Bay 12 Games’ co-founder talks playing The Planet Crafter, Beast, and more than 40 years of saved desktops.

  • e0qdk@reddthat.com
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    6 days ago

    I’m on my first playthrough of Space Age currently and while I’ve got something fairly complex on Nauvis with multiple stops and interconnects and loops and a half dozen or so trains… a lot of my needs on other planets are just point-to-point single train transfers. e.g. running a line out to a scrap patch on another island with millions of units of resources on Fulgora after exhausting the initial scrap I mined out. I don’t even need multiple cargo wagons let alone multiple trains to max out my factory’s input belt capacity there at the moment… Could the whole thing be more efficient? Oh yes – but sometimes simple is good enough, and not having to build loops before I got the deep elevated rail support and/or foundations helped tremendously!

    I think I was probably supposed to figure out the double locomotive thing in the train tutorial – I don’t remember there being loops on the track there… – but I’m pretty sure I’d already built at least simple factories on everything but Aquilo before I realized it was even an option. :p

    • greyscale@lemmy.grey.ooo
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      6 days ago

      In 1.0 I played bobs+angels and ran on a 100 square cell structure

      100x100 cells

      In 2.0 I’ve still only done vanilla, but I went with a 200 square cell this time for bigger trains.

      200x200 cells

      My only regret is exploring south and not east or west

      The creeping horror for other players is making them zoom in to realise the scale of the thing. Its a long time to traverse even with rocket trains and go fast legs.

      Edit: I should have included a picture of one of the cells for scale

      • PlexSheep@infosec.pub
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        5 days ago

        Isn’t a pure square grid inefficient, because trains get stuck? That happened to my square grid megabases, so I stopped doing them.

        • greyscale@lemmy.grey.ooo
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          5 days ago

          Occasionally I’d get jams. The jams would manifest with a train sat occupying the corner, so i put a circuit in each one that sets off an alarm after 60 seconds of being continuously blocked. Then I’d investigate.

          Generally, given that my stations only became available if they had > 1.0wagonscapacity*stacksize the trains mostly sat in “parking” waiting or at “parking” nearer the raw resource in the far outposts.

          It required a little tuning, some modules have a lead-in perimeter loop where 5-6 trains can be stacked waiting to unload.