#vidya

Science Stinks. Labs are increased from 0 to 100 pollution per minute; biolabs from 8 to 30. Research triggers waves of attacks. Lab quality (+30% speed) is now effectively -23% pollution per science pack.

Quality Biters. Adds a second form of scaling to Biters based on evolution percentage. Makes them tougher, deadlier, longer range, and synergy with Science Stinks. Be warned: Normal gun turrets will get outranged by some rare spawns as early as 0.5 evolution.

Explosive Biters and a few other variant Biter mods like Toxic and Armoured. The Explosive ones in particular are immune to fire, so defenses can't be flamethrower-and-forget. Oh, and they appear on Vulcanus too.

Fulgoran robot enemies. Now all four basic planets have enemies that build spawners and expand over time. Bwahahaha! Nowhere is safe! Well, actually, some of the other modded planets from...

Kry's Planet Mods Lite. Too many to list here and it changes over time, evaluate what you want from the pack, it's a good list. Some of my favorites: Moshine, Rubia, Neumann V (from Metal and Stars), Pelagos.

Research Cost Curve. Allowed us to gradually scale up to 5x science cost multiplier for mid game, without being overrun by biters on the second tech.

Carbonut Agriculture and Demolisher Agriculture and Demolisher Scales. Because adding biters to Vulcanus wasn't enough, it was IMO the easiest planet and we are giving it Problems.

Those are the big changes. There's also some minor conveniences like Milestones and Squeak Through and Even Distribution and Quality Down-Binning and Mined Inserters Don't Leave Items and others, some weapons and some map setting changes.

It's been a blast. The combination of polluting labs, science multiplier and biter scaling means that enemies stay threatening on Nauvis much longer. We couldn't simply rush to artillery, because artillery is a Vulcanus tech, Vulcanus is moved behind Gleba by the agriculture mods, and Gleba is not a good first planet to expand to with the difficulty turned up. So we fought on Nauvis for a while. Just getting to space was slower, which meant biters scaled further, which meant we needed more combat power, which slowed us down again, etc.

Quality turrets become relevant to outrange higher level enemies. We added quality modules to miners and furnaces to stockpile plates and ore, resulting in the screenshot you see at top, so that we could consistently produce stacks of high-quality items from high-quality ingredients rather than just a few gambles. In retrospect, I wish we'd subfiltered each tier of quality, but you know what they say about starter bases and "good enough". We have dedicated duplicates of laser-turret-assembly minifactories that take iron and copper plates of various quality levels and output turrets of that quality level.

Debug mode reported >3000 pollution concentrated in a chunk of map containing laboratories before we switched to biolabs. The ❌structure lost! alert was continuously beeping from the massive attacks on every side. Mostly walls, but losses at our defenses were at one point being measured in laser-turrets-per-minute, and we did napkin math on the relative value of putting Productivity modules or Efficiency modules in laboratories because the latter would reduce attacks triggered by research. Later, after visiting Gleba, we instead placed >1000 agriculture towers on Nauvis to grow and harvest trees for the purpose of absorbing pollution. Also, we managed to make labs not be the single largest pollution source on the planet. (Drills and electromagnetic plants compete for first now.)

Here is our enormous nuclear power plant, using a tileable layout. Unrevealed chunk for scale, because the interior is so large and so far from roboports that it only intermittently gets radar scan coverage. 87 reactor-equivalents producing up to 10GW of power.

("Reactor-equivalents?" 84 reactors but 10 of them are Uncommon Quality with +30% output.)

It doesn't fit on my screen if I zoom in.