So I have been trying to beat shattered planet, trying various things. One thing I’ve tried is throttling by cutting off engine fuel to engines based on damage taken, on the theory that the slower the platform goes, the fewer asteroids it has to deal with. I have a big, 6 ending platform that runs between a max of around 190, and can throttle down to about half that by shutting down all but two engines.
To my eye, it doesn’t seem to make any difference in asteroid density. It just takes longer, with the end effect of using more ammo to go less distance. Coming to a complete stop, of course nearly shuts off the flow.
So now I have it in my head that controlling velocity doesn’t affect asteroid speed or volume, which would suck.
I also can’t get interrupts to work properly, and nearly stranded my platform before I noticed :-/ But that’s a different post.
Anyway, is velocity affecting asteroid density, or not?
Update, 2025-04-22
Thanks to everyone who had suggestions; I used most of them:
- Use foundries. This had the single biggest impact. I always forget about foundries except on Vulcan.
- Use lasers for little asteroids. Foundries are only an option if you have fusion, and if you have fusion lasers start to make sense. I’d given up on them when I tried to build a nuclear + accumulator platform, and was quickly annihilated, but they become useful later.
- Rail for huge, rockets for large, guns for medium, lasers for small. This is the magic formula for me, although I also have some logic that switches rails to include medium if rockets get low; rockets seem to be the bottleneck for me.
- Quality lasers are really effective for small asteroids – even just quality 2.
- 1 fusion reactor is not enough. I was a little surprised that fusion is so wimpy compared to nuclear, but with lasers and foundries, I was getting into spots where I didn’t have enough energy to keep the fusion reactor running.
- I have a bunch of logic controlling speed. This is a critical factor in success.
- I’m processing Promethium on the ship, rather than trying to use it as a cargo. This is much more effective, but requires all that logic.
- I’m not using interrupts. I don’t know why I didn’t notice before, but the Shattered Planet has “turn around when” logistics instead of the normal planet logistics.
So, now I load up on everything, hitting Nauvis last for one load of eggs. Then I make a speed run (175km/s max) for the shattered planet. As soon as I detect that I have shards, I cut speed to about 60km/s and cruise for shards, processing eggs to Promethium packs. As soon as I’m down to about 50 eggs, I turn around. I still have a couple hundred shards by the time I cycle around to Nauvis again, which gets me a few extra packs. This gives me about 300 packs, per run.
There’s a bunch of extra logic to throttle based on damage and/or ammo levels, and where I am in the system – I run at 50% on my way back to the edge, because otherwise I inevitably take damage running full speed at the turn-around point. With this set-up, it’s fully automated, I can make the run with no damage, and I am able to process all of the eggs before any spoil. At this point, I think most of the ammo management – designed before I converted to foundries – is unnecessary. I just need to hang out a bit before heading to Nauvis to let missiles stockpile, and I don’t think ammo has throttled speed lately.
Egg management is a pain, and there’s more logic to make sure there are no unprocessed eggs in the cryo factory or on the belt; I used to toss them overboard, but found it was faster to run them through a recycler until they’re gone – there are never more than 9 left over, anyway, and that’s really just in case I get a late batch from Nauvis and a few spoil on the way such that I end up with an odd number at the end.
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I don’t see it mentioned anywhere in this thread: OP, in case you aren’t aware, you can read the platform’s speed off of it’s hub, and use that to control a pump supplying the thrusters. Only one of the fuel/oxidizer duo needs limiting, so you only need a single pump to do this. Set the pump’s condition to
[speed] < [your target speed], and your platform will hover around the target speed.This will over fill the thrusters when stopped (notably when orbiting a planet) but in my experience as soon as the platform resumes travel it burns through the excess in a matter of seconds before returning into the regular “regime”.
I’ve just built the first platform with railguns and was great improvement over rockets for big asteroids. I do find that going slower does mean less asteroids, which gives your guns more time to shoot them down and also more time to manufacture ammunition.
So even if there would be no correlation between speed and asteroid density, you don’t want to go too fast as that overwhelms turrets and manufacturing.
