The first time I landed on Aquilo, it went really bad. Scratch that. The first time I tried getting to Aquilo it went really bad. And then it went worse.

See, the ship you use to get there needs to be built in a specific way, and is the first time you need rocket turrets to survive. The challenge here is that rockets need a rather specific set of ingredients to be built, which are rather uncommon, and they do no real damage at the start. You need to invest in research to get max shooting speed (340%) and a good amount of damage (~400%) so that it doesn’t take 9 rockets per asteroid.

In my second run, I forgot this. I didn’t lose this ship on the way there, but it wasn’t able to build enough to survive in orbit. That took ~30minutes for me to figure out and a save reload. And then a heavy investment in explosive research. Meh.

Landing

This is the hardest part of Aquilo as you’re likely not bringing the right amount of stuff with you. Aquilo has oil and 2 other gases that are specific to Aquilo tech. Nothing else. It’s also so cold that everything needs a heat pipe nearby to function, robots take 5x the power, and solar power gives 1% return. The first 10 minutes or so of Aquilo is basically survival with the tools you brought. I did mention in the past that I parked a space farming platform above Aquilo – it gives iron, copper, sulfur, coal, carbonized coal, calcite, and ice.

I opted to take a slightly different approach this time. 50 solar panels to get some trickle power, then a heating tower power by rocket fuel that I brought along. It burns crazy fast until you hit 500 degrees, and with a logic control to only feed if it drops below 550, I could set it and forget it. 2 heat exchangers + 4 steam engines was enough to get the basics off the ground.

Rather than having a bunch of rocket fuel heating towers and complex routing, I opted to focus on solid fuel. That gives more than enough power for the rest of the build.

Growth

Expanding Aquilo needs ice platforms, which take a while to build. And concrete if you want to put something on top of it. Stabilizing Aquilo means Foundries for iron, steel and copper. You can build most things with just that.

From there, you’ll build the first Cryo plant – no production bonus but does have 8 mod slots. From there it’s a rather small jump to a lithium plant, then to fluo liquids, cryo science, quantum chips, and finally fusion power. Never had a power issue this time, which was glorious!

Note about fusion power – it allows you to put production modules in all buildings, along with speed module beacons. Doubles the planet’s productivity. Doing this before fusion will cause a power outage.

I added a rocket fuel plant later on when the rest was stable, and then built my old fusion plant layout. Honestly, I think Aquilo took less time than Gleba. If you know what you’re getting into, and ship the correct materials, it’s not that bad. If you’re going in blind, and don’t have any blueprints, then things are going to be rough and take forever to ship what you need to get going. This may be my favorite planet to crack.

Planet Power Shifts

Fusion power is needed on other planets, and that takes a huge amount of materials to get done. Vulcanus is the urgent one, in order to scale productivity. Legendary space farming platforms are next, followed by Fulgora and Gleba. Nauvis doesn’t need it, Nuclear is more than enough for everything that will remain.

Next Up

Legendary farming. Unfortunately this run was significantly faster than the last one. I think I ran through the entire thing in just over 10 hours. Since I haven’t created upcycling farms, I don’t have any legendary mods. That’s going to be a hurdle. Research is also quite a bit behind, with most near level 8. I need LDS to be 15 for self-sustainability, which is like 100x farther to go.

That means, I need to optimize the heck of out Vulcanus, and ship out a constant feed of research packs. Compound percentages are the enemy… more on that in a bit.