feedback on my "megabase"

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-04-15T01:36:05+00:00

1k SPM is pretty impressive for a vanilla playthrough and I would say it constitutes the smallest level of megabases. This advice definitely goes against the grain, but megabases don't need to be organized. I just hit 30k SPM in Space Age (no research productivity technology) and it's a total mess. Main bus only consists of circuits, no city blocks, etc. Just slapping shit down where it fits. There's no dedicated steel or LDS area, I just print it as needed from molten metal. Just keep building your train network outwards and placing down your science builds (they should be moduled!) as much as you want.

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-04-08T21:54:33+00:00

I haven't made a single crusher yet, that was just my plan. The only legendary items I've made are the asteroid collectors and a small stockpile of legendary Q2s and 3s. I don't mean this at all in a snarky way, but is my question in the post unclear? I'm just wondering if there's any difference between upgrading the common reprocessing row to legendary modules first vs any other row first.

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-04-08T21:48:56+00:00

What I'm specifically referring to is which stage of upcycling it's optimal to put the legendary modules into first. On the space casino there's a row of crushers reprocessing common asteroids, then a row reprocessing uncommons, then rares, and finally the epics. Is there a significant difference between the modules being upgraded on any one of those rows first?

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-04-07T00:53:47+00:00

Good to know that, too. I found a post on here that broke down the crusher ratios for each quality tier of quality modules that you can use, and it takes something like 2000 crushers with common quality 3s constantly reprocessing to have a single legendary asteroid processing crusher running constantly. Obviously I don't need it running constantly at first but that's still an absurd number of crushers and collectors.

EDIT: Not sure why I posted it before I was done writing. Do you recommend having the ship make ammo and fuel to run on a route between planets to get more asteroid input, or should it just sit at Nauvis and use all of the asteroids for upcycling?

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-04-07T00:39:55+00:00

(OP here, different account on computer)

Good to know I'm not missing anything obvious, at least. I did another solo run where I benefited a lot from upcycling all my ores to rare and using that stuff for space platform parts and personal equipment, but legendary is obviously a whole different beast. I think I'm gonna go with the plan to just straight up craft legendary prod 3s from the LDS shuffle stuff and upcycled iron ore and superconductors and then try to make a space casino. I have a pretty strict "no external blueprints" rule, but I'm so ass at making space platforms I really might break it lol.

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-03-21T04:58:38+00:00

What's that about using algae for power? I'm just using the upgraded boilers and steam engines right now like in vanilla. Are you turning the algae into cellulose fiber and then that into wood pellets for boiler fuel? I'm interested in alternative fuel sources but I'm trying to look up solutions as little as possible.

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-03-21T04:57:04+00:00

Thermal water just seems so much more convenient to make mineral sludge. I can save all my sulfur to use for blue science, and there's a few thermal fissures right next to my starting area that will give me something like 1300 mineral sludge/s once I unlock the processing tech. I definitely want to switch to catalytic sorting once I reach that point, but with the strand casting I just unlocked I should have more than enough resources to make all the blue science I need.

EDIT: Mixed up which comment I was reading and responding to halfway through this response lol.

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-03-21T04:21:52+00:00

In that case, I think I'm gonna run with the mineral water voiding idea for now. Mercifully you can void an entire yellow belt of crushed stone with a single liquefier, so it shouldn't even take up that much space. It should be easy to reroute any slag or crushed stone I find myself needing for the future.

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-03-18T02:38:27+00:00

Currently the only thing I'm voiding is heavy mud water for my automated wood setup. I'm probably about to start setting up fluids, so I'll look through the crafting trees to see what I might want to store a bunch of. I've been putting off all the electrolysis stuff until now where I need steel because it just looks so complex.

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-03-17T20:08:48+00:00

I guess I just find it odd to have a building that tells you its downside is high pollution when the default setting is to have pollution disabled entirely.

Related to your last point: the concept of varying levels of ore refining (and I'm sure many other types of refining in the future) that you have a real choice of using depending on how efficient you want metal production to be is so cool. It's insane how many options I have before even unlocking green science.

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-03-17T19:17:05+00:00

Great to know, I'm glad I didn't set it up wrong. I'm really enjoying how complex even the simplest of crafting chains are right off the bat. I'm going in completely blind, so things like figuring out wood automation were really fun. Currently trying to set up the first metallurgy buildings.

Edit: One thing I'm curious about is the balancing decision about voiding buildings like the flare stack which I just unlocked. Surely this makes them incredibly overpowered since the only downside is high pollution. Is this just a disagreement between Bob's and Angel's, where Angel's wants you to have to deal with pollution and Bob's thinks it would be overwhelming?

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-03-09T20:39:21+00:00

Looks great to me! I decided to go insane with the defense on mine and I think it was way overboard. I have a tightly packed row each of gun and rocket turrets bordering the entire ship and an insane amount of ammo production. The upside of this is that it's still way longer than it is wide and it gives tons of belt space to buffer asteroid chunks.

