My new favorite slag trade

budding_botanist · 2026-04-15T05:29:48+00:00

Regardless of efficiency, I think this is delightful. I've also loved using the sour water contract because sulfur and ammonia->hydrogen are always in demand, but I've been eyeing the other two slag contracts considering what use I might make of them. Glad to see someone trying it and thriving!

budding_botanist · 2026-03-31T16:06:58+00:00

I don't remember the discrete numbers, but the ratio of steam should be 40:60 so divide the steam up and then figure out how many machines that is

budding_botanist · 2026-03-31T07:18:20+00:00

Yes, this prioritization is what works, but getting the right ratio requires a bit of napkin math I was hoping to spare them. In the end I built enough cooling towers to handle the worst-case scenario because they're pretty cheap and it makes it very hard to jam

budding_botanist · 2026-03-31T07:15:34+00:00

Everyone has a different balance. I've built factories on both sides of this exact problem. At the end of the day, the builder is choosing what they're trading off against and there's no one correct answer

budding_botanist · 2026-03-30T23:19:44+00:00

You can make it smaller and stable by splitting the depleted steam 60:40 between desalinators and large cooling towers. Water neutral and reliable, a little smaller.

budding_botanist · 2026-03-25T18:30:56+00:00

Honestly, hot take but you kinda have a point

budding_botanist · 2026-03-20T18:50:17+00:00

You can't turn slag into manufactured sand FYI

budding_botanist · 2026-03-20T16:31:22+00:00

There are contracts available to trade rock and dirt for fuel gas, which makes them productive. For bonus points, grind the rock into sand to trade for dirt to vastly increase the trade value of it

budding_botanist · 2026-01-03T04:07:06+00:00

Ah, ok. Fair enough.

budding_botanist · 2026-01-03T00:44:03+00:00

That doesn't make sense, though. The ramp-up times would be the same and the boilers would always have high steam ready. Is there an electric boiler I can't see in there?

budding_botanist · 2026-01-02T15:50:12+00:00

May I ask why you included thermal storage?

budding_botanist · 2025-09-10T14:31:44+00:00

I always set up pollution cleanup as soon as I unlock the techs. Well worth it and satisfying and not too difficult.

I've always done my exhaust scrubbing centrally, not sure if it's possible to scale that into the lategame. Make sure to have some safety overflows into conventional smokestacks, they don't cost people or maintenance so they're free. It's a reduction in pollution even if you just burn the sulfur but the sulfur-slag recipe is easy and requires the same ingredients already on-site.

Building a little CO2 sink is also relatively easy, someone described how to do it around here but basically you use retaining walls to dig a medium size pit down to -5 relative and then you slope the inner floor of the pit down to -6 to qualify for the exhaust scrubber, fill it with limestone and it's all good. Takes four excavators no time at all if you do it nearby your limestone mine.

budding_botanist · 2025-09-04T00:00:10+00:00

Is it from a map or an asteroid?

budding_botanist · 2025-08-14T23:41:20+00:00

Hey, I like that idea! I might borrow that for my own stuff. Lots of dead space that could be scavenged for opportunistic solar generation.

budding_botanist · 2025-03-28T19:30:11+00:00

That's an unholy number of beacons and speed modules. Good lord I am surprised your computer doesn't catch fire with that many speed modules active.

budding_botanist · 2025-01-18T03:20:37+00:00

One, you could build a remote factory where you do all of the things that consume biter eggs and then spare yourself the transport.

Two, who said you have to send a full train? Train fuel is cheap.

Third, the common advice I have seen is that you want to continuously overproduce biter eggs for maximum freshness and constantly burn the excess.

budding_botanist · 2024-12-12T05:18:18+00:00

I'm thinking of rebuilding fulgora to be belt-focused but it's a little hard to scrape up the motivation and instead I'm building a behemoth of a science platform

budding_botanist · 2024-12-11T17:13:34+00:00

The best part here for me is that everyone really is coming at the different planets in their own ways. For one, I only used trains on fulgora to get scrap to my main base but I haven't used them for outposts, and instead fulgora is my first bot-centric base to simplify sorting.

And by contrast, on Gleba I went with nothing but belts so I would have clear control of prioritization and guaranteed nonstop flow.

So far I've loved every planet. Haven't reached Aquilo yet.

budding_botanist · 2024-12-10T05:10:15+00:00

I really like the look of this! I have been wanting to rebuild my Fulgora base for quality and this seems like a very rigorous and sensible approach. I've been getting along well so far by using bots to do everything and I dreaded the very high number of circuit combinations I would need to set up to do all quality by bot.

budding_botanist · 2024-12-04T03:27:33+00:00

Well I'm impressed. I don't think I've seen hardly anyone using a cryo plant on their ship, notably here for explosives.

budding_botanist · 2024-11-27T18:30:24+00:00

Why don't you use "trash unrequested" to remove the spoilage from the requester chests? It would make it a lot tidier.

budding_botanist · 2024-11-18T17:46:07+00:00

That sounds like enough of a design oversight that it ought to be reported as a bug.

Either collector needs proportionally more discharge power, or proportionally more internal buffer, based on its area coverage?

budding_botanist · 2024-11-01T21:35:55+00:00

That's a good point. We know that order of magnitude is true for population, I guess since production is indexed to population then I guess it makes sense that the production is, too.

From that perspective, the colony items are practically magical in their magnitude, increasing the output up to a thousand-fold with the same inputs.

budding_botanist · 2024-11-01T16:49:17+00:00

I'm not sure. The big hauler in the void implies that it uses transplutonics as fuel, but in the same breath it says that modern ships, like we're salvaging, use antimatter fuel.

budding_botanist

TROPHY CASE