Not often I comment on news, but interesting article all the same. Avowed + Outer Worlds 2 didn’t meet sales targets. The PoE setting will continue but not likely to see Outer Worlds do the same. Which makes me ponder, why?

Avowed

I liked this game as it delivered a ton on nice beats in a decent IP. It had a fair chunk of accolades, available on a bunch of platforms, and had a really good post-launch buzz. It had a month’s head start on Clair Obscur. It peaked at 20,000 on SteamDB, which is slightly lower than PoE2. It was priced as a sort of premium game. Maybe the targets were too high?

Outer Worlds 2

This game is still on my wishlist, and frankly, it launched in the mess of other games that took my attention. There wasn’t much buzz here, at least as compared to the first game. You could get the first game, plus all DLC (Spacer’s Choice) for a damn good deal. It peaked at the same level as the original, which is the same as the other one. The price point though, what the flying fart?

Clair Obscur

This game was priced at 60% of Outer Worlds 2, and 40% of Avowed. It peaked at 7x the amount of both of the others. It was also, quite clearly, better than the others.

Game Industry

Over the past 2 years, about 30% of the US game industry has seen layoffs. That is a wild statistic. Sure, there’s the post-pandemic slump, but there are other factors. Sources of funds have dried up. Game companies are spending way too long making games, with less meaningful returns. Gamers are primarily spending their times in the same 10 game today as they did for the past 3 years (Roblox + Fortnite top that list). The lower end of gaming is chock full of slop that can’t be triaged (50 games launch each day on Steam), and the middle tier has to really do something amazing to get any buzz going. And you know, the whole “everything is more expensive and I need to chose between food and games” thing going on.

Point being, the market is saturated and there’s a limit to how much anything can actually sell in the current climate.

Steam

This is an important factor, one that has impacted the general psyche of gamers. Steam has a wishlist function and nearly every game goes on sale at some point. Some publishers will drop their price by 30% or more within a month (looking at you Ubisoft!), and very few games launch nowdays in a functional state. You are almost always better off waiting a week for a major kitchen sink patch before diving in.

The only reason to buy something now is a sense of FOMO, which is insanely hard to predict. On top of it, that FOMO has to compensate for the price of admission. For every Elden Ring, there are hundreds of other premium games with much less to offer.

Value

Which is the ultimate factor in any buying decision, which is arguably mostly perception. Sure, you can math this out on the aggregate, manage some trends, get the buzz, and ride a sweet spot that lasts a few days or weeks. My persona preference here is somewhat straightforward, and related to the relationship between price and content.

• $5 – Generally not much thought here, it needs some decent reviews and be between 2-10 hours of stuff.
• $10 – This is generally reserved for EA games, and in areas I have a gaming interest.
• $20 – My personal sweet spot, anything that has decent reviews and can keep me entertained for about 20 hours.
• $40 – This is reserved for AAA games on sale, so I tend to only spend this during the winter + summer sales.
• $60+ – Extremely rare that I will spend this much on a game, it has to be near perfect or a game I know I will devour. Clair Obscur for sure here. Monster Hunter Wilds too. Not much else!

I don’t think that Obsidian necessarily made a mistake here, their targets are clearly from Microsoft corporate who can’t seem to figure much out of late. Avowed is a solid game, Outer Worlds 2 seems to be as well. Neither are priced at a point where the perceived value is high enough to generate enough sales to meet some exec’s target. I’m hopeful some level of sanity gets applied here and a more realistic approach is used instead.

In the simplest of statements – make games that cost less.

The core of any factory game is, well, building a factory. StarRupture tweaks the model a bit.

Material to build a base is extremely simple. It’s a single item type, super easy to transport. If Satisfactory had this, it would be a 10/10 game for me.

Placing a building requires you to be consistent with the Z axis (height) and cannot float in the air (stability). This is the only factory game I know of with this restriction, and is a challenge I’ll explain later. Basically, this limitation restricts any creativity or mega bases.

