Colony Factory went crazy!

[Shadow Delta]

So I finally got my colony up and running, and I moved all of my resources into the storage. Then the replicator went beserk and ate up all of my supplies to make a TON of torches, and heat packs... I haven't seen what else is missing, I did see that I have no Aluminum, and i had well over a couple hundred. Now they're gone too.

Why is going beserk and why can't I tell people to stop queing items up?

[dtt.scanner]

hmm... I don't think it takes that much Aluminum, but it does use Silver and Zinc to make the Batteries. The Aluminum may be hiding somewhere else in your inventory. As for the Torches, you NEVER want to do the quest to make the Roasted Meat. Just buy it and turn it in. Do not learn ANY recipes that use Torches as a heat source. You will regret it for the rest of the game. Only learn the recipes that use Heat Packs (... most, if not all, of Vera's recipes.) Rice Balls will probably be the staple of your diet, until you get into major battles with Puja and Paja. They are easy to make and give you more boost than Fried Lotus, which is probably the other early game staple. If you learn and make Roasted Meat for your food, then it will literally take over your Replicator. (Very annoying... especially if you are trying to make things that use the fat... the Replicator will use every ounce of fat in your Storage to make torches, until the Storage is packed with them. Also, they do not stack.)

As a remedy, do not store any fat in your Storage, and you can turn all of the torches into charcoal by placing them and picking them back up. The charcoal will stack and is still useful for things like gunpowder. Hopefully, the colony Processor will not send people out to get more fat.

I think if you have enough heat packs in Storage, and no fat, and you have learned easy recipes that use the heat packs (like Rice Balls), then I don't think the Colony will choose to find more Fat for torches. Don't quote me on that. I learned a long time ago to avoid it, so I am only hoping for the best for you. :D

BTW, you can check all of the recipes in a Creation sandbox world, before you buy the scripts. There are only a few that use torches... most of them use heat packs.

[dtt.scanner]

The Replicator (and Processor, once manned) are designed to automate survival for the colony, producing everything that the colony needs to sustain itself. You do not have to grow anything (Fried Lotus can be gathered by the processor, and cooked in the replicator), you do not have to gather fuel for the Power Plant (coal gathering is automated), Hydrogen for the Fusion Plant, batteries for energy weapons, ammo for ballistic weapons, and heat sources (heat packs and torches) are all automated so that you literally have to do nothing once the colony is set up.

That doesn't mean you can't plant and harvest crops for a wider food variety, or set up processes to collect other things, or use the Replicator for your own projects, like turrets and vehicles. It just means that the Colony will survive on its own if you are off questing for a long period of time.

You do need to actually collect the Coal/Hydrogen from Storage and put it in the Power Plant, but you can actually do that from anywhere on the map if it is already in your inventory, so it is still an easy thing to keep going, even if you are away. Just make sure to refill from storage when you are in the Colony, if your inventory is running low.

[Shadow Delta]

Ok awesome thank you guys! Wish I had known about the torches. I think they made so many torches to make a heat source for food. But I did find my alminium. So I will try and make sure I leave the fat out of the storage and see if that helps prevent the problem. Wish I had known torches would be this big of a problem. I remember starting out and buying every new script I saw, now I wish I hadn't been so gun ho, especially since half of those scripts I bought, ended being taught to me for free anyway.

[Eternie]

We all make mistakes like that, and hopefully learn from the mistakes.

As inventory size isn't an issue only store in the colony the things your willing to go without or that they need.

I made the mistake of putting a lot of stacks of meat into the colony, as it's the currency for me to buy stuff, suddenly losing it all with the colony processor going into overdrive to use up all the meat.

I also didn't notice the reason for torches filling storage so I've learnt another little trick from dtt. Won't help for this play through though.