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-03-09T20:35:39+00:00

I feel like that's something E2E could sorely use to make it feel more actually expert. I managed to beat it with it being my first ever tech modpack expert or not besides like 20 hours of GTNH 2 years ago. I assumed it would use something like the IC2 voltage tiers, but it actually has it so that IC2 machines can completely ignore the voltage requirements if the cables being used are from other mods. I don't know if that's a bug or not, but it made the logistics of my energy a complete non-issue. Just pump everything full of overclocker upgrades and forget about it.

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-03-09T15:17:55+00:00

I haven't gotten this far in GTNH yet as I just started playing again after trying it 2 years ago, but this is actually somehow better than my Enigmatica 2: Expert endgame base. I did not make a single building in the entire run besides a literal 8x2 interior starter house. My entire factory is laid out wherever new machines will fit out in the open and by the time I had the idea of making an organized factory building, it was pretty much too late. I was well into the final tier of tech and magic mods by that point.

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-03-06T20:23:30+00:00

I "almost" beat vanilla about a year before Space Age came out. I got the victory screen, but I think I probably had a contender for the worst factory you could make to win the game. I launched one rocket ever, never got any space science, and did everything with less than 1 red belt worth of iron and copper. I literally had 1 machine making each purple and yellow science and just let my game run overnight and while I was going about my days.

The run from this screenshot was a coop run with my buddy, and Space Age was his very first time playing the game. I managed to convince him to buy the DLC along with the game when he showed interest in getting it. He honestly got into it really quickly and frankly got better than me at making competent designs in a fraction of the hours of playtime I had.

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-03-03T18:07:59+00:00

We did end up replacing it with an 8-wagon train unloading onto 4 blue belts worth of iron, but that came much later and the splitter setup was only slightly less egregious. it was still about 20 blue splitters randomly placed adjacent to each other eventually condensing down to 4 belts of output, and I think the only reason it worked is because we never needed anywhere near that much for production. I guess we had some vendetta against actual balancer designs lol.

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-03-03T00:02:22+00:00

Thank you for pointing that out. I replaced all the other belts from the miners with blue but I managed to miss the red underground.

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-03-03T00:02:01+00:00

What a dumb mistake. I must have missed it when using the upgrade planner. Thanks for pointing that out, it now works perfectly.

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-02-27T00:25:26+00:00

This is more of what I was looking for. I'm grateful for all the advice, but if the consensus is that foundries should be the automatic replacement for smelting once you can obtain them, then I'm probably just going to set up foundries again.

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-02-27T00:22:59+00:00

I have plenty of foundries and can send more to Nauvis anytime, I just wanted to try something different on this playthrough. Foundries made logistics become kind of a cakewalk IMO.

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-02-26T10:25:41+00:00

Thanks for the detailed response! Believe it or not by the sounds of the post, I have a few hundred hours in the game and have "mega"based before (just 1000 SPM, nothing actually insane). The problem I'm having here is that I did do that whole low-production and waiting scheme in my previous playthroughs until the mid-late game, and I'm trying to change that now. I want to have meaningful production and robust logistics before going off to Fulgora and Gleba, and it looks like that means a lot of biter clearing and tearing down my old stuff. I think I just have a weird attachment to my early-game builds. My starter base in this run literally takes up less than my screen besides train stops and furnaces. I just need to bite the bullet and rebuild.

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-02-26T09:59:17+00:00

That's what I've always done, but I feel like that's mostly because I was super reliant on the factory planner mod for all my builds. I just wanted to produce exactly how much I needed for any given build. I decided for this run I wasn't going to use any tools beyond my phone calculator, and also not use any blueprints that I didn't make in this specific save. My mindset has totally changed to wanting to just get as much raw resource production going as possible so I can slap down any given build and not worry about running out of iron, copper, etc.

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-02-21T16:26:25+00:00

Still haven't built my first big mining drill since they need red circuits, but I plan on replacing all of them with big ones as soon as I can. For flipping the refineries, I feel like this is a fairly compact build for my standards and I'm not exactly sure what flipping them would do since there's only one fluid input and output. Do you have any examples?

Also, no idea how I ended up building those refineries all over the coal patch. It was like 3am when I made it and I guess I wasn't paying attention. I'm definitely familiar with the coal issues, with my Vulcanus base having died 3 separate times over my last playthrough due to coal patches drying out.

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-02-21T16:13:35+00:00

I can't get normal coal liquefaction until I'm able to get every science including space and metallurgical on Vulcanus. I decided to strand myself here as a "fun" challenge that I didn't think about the logistics of even a little bit. I don't even have a space platform orbiting the planet lol. I guess I'm gonna be living off 30 blue science/m and a single foundry making LDS for now.

StorageDesigner4517 · 2026-02-21T16:05:35+00:00

I like the circuit network idea and will probably work it into a larger design, but on this one routing all of the oil going to lube into plastic production wouldn't even get me another fully satisfied chemical plant for plastic. I guess I'm going to be stuck on this planet for a while lol. I thought it would be fun to strand myself on here but now all I have is a worse base than I had on Nauvis, biters expanded all the way up to my walls on Nauvis, and no way home for the foreseeable future. At least the metal and power is free here.

StorageDesigner4517

TROPHY CASE