OC by @[email protected]
I’ve been playing space age with 0 evolution increase over time (killing bases still increments it). So I’ve been eager to work around biter bases and pentapods.
Biter spawners can all be blocked by a pattern like the image; surrounding them with walls or solar panels or pipes prevents spawning. (This is intended behavior.) What is not mentioned anywhere afaik is that this also seems to prevent biter expansion from that base.
The same is only partially true for pentapods! Small egg rafts only spawn wrigglers (at low evolution?), and it seems you can block them off as in the image above. I have yet to see one try to expand from a surrounded small spawner.
In both cases, surrounded spawners seem to absorb a small amount of pollution/spores, be unable to spawn anything, and sit passively. No attack triggered.
But (regular) egg rafts are different. They spawn stompers and strafers which can spawn and stand directly on top of the raft. I tried and failed to prevent this spawning by packing the space with spider-trons. Also, given enough time a surrounded egg raft will eventually expand (afaik, it seems to spawn a wriggler in a crevice which then attacks its way out. I’ve never seen it just spawn a wriggler).
Relatedly: Stompers and strafers can stand between tiled solar panels, but not walls. Stompers only damage buildings with each step if they are aggresive.
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Why solar and not walls? Why not use the least expensive material?
First design was walls, but asthetically I do like the solar panels better. You can put a substation nearby and get value out of the space, which walls don’t really provide.
I haven’t tested if a mess of pipes stop wrigger spawning/stomper walking. Iron is probably cheapest option on gleba?
On Gleba? Solar panels are the cheaper material.
How so? There’s plenty of rock, or at least I’ve found enough. You use the big miners and get tonnes of the stuff from small patches. I haven’t done the math, but… I’ve always got boxes full of bricks and walls, and idle miners.
Steel and computer are essentially infinite, of course, so technically I guess you’re right. I just… have way more wall on Gleba than I could ever use.
My landfill keeps getting eaten with running the egg-breeder. I should set it up to store in biochambers and recycle on demand, but…
I… what? Landfill? What does landfill have to do with egg breeders? Is this related to your passive approach to rafts?
I just have a bunch of breeders on one side of a circular belt, a bunch of ag science plants on the other, a nutrient feeder stacking nutrient onto belt and something on the other side to pull off spoilage. There’s some minimal circuitry to ensure eggs don’t spoil in the ag plants, but I’ve got things tuned so eggs never stay on the belt long enough to spoil.
I’m trying to imagine how landfill figures into this. I only use landfill to create overgrowth products, and for expanding farms.
The eggs not turning into science packs are turning into biochambers, constantly. It’s how I keep the egg breeding stable without having a bunch hatch.
So, you use excess eggs to create biochambers? Interesting. I don’t have excess eggs; I have more ag pack generators than I produce eggs, so one is usually idle unless there’s a surplus of eggs, then it builds a pack, the surplus is gone, and the cycle repeats.
Encouragement to make at least some! It’s nice to have a local way of restoring egg production (4 biochambers -> recycler -> 1 egg, on average).
Essential since I’m trying to be passive. But I suspect it would be convenient in other situations too. (I guess it’d also be an efficient way to get eggs on nauvis? Haven’t thought about why we’d care.)
You can burn the eggs too. Storage for biochambers will eventually fill up and need manual intervention.
I don’t know how you manage. All of my stones go toward train tracks and landfill, and I still need to import more to keep up. I’m even using enriched resource settings.
Belts. I have no trains on Gleba, it’s all turbo belts. So far, I haven’t expanded so far on Gleba that fruit is spoiling on the belts, except when they back up, but if that happens I’ll just move processing closer to the fields. What with spoilage management, I’ve found density is itself an issue, so spreading out to multiple smaller bases is easier. It helps that the native wildlife isn’t a robust or aggressive as Nauvis; Nauvis encourages building a giant wall around a mega factory (IME), but Gleba I find it’s easier to spread out. Energy being essentially unlimited, I just sprinkle laser turrets around for peace of mind, and a Spidertrons hanging out for just in case… but, really, the most dangerous the wildlife has been is when something got wedged in egg production and spoilage led to outbreaks. It’s been ages since one of those happened. Gleba isn’t Fulgaris, but it’s pretty peaceful, at least around my bases.
This is a nice idea that I’ve never thought of before and seems like it would be useful even on default settings, and even if it doesn’t totally work for pentapods.
@[email protected] how difficult is it to get the player or bots close enough to build the walls without being attacked? When I’m anywhere near a nest it spawns biters constantly
A few notes on managing biters early game: Worms attack bots, so blueprint placing was a bad time without killing all the worms first. I had the easiest time doing this by placing a bunch of turrets filtered to only attack worms+biters. I think it should be possible to place a roboport close enough earlier in the game, and then carefully build ‘from the inside out’, only shooting down the biters when you’ve basically encased them.
On gleba, I had the mech-suit from fulgora with the upgraded roboport, so I just kite things around while doing the science. Everything de-agros if you get enough distance.
I wanted to add that surrounding a convenient bitter base seems like a good way to make the captive biter stuff less of a headache. You can save one well located base for when you reach gleba.
