Space exploration! extremely complex.

[Bruce]

I'm tired, I decided to try space exploration and after 60 hours of playing I haven't left my planet because everything is extremely complex and frustrating. I find the concept interesting but with this complexity players give up even before launching their first rocket.
I tried to continue with a vanilla save but it changes the recipes which makes everything confusing.
Im done with mods.

[Zinc Saucier]

I agree. The biggest problem with SE is that it's just "more of the same". There's no real game changing mechanics as far as I can see. Even building spaceships is just another way of expanding the map. It's pointless.

[Nico]

SE is known to be a very long and tedous mod, which especially only really starts to be noticeable different once you launch the rocket. So probably not a great first mod if you hoped to see changes immediately.

A very different mod from the very start would probably be bob&angel. Though especially with plants and animals it gets quite complex. If you want something simpler you might enjoy Krastorio 2. Which btw is compatible with Space Exploration ... not like I would recommend that after you already got tired after the first bits of regular SE ....

And there still are many other great full overhaul mods out there. SE is just not a too great one mechanic wise, as it's built to be very long and tedious, which is not something for everyone. Another example would be Pyanodon, which is infamous for being stupidly complex. But most other full overhaul mods are usually somewhat normal and built to be fun without being too complex, obviously with different ranges of complexity. But in general it's always recommended to use a mod like helmod to get a better overview over all the possible recipes to figure out good ways to produce the materials you need, since without it you sometimes will still have troubles figuring that out..

[Shimazu]

SE is really tedious but i like that tbh.

Can Always try something easier or different.

Angel+Bob

Nullius

Krastorio2

Industrial Revolution 2

Stay away from pyanodon

[BlueRock]

I have gotten a bit further in space exploration, but also combined it with Krastorio 2. Have built in space and colonized on a couple other planets to build utility and production science. I cheated a bit by grabbing a blueprint for a mall, because using the previous version of everything in recipes leads to a heap of spaghetti before getting logi chests. SE with or without K2 definitely ramps up the difficulty on solving logistic problems, building circuit networks, and handling byproducts for recipes. Trying to automate cargo rockets that can supply multiple items to orbit is a bit challenging. Some use single item cargo rockets, but it isn't as efficient. I finally learned how to use the matrix function in factory planner when determining how to setup iridite core mining. Was it fun? Kinda. But I think maybe I should have tried finishing Krastorio 2 first on its own.

[RiO]

Originally posted by BlueRock:

Some use single item cargo rockets, but it isn't as efficient.

Ultimately, it is actually more efficient. (And a lot simpler to orchestrate too.)
But it requires a much bigger and more expansive set-up to maintain separate silos per product. So it isn't quite as convenient when you're just starting out.

[dynalon]

SE is mod about logistics, it will also force you to learn circuit network. If either one of those is not for you then stay away from SE. I would recommend finding a group of people to play SE with, it is so much different when you can just leave some tasks to someone else.
I would also recommend QoL mods, recipe book in particular or any other which shows what is used for what. There are few others such as longer space underground belts and pipes, maybe factory finder (very useful in multiplayer).

[shadain597]

Originally posted by Bruce:

I tried to continue with a vanilla save but it changes the recipes which makes everything confusing.

It's an overhaul mod. You start the playthrough with it enabled and from there you are stuck with it. Even smaller mods can break things if you try adding/removing things mid-playthrough. But you can have multiple, separate playthroughs with different mod sets that you switch back and forth between, provided you make sure that the correct mods are loaded before entering the save.

Im done with mods.

You do you, but it'd be a shame if you let Earendel's highly questionable execution of a good idea keep you from trying all of the other interesting things out there.

[Nyx (She/Her)]

Originally posted by BlueRock:

I cheated a bit by grabbing a blueprint for a mall

nonsense, blueprints are shared for a reason; that is not cheating at all

[dxmc]

I'm over 600 hours into a playthrough of K2/SE. I did one playthrough of vanilla, then one with K2, now this. I've enjoyed the challenge of learning logisitics and circuit networks, this experience has taught me more about the game than anything else I've tried. I think it's a great mod and it should be kept in mind that it's a work in progress, with frequent updates and changes that have improved it a lot.

On the downside, it's supposed to be about exploration, but that turns out to be a repetitious process of going to another planet that's not going to be much different than any other planet, there's just a few types, setting up a mine and/or subfactory, often with a blueprint, automating it, then moving on to the next planet. Once you get the hang of the logistics it all becomes pretty routine, just more expansion.

And at the same time all of the advanced sciences follow the same path, just with different materials. So you have to produce huge numbers of different data cards and that seems excessive and tedious.

