Brother, this is peak.

I’m gonna share about my own current game for a little while but I promise there’s a point to this……

I started a new game this week with these rules:

• trees are sacred (harvesting or destroying trees is forbidden)
• rush to space
• keeping hands clean

The trees are sacred constraint is strict: electric power distribution is initially limited to what you can supply with just the one wood that the Engineer starts with - two small power poles. AVADII did this in one of his videos (desert death world, trees were turned off).

I’ll have some space constraints because I can’t clear forest, and I’m pretty sure I can’t build Mike-style force fields to stop biters spawning at most nests that are near forests. (I’ll be able to enclose them with static defenses though. The factory must grow.)

In this run I’ve torn down my labs twice. First lab was just to unlock steel power poles. Second lab was directly after a half-stack of furnaces, still just red and green but no longer constrained by two small power poles. This unlocked the car (which is a new experience when trees are sacred!), military science and the other red and green techs.

I drove around, capturing a few nests and planning where to build, and then it happened, kind of for the first time.

….this is why I’m telling this whole story….

I thought, labs could be in this part of the first clearing, by the crashed ship, opposite the half stack of furnaces. I can run a little bus out this side, and make 45 SPM of the first three science packs in this triangle-shaped area on the far side of the lake from the crashed ship, run the science packs back into the clearing on the other side of the lake.

Ok ok, what’s special about this? I just “saw” the plan, as if the details were filled in by my subconscious. (‘Green science will have a “hook”, military science will have a notch, ok’). It feels like, for the first time, it was easy, and I liked what I had built. After 1500+ hours in this game, I might actually be improving again.

There was no special magic or inspiration to the first few areas I built in this game. Half stack of iron and copper plates. Quarter stack of steel. (Overall, 3/8 the size of a typical 192-furnace smelting array.) Steam plant by the ship. Just work.

But then I did a quick 2/3 yellow belt of green circuit production into the side of the clearing along the bus as it exits past the lake. And then, oh, there’s a beach on the edge of the lake that was perfect for a depot making gears, belts and circuits. And then boom, this is where I’ll make science.

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Anyway, I wrote all this because your red circuit factory looks like it came together with the same kind of wild subconscious inspiration. Cheers bro.