This is actually an unfair title. The other posts in this series have been more about the journey through a phase up ’til the final Space Parts portion – this is more like the start of it. Phases 0-2 are simple and can be done in a night. Phase 3 will take a couple nights to coordinate as you really need to setup a large factory to scale. Phase 4, you will hit some weird math problems and logistical challenges getting enough raw materials to your factory. But, and this is really important, everything up until the end of Phase 4 can be done in a total of 3 locations – a fuel / plastic factory, an aluminum / quartz factory, and then finally a main factory. There’s zero need to do any more than that – Nuclear is completely optional, alternative power generation too. Two simple trains, or a loop, and that’s it. Win!

Phase 5 is different in that it looks at all your production lines and says ‘what if all of those hours, all that work, effectively allowed you to create 1 late game item per minute’. Hours and hours of work. Miles of belts. A near thousand production buildings. All of that, to create 1 item per minute. And then ask you to create 1000 of them.

To give you an idea, the first item in Tier 9 research requires 10,000 iron plates among other items. Having them is simple if you’ve been using industrial storage containers, but the number still made me go ‘wow’. Unlocking the new stuff comes with complex crafting cycles, where everything seems to be interdependent with something else, with buildings taking 4000MW each to run. It’s a bit like when we moved from the kid’s table to the adult one, it’s sort of the same but things are just fancier.

Time Crystals deserve a special mention. Each craft is 6/min in a Converter (12/min input, so half ratio). Diamonds are required, which is either coal (600:30) or oil (200:40). A ‘pure’ coal node at 250% = 1200/min. If 100% dedicated to Time Crystals, you’ll get 30 per minute. ‘Pure’ oil is 600/min, which gives 60 Time Crystals per minute. They stack to 200 and I use them like candy (it’s why Mk6 belts are so crazy expensive).

The strategy thusfar is the same as before.

• Goal 1: Focus on unlocking every research item I can, and automate & store new items that are available. Once storage for all the new items is up, then it can keep going while I do other stuff. I have found numerous math problems that can only be solved with Mk6 belts.
• Goal 2: Improve power generation by a factor of 10x. Nuclear brought me up to 100,000MW. That’s Uranium only, with me sinking 0.5 Plutonium Rods/min to avoid waste. Burning those rods would add 2x to my power output, and the waste can be further converted to Ficsonium rods, which burn for very little, but product no waste. So math says if I want 10x, I need to quintuple my current factory. That… that is going to be an adventure.
• Goal 3: Produce enough Space Parts to complete the task in 2 hours of production. This seems simple, but again, I can build generally only build 1 per minute and I need around 2,500 items. Math is not my friend. I prefer to address power issues long before production issues… the other way is too painful.
• Goal 4: Optimize. I’m at the point now where I have enough base construction material to rebuild almost any factory from the ground up, at scale. The east coast has 2 pure Oil nodes. I should be able to get 1,800 rubber and 1,800 plastic out of that, which should be more than I need for anything. My train network needs a 4 way-central hub, to cut travel times. I likely need to build a tier 2 factory in the north east. I have found no need for drones yet, maybe that will exist.
• Goal 5: This is a weird one, fine. Tier 9. I have little interest in matter conversions. The idea is interesting, but the power & material costs make little sense to me right now, at least not at scale. 120/min is paint drying slow. Portals I’d like to test, but the costs to run seem somewhat high (2 pasta/min).

These are similar goals as I’ve had in prior phases, the difference mostly around the amount of time to achieve each one. Where the early phases may have a goal achieved in 10 minutes, at later phases it could take an entire play session. Heck, getting nuclear power setup took 2 sessions.