Biolabs are amazing. Not only do they have an innate 50% productivity boost but they go twice as fast (5x at legendary level). It may not seem like much, but when research takes 1+hr and 10k science packs, it’s massive.

The challenge here is that they require biter eggs to build. 10 of them in fact. You can only acquire these by sending capture rockets at biter nests in the wild, then feeding them bioflux to create eggs. You can eventually build your own nests, but only after completing Aquilo. I waited last time, I will not make that mistake again.

Main Steps

1. Get Bioflux to Nauvis before it spoils. It has a 15m shelf life, so a direct path from Gleba to Nauvis is required.
2. Build a capture rocket. That needs Bioflux.
3. Find a biter nest. This may be the hardest part with no enemies. I’ve yet to encounter a single one on Nauvis.
4. Capture the nest, feed it bioflux and harvest the eggs. Manually.
5. Create 40 Biolabs, which is 400 eggs.
6. Profit.

Normal Play

Biter eggs normally expire, and spawn, well, biters. In a normal game, you would need to defend buildings with eggs in case they expired. No enemies means that this risk is entirely gone, as is the challenge of actually acquiring the initial eggs as they would often be in the heart of biter land. This is a very welcome change.

Upgrading Nauvis

This is an interesting decision point, as the value of Nauvis drops massively once you’re done with Gleba, and becomes only useful for research and biter eggs when you complete Aquilo. As I plan to build a legendary factory on Vulcanus, it does make sense to keep Nauvis running for a little while as it’s my ship building yard (no meteors). Building any ship requires a few truckloads of steel, and the absolute best way to get that is through Foundries – from less than 5/s to over 40/s.

So I figure if I’m going to upgrade that, may as well upgrade the rest.

• Foundries on Steel, Iron and Copper. This creates a significant need for calcite shipments.
• Electromagnetic Plants for red/green/blue chips
• Big Miners everywhere

Next Steps

Aquilo is next, but to get there I need a farming ship and a rocket-enabled ship. The last time I did this, it did not go well.