Each base starts with a Base Core. It allows building in a square radius, in particular allowing mining buildings to be placed. It also has a max amount of building points that enables protection from the hourly fire waves. You can upgrade the core, but doing so triggers continual enemy waves, which have poor mechanics at this time. So, level 1 it is.

You can also build habitats, which protect you from fire waves, give a respawn point, allow personal crafting + research, and a few other bits. Easy to build, easy to stack. These are needed for exploration, acting as save points.

Each base needs power. Solar to start, and then wind later. Set it and forget it, which makes it a pointless mechanic currently. I’m sure it will change.

Right, now to the actual buildings.

• Smelters do what you think. They refine basic material. Simple ratios, standard output.
• Fabricators allow up to 2 inputs and make basic material. Furnaces allow 3, Mega Press allow 4.
• You’ll want storage buffers present, they are small enough in footprint.
• Cargo dispatchers send things to cargo receivers. Build the receiver first. Throughput here isn’t spectacular, but it works.
• Orbital Launchers send things to space in order to progress in content. Think simpler space elevators. It works well.

Rails though, rails are something else. They work in 3D and they clip, meaning they cannot overlap. There are 2 ranks currently, 120 & 240 items a minute. They are directional and can loop onto themselves. Importantly, the work on a pull mechanic, meaning they only have content on them if a building requires it. If rails are saturated (as you would with belts), you have some serious issues to work out.

Mega Base vs Mini Base

Scaling a base requires two things. Space to build and modularity (for re-use). Blueprints only add speed to the building process.

StarRupture doesn’t provide space, both due to the world terrain and base core limits. Oh, you can build a dedicated base to a level 8 item, but not to 2 of them.

Modularity is the next bit, in that a template needs to be applied. The issue here is rails. If you build a single rail to transport what you need (sort of a sushi belt), it will either get jammed with other requests, of generate a pile of spaghetti. If you build dedicated rails per input, for sure you are going to have clipping issues. 4 rails into a mega press… that takes up a crazy amount of space to build and requires so much clicking to make the vertical portion work.

Recall that in factory games add compounding amount of material requirements per level. Level 1 may need 10 things, level 8 requires 1,000. That means bigger factories. The end result is that you’re much better off building bases that are dedicated to level 6 items, which can be relatively compact. The challenge then is about inputs and outputs.

Ideally you use cargo shipping. It works well for advanced items, not so much for basic material (except helium, you need this for helium).

This model works well enough up to the world engine. Looking at the item tree past that… what seems to be the result is a massive amount of drones shipping material across the map. Curious how this work long term.

A bit further in. There appear to be 11 tiers currently, though only 8 are needed to reach the World Engine and the “end” of this version’s content. That’s about 20 hours or so.

A set of quick thoughts here, as there’s a sort of mixed bag train of thoughts.

The Good

• This is early access and the systems are generally simplified. It makes little sense to add complexity now, get a solid foundation first.
• The buildings + flow are a reasonable size and there aren’t 2 dozen of them. Effectively, you have 1 building per number of inputs, which is extremely nice to see.
• The world itself looks and feels great. Exploration is rewarding. The pre/post flare world changes are also solid.
• Material requirements for building are simplified, which is amazing! Imagine is Satisfactory didn’t require you to have 13 different items to build 1 thing, that’s here. It allows for base building anywhere with relative ease.
• There are only a few raw material types to build with – effectively iron, copper, clay and helium for a large portion. You’re not stuck with super complicate spaghetti trains.
• The movement + combat mechanics are generally responsive. You can double jump (2xspace) and dodge (left alt), which are not explained but essential for survival.
• Building extended bases is relatively easy. A shield tower costs peanuts, and it’s dirt cheap to build a shelter with 2 clicks.
• I like the idea of LEM (slot-in stat boosts), but the implementation feels wonky. The only ones that seem to matter now are +stamina. Would be neat to see this expanded.

