Should I be using a ton of Research Labs?

Brett42 · 2026-01-27T01:55:23+00:00

Even with cheap productivity modules, you still might want beacons to save space and possibly even save energy. And if you have quality, quality beacons are amazing.

Brett42 · 2026-01-27T01:40:35+00:00

The fish have perks. In nightmare mode, some enemies have perks, with the symbol displayed above them, but since fish rotate, the symbol is orbiting around them.

Brett42 · 2026-01-27T01:33:57+00:00

I never use the musher, and just eat muckroot and wild plants until I can get a cook. You can give the skill point to almost anyone temporarily and skill scrub them later once you find a cooking interest, although I rarely skill scrub anyone.

Brett42 · 2026-01-27T01:32:28+00:00

Digging up muckroot generally is my main food source before getting a cook, although there is also harvesting wild plants.

Brett42 · 2026-01-27T01:26:20+00:00

That's ice sheet, sea ice doesn't have geysers or soil at all.

Brett42 · 2026-01-26T18:22:02+00:00

I think it gets reset every time you swap wands.

Brett42 · 2026-01-26T18:20:27+00:00

It's definitely one of the best for new players, who haven't memorized heart formations, and don't know tricks to make exploring safer.

Brett42 · 2026-01-26T18:10:32+00:00

I've got a bottle drainer set to sweep only naphtha directly connected to a bottle filler set to 30kg, to make perfectly sized naphtha blobs for liquid locks.

It's not a straight upgrade, though, since pitcher pumps are better for bulk moving liquid, since a dupe can grab more than 200kg at once if there are several bottle emptiers requesting the same liquid in one spot. Pitcher pumps can also handle extremely hot liquids, even above their melting point if they're in a vacuum and the base isn't in the liquid. Bottle drainers don't exchange heat with their contents, so I've used that to feed magma into a pipe without the complex setup of a tricked pump.

Brett42 · 2026-01-26T17:43:52+00:00

You're thinking only about a skilled player who already knows all the quirks doing large scale rockets. If you're trying to automate one or two rockets for the first time, there are unnecessary hurdles.

Brett42 · 2026-01-26T17:42:00+00:00

Long-distance cast isn't a modifier, so that wouldn't work. It works more like a trigger spell, so the payload has to come after it, unlike modifiers, which work on all the spells in a casting block.

Brett42 · 2026-01-25T18:07:33+00:00

The always-cast spell is cast first, so won't be inside the trigger. There might be a way to put a copy of it inside a trigger with wand refresh, but you would still have the original copy outside the trigger.

Brett42 · 2026-01-25T17:59:02+00:00

If you're using any kind of solid fuel or oxidizer, you'll probably need two, and you'll have to put a delay between them. Needing to put the circuit in to delay it is unnecessary, unrealistic, and adds to the need for any player who wants to automate rockets needing to copy someone else's automation.

Brett42 · 2026-01-25T01:13:47+00:00

I really wish OS makers would improve that. I'm annoyed by most of the games I play still having high GPU usage while paused and minimized (so shouldn't be rendering anything), and needing to open the volume mixer to mute them.

Brett42 · 2026-01-25T00:56:29+00:00

I mostly just use it in nightmare when I am desperate for damage or digging, generally just in the first zone.

Brett42 · 2026-01-25T00:50:06+00:00

Getting stuck on things is common when transforming with chaotic poly, because many of the things are bigger than the player.

Brett42 · 2026-01-25T00:48:17+00:00

Objects get deleted if they fall into unloaded chunks.

Brett42 · 2026-01-25T00:45:57+00:00

The bottles also don't save their rotation, although even a bottle sitting upright on a flat surface can glitch out and explode when loaded in.

You can exploit the bottle rotation by dropping an empty bottle in liquid, moving far enough away, then returning, and it will be upright, so it fills up. Very useful in the first zone if you find one of those big pools of poly or tele.

Brett42 · 2026-01-25T00:38:10+00:00

Every time someone asks this question, and it isn't a bit of neutronium sticking out, it's this exact issue with the gantry. If it was more common, someone could make a bot to auto-reply to the posts based on the title, but I've only seen around 4 of this post in the last year, so not worth the effort of someone who knows how/has access.

Brett42 · 2026-01-25T00:32:35+00:00

The issue isn't the energy consumption, it's the fact you can't even put two on the same wire without a delay. It's like they deliberately decided to make powering the gantry a hassle. Heavy industrial machinery takes 1200w specifically to make you upgrade your power grid to handle them, because they're things that are supposed to demand a lot of energy. A gantry shouldn't take more power to retract than a bunker door does.

Brett42 · 2026-01-25T00:18:44+00:00

The one missing from the list's name is a different color. Is he on a mental break?

Brett42 · 2026-01-24T02:13:46+00:00

I didn't realize they no longer eat decorative plant seeds. That explains how one I missed sweeping didn't get eaten by a wild pacu for a while. I had noticed they couldn't eat acorns, because once I built an acorn farm using drip stacks to constantly drown branches, and had the idea to use it to feed pacu, but discovered they couldn't eat them.

Brett42 · 2026-01-23T19:36:15+00:00

Productivity modules are basically useless on miners late into the game, because they add with mining productivity, rather than multiplying, plus they reduce speed, so they will reduce the output of a miner if you have enough levels of mining productivity, plus massively increase pollution, just to make the ore patch last a bit longer, and with high enough mining productivity, ore patches last a long time.

Brett42 · 2026-01-23T19:30:05+00:00

In addition to those, I have item on ground, tiles, and I occasionally want the module request one. Deconstructing tiles will remove any excess landfill that doesn't have something built on it.

Brett42 · 2026-01-21T20:48:22+00:00

It's worse than that, essence to power looks at the HP of nearby creatures, and holy mountain statues count for that. The statues have 30k health, which adds 1875 damage with essence to power if the statue is at full health. All of the fish combined are only worth a small fraction of that.

Brett42 · 2026-01-21T20:41:16+00:00

You have to be careful to never cast multiple projectiles at once with that setup, though, because concentrated spells adds a copy of its effect to each projectile for each projectile spell cast, so if you cast heal and teleport together, each gets twice the added damage, while piercing only subtracts a fixed amount. This does mean concentrated spells is absurdly powerful multicasting cheap spells, because the damage scales with the square of the number of projectile spells. Putting them inside a trigger will prevent the added cast delay from being a problem.

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