I’m giving a new playthrough with the experimental build of 2.1. There are things that work well, others are more frustrating. Quick thoughts…

• Mods: None work, which is less. I really miss having the Burn Stack mod which allows burning gas/fluids.
• Mod Toggles: You can disable quality, if you want. I opted not to, though didn’t invest in quality until I was heading to Aquilo
• Blueprints: 98% of them work as expected. 2% seems small, but there are issues you will need to troubleshoot. Chasing gremlins.
• Fluids: Measuring volume in pipes is great! Being able to flip Pumpjacks is also a very nice QoL bit, allowing much tighter builds.
• Landing Pads (extract directly from them): For regular builds, no real impact. For Aquilo, or massive SPM builds, this is a fairly significant change that speeds up a LOT of activities.
• Radar: Scanning the entire galaxy is possible now. I’ve yet to find a practical use for it, in fact, turning it on in my blueprints caused issues in reading too much stuff I didn’t actually have. What really sucks is that you can’t change a radar setting while on another planet (yet).
• Labs/Biolabs: You can set research based on available research packs, based on priority. Primarily useful for Gleba, as you waste time when that material isn’t available. It does help with Aquilo research later on. By the time you reach Prometheum, this doesn’t mean as much as you’re effectively always researching with every component.
• Rocket Logistics: The game will automatically distribute the amount of items based on weight to meet demand. So if you need like 2 collectors and 8 crushers, that will come in 1 rocket instead of 2 with a ton of excess. This is an absolutely massive QoL change for the mid-game… I figure it’s cut the distribution load in half, at least. Any ‘first landing’ logistics request is going to be super fast, and shipping stuff to Aquilo long-term becomes ridiculously efficient.
• Space Logistics: You can now request items from ANY planet or from another platform. Shipping from any planet rarely makes sense, as rarely are you producing an item at volume across all planets, so that’s actually caused way more issues. Shipping between platforms, that has extremely niche use cases – like having a space platform above Aquilo making extra rockets for another transport ship. There are many odd behaviours here though.
• Visual Uplifts: I do like this. Assembler and Rocket Silos look a whole lot better.

Space Casinos

Bye Bye Space Casinos. Important to note that a major piece of Space Age is that all materials are either infinite in harvesting, or infinite through alternative means, your challenge is in the design to get infinite output. Space Casinos leverage the infinite material nature of asteroids, along with quality modules that result in legendary base material (iron ore, coal, or calcite).

So let’s math this out a bit.

• Asteroid Reprocessing has an 80% output chance, with 2 mod slots (12.2% chance). Rough math, 9.76% chance per event to move up a piece. When you get a legendary asteroid, you can then process it for up to 300% output. At legendary levels, this thing spits out material.
• Recyclers have a 25% output chance and you can add 4 modules to these (24.8% chance). Rough math is 6.2% output from harvest to end. Same end result of 300% productivity. The net effect is 50% as efficient as crushers, per step. This part is important!

The good news is that recyclers are significantly faster than crushers, so you should need much less of them (rough math is less than 10% of the previous crushers), which is good as each recycler takes 100% more quality modules to work. The footprint is tiny.

This means that existing Space Casinos can be repurposed using recyclers instead of crushers, needing only a fraction of the modules to function. New Space Casinos can theoretically be built with a much smaller footprint – the tradeoff being less collectors and less input of asteroids… so it may end up being a horizontal line as a result.

I’ve built a few processing plants for legendary material. The math here per step is substantial. To get to legendary material, on average, you need to run through 4 upgrades (uncommon, rare, epic, legendary). With each step being 50% less efficient, that 0.5^4 which ends up being around 3% of the prior model. I ran a test, with legendary modules (25% total per recycle) between Gleba and Vulcanus four times. Zero legendary. In fact, it took 10 trips to get 1 legendary item. So this model doesn’t work anywhere close to prior.

I also tried to pre-process the items in crushers and then recycle, for higher volumes. Legendary productivity modules means you need 3 recyclers for 2 crushers (yay!), and you need stack inserters too, or the belts stop working. Reprocessing asteroids is an option if you’re overweight on any given type.

And to clarify, you don’t need more crushers, you can see that even just having 6 is enough to saturate a belt. I guess you could build another first recycling line, but the results remain very similar. The output is simply atrocious. Maybe 2 legendary items per run.

So seems pretty clear. The previous space casino model is broken. Getting iron, calcite and coal… the volumes are cut tremendously. Iron has other options. Coal and Calcite, you may just need to manage expectations for a bit and run multiple versions of these space harvesters. More investigation required!