The So-so

• Base defence is interesting as an idea, but poorly executed. I strongly recommend never upgrading a base as that causes regular waves of attacks.
• Moving items between bases becomes a requirement with helium. The tools to do so (cargo drones) can only be setup on the launch side, but need a target built ahead of time. This should be configurable from either end.
• Enemy spawns are annoying as the world layout breaks your line of sight but not theirs. Very annoying near the world engine where multiple ranged enemies will attack you and no real ability to respond.
• World traversal takes too long, and if you trigger enemies, they follow you for way too long. +Movement items are needed.
• Rails (a version of belts) can get wonky, requiring a restart. I like the concept of a pull mechanic… more on that in a bit.
• Base construction has a high dependency on the Z plane (vertical), in that it needs to touch the ground. If you’ve played Valheim where buildings fall apart if not on a solid foundation, see that same thing here. The concept is sound, but the tools present should allow you to build sufficient supports. Not the case. Which means very weird factory layouts.
• Collecting recipes requires significant exploration. There map is a sort of L shape and you start in the bottom left. There are duplicate recipes in either direction, but actually finding those recipes feels more like luck. I don’t mind the exploration, but would be nice to have a sort of hot/cold mini game to pinpoint the ones you want.
• Further to this, the only purpose of exploration is for a dozen or so recipes.
• While I don’t mind the size of weapon clips (for reloads), the ammo stacks are too small. 300 currently, should be 1000.
• Dying has you lose your weapon and items. If you died it’s 99% because of enemies and likely you will die during a corpse run. Creating a new weapon + ammo means you need to create storage boxes at every base. Meh.

The Bad

• Base defence in general when facing repetitive waves of enemies. I have a large dislike for PvE in my factory games, it disrupts the zen. I can manage it to a degree if the automated tools present can be configured to manage that threat. For now, I would hope they add a toggle to remove wave spawns until the defensive options are overhauled.
• Hunger / Thirst mechanics just don’t work here. They aren’t meaningful, the items you can produce are all worse than their raw ingredients, and provide no added game context. Having 12 different food items as raw ingredients counters the good of the game (simple).
• The amount of items that can be crafted as you progress is, well, concerning due to factory design challenges.

There is a ton of cool stuff here, and it’s different enough to bring some interesting ideas to the table. It addresses a ton of the issues present in the genre, both with simplicity and continual goals to work on. Tons of potential here.

I have a penchant for puzzle games, especially those that focus on deduction. TR-49 is from inkle, the same devs behind Heaven’s Vault. Both focus on language as the key puzzle component.

The principle interface is above. You have text on the left, and a code on the right. Through combinations of XX-## you navigate through what’s effectively a broken wikipedia, trying to restore the links. The main goal of the game is to wipe a particular record, and depending on your choice, there are multiple endings.

There are some automated note taking tools that help you deduce some pieces together, and milestones that let you know if you’ve hit a particular point. That adds a sort of boundary on the puzzle, which is key when you are presented with seemingly infinite options.

Each set of coordinates follows a particular pattern, which can be used to infer other links. The format always follows a XX=object and ##=date structure, it’s how they are intertwined that matters. The text itself may present something like ‘6 years before their death’, which gives a ## pivot for the same object. You can brute force the ## portion as it’s 100 choices if you’ve found an object code. There are other object codes that are used once, or coordinates that act for separate purposes.

While you’re solving this, there’s ongoing dialogue for the setting. It’s a weird setting and one that is best experienced fresh as it tightly bound to the multiple endings. This does add a lot of voice acting, where you will want to play with headphones in order to isolate the sound and truly focus on the puzzles.

The total journey isn’t exceptionally long, maybe 6 hours, but it is quite fulfilling. Well worth the purchase if you’re into this style of game, of which I am a HUGE fan.

I like factory builders and tend to give them all a shot. Mileage certainly varies here, with two main reasons. First, is that the math needs to friggin’ math. Ratios and scalability are key so that you can compartmentalize a factory. I’ve gone over this bit a lot, and was probably the only gripe I had with Techtonica.

Second is manageable and achievable goals. Making the numbers go up is an inherent goal, but the actual steps to get there are key. Satisfactory has milestones (good) and hard drives (bad). These goals have to be incrementally harder to reach and ensure there is no downtime where you’re just waiting for a ticker to complete. This is much harder said than done.

