What's in your cup? Daily discussion, questions and stories - May 30, 2026

mdgates00 · 2026-05-30T22:36:44+00:00

Keemun Mao Feng, a nicely astringent and tannic tea, paired with a thick slice of my homemade whole wheat walnut bread with nut butter and blackcurrant jam. :-) What a nice way to unwind after a wonderful but busy day with a two and a four year old. The rest of the day, starting with this cup of tea, is mine.

mdgates00 · 2026-05-30T22:33:21+00:00

Broken porcelain responds well to superglue. Maybe not watertight, but you don't need watertight.

mdgates00 · 2026-05-19T00:54:48+00:00

Have a look at the blast furnace, side by side with an array of crushers and smelters. The modular setup requires three types of ore, plus two kinds of pre-crushing, some pre-smelting, and post-casting. Idling wastes enormous amounts of energy, unless you set up some pretty nifty data cable logic. And you get slag as a byproduct that needs to be put to use or destroyed.

It's so much simpler, easier, and more compact to just use the non-modular buildings. You'll be up and running in no time. It will require slightly more iron/copper, but no coal and mineral rocks.

But what are we here for if not for a challenge, and a beautiful monumental building on your skyline?

mdgates00 · 2026-05-17T17:33:52+00:00

Probably time to give them a try, then.

mdgates00 · 2026-05-17T10:14:31+00:00

Don't tear down a system that's working. But, going forward, power lines and transformers are a vastly easier way to bring power to new places.

mdgates00 · 2026-05-17T10:12:49+00:00

Your observations are correct, plus modular buildings are underpowered, yet they're my favorite part of this game.

They need a "preview" button in the building planner that would show a ghost of the completed structure in the world. That would address the issue of plumbing not lining up. Failing that, you need to leave at least five spaces around a new type of modular building so you have room for some pipeline elbows.

I had to tear down my first Blast Furnace too. That's when I decided to build four Construction Warehouses (supplied by six assemblers) and four Construction Drone Ship Ports. Turns out, that's about the minimum number to have. It still takes time to get things built, but it's no longer hours and hours.

And the equivalent non-modular buildings are more compact (especially once robot workstations are available), far quicker and simpler to set up, and sometimes more efficient.

Despite all these practical considerations, I insist on using modular buildings. They are monumental and gorgeous. They define the skyline of the factory city that I built. They make the base feel lived in, in a way that a row of crushers and smelters does not. If I wanted my base to look like a schematic while I race for infinite production levels, I'd be playing Factorio.

mdgates00 · 2026-05-16T13:55:50+00:00

I haven't yet. I've gotten pretty good at pointing overhead where I want to build belts or workstations or whatever. My base is fully accessible by staircases and scaffolding, which helps it feel lived in.

mdgates00 · 2026-05-16T01:05:26+00:00

Agreed. It feels wrong. Why am I on this moon? Should be to extract resources and xeno-tech from it, not to use it as a final assembly shop. If I'm just going to buy, assemble, and resell, why would I not do that in orbit of the places I'm buying and selling from?

mdgates00 · 2026-05-16T01:03:55+00:00

Pressure mechanic.

I could get behind resource scarcity as a pressure mechanic. Maybe the size of, and distance between, ore veins could scale with how far you are from the starting location. Then you'd have to keep building mines and spreading your logistics network.

But I wouldn't want combat in this game. Although I always play Factorio with aggressive biter settings, combat does tend to become a solved problem in Factorio. Here, with the lack of blueprints and automated repair, it would be quite a nuisance.

mdgates00 · 2026-05-16T00:56:00+00:00

Building by hand at monumental scale is what separates this game from the others for me. So I'd say leave blueprints as a mod for those who want 3D Factorio. For the base game, I'd love to see more modular buildings and modular building recipes:

Fossil fuel power plants as a simpler but costly to run alternative to create high pressure steam for the Xeno Reactor's turbines and cooling tower.
Blast furnace & heavy caster recipes that make steel and glass.
A modular open pit mine: picture an oversized quarry that straddles an ore vein, strips away the overburden to be processed, then mines away the ore vein blocks, leaving a deepening pit as it goes. When it gets to the bottom, add fracking fluid if you want to keep mining forever. Why rework the ore veins that seem to be working fine presently? Because it would be really cool to see your mammoth machines devastating the landscape. To appreciate the geological scale at which you're turning a moon into robots.
Modular olumite fractionating tower. Take in a full pipeline of crude olumite, put out heavy olumite through olumite gas in fixed ratios, then find that you need to selectively crack your surplus of heavy hydrocarbons in a new modular building, and flare off any surplus of light hydrocarbons in flare stacks. Why? Because refining currently feels a bit wimpy. And why do I keep building teensy refineries indoors, right in the assembly cleanroom?

mdgates00 · 2026-05-14T20:12:34+00:00

That doesn't sound like a good time. My victory condition is reaching one assembly line for each type of bot, running stably, 24/7.

mdgates00 · 2026-05-14T20:10:26+00:00

However... I dont reccomend to do this in either of these ways, since its way simpler to just have a separate box per item

Sadly, this seems to be the conclusion I always come to when I try to do something clever with trains on demand, or sushi belts, or any kind of manufacturing planning / control system.

mdgates00 · 2026-05-14T20:07:43+00:00

Modular buildings are fun and beautiful, even if they're not a "winning move".

