The later recipes all use silicon in prodigious quantities and since every recipe uses the previous recipe as an ingredient it just multiples the further you get.

One IC Chip uses 5 silicon + 5 Cable (which itself uses 2 silicon and a wire uses which is another silicon) which is 60 silicon sand per chip.

Cable is used in the high density frames and the optical cables too.

The cable recipe needs to be reduced given its the base for everything and silicon needs to be way more common.

Unless there is some other way and I am missing it?

[darkmathis]

Originally posted by Overeagerdragon:

I pretty much did the same I did in Factorio when Alien artifacts were still a thing. I build a Dragon teeth laser/plasma wall around my base and then went out to piss off all the bug nests I could find... put a Twinminer with a small cargobay on a program to collect scattered silica and linked it to a storage depot I built near some "hotspots" near the wall....

Don't work hard... let the Silica come to you :P

I have a cadre of cubs I programmed with some "kite at max turret range" logic and an auxiliary "pick up anything in the power grid" on a twinbot. I need to refine it so the whole thing escorts the twinbot back to base with spoils, but I can generally dispatch them in a direction and check in with them later

[Joelle]

Originally posted by darkmathis:

Originally posted by Joelle:

Experiencing this issue now within my game on rich resources. (I saw a video of someone saying restart your game and put on rich resources as you'll regret it later. Was about 20 hours into a game and decided to reboot at beginning. Cannot imagine if I hadn't done that and am still having challenges obtaining silica on rich mode today. Definitely should have larger veins in the plateaus.

I *think* the devs are trying to incentivize combat, because if you approach bug nests and back off without killing them, each bug drops disgusting amounts of silica. I have a suspicion this resource is intended to be farmed by aggressive territorial negotiation tactics.

Yeah, I do understand that. I've done that thus far, just the higher tech recipes consumes so much silica compared to the other resources. That's more of a feeling watching my 2.6k stores and harvesting operation tank heavily when I start using the upper tier items for research or items. To be fair, I haven't spent the time to actually compare 1:1 higher tech items and how many use silica and at what amount compared to iron ore or crystal.

[darkmathis]

Originally posted by Joelle:

Originally posted by darkmathis:

I *think* the devs are trying to incentivize combat, because if you approach bug nests and back off without killing them, each bug drops disgusting amounts of silica. I have a suspicion this resource is intended to be farmed by aggressive territorial negotiation tactics.

Yeah, I do understand that. I've done that thus far, just the higher tech recipes consumes so much silica compared to the other resources. That's more of a feeling watching my 2.6k stores and harvesting operation tank heavily when I start using the upper tier items for research or items. To be fair, I haven't spent the time to actually compare 1:1 higher tech items and how many use silica and at what amount compared to iron ore or crystal.

I *believe* one of the blight techs actually allows you to spawn your own bugs. I'm curious whether this will be a way to locally farm silica, or if it's just there to give you access to chitin (which you can make with blight chunks and silica anyway).

[Zaflis]

Originally posted by darkmathis:

I *think* the devs are trying to incentivize combat, because if you approach bug nests and back off without killing them, each bug drops disgusting amounts of silica. I have a suspicion this resource is intended to be farmed by aggressive territorial negotiation tactics.

The hard part about combat right now is that there is no big map mode. If you play with only "rich" you will quickly explore so far away that it's getting hard to track where home is even. Finding your mining groups out in the fields will be another challenge, if not counting the biggest one; making automatic commander/follower behaviors for the bots which is very non-trivial. It also requires powering of the miner group and bots that carry ore, and if that carrier is only a twinbot it can be quite slow. The further away you mine the more you need ore carrier bots. Just giving it 2 solar panels might not be enough guarantee when it gets night.
(Yes i'm aware of remote powering module but that will also require setup for each carrier bot.)

[darkmathis]

Originally posted by Zaflis:

Originally posted by darkmathis:

I *think* the devs are trying to incentivize combat, because if you approach bug nests and back off without killing them, each bug drops disgusting amounts of silica. I have a suspicion this resource is intended to be farmed by aggressive territorial negotiation tactics.

The hard part about combat right now is that there is no big map mode. If you play with only "rich" you will quickly explore so far away that it's getting hard to track where home is even. Finding your mining groups out in the fields will be another challenge, if not counting the biggest one; making automatic commander/follower behaviors for the bots which is very non-trivial. It also requires powering of the miner group and bots that carry ore, and if that carrier is only a twinbot it can be quite slow. The further away you mine the more you need ore carrier bots. Just giving it 2 solar panels might not be enough guarantee when it gets night.
(Yes i'm aware of remote powering module but that will also require setup for each carrier bot.)

When/if the issue where you can't write behaviors to use the deployer, this will probably not be an issue. You can create an auxiliary whose only job is to equip the deployer and set up some kind of FOB. I would envision something with a medium solar cell, sign, radar, and power field.

You know someone is eventually going to write a self-expanding base where they basically create weigh stations to operate as navigation checkpoints.