Comparables

StarRupture (why one word?) is a mix of multiple games in the genre. It’s a preset 3D map, with research that leverages usable products, and has some PvE against planet bugs, so a tad similar to Satisfactory here. It uses a grid structure for placement of stations, which is very nice.

In terms of differentiators, every hour or so, the planet receives a massive solar flare that burns everything that isn’t under a shielded protection. That giant fire causes the factory to stop working until it auto-cools and adds new things on the map. Cavern access is one, which doesn’t yet mean much that I can see. It also spawns some fireballs you can mine, which are only used in 1 recipe to date, as well as meteors you can harvest which allow you to build more bases. It also has hunger/hydration gauges, which are closer to Planer Crafter in nature. Somewhat uniquely, it doesn’t use belts but instead rails under a pull mechanism.

Rails

Worthy of it’s own point here, rails are functional connectors between buildings. If a building needs something and that something is connected to an available rail, it will traverse the entire map in order to meet that need. A rail is not dedicated to one item, as you can connect multiple together. Their only limit is throughput, which is generally only an issue at the ‘mouth’ of a factory. Since a rail only transports what is needed, you can have 1 rail supply 3 items to a factory without causing jams.

Factory Design

Resource collection can get a bit weird as the nodes are spread out – Helium 3 for sure. You’ll eventually unlock the ability to ship things between bases, which opens the door on a mega factory of sorts. World design requires foundations (which don’t always work), meaning you can’t cover the entire planet like you could in Satisfactory. Even the base shields you deploy have a hard limit on the number of buildings you can deploy (higher than you think mind you). I’ve ended up with sort of micro bases, where they harvest raw material, smelt it, then ship it to the larger base.

Research gates start off a buffet style where you will invest in 5 at the same time. Eventually, you will end up focusing on a specific research and dedicate everything to getting it done. Dedicated bases with shipping is key here.

The relatively great news is that actually building something requires 1 or 2 items total, no matter the complexity. This dramatically simplifies building more bases, or a quick shelter if a flare is coming up.

Early Access

I haven’t had any crashes, which is nice. The ratios generally work, and figuring out how to best use rails is a nice thing. Progress on research generally means you always have something to do and/or tweak. Exploration has progressive risk, with some areas feeling like death traps due to a combination of poor shooting controls (yes, guns) and a lack of combat options – standard EA issues.

Exploration is required to progress, as you need blueprints for research items, and Helium + Sulfur is nowhere close to where you start off. It’s certainly more enjoyable to explore than most 3D games.

There’s a decent sized list of QoL bit here, like how much research is needed for an upgrade, how maps work, how consumables work, and general factory design. But it’s all QoL items and not simply ‘broken’, which honestly speaks volumes to how the dev team took their time to launch something good. The major design risk here is going to be the rails and how they work at scale, time will tell. I feel like the potential here is higher than many others in the genre given the various bits at play here. To be clear, it’s only potential at this point – that’s the nature of EA.

Overall, I am impressed with what’s here. Well worth a pick up!

I am not one for New Year’s resolutions. Most of my reflective / change time is during the summer when things tend to slow down. Holiday season is often a mix of surviving / recovering / enjoying, not so much to make large scale changes. But that’s me.

Now, 2025 objectively sucked. I am fortunate enough to not be old enough that I don’t really have easy comparatives of bad years, though 2020 is a bar I would prefer to never reach again. 2026 is off to a rough start – at least on the world stage. It’d be cool to go a few days without some stupidly aggravating world event. Can we be cool for a bit?

Family stuff is straightforward for now. Enjoy the moments. Appreciate the moments. It certainly feels fleeting. Hockey is both a safe space and an outlet that the family can enjoy. That’s nice to have.

Health is improving but not great. Found some courage to try a modified exercise program that now let’s me wake up without backpain for the first time in.. hell, I don’t know when. I used to spend most days with a 4/10 of lower back pain, so this improvement is very welcome. Holiday eating habits were rough, so glad to get back to the standard routine.

