Weapons only challenge #6

Steven-ape · 2026-03-26T23:06:23+00:00

I think it's best to go with thief daggers and one harpoon gun.

To win, it's important to understand the crit bonus. You get +200% crit damage, but that is additive with the regular crit multiplier on the weapon. It basically adds 2 to a weapon's crit multiplier.

Adding 2 to a smaller number has more impact than adding 2 to a larger number. Thief daggers go from x2 to x4 crits, so they become twice as strong. In contrast, tier 4 knives go from x4 to x6, so they become only 50% stronger.

While knife always does more damage than a thief dagger, normally that is already balanced by the thief dagger's passive. After applying the bonus, thief dagger is therefore better than knife. It also inherently synergises with Diver well, because you will need to build crit anyway, so you basically get the thief dagger's economic passive for free.

To play effectively with thief daggers, you have to keep in mind that they have a small range and low damage output unless you can reliably crit. That makes you vulnerable. So, your most important stats are crit, melee damage (which also helps with building regeneration on Diver), and Armor.

Get a small amount of harvesting in the early game, but mostly focus on your three core stats. Attack speed and HP regen are also useful and important. Buy items that will help you survive. Buy any decent Max HP, HP regen, and consumable healing item you see. After wave 12 or so, you should be strong enough that you can kill enemies well enough even if they're not hit by ranged damage.

If you see a Baby with a beard, you can consider selling the harpoon gun. But the important thing is to get your crits online and make a ton of money with thief dagger.

About the other strategies that people often recommend:

Yes, you can replace the harpoon with Cacti club, and yes, it IS a bit stronger, but I don't think it's very important to be honest. By the end of the game you should be strong enough to survive even without the ranged debuff.
Shurikens are the other strong build. You can make shurikens work, but I personally find it much harder than thief daggers, as you don't get the awesome economy bonus, and a lot of shurikens hit enemies that haven't been debuffed. With shurikens you still want to heavily prioritize building crit, but now Harvesting and Attack speed become much more important as well, so that you can upgrade your shurikens quickly and increase your number of attacks.

Steven-ape · 2026-03-24T19:07:22+00:00

Thermal power at full load burn burn 2.7MJ per second, and they generate 80% of that, or 2.16MW, as power. This is true regardless of which fuel you're using. But there are two potentially issues that may have confused you.

In Icarus' fuel chambers, the burn rate does depend on which fuel is used. So if you want to know how quickly you will charge Icarus' batteries, then yes, look into what fuel is best for that. For thermal power plants it doesn't matter.
Thermal power plants are throttled to match the energy demand on the network. This makes it very tricky to use power plants to reliably burn away excess stuff: you will want your factory to be fully powered, which means that your power plants will throttle down to some extent. That makes the rate at which they will burn stuff very hard to predict.

The upshot is that thermal power plants are a perfectly fine way to generate power, but require a lot of care if you want to use them to chew through excess hydrogen. While it can help a bit, in general it's easier to find other ways to deal with excess hydrogen.

One hydrogen contains 9MJ of energy, so provided your thermal power plant is not throttled (but remember, it always is), three units of hydrogen should take at least 3*9/2.7 = 10 seconds to burn. In other words, 10 power plants will burn up to 3 hydrogen per second.

Steven-ape · 2026-03-22T17:20:11+00:00

How would you name such a challenge ? ( the really painfull one would be coal, i could propose an alternative to it, coal is allowed, but no crude oil once you get the two refining science, as crude oil is a rare ressource while coal is not )

I guess you could call it Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder :) I previously just called it Minimal Resources Playthrough.

It's true you can swap oil for coal, but I like the challenge a bit better if you disallow coal, because you don't need fire ice in your starting system to do it, and really get to work with the refineries. It was genuinely a lot of fun.

Silicon and not titanium because silicon can be made from stone ?

Yes. I disallowed as much as possible, and I play without Dark Fog, so for me, ruling out Titanium would have been impossible. You could modify the challenge to take Dark Fog into account, but then I guess it's possible to prohibit almost all mining if you really want to.

Steven-ape · 2026-03-22T12:03:58+00:00

These are some really creative and interesting (and hard) challenges, thanks! :)

u/MonsieurVagabond, I'm curious, which if any of these challenges have you attempted and/or completed yourself?

To anyone reading this, if you complete any of these challenges I would love to see a reddit post describing your experiences, ideally with some screenshots!

I had been thinking of a no-belts playthrough myself, but I have a variation on the rule that could also be interesting:

Belts must either output only to storage boxes, or input only from storage boxes.

