Maraxsis is a planet mod that’s meant to be available at the same time as Aquilo, which means a significant amount of challenges. One of the challenges is spelling the name of the planet!

The planet is covered by water, preventing most buildings from functioning on the surface. You need to build pressure domes, which significantly limit your floor space. The good news is that these act as roboports, the bad news is that you need to ship in barreled atmosphere to get them to work. You can overlap their logistics range so that robots can work in and out of the domes, and across them. That leaves space between them for other buildings and dramatically reduces the need for belts. Maraxsis also has spots on the map that lead to a trench that has no light, very high pressure preventing nearly all buildings, spots of lava, and no method to move things between the trench and surface.

Now, the real pain in the butt part of Maraxsis is the main new building – the Hydro Plant. This building gives a base +50% to quality, which means you need to deal with 5 potential outputs/inputs. There are ways to get logistics to filter based on quality but it’s finicky. You can either build 5 versions of a building (useful for salt filters and research) or you can just recycle the material based on quality (e.g. rocket fuel).

Maraxsis requires a ship that can head to Aquilo, needing rockets and significant storage space. If you’ve already solved Aquilo and unlocked fusion power, you will solve some fairly large headaches. If you haven’t optimized Vulcanus / Gleba / Fulgora you will have a bad time. There’s a ton of back and forth here as you need odd items that shouldn’t be crafted on the surface (such as 8 types of new pipes – required to interact with the trench).

Note that once you land on Maraxsis you are stuck there until you solve all the core puzzles, which unlocks rockets. And it will take longer to solve this planet than most others.

Complex vs Complicated

These things are very similar. Quite a bit of life is complicated, where things are intertwined without a whole lot of rhyme or reason – lacking design principles. Everyone’s initial attempt at automation games is complicated, with belts everywhere. This is normal – you don’t know what’s coming and can’t really prepare for it. At the start, a single mine with a single smelter produces more than you think you’ll ever need. Eventually you’ll dedicate a planet and have hundreds of smelters. You can either build those one at a time, and have a complicated setup, or plan better.

Which is where complex lines up. Complex is when order and efficiency is applied to complicated. Computer chips are complex. They are tiny little things that perform magic miracles. Your phone is infinitely more powerful that the tube and vacuum computers of the late 50s which took up floors of a building.

Factorio is notorious for complicated. Space Age even more so with the roulette aspect of legendary materials. Some pieces can be ‘easily’ simplified. Others are insane. Try building a legendary upcycler for quantum chips on Aquilo – that is a wild exercise!

Maraxsis is very complicated, as it throws a bunch of curveballs at you. Multiple types of quality, very limited construction space, complex production chains that require buildings from every planet except Aquilo, and a near permanent shipping of off-world items to keep the planet running.

Starting Off

Consider this a first landing on any planet, and one where you will need at least 10 of every building you can make – including Biochambers and Agricultural Towers. You’ll also need a decent shipment of blue chips, tungsten plate and carbon fiber. Depending on if you have fusion power or not, you’ll be shipping that or nuclear plants. You’ll also want to build a diesel submarine as soon as you land – you’ll die in 15 minutes of exposure to the planet surface otherwise.

Place the landing pad, bring down a chunk of stuff, build a sub, then delete the pad and explore. You want to find a spot that is near a trench (a dark gash in the map) and near a coral reef. Your eventual base will need quick access to both eventually. The closer to a trench, the more cliff explosives you’ll need to clear the land.

Your first goal is to lay out a power grid – I always use a 50×50 one which is based on roboports (which cannot be used on this planet). Build a hydro plant, and then build a pressure dome. Placement of that dome should be 1 grid away from the trench and generally in the middle of the grid. Without power you can’t really tell how much range it has, but pretty much anything within the 50×50 power poles will be withing robot reach. So place down the landing pad in that spot, and eventually it will connect to the dome network!

