Actually, three of them. One for basic material (which is needed for Aquilo) and two for legendary material. Both can be built early, but can’t really be used until certain steps are completed.

Basic Farm

A square shape, that has walls, gun turrets, and rocket turrets. A belt goes around the whole thing, with the space material on the inside, and the weapon material on the outside. You can power most of it through solar, but that is likely to create problems down the road. Nuclear (only feed it when needed) is the best option. Remember to request nuclear fuel!

There are areas to generate fuel (near the engines), areas to generate ammo/rockets (with foundries), and importantly, the actual farming area.

There’s one loop per rock type, and each rock can give you two results. The arm has a logic gate that opens if you need the material (less than 2k copper in this example) or the belt has room (less than 60 on the belt). The results go to the main storage, and overflow is split to the right and dumped over the side.

Since I don’t want storage overful with one item, I limit each to 2k. The arms shut down if I have that amount. The line naturally backs up to the splitter, and excess is dumped. The left side is a chemical floor that splits Carbon into Coal. End result is 2K coal, carbon, sulfur, iron, corrpe, calcite, and ice.

This is the real magic, since there are times where you have too much of one rock and not enough of another. This is the metallic trigger, where too much metallic (80+) and not enough of another (less than 10) causes the metallic rock to be transformed into a random other one. This is important outside Aquilo, where 80% of all rocks are Oxide (ice). If you don’t recycle them, you won’t have enough metal for ammo.

It is possible to finish Aquilo without a space farm, no question. Be aware that you’ll need to ship an incredible amount of iron, copper, calcite and coal as a result – you will hit bottlenecks.

Legendary Ship

Think regular farming ship but twice the size. The idea here is the last bit I put on the regular ship – recycling. More specifically, upcycling.

Using Quality Modules (the best you can), you recycle rocks with the hope of getting a higher quality result. Do it again for uncommon, rare, and epic rocks and maybe you get one legendary from it. Crush that legendary stone and get either iron/copper/calcite (one ship) or coal + sulfur (another ship). I have a future post on why you want to invest in legendary quality modules – short answer, they are 100x more effective.

Since you don’t need to head to Aquilo (Vulcanus to Gleba has the best type of chunks), you only need gun turrets. Power is a challenge. Since you should unlock Fusion power before Legendary items, it’s a straightforward thing to put fusion on a ship as it runs on it’s own once primed. Again, remember to request the fuel!

These legendary ships are 100% optional and 10,000% end game. My entire run, with the exception of Fulgora power batteries, with only normal items. This is different than my first playthrough, and I honestly prefer it. If I took the time to find a mod that allowed multiple rarity items to be used in crafting, then we’d be talking. But the sheer amount of waste in gambling drove me crazy.