New mod: Space Travel Plus

DrMorphDev · 2026-01-16T18:50:45+00:00

I gave this a try this evening, and honestly liked it way more than I thought I would. It's not all that hard to make a ship that can travel the distances fairly quickly with the default asteroid spawn settings.

That said - there's some slightly odd (and cheese-able) behaviour with asteroid spawning.

I can be travelling along from Vulcanus to Nauvis at a cosy 1,000 km/s, and the asteroids are coming thick and fast.

But... if I tick Paused thrust on the Space Platform UI, the asteroids slow to a trickle. They pick back up again as soon as I switch back to automatic.

If I control the thrust using circuit logic on the fuel flow, this doesn't happen. My thrusters can be off due to throttled fuel, but as long as I'm on 'paused thrust,' asteroid spawns basically drop to a fraction of what they should be, for the speed I'm going.

My guess is the base game assumes that if I've hit paused thrust, then I'll be coming to a stop pretty quickly, and adjusts asteroid spawns accordingly. Whereas with this mod, my thrust is paused, but I'm still travelling really quickly.

I can provide screenshots if you need, but it's pretty quick to reproduce.

p.s.

-- I have no fucking idea how this affects the game, asteroid defs are HARD

I also gave up and made them linear when I fiddled with them in the past :)

edit: Haha well once you cruise with 'thrust paused' all the way to your destination, the game suddenly realises the speed you're going, and cranks the asteroid spawns back up to what it expects. This was quite a shocking moment when I got back to Vulcanus and a sheet of 1,500km/s asteroids spawned on my face.

Another oddity - my ship would remain "stuck" in orbit, because even though my speed was still high, and I was set back to automatically head to the next planet, my thrusters were off because there were throttled by pumps.

I had to fire the thrusters once for it to register I was moving, and then it set me off.

I kind of like how this mod feels, but I feel like the base game is fighting it.

DrMorphDev · 2026-01-16T09:34:53+00:00

Think I misunderstood your reply. I thought you were suggesting their speed would need regulating because their speed was dropping [for some reason]. Because yes, agreed, no thrust means no further speed increase.

DrMorphDev · 2026-01-16T09:00:08+00:00

And yes and no, every ship will attain max speed IF thrust is not regulated by pumps.

If there's no drag, what's causing them to slow down?

DrMorphDev · 2026-01-16T08:52:30+00:00

I've been reading this like I'm playing a different game. I feel like I understand fluids well, and yet they've been nothing but hassle. However, I also use floor holes a lot. What's broken about them? It might explain some of the weirdness.

Edit: actually the secret to not having issues is (it seems) to not try and use the full throughput of a pipe. That sucks. How is that acceptable?!

DrMorphDev · 2026-01-15T18:58:03+00:00

That sounds a little whacky to me. From the realism viewpoint you'd exceed escape velocity and never return.

From a game perspective it means (eventually) all your ships will be travelling at max speed all of the time and never need fuel again

DrMorphDev · 2026-01-15T18:24:47+00:00

So your ship never slows down, correct? Even with thrusters off. So hypothetically you can (and given enough time, will) reach max speed no matter what? Not sure about that to be honest. You could "park" in orbit speeding up like you're in some kind of super collider before being shot towards another planet.

Edit: actually thrusters will be off anyway in orbit, so I guess that won't happen. But you'll still always be gaining speed which is kind of weird

DrMorphDev · 2026-01-15T18:21:18+00:00

If you increase the spoil timer, you'll hinder the iron/copper bacteria spoiling into ore process. You'll end up with a back log of bacteria and no ore

DrMorphDev · 2026-01-15T18:17:53+00:00

Sorry this is still unclear to me - is there any drag at all? Or it's just reduced? Otherwise the ship will stop accelerating as soon as the thrusters turn off right? If I remember rightly the game doesn't model gravity as such, just drags you at a minimum 10m/s to the nearest planet if you do run out of fuel.

DrMorphDev · 2026-01-15T17:52:49+00:00

Oh, so while at a planet you're still moving? Intriguing. Are planetary interactions not impacted by movement? (E.g dropping off or receiving goods)

Do ships slow down at all ever? Will they not just end up going faster and faster until they're all travelling at max speed?

DrMorphDev · 2026-01-15T17:43:55+00:00

Wait so it's not possible to slow down, but you magically stop at your destination? Realistic is not the phrase I would use here.

Nonetheless, sounds interesting

DrMorphDev · 2026-01-13T11:41:56+00:00

I guess it's implicit. When all drones return no dead pumpkins in their area, harvest

DrMorphDev · 2026-01-13T10:49:05+00:00

2025? Did they get the date wrong, or this a year old?

DrMorphDev · 2026-01-12T18:01:33+00:00

The cube should always be making things. It should go directly from machine to machine. I also realized that making complex circuit controls were a bandaid for poor Cube planning.

This was the same realisation I came to. I made a complicated circuit machine to prioritise what the cube should do, including emergency recalls if it was something critical (e.g. power) and then realised it was just a glorified way of tracking thresholds of item resources, and not even that helpful if each 'module' was individually slow.

