Burnout

[buoyant stratus]

How to get over the "I need to kill these biters, but my tech is too bad, which means I need to mine stone and make military, and after that I need PUs, and LDSs, and for that I still need to get 1-3 ore patches more" phase? It's almost making me give up. It's always the same, red, green, blue, maybe military and I get lost in the spaghetti that is too big and confusing to remove. Also, because of the biters, I can't take too much time, and if I reduce them, I feel like a cheater. There's so much to do it's overwhelming! Make more military, expand the mall with the blue sci things, make nuclear (you cannot tell me it's optional with the amount roboports consume), go to space, make purple sci, maybe switch to electric furnaces, module up. It's frustrating and feels like I am bearing it all to get to the "good part" (it's always the next) and making bad choices (making bots, what are they for??? Everyone recommended rushing these). I tried to install some mods, but those felt like cheating too, if I didn't try it "vanilla only" first.

[static cairn]

That sounds like you need to find map settings that work better for you

Or maybe try multiplayer, so you have someone else to work things out with (or guide you)

[buoyant stratus]

But isn't the default the "standard" (aka intended experience)? I sometimes ponder starting without biters, cliffs, or more ores, but I think "I wont have really beaten the game and then I will need to bear the burner phase and the electrical transition slog all again"

[static cairn]

It is the default experience that they expect most people will like

But there's a good reason there's multiple presets, plus the ability to fully customise everything

I pretty much exclusively play on railworld settings because I don't like dealing with biters all that much and play pretty slowly, but do like building trains trains

[vagrant flicker]

Railworld or Ribbon for me.

Or RSO when that gets updated to 2.0

I usually turn off cliffs too, I don't like that form of logistical challenge.

The default would be good for most people. But some want more or less challenge in some aspects

[tight cove]

What problems are you having with the biters, exactly? I find that a wall, a conveyor of ammo next to it, and turrets wherever they need to be is enough to handle biters, and the starting resources should be more than enough to make that. Are there no trees to help absorb pollution? Do you have a nearby huge lake or cliff to use as natural defense?

Also, once you get a car you can basically drive in circles around a hive and as long as there are no obstacles to run into (or you destroy them with grenades) then they can't really stop you.

[dusky barn]

Rich resources secured behind good defenses will give you some really good peace of mind

You will have all the time in the world to straighten out your spaghetti

Remember, if your base is under renovation, that means it isn’t working. And if it isn’t working, it isn’t emitting pollution, which means biters are evolving more slowly

[buoyant stratus]

Wait, isn't the ammo conveyor kinda a waste of resources, as it fills each turret to 99?

Also, I tried making some cars, but the thing I have trouble with is retrofitting my entire iron, copper, petroleum, water, coal, light and heavy oil, and maybe circuits to add a stone belt and a stonebrick belt. But if I break it all down, biters will come and keep shredding me, or something will start running out and I'm back to the burner phase and probably have medium biters and a huge pollution cloud

I kinda don't use turrets. I thought going to each nest and having to turret creep/rush to tank/hope my grenades don't hit myself was normal

[dusky barn]

It fills each turret to like 10

There will be much more ammo on the belt itself than in the turrets

And now in 2.0 you should be able to control that with circuits if you wanted

iirc wires can now read turret ammo count

[lusty drift]

Some thoughts from me, you don't need to retrofit everything to squeeze another belt in, if you're already doing spaghetti just be lazy and run it backwards, if you're tearing down what you have then you're not progressing forward

Sometimes its faster to make a new one rather than retrofit the old one, like for the mall its very common to remake the mall with intent to add Blue Science stuff instead of editing your old mall

If you're in this position then modules, space and electric furnaces should be on the back burner, I'm about to go to the last planet and my base is about 150spm and I'm still using steel furnaces

Finally, bots, this should help your spaghetti problem too. Construction Bots can take items from Red and Yellow chests to build ghost items, what this means for you is copy pasting your Green and Red Chips setup, your Blue Sci and Mil Sci and whatever else and pasting a new version of them beside the old base and now that you know what you need and how much space you need, leaving space to hook up the inputs logically but also have space to add things like stone and bricks. You can use bots to plan this out even though you don't have thousands of belts handy, go hook up an new iron patch and clear some biters and the bots will be finished by the time you come back

Its very normal for people to rebuild their base using bots once they unlock them, you generally copy your old builds but put them into a more sensible position for the long term, hook up the inputs and when you've confirmed it works, removing the old spaghetti mess (or ignore it altogether).

As a bonus if you have mil sci and blue sci get a tank to go biter clearing, it's so much better than any other option right now

[buoyant stratus]

Have blue sci, but not mil

That's because of the whole stone thing

[lusty drift]

Ah yes OK, honestly hand feeding stone or bricks to a mil sci build to get flamethrowers and the tank is fine in my book, can do the permanent one in the restructure

[buoyant stratus]

Ok, so I totally forgot hand feeding was a thing

[mild sonnet]

This is a good tip, not everything has to be automated immediately

[polar shuttle]

I recomend rail world with large starting are and make sure to have a forest nerby that gives you tons of time to go slow and will prevent enemys from expanding also efficency modules in miners help reduce polution a ton polution is what trigger biter evulution and attacks

[prime ore]

everyone recommends bots because they allow you to scale without building everything by hand, and that is extremely powerful
static defenses are really stong even with just turrets and a red ammo belt
with added flamethrowers and robot repair for the odd spitter projectile that makes it through you have complete safety from biters for as long as your resources last
and they last a real while

i recommend securing your borders well right away, and only then doing nuclear