Noting there are spoilers in this post.

Again a note that Cerys was attempted right after the starter planet (Nauvis). The net impact is that some research pieces are not complete… but honestly none of that matters as you can’t ship anything to the planet. Generally, what you can build on Nauvis you can build on Cerys, so you need to be somewhat creative in your options. This excludes robots for a very long period, as lubricant takes a long time to sort out.

The initial landing is a mix between Aquilo and Fulgora. You have nothing but your suit and a mining pick. You need to mine some nuclear scrap and then, just like Fulgora, recycle it to semi-useful components. This feels more like the start of the game where you just don’t have tools or automation ready to scale, so you’re hand crafting everything. It’s super important to run across the small map and manually collect all the material you can see… it gives you a chunk of solar panels, accumulator rods (more on that in a bit) and blue chips. The same rule of thumb remains : don’t recycle items you cannot craft.

Power is interesting here. Substations are easy enough to create and solar+accumulators work in the cold, so the lower right part of the map is the best location. Using a grid approach, you can generally map out and power the entire moon surface. Generally.

The issue is the slew of heating towers, crushers, and Cerys factories. Heating towers melt an area around them (if there’s water, it needs bricks to stay solid) and need solid fuel to work. I opted for a stupidly complicated sushi belt of solid fuel across the map to feed towers that were close to the middle, and then a second ring for the outer parts, on a lower priority. It takes about 10 recyclers running 100% on nuclear junk to generate enough solid fuel for the towers. This means you need to have a re-processing plant for all excess material, effectively doubling the number or recyclers needed. This is a fun exercise of logistics, compounded by a very limited workspace.

Due to the nature of the frozen moon, you can’t easily build a main bus and you don’t have robots… so it takes a while to get it all sorted out – mostly through manual means. This is mostly stop-gap until you un-freeze the first of multiple factories, and where the 2nd major step takes place.

These factories are part of the map, cannot be moved, and must be kept thawed. Unlocking each requires blue chips and repair parts (which don’t stack). You can then use the factory to produce a given item – all of which are needed to proceed further. It’ll take about 10 of them by the end, all producing something different, in order to complete the moon. This will generate spaghetti runs of pipes + belts to move things from one factory to the next. Ya gotta do what ya gotta do I guess.

It takes a bit to unlock all the various pieces in the research tree, which is fine enough with goals. You then reach a challenge in acquiring 3 key items: Carbon, Fluorine, and Plutonium. None of those have obvious methods.

*Spoilers*

Carbon is normally only craftable on Gleba or from space material. You can’t build rockets on Cerys, so you’re going to use Gun Turrets to shoot the small (and specific to Cerys) asteroids, manually pick them up, and use the thawed crushers to turn them into Carbon.

Fluorine is on the right side of the moon, which is permanently frozen. You need to activate the main nuclear plant and use heat pipes to extend far enough to melt the mining locations (all of them), then use the Fluorine to make Lithium. It is a VERY good idea to have liquid storage containers in a thawed area in case the nuclear plant loses power. It will lose power.

To get the plant to work, you need plutonium. The only way to get plutonium is a random event where a particle interacts with nuclear ore. There are no instructions on how this works until very late in the puzzle. Complicating matters is that the nuclear plant, when active, shoots deadly particles that kill you in 3 hits. There are no explanations on how to prevent this from occurring but the answer is oddly simple… liquid storage containers with liquid water – not ice – water. You need to run heat pipes out from behind the containers, so a minor puzzle to sort that out. Getting enough plutonium is a crazy stupid exercise of trying to manipulate particles using the charging rods with polarity settings. Odds increase the more uranium per container, so the problem gets easier to solve the further along you are.

*End Spoilers*

Once you have those pieces sorted out, the immediate priority is building robots through lubricants. Roboports are easy enough to create and having a dozen logistic bots completely trivializes all the puzzle pieces. Heating towers + plutonium problems all go away. Collecting asteroid chunks is 100% automated. Cerys factories can be easily automated. You’ve effectively solved the planet and can move on…

After you leave the planet, it’s still a good idea to keep researching Holmium boosts as that is a right pain to manage on Fulgora long-term.

End Thoughts

I rather enjoyed the puzzle aspects and the need to really be aware of the total environment. Expanding the available area takes a while to sort out in any sustainable manner. It’s fun to have different things to sort out without the typical toolkit of buses and robots. Honestly it reminds me more of the first time I played Factorio and just trying to figure out how to get 2 buildings to talk to each other without me being involved.

More directly, I would recommend Cerys more for new playthroughs and the first planet visited rather than adding to an existing save. You don’t really gain anything super long term here, but the loss of all automation tools is extremely jarring, even if the duration is ‘short’.