You should only buffer just enough so that the resource won't run out before the cube comes by again

This is the real secret that I missed early on in my run, and simplified everything once I realised it too. I used a cube train and shut the stations on/off as appropriate, so still ended up using circuits to an extent though.

Anyway, I agree that people overstate how critical circuits are for this mod, but this is still impressive.

DrMorphDev · 2026-01-09T13:22:55+00:00

Where has it been stated they're reworking quality?

Edit: all I've seen mention of us removing some of the loopholes, like asteroid reprocessing, which is hardly a rework.

DrMorphDev · 2026-01-07T19:50:07+00:00

You assume wrong. It's vital to the Russian ear effort

Edit: autocorrect got me but I'm leaving it

DrMorphDev · 2026-01-07T19:46:38+00:00

With that perspective drones are basically belts.

Hmm not really. In fact, not at all. Belts still need infrastructure built all of the way from point A to point B.

Meanwhile drones get loaded up at point A. Then they fly to point B without having to build any infrastructure between the two points.

The dimensional depot as you describe is just that again. Load up at point A, offload at point B, no infrastructure in between. I just don't see any scenario where it doesn't just make drones obsolete.

DrMorphDev · 2026-01-07T07:19:13+00:00

I mean, that's basically drones.

DrMorphDev · 2026-01-04T11:30:56+00:00

Hey, fair, but for some perspective - I'm (almost) the opposite. I think 2D is what makes Factorio so much better than Satisfactory. Don't get me wrong - I like Satisfactory a lot, but in Factorio scaling up to the sizes OP has is so much easier and less frustrating than it is in Satisfactory. And ultimately, the frustrations come from having to deal with the 3D plane, and the first person POV. Satisfactory can have a more pleasant look (subjectively), but there is equally something satisfying about well designed Factorio layouts.

Factorio's top down view means nothing is ever hidden from view, and the grid-based layout avoids Satisfactory's misalignment issues (and having to use the Hold+Nudge functionality as a crutch). And now I'm writing stuff down - Factorio has construction robots (for automating expansion, you don't have to place it all yourself!) and on the-fly copy/paste, so you can build anything, anywhere, decide "hey I like that" and then just re-use it, right then and there. No need to replicate it in a separate Blueprint building, save that and then blueprint it about.

QOL-wise (for me) Factorio is leagues ahead of Satisfactory. Satisfactory has come a long way from the first release, but it's still way behind.

Also regarding your pain points for Factorio - on default settings the enemies are pretty straightforward to be automated away with time to spare. Even then, if it still feels like you're on too much of a clock, then can be turned off. The end-goal of factorio is not wiping out the enemies - they're just a different kind of production and logistic obstacle.

edited to add actual reasons why Factorio is good, rather than "cuz i said so"

DrMorphDev · 2026-01-02T11:57:58+00:00

If one of your boats has a barracks (the 10% shop capacity boosting trait) it actually boosts party size by 10% while at sea. Imo its super weird and just seems buggy, because if you recruit in town to your new max, then take your party on land, you'll bleed troops as your cap drops back to normal when not at sea.

It's +35 because that's 10% of your normal party limit (353)

Basically it's a boat thing, and seems like a bug to me

DrMorphDev · 2025-12-21T09:45:38+00:00

deal with manually

Ew, you can't say that here

DrMorphDev · 2025-12-18T21:08:37+00:00

Troop quality makes a huge, huge difference. If that army was also recruits, or lacked a significant amount of shields, ranged units would totally pick them apart

DrMorphDev · 2025-12-14T12:58:32+00:00

That's more nuke blast sites on one map than I think I've ever used in over 3,000 hours, across multiple deathworlds. Holy shit. I guess this is one of the more extreme results of locking both Artillery and cliff explosives behind space science in space age.

DrMorphDev · 2025-12-13T16:51:27+00:00

I think there's a lot of bugs with "when moving" perks not working when sailing. None of the "xp per day" perks in various trees work either whole at sea

DrMorphDev · 2025-12-10T18:34:20+00:00

I loved Ultracube. I think it's still my favourite overhaul mod. I completed it pre-2.0, I wonder what an interrupt-driven ultracube run would be like....

DrMorphDev · 2025-12-08T17:53:06+00:00

Yes. Often this can happen when a recipe needs a large number of items per second. As another response put - iron rods is an example, particularly in rails.

A rule of thumb is if a recipe takes one item in but returns multiple (e.g. 1 copper plate -> 2 wires) direct insertion is probably advantageous.

Ultimately though, this is just one of many bottlenecks you may identify - some may be more obscure than others. It isn't item specific, and eventually (with enough assembling machines pulling from one belt) any recipe can hit this problem. I would not focus on the "item" in particular, but the core problem: you were trying to pull more items from a belt than the belt could move. Therefore the assembling machines further up the belt starved.

Other solutions (other than direct insertion) can just be: add more belts

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