The more I play, the more the EA gremlins pop up. Pacing & unlocks are not yet balanced, so I find myself in spaces where I’m told I need to do something, but don’t have the tools to do so. Example, the second zone is flora based and you need to collect Nitrate. The only way to do this is through manual means with an Atomizer, even though you can see mining stations. You also are required to use Uranium to unlock chests, and will not unlock the ability to craft that for at least 3 more zones (hours later). Weird.

The concepts however are really interesting, and the mechanics of them are rather impressive. The game effectively asks, why do you need belts? And honestly after a few hours, I am left wondering why they exist at all other than a resource sink. I’ve made tons of posts related to main bus architecture and logistic distribution models… and while the concepts remain, the implementation is so different here. Except fluid/gas, and that implementation sucks here but is standard in other games.

As you progress in the game, you unlock different buildings that produce more complicated things. It’s more or less voxel based construction, and allows 2 levels of construction. The game will automatically route items between buildings, if you set the path. At first this is simple enough, but later on gets extremely complicated. Not being able to measure throughputs adds to complexity.

I don’t mind complexity, and I don’t mind brute force methods. The math however doesn’t always math. Upgraded miners are good, as are the docking stations. You need to upgrade storage to hit 360 items a minute transfer rate. Smelters are the first production level. You either create 39 or 52 items per minute – so 9.2 or 6.9 buildings. That will saturate a production chain. If you need more than 360 items a minute, you need to build another entire production chain. No belt upgrading here. You won’t know you need more than that until your storage empties.

One important note on logistics is compression ratios. If an item is refined to a lower rate (or larger stack) it is often best to refine it before shipping. Like 2 iron ore to 1 iron plate, you are 100% more efficient on shipping. So far, the only material that benefits from this is superalloy, an item you won’t see for a very long time.

First Zone

This will be your ship production zone, and 100% of everything you produce is meant to construct ships. It will look horrible and you will suffer from less than ideal design decisions if you don’t plan properly. 90% of it can be tweaked some with one exception – your ship building facilities must be close to your fueling station and close to open space. This is the only way the tug will be able to move ships for fueling and then park them in the open space. 25 ships is easy. 250 ships take up a TON of room.

Second Zone

This is a weird one. You collect Nitrate, which has no use at all other than a construction milestone. You can collect Hydrogen, which is used to power Fusion Plants for power (more on that later), and you can build what are effectively windmills for 3x the price of solar panels for a 50% more power. Not really worth it there.

Third Zone

This is your 2nd asteroid belt and should be treated near identical to the first zone, with one exception. This is your base material factory that will allow you to expand every other base. It will be powered through the 2nd zone’s hydrogen and scaled to give you as many construction materials as needed – up to computers. Massive QoL game changer when you get this running!

Fourth Zone

There’s nothing here of use at this time, other than 5 talent points to quickly harvest. You likely won’t have completed harvesting the points in the 2nd zone by the time you end this one. The quest you unlock here is likely to be your quit wall, as the volume of the builds will choke all production for a few hours. That’s honestly fine by my account, as what’s done up til this point is more than impressive.

Power

Mining stations, when upgraded and with defensive bits, need 3 solar panels to function. Set it and forget it. Absolutely dirt cheap to set up.

Production bases should be Fusion based. Hydrogen is extremely easy to find and infinite in supply. You can build power links between mining stations and your main base, but the material costs are more than 3 solar panels and a power outage impacting an entire zone sucks… so why bother? Power storage is a thing, but I’ve honestly never seen a use for it.

Moving On

As an EA game, I’ve had my fill for a while. The main quests up til about level 8 are a good exploration of all the meaningful mechanics. After that point, scaling of logistics becomes simply too painful to manage. To reach the next step, I’d need to fill in zone 2 with Hydrogen Farms to build an infinite power supply field for every other zone, with 1 warp station per product type, which would then make a mega station.

More to the point, the inter-zone logistics is a major hurdle and my major design issue with the game. It is absolutely possible to scale everything with a warp per product. I am not interested in that complexity for now.

That said, for an EA game, it may be the best experience I’ve ever had in terms of quality. Holy cow. Quite curious how this game will go long term, certainly the strongest start I’ve seen in a long time.