Rail Automation

[Joelle]

Genuine question here that I am struggling to figure out.

If the goal of the game is to unlock all planet gateways/cores and certain railway items require end-game material, what is the point in getting all this automation setup other than the wow factor? It feels like you get access to a very cool thing at the end (railway station at least) without much use for it by that point in progression to provide value to you. i.e. Early on I see the need to have various mining camps and automation to run things to your storage center on a base, but you don't have access to the auto-miner thing yet or rail stations.

[seven]

I don't really see that there are any end-game requirements for any of the the train items. The only rare item early game would be titanium which you can get as soon as you unlock the trade platform.

But, I do also question what is the point of automation in the game, other than a goal in itself. There is no reason to collect large amounts of materials, other than collecting large amounts of materials. I'm about halfway through a playthrough where I can only use the small shuttle, the tractor and trailer, and train items. I've only done any automation to complete the autoarm mission. Automation isn't needed to complete the game.

Automation can be a fun part of the game. I enjoyed figuring out how to automate using the trade rocket to convert scrap to other materials. But in the end I have canisters of resources with no purpose. I wish there were mid or end game things that did require large amounts of effort, or resources.

[JKbigshot]

I'd say the automation stuff is more so for the events that come and go, since each even requires a ton of certain items and basically having everything automated (atleast to your liking) would make the grind for these events a lot easier

[Mr.SeriousCatt]

Originally posted by JKbigshot:

I'd say the automation stuff is more so for the events that come and go, since each even requires a ton of certain items and basically having everything automated (atleast to your liking) would make the grind for these events a lot easier

Yeah but the events are a secondary thing on the game, something external not tied to the mission or story, right?. Ppl wants an excuse to hoard materials, on factorio or satisfactory this works because at some point, new unlocked items and structures ask for absurd amounts of materials so automation becomes a must to make things easy as you progress

Astroneer needs to start to think bigger, we need some goal, big goal to give us an excuse to hoard, to automate things, to make things easier to hoard, to share and move materials from planet to planet