Spoilers here. If you haven’t sent the last shipment…

Lots and lots of material needed for this. My goal was to produce each component in 2 hours, so 120 minutes.

• 1,000 Nuclear Pasta
• 1,000 Biochemical Sculptor
• 256 AI Servers
• 200 Ballistic Warp Drive

Pasta

You need 10x more than Phase 4. The main issue here is going to be copper powder. Pure Copper on a pure node = enough for 2 particle accelerators that are boosted with Sommersloops, giving 4 per minute. This was the first thing I set up and just let it run. It took 4 hours. So I guess I failed this one?

Biochemical Sculptor

This one is actually super easy to make. I already had a ton of stored Reanimated SAM Ore, so making Ficsite Ingots / Trigons was simple. And I had a pile of Assembly Director Systems from phase 4. I had this done in an hour, with Sommersloop boosts.

AI Servers

Field Generators I had a pile from Phase 4. Neural Quantum Processors + Superposition Oscillators though… that was hard. I had 2 Quantum Encoders per material and those were boosted, with the AI Server also boosted. I could not get enough Dark Matter Crystals produced to keep up with demand. There are many ways to create these, but math says the most efficient method is through Time Crystals. I had to create a new factory just for these using some oil patches on the west side of the map, then shipped through trains.

I honestly thought this one would be simple, but it ended up taking 3 hours after I fixed the bottleneck.

Ballistic Warp Drive

Thermal Propulsion Rockets are from Phase 4, I had a storage container full. Again, Dark Matter Crystals were a problem here, so I prioritized AI Servers first. Singularity Cells are the penultimate item in the game, used for Ficsite power plants, Portals and Space Parts. Each building takes 1 pasta to create 10 cells, so you can for sure understand I had these boosted to keep my other things running while I did this. I had underestimated the concrete requirement (200/min). A pure node + wet concrete = 800/minute, which was the only solution that made sense.

I had to detour a bit to get the concrete bit sorted out with a dedicated plant, but once done, it took about an hour to get this part done.

Final Load

Putting all of this into the Space Elevator is the last step to the game proper. I won’t spoil more than needs be here, but it’s a damn cool effect and final scene before the credits roll and you get access to the gold coffee cup.

Factory Thoughts

Hindsight is a fun thing, and now that I can look back on the journey, I can see where I could have done better.

What went well:

• Each Space Part phase was done in parallel, except Phase 5 – that was a smart move to avoid a pile of bottlenecks.
• Running a mega-factory (about 50 units above ground) with a gigantic bus was also a very smart move, as it allowed me to scale production with relative ease.
• Waiting for drones was also smart, they are painful to manage. Avoiding all vehicles except trains was brilliant!
• And without hesitation, the smartest of all moves was building in production storage buffers. It created a ton of buffer for logistical nightmares. Future post on this.
• Flight Mode + all alternative recipes from the get-go is a better experience. Hands down.

Where I could have done better:

• I should have invested in Dimensional Depots earlier. Tier 5 for Jetpacks, and then spend an hour or so finding spheres. That one hour would have saved me 10 later on.
• Planning train layouts, specifically building more flat/straight areas which could be used as future stations. It was a lot of re-work to add a station where the trains were on an angle – especially the eastern oil/plastic factory.
• I learned about half-way through that it is more important to build dedicated production lines than small clusters. Sure, the ratio of refineries/blenders/power plants may be the same, but it’s infinitely easier to just add more refineries to a chain than add an entire block of buildings. I need more wire? Build more constructors and feed them to storage, don’t build more miners and smelters in a cluster.
• Excepting the first portion of the game, “good enough” doesn’t fit my playstyle. Power issues only occur if you don’t plan. Shortcuts bit me in the butt more times than I’d like to count.
• Mathematically, there is no need for any nuclear power. I set it as a goal, but it astoundingly better on your sanity to build a Rocket Fuel plant. It may not look as cool, but a single plan with 600 oil is nearly 150,000GW. I did the math too late.