The game up until this point is about building self-sufficient planets. You start off with only a few things, then need to get a cycle running, then expand the local resources, and finally enter the research phase. The challenges presented are certainly more complex as you go (Gleba’s production loops are something new), but nothing that makes you question your sanity.

Aquilo is not that. Aquilo makes you question everything you now about the game and you will likely fail multiple landing attempts due to the environmental issues. I will say that the difficulty on Aquilo is mostly in the ability to create fail states that feel unrecoverable. It is the only planet where I needed to revert to earlier saves. It doesn’t have overly complex production chains, but the logistics of getting stuff around is the real challenge.

Getting There

Whatever ship you have, it’s not good enough. Medium asteroids are on the path to Aquilo, and you’ll need production capacity to fill missile turrets + gun turrets to survive. You’ll also need much more storage than prior, as Aquilo has very few natural resources. I made a lot of mistakes here. Overprepare.

Planet Conditions

Solar only works at 1%. There are no natural resources, though you can collect Ammonia from the oceans to make rocket fuel. This means you’ll need to ship all basic materials to Aquilo, or build a farming space platform and put it above the planet (I did both).

The planet is also ice cold and nothing works without being close to a heating pipe, which is heated from a Heating Tower. It takes 2 fully moduled chemical plants to create sufficient rocket fuel to power 4 heating towers. All power + heating will come from these for a very long time.

Ice is everywhere and a huge byproduct issue. You’ll melt what you can to make water, transform the rest to ice platforms (that need concrete above to not melt). Every other ice needs to be recycled.

Oh, and it’s so cold that robots take 5x the power to operate. So mass robots fleets are not really viable.

Lithium and Fluorine are two other liquids on the planet you will need to harvest for the planet specific items.

Making Space

Aquilo requires you to create more room for the factory, and requires concrete to be laid down on top of the ice. The starting footprint is barely enough to get going, and you’ll reach a point where even that is so poorly optimized you’ll need an ammonia + water bus to feed all the various machines. And when you hit the power issues (you will) it will likely cascade into a full factory outage.

Very important note. Heating towers can only boil water in heat exchangers when above 500 degrees. They can burn until 1000, so you will absolutely want to have a condition on your inserter to not add more fuel if the heating tower is above say, 550 degrees. Otherwise, say goodbye to your rocket fuel.

Second important note. Heating pipes to thaw equipment will drain more heat from the tower that you may think and easily force you to continually add fuel to keep above 500. If in doubt, disconnect the heating pipes to generate power – pipes only need to be around 30 degrees to work

Aquilo Science

Getting to this point is a lot of yada-yada of heat + power management shenanigans that includes unlocking Cryogenic Plants and science packages. You will need efficiency modules to reduce power usage to eventually claw your way to unlocking Fusion Power. That requires a TON of quantum chips (cryogenic chamber with 8 production modules and 2 speed beacons is sanity).

Aquilo is extremely slow and quite hard to design due to the heat limitations. I barely scrapped by with 4 heating towers. However…

Aquilo Power

Fusion Power is insane. Completely insane. It works on a 4:28 ratio (less reactors messes up the ratio), requires a cryogenic plant (operating at 16/s, so add modules) to cool down material in a closed loop. You will prime it with ~100 barrels of Hot Fluoroketone and never touch it again. It will then give you GIGAWATTS of power. Every single power management issue you’ve ever had, ever, is gone. I don’t mean managed, I mean gone. And it burns near-free fuel at a super slow rate, with no after product and self-manages load. Every disadvantage to nuclear is gone, at 10x the power output for 10% the space requirement.

Moving On

Once you have this unlocked on Aquilo, that pretty much to me means you’ve beaten the game. There’s a minor step of building a ship that can go past Aquilo and will require ~6 railguns and ammo to survive long enough. Given all the work up until this point, that is a very minor detail.

And, similar to the base game, you can complete it and move onto prometheus science which unlocks the ability to speed up research. Which is super useful if you are planning to scale up to insane levels or chase quality levels.