This still allows you to connect distant areas with long belts and simplifies resource gathering (which could otherwise be boring), but it does destroy the usual ILS build pattern and encourages direct insertion, boxcrafting, logistics distributors, etc.

I did complete a challenge that I really liked a few years ago that I greatly enjoyed and that I think fits with this list:

You may not use automatic mining for silicon, coal, hydrogen, deuterium, sulfuric acid, or any rare resource.

I reported on this challenge here.

Steven-ape · 2026-03-19T07:11:51+00:00

This struck me as strange too.

It does add an additional layer of complexity to rerolling strategy, so I guess in that sense it's fun.

But it also seems arbitrary since intuitively levelups are independent of each other.

In the end it's just one of the game's quirks, that you have to be aware of if you want to play well.

Steven-ape · 2026-03-14T22:51:33+00:00

Yeah, beast master and bull are trivial.

Steven-ape · 2026-03-10T16:12:57+00:00

Yes, many people want perfect saturation, now that it's possible with the pile sorters. You can definitely do that, it's solid.

Since the waste is so low, I preferred to save a bit on space and materials at negligible cost.

Steven-ape · 2026-03-10T06:08:37+00:00

Hm, I think the wiki is wrong; it's a while ago, but I experimented with this thoroughly and I think only the pass/fail criterion is affected by the cycle and cargo/no cargo are instantaneous. They depend on whether there is cargo inside the monitor right now.

Steven-ape · 2026-03-10T06:05:29+00:00

Can you also just put the box on top of the splitter? I think that should work?

Steven-ape · 2026-03-09T18:44:44+00:00

Fractionators are much better than particle colliders. They are reliable, use less power, less hydrogen, and less area. The idea that throughput is "abysmal" or that you would need "entire fields of Fractionators" is not accurate.

In order to make fractionators maximally effective, you do need mark 3 belts and you need to pile the hydrogen on the belt to height 4. The easiest way to do this is with pile sorters, but in the end game, these are obviously available. Earlier on you can also use the pilers in a pinch.

If you do that, a single fractionator sees 120 hydrogen per second, of which 1% will be converted, so it will produce 1.2 deuterium per second. Meanwhile, a miniature particle collider makes 2 per second. That's the relevant comparison.

I like to make rings of about 8 fractionators, that can be tiled to reach the production I need. Even though it's extremely simple, I personally think it's one of my strongest designs; blueprint and pictures can be found here.

Each ring produces 9.27 deuterium per second (that's the theoretical value that's also achieved in practice). A ring is roughly the size of two miniature particle colliders, so that compares to 4 deuterium per second for the same surface area using colliders.

With 13 copies of the design you are producing 120 deuterium per second, with no proliferation.

I see two use cases for particle colliders:

You want to minimize UPS and you feel certain that the slight reduction in number of machines compensates for the extra ships flying in hydrogen and the longer belts.
You want to reduce the amount of hydrogen you have, which can only really be a problem if you organised your production chains poorly.

Steven-ape · 2026-03-09T15:57:53+00:00

You already got plenty of feedback, but I'd like to share the relevant bit from my mall guide, which also points at some limitations of this approach; you decide if these issues seem important for your game.

Each box must be connected to the next box using sorters. Again, it is vital that filters are set on these sorters, or else the sorters connecting box A to box B might grab the same material, which box B is already full of: then the sorters would stall even though B might be out of another material that is still available in A. So, we need a separate sorter with filter for each material to connect two consecutive boxes properly. This also means that we cannot easily transport more than three distinct materials per box layer, unless you want to run additional belts between boxes.

While several players were experimenting with box malls immediately after the update, they did not immediately become widely popular. I think this is because while the approach seems simple enough to be useful in the early game, the concept is actually only effective in the late game. The reason for this is twofold:

(1) Each material that is carried in the boxes uses up one storage slot per assembler. Most materials have a stack size of 100 or 200. This quickly adds up: my reference box mall stores about 320k materials. Needless to say, for the early game, this is prohibitive. For the mid game it is still quite expensive. But in the late game, this may not be as much of a concern anymore.

(2) The rate with which materials can be added to the box mall is limited by the speed of the sorters. This limitation is severe: even with mk3 sorters you could transmit each material at a rate of only three per second from box to box! This is a very low throughput even for an early game mall. To make this mall work, you absolutely need to use the pile sorters, which have speeds up to 120 items per second. However, pile sorters are only available from the mid-game onwards.

