How "bulletproof" does Nauvis need to be before leaving?

[Lucid]

In every 1.0 game I've played I get real lazy towards the end because if you only need to launch 1 rocket, who cares if you chest buffer the silo? And if your train signalling causes a hiccup once every 6 hours when that one train that's too long for the intersection collides with another, it's not so bad to manually back it out and then reset it. Leave all that technical debt to the biters.

But I'm now faced with the prospect that the game is gonna keep going once I start on another planet and I'm not gonna be around for... Well probably a couple of days once it all adds up.

I know you can remote control tanks and if you have bot and radar coverage you can still do a lot, but what are some of the problems I definitely don't want to have happen while I'm off world? How much effort goes into smoothing out those small manual tasks you never bothered to sort out permanent fixes for?

[knighttemplar1960]

The small problems are still small problems. If you have an issue that occurs once every 6 hours you'll be fine as long as you have enough material on the new planet to launch a rocket and get back to Nauvis (or which ever planet is having the issue you can't solve remotely).

As long as you bring enough rocket fuel, low density structures, and blue circuits along to launch a rocket from the new planet you can get back in a reasonable amount of time and fix the problem manually.

So you can handle soft defenses if you plan ahead or you can harden your defenses and take more time and have to import less stuff.

[Chris!!]

I haven't quite reached the point yet so I don't know how applicable it really is, but I would probably secure the perimeter with flamethrower turrets and walls, then use trains or nearby oil patches to fuel them.

I would then automate repair packs, walls and flamethrower turrets, then give the tank a portable roboport and bots so I can send it over to keep the walls repaired.

A more boring solution would be to stop polluting so that they wouldn't attack my base while I'm gone, and only send a tank to destroy nests encroaching on my territory.

[GAMING_Alligator]

I spent some time evicting all biters from my pollution cloud, and used lakes around it as the edges of straight lines of laser turret spam ("fortified perimeter walls" if I'm being polite). Each of these lines has their own small train station with provider chests of walls, repair packs, and spare turrets, limited to one stack each, and a small squad of worker bots responsible for maintaining that line. Trains are set to return to the mall to pick up replenishment if any of the stacks runs out.

Took a while to set up, but as long as nothing disastrous happens to its power supply, the factory is basically bullet poof to biter attack.

[Lucid]

I have got a wall off beyond the pollution cloud, currently on gun turrets with uranium ammo. I have the roboports set up but I do need to automate repair packs and ensure they get shipped out. It's looking like I'll need to expand it before I leave and claim some more copper nodes though, so I can look to set up flamers as I go.

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

So you can handle soft defenses if you plan ahead or you can harden your defenses and take more time and have to import less stuff.

I am very interested in strategies to reduce the amount of building rockets to import/export or shuttle myself for solving problems, because those things are expensive.

[malogoss]

Odds are, something will go wrong while you're away.

Automate the crafting of as many things as you can before leaving. Hmm, well, shotgun ammo would not help at all while you're away, but the most crucial things would be:

assemblers
construction bots
roboports
belts
inserters
poles
provider chests
storage chests
pipes
possibly chem plants too

If all those are easily available, at least you should be able to improvise if something else is needed.

I'd also recommend having at least 40-50% of your power made by solar panels. At minimum when you're not researching anything and your factory is idling. Solar can hardly fail you, while other sources can just shut down while you're busy elsewhere, and it's a nightmare to restart, if not impossible.

Finally the absolute safest thing would be to do the trip with some power source in your luggage (solar?), with the mats to build a rocket silo and a rocket asap. If thins go south, that's a free return ticket. But honestly, this might be over kill if you did all the rest.

Good luck.

[Simon]

You could pretty much entirely abandon Nauvis if you felt like it; there is no way to soft lock yourself here, other planets have all you need to launch a rocket.

That being said, a couple roboports and construction bots is literally all you really need. You can do anything so long as you have construction bots. By the sound o fit, you're way over prepared, I wouldn't worry about leaving Nauvis behind at all if you have a parameter wall.

[Underscorecow]

If you wanna continue to do your researching on nauvis then you need it to be pretty bullet proof.

