Do you send all materials to a central island?

[spark.milanders]

I have restarted after realizing you can have drones transport items. I've even recently unlocked the bridge and flingers and built my 3 monuments. Thinking about redesigning my base the biggest thing I struggle with is sending ants to the other islands - I'm constantly micro managing the larvae carried over and look away for a minute to adjust the scrap and glass carriers and next thing you know I have waaaay too many babies on the new island and home base is short staffed.
Is it best to just send a few and mine say glass shards then send them back to the starter island to smelt them there? Or smelt them on desert island and send the glass blocks back? Do you make the copper and resin and such on desert island or send it all back to the main base? I can't tell what's more efficient. It's a lot of travel time to send it back but it's much less management of population. I have the flingers but haven't tried them yet I wonder if I could put landing pads and launchers close to the borders and just have the drones carry items a short distance then use flingers to get them back to the main base area? Since the 3rd island is a ton of fiber potential it makes me think I'm supposed to be using a lot more drones
My next step is building my first dyne and before I get all that setup I wonder how I should arrange things.

[Alleas]

for the gyne i reccomend looking at one of my guides, should help out. for the transport op goods, if you wanne use drones setup supply chains with stockpile gates on mian island connected to other islands, and vice virsa , so you keep the stock of items in check and dont have to do micro managing. you can olso do that for larva.
if you wanne use slingers just set it up that they sling what you need with small workers or something

if i go to a new island i do a simple setup of a smelter of iron with a screw creating facility and a assembler that make small digger ants and when the small digger ants about to die they go to a combiner to make a digger. then i let them mine until they die.

i olso use the small worker ants that are made there to do small tasks like, slinging stuff, hauling stuff, and when they are old send them to the production chain to become small diggers

[Frankie]

I mostly do all on main but the longer you play the more you realise that you are probably supposed to play on all islands. Some buildings can only be built on certain islands is a giveaway for example ;) But then on the other hand I am more like an automation "light" kinda guy, I bump my head against the wall until the wall breaks :)

[spark.milanders]

Originally posted by Frankie:

I mostly do all on main but the longer you play the more you realise that your probably supposed to play on all islands. Some buildings can only be built on certain islands is a giveaway for example ;) But then on the other hand I am more like an autmation "light" kinda guy, I bump my head against the wall until the wall breaks :)

I'm the same way Frankie I play factorio and DSP and just brute force some things. I'm not that good but I enjoy it!

[jan]

For the population control: Use a Larvaestorage, which is always full. But put the dispenser behind Timer Gates.
Lets say every 30 seconds (max 2 Larvae per minute) makes roughly a workforce of 10 Small Worker Ants on the other island. Combiners and Assemblers take care of the old Ants, to make Diggers/more Workers and a Recycler is a must have in the end.
Most of the time i do have to many Iron Workers, in a waiting line, but thats not an real issue. In the end the Ants will always be Inventors.

[Frankie]

Originally posted by spark.milanders:

Originally posted by Frankie:

I mostly do all on main but the longer you play the more you realise that your probably supposed to play on all islands. Some buildings can only be built on certain islands is a giveaway for example ;) But then on the other hand I am more like an autmation "light" kinda guy, I bump my head against the wall until the wall breaks :)

I'm the same way Frankie I play factorio and DSP and just brute force some things. I'm not that good but I enjoy it!

Glad to see that I am not the only one :) I think at the and of the day you just want to get as many enjoyable hours out of a game, and the way we do it nets more hours ;)

[Foxy]

with catapults i find flying limited time drones to slowly move stuff irrelevant. a catapult crewed by an eternal pod 1 worker will move around 20 items a minute at a cost of 0.2 energy pod

If the other island is close (really close) you can use the lower level slinger with the same setup

[RiO]

Originally posted by jan:

For the population control: Use a Larvaestorage, which is always full. But put the dispenser behind Timer Gates.
Lets say every 30 seconds (max 2 Larvae per minute) makes roughly a workforce of 10 Small Worker Ants on the other island. Combiners and Assemblers take care of the old Ants, to make Diggers/more Workers and a Recycler is a must have in the end.
Most of the time i do have to many Iron Workers, in a waiting line, but thats not an real issue. In the end the Ants will always be Inventors.

Timer gates work, but are futzy and operate off of the principle that your production rates and thus your required colony size on an island will always be roughly the same. Which isn't how things end up working in reality with fluctuating stock.

Consider instead the following:

Stockpile gates can connect across islands.
And larvae storage counts as a stockpile entity.

You can connect a stockpile gate to a larvae storage just across the bridge, then setup a dispenser wherever on the next island over you want to put your actual nest and pull larvae into incubators.

For distributing ants, you can simply use counter gates to observe the amount of 'free' ants stuck in a buffer loop, and only incubate more when it dips below a threshold.

[Zaxabock]

I tried to figure out how to get digger ants on the desert island to start collecting rubble and it took me way too long to realize that drones can just carry larvae over to the island, so you can produce them there after setting up the necessary production lines. Deceptively simple!

Also here's my way of controlling ant birth rate, hope it makes sense:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3446225300

[Opium]

Yeah i still build mostly on main (just mining on other islands). I do concrete production on desert now though given it's the only one with rubble... well it was till i just ran out, now I catapult rubble over to it from the "little random desert" island below it...

I kinda ran out of space on main though: so I deleted all the gynne stuff. Have just started rebuilding that on desert. Built a massive collider setup on desert: its my only other island with a decent main path loop, and i was about 100 hours in before i did that. Oh and stupid fabric: I started building that on jungle because it was bugging me catapulting fibre over to main just to send fabric back (I have a bunch of workers there collecting pods that turn in to drones at end of life and use the fabric)