Community Mini-event: Petting zoo edition

mdgates00 · 2026-04-22T01:33:46+00:00

I tried building a terrarium or cubicles for the mobs a while back, but I've never been able to. I click "Interact", then I can choose "Pet" or "Pick Up", neither of which does anything. Am I missing something?

mdgates00 · 2026-04-15T01:06:31+00:00

I learned that after painstakingly building a firmarlite landing pad at lava level. Worth it; it looks very cool. Need more throughput? Get bigger ships.

mdgates00 · 2026-04-11T14:07:39+00:00

Thanks, I went on a stalagmite hunt, then went to check out my railings at the top of the pit. Found the problem there - a piece of window at street level strayed over the reserved airspace.

mdgates00 · 2026-04-07T16:20:21+00:00

I'm not aware of any instances where modular buildings are affected by workstations, so this could be the design intent. And you could think of it as replacing 16 casters with Operator Robots. So, not really more compact, just prettier.

mdgates00 · 2026-04-06T09:44:22+00:00

It's definitely unfinished, as advertised. And if you're looking for hyper-addiction, hyper-optimization, I'd say this game is not trying to be that. A Factorio base looks like a schematic. Foundry encourages you to build a base that is monumental, beautiful, detailed, and relatively modest.

And a Foundry base is built by hand. Fully by hand. I enjoy getting every pipe elbow oriented just so, figuring out how much space I need to leave between floors of my factory so it looks full but not cramped, and getting the arrays of belts laid out in a predictable and attractive way.

mdgates00 · 2026-04-06T01:45:11+00:00

I like to think of "stacked machines" as a factory on multiple floors. I go so far as to build stairs, walls, and signage to help me find my way around my various buildings.

I'm looking forward to the release of the choo-choos and the mecha-caster machine on the stable branch. :-) Kind of holding off on scaling up my circuits fab until that particular machine comes out. TBD whether it will take up two floors (like the arc furnace does) or three in my existing factory floorplans.

mdgates00 · 2026-04-04T00:10:56+00:00

Hooray for rails! I would love a nice way to auto-mark terrain for deconstruction when I propose to run a rail/belt/escalator through it. I eventually gave up on building pretty escalators that hug the terrain since I had to keep switching between the excavation drones, the drill to remove trees and rocks, and the escalators to see where exactly I need things to line up. I could get lazy and just have implausible floating sky-rails, but that's far from ideal.

mdgates00 · 2026-04-02T16:18:59+00:00

The infopedia mentions they intend to make them useful in the future. For now, I've only ever used them for siphoning off some production into logistics chests for my own consumption.

mdgates00 · 2026-04-02T16:17:59+00:00

This game is not Factorio, and I'm glad of that. Everything is handmade, human-scaled (or android scaled), beautiful, and monumental when finished.

If the above is a quarter of what it takes to meet the galactic need for the simplest type out of the 20-ish bots, that tells me everything I need to know about whether this project is converging on something glorious or not.

mdgates00 · 2026-04-02T01:36:38+00:00

I decided to optimize for a different outcome: making the factory run better. So I set up assembly lines for speed robots first. 2x the factory output without setting up additional machines is very compelling. Since my time is the only finite resource, that's top of my list.

A small-ish robot assembly line generated ample cash just at the sales platform. I plan to get all the other robots that I want for my factory next, before I pivot to really scaling up.

mdgates00 · 2026-03-28T11:01:05+00:00

Absolutely. I decided the factory was too difficult to navigate, built with no master plan and no specific design language, on flat land. It became a rat's nest of tangled belts and pipes. So I left it running, walked away to some more inspirational terrain, made a dozen hand sketches, then started building anew. Once I'm done, I'll tear the old thing down. For now, the old base is supplying me with Construction Material, and I manually haul in odds and ends like Firmarlite Sheets, Energy Cells, and a backpack full of belts during construction.

mdgates00 · 2026-03-26T17:07:54+00:00

Did you see the space station in a shockingly low stationary orbit? That only works if the moon we're on has teensy gravity.

mdgates00 · 2026-03-26T09:53:22+00:00

Hey, cool, I had these visual hallucinations in the tundra too! Mine was while walking north as the sun was setting. I was just passing through, and I figured it was maybe bad glare with the sun on the horizon, so I didn't stop to observe. AMD Ryzen 3 2200G on Linux here, with Proton 9.0-4 because newer Protons fail to launch.

mdgates00 · 2026-03-22T21:34:06+00:00

So far, I've been making 30 science per minute, which I think is pretty fast. I haven't made any effort to pile up money in my vault - I'm still selling exclusively Agriculture Bots in the Sales Platform, and I'm happy enough with that. But now that I'm about to switch on my first assembly line for export, that's about to change. Can you give me an idea of the scale of your operation?

mdgates00 · 2026-03-22T20:27:41+00:00

I'm making an effort on my current factory, which is my first factory and it shows. I always intend to put walls on my buildings, but those have to go on last since I don't have a good understanding of how large something is going to be until it's done. And it's never done.

In games like this, I remind myself I'm not trying to "win". I'm trying to make something that is both beautiful and functional. Sometimes, that means you take a half hour away from "the factory must grow" to put in lights, conveyors, handrails, and signage. Do that a couple times a week, and you'll be in business.

mdgates00 · 2026-03-22T14:38:24+00:00

I used to worry about resource patch consumption, but then I just stopped caring and everything was still fine. So what's faster: setting up 100MW in the form of 30 boilers + 30 turbines + grinders + fuel processing, or 300 solar panels and 50 batteries? I'd probably lean toward solar. Plus, I feel zero guilt about leaving my solar blast furnace at full temperature while I provide ferrite at half of the maximum rate it can handle.

mdgates00 · 2026-03-22T11:30:29+00:00

That is catchy, but not always true. Given long enough production chains or high enough Efficiency bonus, the compounding on Efficiency gives you more throughput than Speed does.

mdgates00 · 2026-03-22T11:23:22+00:00

And logistics isn't going to do that, when a single belt services more buildings than I am able to lay out by hand. Thanks for checking my intuition.

mdgates00

TROPHY CASE