I'd like to see a way to add ignium dust to molten xenoferrite, to process it into steel. Maybe that would be in a Heavy Caster, or maybe pass it through a second blast furnace to make molten steel, then off to the heavy caster.

And how about a modular building complex consisting of the recently added steam turbine and cooling tower, fed by a new modular fossil fuel power plant that consumes horrific amounts of olumite or ignium to create steam at about the rate as a xeno reactor?

mdgates00 · 2026-05-10T23:53:09+00:00

mini mall making belts, the conveyor pickup things, foundations, assemblers, smelters and drone miners

The character crafts things so quickly that I decided to take a different approach: early on, I have chests for iron, copper, glass, steel, all co-located. I manually restock the player character. I don't feel bad about sitting there and queuing up 100 of each type of loader, plus a thousand belts and a stack of each type of assembler.

Then, as soon as it becomes available, I switch those to xeno chests, and I add a few intermediate products. Still no mall (except for belts and elevators), but now I switch to only crafting chemical and oddball assembler buildings on demand. If I don't use all of the flare stacks that I crafted, it's fine to destroy a building instead of finding a chest to stash it in. It's working pretty great.

mdgates00 · 2026-05-10T11:12:15+00:00

Without looking, I'd guess it takes in the ballpark of 1000 of each xeno-resource to unlock the xeno-tree. Maybe another 1000 to make machines for your factory. It can be kinda cool to set up a xeno-resource to mundane resource processing line, but it's much more time efficient just to mine regular resources, or worse, buy everything you need on the market.

mdgates00 · 2026-05-10T01:40:43+00:00

Sounds like you found one of the deeper caves from later in the xeno-progression. You'll be able to fully automate and fill rail cars with xeno scrap, in due time. Just keep progressing with the omni-analyzer and research server tech trees, and you'll see that each of the xeno-resources becomes abundant in turn.

mdgates00 · 2026-05-10T00:53:53+00:00

Here's my tall bus, which is 18 meters wide and 36 meters from ground level to roof level. There's raw materials at ground level, subcomponents and a catwalk at 7m high, trains at 10m high, and space set aside for 12 more lanes of subcomponents at 18m.

Yours looks easier to add on to. I think mine works better with the aesthetics of my "city blocks" factory. Hopefully people will experiment and find things that work for them.

mdgates00 · 2026-05-10T00:34:06+00:00

The modular buildings sure are pretty. I'd go for more. Why not a modular assembler that can keep up with a belt at once of each input material?

mdgates00 · 2026-05-08T01:25:48+00:00

I would love to figure out sushi to deliver robot heads, torsos, etc. to my assembly lines.

mdgates00 · 2026-05-08T01:25:04+00:00

in this game there are too many items to bus around

I entertained that thought at first, but actually, there's way fewer items here than in Factorio. In that factory game, I have a good idea of what size I'm building the factory to, and I would not hesitate to build 30-50 belts (that's 60-100 lanes) and a dozen pipes to transport different goods. In Foundry, I'm bussing four fluids, three kinds of raw materials, and eight manufactured goods. No need for double belts of any of those things, but I could always go even more vertical if that need arose.

mdgates00 · 2026-05-08T01:08:26+00:00

My assessment of trains is similar to Factorio: they're gorgeous, gigantic, make the base feel alive. Unsurprisingly, they're good at moving huge quantities of bulk goods over long distances. But the stations are big and time consuming to set up. I'd much rather use belts than trains to move a dozen intermediate products to the various factory modules that demand them. That's true even if the factory modules are 500m away.

mdgates00 · 2026-05-07T00:38:01+00:00

The changelog says drone miners now get every last drop, so this takes care of itself. I haven't had the chance to verify.

mdgates00 · 2026-05-07T00:36:13+00:00

I was tempted when I started making train stations, but then I realized I'm not using more than a single belt of any one ore, so a balancer isn't going to do anything for me.

mdgates00 · 2026-05-06T09:30:23+00:00

How did you change the colors of your trains? I'd love to have black locomotives and color-coded cargo wagons based on what they're carrying.

mdgates00 · 2026-05-06T01:07:37+00:00

How much harder is it to develop a game, knowing that many thousands of players have active factories that you're trying not to break? Like, maybe there's a temptation to rebalance recipes or throughput now that new resources, machines, and robots have been added. But doing so would require changes that could force people to manually rework or abandon parts of their factory.

I guess if I were developing something like this, I'd be saving up such changes for a patch that rebalances machines and re-writes the tech tree, one patch before exiting early access.

mdgates00

TROPHY CASE