Welcome to the planet of near infinite materials! And the planet that’s borderline gacha with randomness everywhere. The environment itself is hostile, with lightning storms every night that can destroy a ton of resources if you don’t have lightning rods around. And the world is built with islands, some small and medium with scrap ore, and larger ones with not much on them. The oceans are pure heavy oil.

The main goal of our first foray in Fulgora is the science, but the secondary goal is learn about upscaling. Everything here focuses on the Recycler as a result.

Power

The way Fulgora should work for power is to collect lightning strikes and store them in accumulators. You will need a LOT of them. Quality accumulators are massive improvements.

Nuclear power is an entirely viable option here, shipping in some basic materials, setting up a kovarex plant, and melting ice for the needed water. It is tight space, a thing you won’t really be able to avoid until much, much later.

Recycler

Simple in concept, complicated in reality. You put stuff in, and the Recycler breaks it down to it’s basic components at a 75% loss. Put in 100 Iron Gears, and get 50 Iron Plates (since it takes 2 to make 1 gear). Put in Scrap Ore, and there’s 12 items that can come out, at different %. Learn to love the scrap, because it’s the only way to get water + plastic on this planet.

Also important to note that quality modules on Miners impacts the quality of the scrap, and that Recyclers with quality modules improves the quality of the outputs. So those 12 items are actually 36 (normal, uncommon, rare).

Managing Outputs

A recycler will generate a TON of random material, so you need to sort that material out. You can use splitters with filters to extract material for storage (based on quality). Anything that isn’t stored needs to route back to the recyclers for reprocessing. You will need a LOT of recyclers to process fully saturated green belts.

You’ll also find some secondary outputs, things that come out and you didn’t realize at first. Plastic, Green Circuits, Iron Plates, and Copper Plates are notable. Size wise, you’re going to need a filtering belt that’s as large as your recycler belt.

Once you have the outputs filtered into storage, you’ll have near infinite basic materials on hand.

Holmium Refinement

This is the unique planetary ore, and it’s only available as a byproduct from scrap ore. Importantly, the quality here doesn’t matter as it gets turned into liquid that has no quality. Well, quality DOES matter because you can only insert like-for-like items. Since it takes 2 items per input, you must insert the same quality items. End result, you need 1 Chemical Plant dedicated to a given quality of ore.

Using Foundries will create a TON of Holmium plates. One Foundry is more than enough to fully saturate, and it gets crazier when you add productivity modules.

Holmium is also used to create Electrolyte, a liquid used for most end-products on Fulgora. Nothing too complicated here, as it only requires Heavy Oil. These will give access to Superconductors + Supercapacitors, which give you access to this planet’s science. The wide majority of this processing is done as you would with other oil processing, taking up a relatively minor amount of space.

Quality Matters

The science here gives you Mk3 Quality Modules and most personal defense items, like Mech Armor, Mk2 Personal Roboports +Mk3 Batteries. The question is, does quality matter? It only matters when you are restricted in build space. If you have an infinite field, then adding 50% more things to it is simple. If you are limited, then you want the things on that field to be 50% more efficient. In that context, personal equipment is absolutely worth upgrading. For crafting buildings, this gets complicated as it can mess up production chains. Specifically on Fulgora, higher quality capacitors (to store energy) are amazingly effective. Normal store 5MW, uncommon 10MW (100% improvement!), and rare 15MW.

(Important note: the game has an atrocious interface when it comes to managing quality products. I can handle the quality limitations, but the ability to upgrade/downgrade/sort by quality just isn’t there. Find a mod or an upgrade blueprint, there’s plenty on Reddit.)

Upscaling

There are two ways to generate a high quality item.

1. Use quality modules and pray to RNGsus, managing the random outputs.
2. Use quality ingredients to create a same quality item.

Upscaling is the act of applying both methods. Use randomness to hopefully create better products, recycle the items that were not upgraded, and then re-use those quality items to directly create quality products. Sounds complicated, and it kinda is.

A practical example is Quality Modules themselves. You’ll start Fulgora with Mk2 modules, giving a 2% chance of improvement. You’ll leave with rare Mk3 modules, which give 4%, a 100% improvement.

The regular process of making modules starts with Mk1, then Mk2, then Mk3. Using belts, you can set up a production chain to create normal versions with normal material. If you insert quality modules at each step, you have chances of increases rarity. The trick then is to extract the uncommon / rare modules from the production chain. That’s the 1st part of the process, and entirely possible to generate a Mk3 rare module (at 8% quality, that’s 8% at uncommon, and 0.8% as rare).

The next step is to create with quality materials, which will be very slow as the materials will be hard to come by – especially circuits. One station will create uncommon modules with uncommon materials. Again with quality modules. Another station will create rare modules with rare materials. This is the 2nd part of the process.

You will want to use the quality modules on every Recycler and every Big Miner, eventually having them all rare Mk3. You could recycle excess modules, which I would only recommend if you have more than 500 of any given one in stock. Eventually you’ll need them when getting to epic/legendary levels.

Mech Armor

This thing rocks. It automatically flies over everything, including water and trains. You absolutely want to have it equipped. Quality matters here:

• Normal: +50 inventory, 10×12 equipment grid
• Rare: +80 inventory (60% more), 12×14 grid (30% more)

Exoskeleton goes from 30% to 48%. Mk2 Roboports recharges 6 bots instead of 4 and use 40 robots instead of 25. Mk2 shields go from 150 to 240hp. All of these are awesome investments.

I do not recommend method #1 to create these as the material costs are quite high. Create rare versions of the base material and the final step can then be guaranteed. It will be multiple steps, but I found it absolutely worth it.

Next Steps

If you don’t care about quality, then Fulgora is the quickest and simplest of all the extra planets. Once the recycler production chain is up and running, science is a quick hop away and you’re done. A Tesla gun + ammo is useful on Gleba, and you will want to extract a few Electromagnetic Plants + Tesla Turrets as well. The really good news here is that the recycler gives you Blue Circuits, Low Density Structures. Rocket Fuel is free since Heavy Oil is free. You won’t ever need to import them.

I would not create any production chains to create circuits yet. You may have all the ingredients to do so, but the throughput is a real mess, and it’s honestly harder on Fulgora due to the need for Plastic. But, that’s for later.

Turning Back

With the Electromagnetic Plants, Foundries + Big Miners, now is a good time to return to Nauvis and upgrade your production chains to improved tools. I say Nauvis as you likely have ample space to build whatever you want, and the power management options are easier, and all research is done here. In that regard, it makes sense to just upgrade the base planet.

I will say that Vulcanus is the golden planet and you will likely want to build green/red/blue circuits for shipping here as 99% of the material (tungsten is the exclusion) is free.