Games coming up… well this is a weird one I guess. GTA6 may actually launch. Control 2 as well. Aside from that, not much on the radar I am paying attention to. If you look at the 2025 games in review post, there were only 3 big-name games there. I find I am gravitating much more towards the indie/middle pack games. Star Rupture (a sort of Satisfactory clone, in EA) is worth a poke. The commoditization of game dev, and frankly evolution of AI means that almost anyone can translate an idea into a decent game. The moral pitchforks of ‘no AI’ are the same we had in 1993 with Jurassic Park (animatronics vs CGI). It can’t be used everywhere (well, perhaps James Cameron has thoughts here) but it would be kind of moronic to not experiment some. The clear danger here, and it is a significant one, is that ‘people’ in general are idiots and self-serving. Social Media is the best example I can think of to showcase the stupidity of humandkind propelled by the quest-for-more-money of oligarchs. It’s not about doing more with less. It’s about doing more with the same.

I am sure that we’ll get some solid deliveries this year, likely a larger focus on portability where the Steam Deck and similar devices can truly start to shine through. It seems that is a more likely path forward given the RAM shortages around today. We’re still a few years from integrated graphics being fully viable. Close though!

I will point out I’ve done a recent replay of a few Final Fantasy games. More on that in a future post. For now, let’s just hope we have a decent 2025. Or at least a decent January 2025!

I remember playing Arkanoid when I was a kid and being amazed at what a mouse could do. Ball x Pit is pretty much Arkanoid on steroids.

To state clearly for the record, this is not a game you play forever. After about 20 hours or so, you’ll have seen pretty much everything. The NewGame+ mode isn’t more than reskinned + harder levels. Still, for the price of entry it’s hard to find a better deal.

And as always, the game is amazing on the Steam Deck. Very easy to pick up and go.

The Basics

You have a character, they shoot 1 or more balls towards enemies that gradually move towards you. There are 2 mini bosses and a final boss per level. Complete the level with a few characters (that you gradually unlock) to get access to more levels. Rinse and repeat.

The Twists

There are a couple big ones. First, you have a home base where you place buildings and farmable areas for resources. This is the meta progression of the game. These unlocks come through random drops (blueprints) in levels and gradually increase in power.

Second, you are provided ‘special’ balls that have additional effects, like more damage, poison, frost and so on. You can combine these balls to new balls (evolution) or merge them for mixed effects (fusion). Understanding how these work together is important at first, and less so as you progress when you can brute force some pieces. Iron + Fire = Bomb, a super strong option for early levels. Ghost balls pass through opponents, quite useful.

Third, each character has a perk of some sort that you need to work through. Maybe it’s more balls, maybe the balls come from a different location, or you use a shield to bounce them. The last character allows you to AFK. You also acquire passive boosts per run on your character, pick those that complement the character perks. Increasing a character’s stats, even by 1 point, has a significant impact. Trophies for clearing zones improve the more character’s clear it, also a significant boost.

The Optimization

Rogue-like games always have optimizations and here is no different. Resources are key to progress and initially gold is a huge bottle neck. To start you can only harvest once per visit to town, which resets every run. With a few gold mines put together so that the harvesting characters ‘pinball’ in a small place, you can acquire some gold, start a run, quickly fail it, then get more gold.

Eventually you gain the ability to buy more harvests, and as long as each harvest is 75% or less the cost of a purchase, you can farm more and more gold. With all characters and max gold mines, you should be able to get 3,000+ gold per harvest. Takes a while to get there though.

Harvesting wheat/wood/stone is different and honestly less than pleasant until the final building is unlocked. 1 farm, 1 lumberyard, 2 quarries gives you 4 people harvesting big fields every few minutes, with everyone else in a gold mine. You can use the gold you get to buy more resources through the market. When you finally DO get the last building, then it’s honestly about being offline (game closed) with 3 farms, 3 lumberyards, and everything else in quarries. When you restart the game you’ll have tons of items, probably 500k gold worth. With that you can upgrade the infinite buildings for more stats.

The more stats piece is only relevant to the NG+ mode in truth. By the time you get there, you should have a good grasp of the game.

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…

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’.

