The main focal point of Techtonica now related to digging to later floors and leveraging the Elevator. In the EA versions, the Elevator was the final part unlocked and teased more content. Well it’s here now.

Basics

You unlock the elevator in the tutorial on floor 1. It teaches you to insert mining bits to dig to the next floor, and that’s about it. In truth, the elevator does quite a bit more.

• Every elevator floor has power floors surrounding, and each of these transmits power from other floors. Unfortunately it doesn’t do a good job of explaining how power is transmitted in 2 groups – floors 1 to 11, and then 12-16.
• You can interact with the elevator to manually insert or remove 1 stack of something on a given floor.
• Every floor has 30 ports that allows
  • Exports to any other floor (adjust the # above the port). No need to filter, so you could technically have a sushi belt (a belt with different things on it), but I’d recommend not given that you’ll create backlog eventually.
  • Unfiltered imports (adjust the # to the floor you are on). As these are unfiltered, you need a filter inserter, and eventually a stack filter inserter to only remove the item you want.
• There are 2 more ports for mining bits. You can only insert 1 stack at a time across both, so in reality there’s no need for 2 at all.

Intermediate

Given the basics above, the elevator should become a bus hub of sorts between floors. What will likely happen instead is the following:

• You will designate a floor as a main factory. This will likely be Victor, but it may be another.
• You will designate a floor as a power generator – I’d suggest Freight given the abundance of water.
• You will designate a floor for the Core Composers, shipping research cores to take up space. This can be the same floor as power generation as they can be placed above.
• You will designate more than 1 floor as a distribution centre.
  • This floor will intake items, store them, then distribute them to the proper floors. You need to do this for Blast Charges and Biodiesel.

Complex Scale

Understanding how to work with the elevator, and it’s limitations, will impact your ability to scale. The real challenge in all this is that production chains will massively change over time as you unlock more research. If you want to build at scale, you’re going to have to dedicate entire floors to a specific purpose, and send them to a logistics floor.

• Multiple mining areas shipping chunks/bricks.
• A foundry floor for basic items. This includes all ingots, slabs, and bricks. Saturated belts are fine here.
• A fuel generation floor. Initially only for Biobricks, but eventually Biodiesel. It is amazing how much material you need for Biodiesel.
• A plant-based floor. This will generate a LOT of byproducts and if my math is correct, be the largest consumer of power.
• A building logistics floor. This is a different beast, as you want to send the items to the elevator storage so that you can draw down from it on any floor. This part sucks because any item on a belt heading to the elevator is wasted. Stick em in containers instead and head to the floor to fill up.
• A research floor. This may seem straightforward, but the scale of material needed is eye opening.
• 2 intermediate construction floors. 2 simply because there’s so many materials.

The challenge with this model is that you will lack information on throughput. You may be building 30 Relay Circuits a minute but have no real indication of how many are being consumed.

In the EA game you needed all of this, but on a single map which caused rather significant performance issues. With the floor model you are presented with the option of doing 90% on a single floor, or spreading out the love. You can most certainly take option 1 and reach the end of game (I did) but if you want to make it scalable, you’re going to need to build on multiple floors. I know I needed to build a logistics floor for fuel + blast charges… shipping each of those to 5+ floors takes up too many ports.