Otherwise have the conveyors going to your labs cut so the science portion of your factory eventually turns off and the remaining resources are only spent sustaining your factory (making solars, laser turrets, ammo, etc) you wont produce much pollution just to sustain a small mall for that anyway. Biter attacks should become irrelevant even without flamethrower turrets.

[mrxak]

You can return to Nauvis easily, and you probably will, if you go to your new planet initially with enough stuff to build a rocket silo there and at least two rockets (one for you, one for the initial load of science to send back to unlock the new planet's tech). The main thing you want on Nauvis is a fully working base with everything connected to logistics so you can ship more stuff from Nauvis to your new planet. Getting regular deliveries, at least to start with, helps get your new planet's base up and running much quicker. And, if necessary, you can ship yourself stuff like rocket component ingredients so you can return.

Make sure you set up your landing pads on each planet with a bit of circuitry to set the requests, so as to automatically pull down goods in orbit, have a few platforms shuttling stuff around in a loop around the inner planets, and everything will work out great. I put all my requests on a constant combinator, and let other combinators do the math to figure out what's actually required to top off my planet's storage of things, and request full rocket loads of the stuff from orbit. And I have a delivery platform from each planet going around dropping stuff as the other planets require. With automated interplanetary logistics, I can ghost build anything I want remotely from wherever I happen to be, and things will just happen without me being there, even if it takes a few minutes for a new interplanetary delivery.

I returned to Nauvis after just a few hours on Vulcanus, once I killed a few worms and had everything set up nice to produce rockets and science. I haven't been back in person since. Instead I went to Fulgora, then eventually Gleba, returning to Nauvis periodically as desired. Until getting Foundation on Aquilo, you may need to visit Fulgora a few times to set up island trains, because having one logistic network everywhere for construction won't be possible. I found there was really no reason to be on Gleba at all. And I left Aquilo almost immediately, too, since there's nothing to do there that can't be done by bots with remote view.

So, really, you only ever need to spend time on Vulcanus to kill worms, or Nauvis to clear out biter nests. I feel like it's sensible to be spending all your time on Nauvis, after you've expanded your territory on Vulcanus enough to be fine there for a very long time. And then you only need to go to Gleba again after your initial visit if something messes up because of spoilage and you have to find a nest somewhere and restart your egg production from scratch again.

[Gregor Samsanite]

In 2.0 you can do more with remote view, so construction bots with roboports and radars around your base should be enough to fix most production problems within your factory.

For biter defense, if you build your walls way out away from your pollution, then you're not going to have a lot of problems. Without pollution irritating them vanilla biters aren't too bad. The new 2.0 terrain generation makes this easier with water and cliffs forming more natural barriers, so you need to defend fewer gaps in between those obstacles. Efficiency modules in miners, since these are your biggest polluters and the closest to your walls. Solar power and accumulators makes your base more self-sufficient and less polluting.

Worst case if you really want to get home, if you have logistic bots in your main factory, it can supply a ship with whatever you need to come drop it on whatever planet you're at. This includes all the materials to build a rocket silo and rocket that will get you back into space.

[mrxak]

Remote view is really amazing. You can even tell your bots to move goods between chests and assemblers as if you were right there doing it yourself by hand.

[Nonotorious]

Let it overrun and make it like a starship troopers challenge to take back the planet.

[Hurkyl]

I think the worst things that happened when I was off planet was finding out that I really needed to remote build/craft something and it wasn't in the logistics system (or the logistics system otherwise broke in some fashion)... and I didn't have logistics chests to place to make it in the system.

This was more an issue for the planets that weren't Nauvis, though.

Originally posted by mrxak:

You can even tell your bots to move goods between chests and assemblers as if you were right there doing it yourself by hand.

Although maybe this would have solved my problems if I knew about it.

[Hurkyl]

Originally posted by malogoss:

Odds are, something will go wrong while you're away.

Automate the crafting of as many things as you can before leaving.

If you have the logistics system researched, a really convenient tool is to set up an assembler with a requester chest and provider chest attached to it, so you can remote 'handcraft' things that your preparation wasn't enough for. (assuming enough basic resources are in the network)