Clearly, I am an advocate for bus mechanics. It has a tremendous amount of advantages, significantly so when the items on the bus have an infinite shelf life. It saves you from spaghetti factories, allows for improved logistics, and overall more efficient use of material. With that, there are some interesting downsides that really only start to show in specific cases.

Available Space

Bus architecture is on the whole smaller than dedicated lanes, but it also comes with larger space requirements. 15 small paths take up more overall space than 1 large one, but that large path cannot be deviated. If you have mines, water, or obstacles in the way, you may not be able to build the bus. Satisfactory solves this with vertical factories. DSP can pave over planets. Factorio has this issue when you leave the main planet, which can certainly be mitigated through cliff explosives, landfill and ice.

Item Queues

A bus generally operates on a saturation model, where all parts are full. Any item on the bus is one that is not being actively used, and therefore you have a major buffer of items. This is good to manage burst demands, but can be bad when you have very expensive items sitting idle on the bus. This is a major issue if the items on the bus can expire, as the time to travel / wait, can cause it to spoil. Satisfactory will have a massive bus and a giant ‘waste’ of materials (which are infinite, so you’re wasting time). DSP doesn’t really have too much of a problem here as the ratios generally are in your favor. Factorio only has issues here with items that expire, mainly Gleba items.

Accuracy

The greatest benefit of a bus is the flexibility and simplicity of use. You can clearly see with your eyes if it’s working as an empty bus = not going well. The solution to an empty bus is relatively simple, add a bunch of items to it at the start until it backs up. No math, nothing fancy, just jam it full of stuff.

The flipside to this is that it becomes increasingly expensive to scale the end result items as each individual item on the bus may cause bottlenecks. Or, you may simply run out of space and need large scale transport logistics. In these cases, it’s often better to build mini-factories that are offshoots of the bus, especially in late game aspects. The net benefit of this model is that the input and outputs are controlled, and easily replicated with blueprints.

• Satisfactory is very binary here, as you either make mini factories from the start or you make a bus all the way through, simply because there are too many items. You may end up using this model for a Nuclear factory though, even though it will take about 20 or so different ingredients to work. The lack of large scale blueprints absolutely prevents effective use of factories. You can make them for sure, but it’s going to be hours of effort. If the production chains weren’t so complex…a Ficsite Bar for a power plant has about 30 different production steps.
• DSP’s bus is very different as there are 2 buses. One for buildings, of which you won’t ever build factories for. Another for everything else with Logistic Stations – which is like watching mosquitos fly around, moving items between towers feeding dozens of mini-factories. For late game, when focusing on SPM, there is some value in building factories dedicated for this as you can ‘easily’ increase your SPM by putting down a new blueprint. The game is extremely modular and flexible in this regard, with the absolute best production dashboard information around. An analyst’s dream.
• Factorio’s bus is such that you will only ever have mini-factories. The bus itself is only ever relevant for items that are created in very high volumes. Where the starter planet may have a bus that feeds construction of buildings, this is absolutely not the case on the next planet as robots & requestors can address this for you. This is a net effect of simplified production chains, as compared to others. The casino portion of acquiring legendary material is a completely different topic highlighting the pitfalls of a bus, and while ‘fun’ to puzzle out an optimized method, absolutely sucks.

More Positives than Negatives

While there are niche cases where a bus is not particularly useful as the volume of items created are highly specialized (e.g. Nuclear Plants in Factorio), the wide majority benefit from a main bus for common refined raw material (e.g. the step just after raw material such as iron plates). Normally this main bus has 6-8 item types, generally in the space of iron, copper, coal, oil, then 2 more liquids and solids.

Full buses are different, where all items that have more than 2 uses are put on the belt. For some games, this means that the bus has 20 items. For others, 40+.

As a general rule, anytime I play a game with production elements, I opt to build some sort of bus in order to math out the long term requirements. They are relatively easy to build, provide a lot of flexibility, aesthetically please my eyes, and allow me to quickly diagnose production issues. Optimizing that bus would mean making it as small as possible, which really only comes from experimentation, knowing which items only have a short-term need. And with most of the games in this genre being in Early Access… well a patch can change a lot.

Plus, it’s fun to say bus.