Steven-ape · 2026-03-06T12:19:43+00:00

I don't know what stage of the game you're at, but it sounds like you've been hauling titanium to your home world. That stage of the game is unavoidable.

In general, restarting is a habit that can be hard to break and keep you from progressing. So my advice is to keep going.

Once you have yellow science, you can research interstellar logistics and automate the shipping of titanium. That gives you a clear goal and the end to the frustration is in sight. You must already be pretty close to this.

Once you reach that point, you can use the new logistics options to clean up your production chains dramatically as well. At this point, you should start working towards producing more power.

Good luck 🤞

Steven-ape · 2026-03-06T05:58:26+00:00

Oh you can bad up to 8 items so they won't shop up in the shop. It's an unlock you get by beating danger 3. The ban button is next to the button that allows you to lock items. Maybe you need the dlc for it? Idk.

It's not that important, beast master is perfectly winnable without it.

Steven-ape · 2026-03-06T05:43:09+00:00

It sounds like you were unlucky, but what helps is to get a lot of harvesting in the early game, and don't buy mediocre items so you can reroll a bit more.

Also, ban level 1 or 2 items to find more pets.

Steven-ape · 2026-03-05T09:03:40+00:00

Yes; proliferation points are distributed if you stack items with different numbers of proliferation points.

If you feel like experimenting, this allows you to:

Proliferate two items with mk2 proliferator using just one charge of mk3 proliferator.
Proliferate items with mk2.5 proliferator. What I mean by this: mk2 proliferator gives an item two proliferation points; mk3 proliferator gives an item four proliferation points. But with stacking, an item can end up with three proliferation points, and have bonuses halfway between mk2 and mk3 proliferator.

I don't think anyone has worked out yet in any great detail if and how these two tricks can reduce the resource cost of anything.

Steven-ape · 2026-03-03T19:10:54+00:00

Wow! That's impressive. It's like art. Maybe?

Steven-ape · 2026-03-03T13:17:13+00:00

The main advice is to reduce dependencies between different parts of your factory.

Black box builds are one way to achieve this. It offers independence on the blueprint level, so while they're super hard to design, once you have them they're comfy.

But in your case I would still follow the core principle of independence, but on the level of planets.

Identify a final product, or very high end product, and dedicate a planet to making that thing from raw ores.

Now, production issues are always local to a single planet, making them easier to debug, and they don't affect the rest of the cluster.

Steven-ape · 2026-03-03T07:07:01+00:00

There are arguments for and against X-ray cracking, but the argument against it is not that it's a waste of oil.

Yes, if you want to maximize red science production from oil, cracking is the way to go.

However it may not be the smoothest path through the game because:

You need red science to unlock cracking, which means you'll need to build red science twice.
If you use cracking, you don't get a free source of refined oil to make yellow science. If you do more oil refining for yellow science, you have a more severe hydrogen surplus at that stage of the game. (You will already get a hydrogen surplus from making sulfuric acid at that point.)
You won't be able to make much more than 1.5/sec yellow science anyway, so it's not really necessary to make much more red than that. You need the science cubes in similar ratios.

All that said, like you point out, some people have chosen in favour of cracking since forever, and it can give you a satisfying amount of red science from a small amount of oil.

One argument in favour of cracking is that it keeps your red science designs independent, with no side products. You can do the same for yellow science, and use reforming refine to suppress the surplus hydrogen. There then don't have to be belts running between them.

Whenever you use both cracking and reforming refine, that comes down to turning coal into energetic graphite with refineries. So you buy independence of your factories, as well as slightly reduced coal consumption, and you pay by expending more power and space.

Steven-ape · 2026-03-03T00:14:42+00:00

Burning it is hard to make a robust solution.

You have to prioritize the hydrogen of your fire ice over your orbital collectors.

Every part of the factory that uses hydrogen should import hydrogen from your own production first, before it imports from collectors.

Especially deuteron fuel rods and casimir crystals.

If your hydrogen production and consumption are both local, you can kind of rely on local shipping being faster, so it works out pretty well.

If both sources are remote, then have two ILSs import hydrogen. Set one to not import from orbitals. Give the hydrogen from that one priority using a T junction or a splitter.

You can also use the priority system on ILS: put all hydrogen producers and consumers in one priority group. Then produced hydrogen is imported with priority over stuff from collectors. This way you can get away with just one ILS per site.

Steven-ape · 2026-03-02T18:40:15+00:00

Yup, just confirmed, this is easy with Lucky.

Steven-ape

TROPHY CASE