But on the positive side, advanced research gives you all kinds of really good advanced weapons, armour and other gear. You can build some pretty interesting and different stuff and ultimately it's a great challenge to get to deep space science and the arcospheres. So I'd agree that it could use more work, it's really more of a collection of interesting ideas than a complete, coherent concept, but I still think it's a great mod for those who don't mind putting the time into it, want a good challenge, and who really want to learn more about the game's more advanced mechanics.

[dynalon]

Originally posted by dxmc:

But on the positive side, advanced research gives you all kinds of really good advanced weapons, armour and other gear. You can build some pretty interesting and different stuff and ultimately it's a great challenge to get to deep space science and the arcospheres. So I'd agree that it could use more work, it's really more of a collection of interesting ideas than a complete, coherent concept, but I still think it's a great mod for those who don't mind putting the time into it, want a good challenge, and who really want to learn more about the game's more advanced mechanics.

I find the research severely lacking. There are only very few researches which I found useful, like space elevator, spaceship research or railgun turrets. Everything else is either expensive to use that it becomes inconvenient, it does not provide enough improvement to bother crafting it or it comes too late to matter.
For example piledriver from weapon delivery cannon - why would anyone use that? Artillery with nuclear ammo does better job in every single aspect. Or last tier of furnaces, yes it is twice faster but it also take twice more space, who would bother redesigning whole city block because of that. Ammunition for gun turrets - there are 5 or more types and I haven’t touched gun turrets since early game, what is the point of it, if there are better options (wall with lasers supported by railgun or flame turrets). Same goes for personal weaponry, it just comes too late or feels redundant or inferior to what you currently have.
Energy generation - why are better reactors locked so far in the research tree, by the time you get them you will probably have space elevator in every orbit with solar panels supplying all the power you will ever need. I could go on, but you get the picture. I still like the logistic part, that is what I enjoy about the mod, but research in general is terrible and it does not feel rewarding at all. The pain you have to go through to setup each science is just not worth what you get from it.

[DaBa]

I don't really know what to tell you. You should've known what you're getting yourself into?

[Zaflis]

If you say SE is tedious, you also want to stay away from Bob&Angel's. Just playing Bob's alone is too tedious for a lot of people, but it's barely manageable. Industrial Revolution is next step down in difficulty and Krastorio 2 even easier than that.

Why IR2 is difficult is because it has many different "eras" of tech. You need to power assemblers, furnaces and everything with steam for a while for example and then have to figure out which craftable parts are redundant in the next era. Once you have everything done electrically it presumably gets easier but it may take dozens of hours to get there.

[AlexMBrennan]

If you say SE is tedious, you also want to stay away from Bob&Angel's

I disagree - AngelBob makes the recipes more complex but you can still play the game normally.

SE on the other hand basically forces you to play with Seablock (most stuff has to be built in space where every floor tile has to be expensively manufactured).

That is why AB is better: you can enjoy your fiendishly complicated petroleum recipes without having to wait 10h to build enough landfill for a refinery.

[shadain597]

Originally posted by Zaflis:

Why IR2 is difficult is because it has many different "eras" of tech. You need to power assemblers, furnaces and everything with steam for a while for example and then have to figure out which craftable parts are redundant in the next era. Once you have everything done electrically it presumably gets easier but it may take dozens of hours to get there.

By the way, IR 3 is now available, though since it's only like a month old it might still be getting significant updates/changes--and it has a lot more listed incompatibilities.

In my experience, IR 2/3 shouldn't take dozens of hours to reach electricity, not unless you are playing some sort of marathon game. I think about 10 for anyone who can get research going at a good pace, and us slower folks might approach twice that. I guess getting all of the electrical components produced and placed down in a new factory layout might technically push some people over the 2 dozen hour mark?

One of the important things to realize about the IR series is that the creator wanted more intermediates and/or really hates handcrafting--so either get comfortable with making malls from the very start or get a mod that speeds up handcrafting. Or a bit of both, because many factory buildings take over 1 minute to craft by hand from scratch.

[Zaflis]

Originally posted by AlexMBrennan:

If you say SE is tedious, you also want to stay away from Bob&Angel's

I disagree - AngelBob makes the recipes more complex but you can still play the game normally.

It's the recipe complexity that kills it for me, i tried A&B once or twice but probably quit during first 1 or 2 sciences. Comparably i've gotten to endgame (tier 8 modules etc) in Bob's twice. K2&SE is going much better so far, although it's not in space yet it's roughly the next step to do. That's somewhere around 80 hours in when i rebuilt entire base for certain train layout...

Looks like this (85 train stations and more later, no yellow science done yet): https://i.imgur.com/UKMRB6O.png