From there, the progress is somewhat linear. You need to refine the salt water, then you need to pump lava from the trench to get foundries running. That will require a new production line on Vulcanus for the new types of pipes. From here, you’ll need to set up a fish farm and refinement with biochambers + towers – very similar to a Gleba setup, nutrients and spoilage to manage. This part starts complicated but design experience here helps a lot to optimize with an external pipe bus. You only need to unload atmosphere in 1 dome, and you can pipe that to the next ones. The hardest part here is going to be the shipping of logistic bits to the planet.

Phase 2

After you solve the fish farm part – now it gets complicated. You need to create material in the trench, which has no power sources. Maraxsis went through some design changes and the salt reactor is both simpler and more complicated than before. It’s a nuclear plant on steroids, and you need to pipe the supercritical steam down to the trench to power a specialized turbine. This also means you need to build a patrol for the submarine to move material from above to below and back again. This requires ports and is quite similar to train logistics – if a bit more finicky. This unlocks the hydro science – which has 5 types of quality ingredients to manage, so you need 5 production plants. Feels like details at that point. Project Seadragon opens up and allows you to build rocket launch pads! Finally an exit!

Phase 3

Except it isn’t. You need to build sealant. Sealant requires gas from the planet and heavy oil. Heavy oil is acquired in the same way as on Vulcanus – painfully, oh so painfully. This part honestly sucks, because it’s complicated instead of complex. Interacting with the trench yet again to create sulfur, breaking down carbon with calcite to get coal, kickstaring coal liquifaction, then a chain to refine light oil and petroleum oil. This production chain takes up half a dome, and pretty much completes the planet.

By the time I left I had 4 domes.

• One for power, steam, atmosphere, batteries
• One for foundries and assembler crafting
• One for processing fish products, research and oil processing
• One for power in the trench

Residuals

There are 3 pieces left to manage here.

• Prometheum science is unlocked with this planet’s research. You will need to export it and bring to Nauvis. This sucks because you need to import 5 different qualities of research packs, and then set it up on Nauvis for import and distribution to your labs. Aquilo research is required, so head’s up there too.
• Balancing is an issue. 99% chance you don’t have enough salt and you have way too much hydrogen. You will need to apply balancing here, notably flare stacks (another mod) that burns any excess gas – a pump with a condition to only activate over 20k in storage is enough. There are other balancing issues you’ll need to sort through, notably wyrm containers having so many quality types
• Extra Research. More cargo landing pad space is a weird thing to need – but I guess it has uses for late-game 1million+ SPM folks. The nuclear sub costs is 5x the cost of a regular sub for twice the benefit, and the diving equipment just means you can survive outside a sub. There’s a new type of beacon with greater range and less effect (which I’ve yet to craft) and some other bits and bobs. Other than gating prometheum science, nothing to write home about here.

Conclusion

Maraxsis is a very interesting puzzle. It is more like Aquilo in that it requires near constant babysitting with space logistics, and a generally limited floor plan to get the pieces working together. The quality piece is a choice – either you manage it through logic gates or multiple stations, or you just chuck all the stuff you don’t want in the recycler.

The only true negative piece I have here is the interactions with the trench. The duct piping is annoying to manage as it has to be crafted off-planet, has too many pieces, and getting what you need in/out requires a very specific placement of vertical pipes. Getting power down there was harder than it should have been. I was able to solve all the problems myself here, which was different than Cerys’ death machine of a nuclear plant, so that’s something. I am not a fan of Maraxsis research being tied to late game science productivity mind you.

The overall good news here is that while Maraxsis is a very complicated planet, it allows enough flexibility to optimize to reach a complex state. I’d recommend a pressure dome flow away from the trench (e.g. trench on left, domes progress to right), with the pipe bus on the opposite side of the fish farm (above or below). 5 topside domes, spaced for maximum roboport distance, allows you ample room to build everything at massive volumes, and have a good quarter of one dome meant solely to recycle/destroy excess items. There’s a lot that can be done to optimize here.

Let’s see what come next…