My manufacturing can’t keep up. I’ve been slowly updating with higher quality assemblers and chemical plants, and I’ve got speed 3s on everything, and even with a stockpile of thousands of railgun ammo, bullets, and missiles, I run scarily low on rail gun ammo. Right now I think my bottleneck is explosives, so I’m expanding that, but I think I’m going to have to put in some decider logic to selectively send explosives to one or the other depending on which is running low.
I don’t know. I did learn the hard way to not over eagerly quality-upgrade walls, unless I have enough stockpile, because Factorio isn’t smart enough to replace something with a lower quality item if the higher quality isn’t available.
I also don’t think putting more railguns on the platform will help, since ammunition is the limiting factor.
What do you have your targeting set to? Railguns targeting everything big and huge is effective, but runs me out, so right now I’m just targeting huge. This puts more load on missiles.
I do have a ton of bullet production; I wonder if I’m over-relying on gun turrets? They consuming all the plate, which railguns need for girders. They also impact carbon availability, indirectly, which limits stuff needed for the explosives pipeline - that’s usually starved, too. But I think my issue at the moment is explosives.
I used to produced red ammo, opportunistically - the logic gates for this are absurd, and I think it’s just wasting space because it almost never triggers.
I’m really trying to limit reliance on quality. I built a pipeline for specifically (rather than randomly) producing quality finished products on Nauvis, but found it tedious and unfun. Like spoilage, it’s an aspect of the new mechanics which I feel didn’t improve enjoyment of the game.
I mathed that red ammo uses notably more iron per damage than yellow ammo, red manufacturing also takes up notably more space. On the spaceships, this was something that I found way easier to simplify and just go with yellow ammo for guns.
As for running out of other asteroid types, remember you can change the type of the asteroid. I had a thing setup where asteroids would go into the appropriate manufacturing line, and if that line didn’t need them, they would continue on and get turned into a different type. Really helped fix resource bottlenecks as I didn’t have to worry about balancing resource use. Just had to make sure I had enough asteroid converters.
I’m using reprocessing heavily, and leveraging the circuit network to balance it. It’s basic; I think I need to use some other circuit tools to make decisions based on cardinality ratios, rather than just hard-coded numbers.
That, and thinking about making a floating factory that generates black potions, rather than a glorified cargo ship. And tuning.
Same here. I have a sushi belt for asteroid chunks and ammo, whose primary function is being a buffer that can hold a bunch of items.
Then there is reprocessing hooked right into it, with a single decider per crusher to control it.
In my experience, it definitely affects it.
my first ship to aquilo, I launched, with myself and basic stuff for it, and manually toggled the switch to reduce speed. Worked fine.
Sent my ship back while I built on aquilo, destroyed within 2 minutes.
I loaded an autosave, realized I didn’t actually bring enough explosives to get back, and was losing them faster than I was making them since my explosive damage was very low. I realized my ship was probably lost for good, now, since the autosaves were too recent now.
So I made a hard save and tried a bunch of times to do various things in the hope of cheating that fate. I tried crawling at about 50, I tried rushing. I tried hopping by blasting forward and then idling, getting some actual distance, then dealing with a bunch of asteroids, and then hopping again.
I found steady and slow got me the farthest, almost halfway. Hopping produced more asteroids and was also more likely to cause damage just because of the sudden density of them. It was actually more efficient to go full speed than to hop, I think because while you’re slowing down and speeding up you’re still generating asteroids, and you never end up moving backwards, unlike hopping, where I could get that -10.
But going slow definitely was the winner, by a lot.
Now, there was a bug, where you’d generate more asteroids while you weren’t looking at the ship. Given it’s nature as a bug, I think there’s a reasonable chance that this generation isn’t dependent on speed. Do you by chance need to update? This was fixed in 2.0.43. It could explain the issue.
I think there’s also a chance that, while it does affect density, it just doesn’t affect it as much as you’d like.
Try reconfiguring and running, say, 1 rocket, or use a pump to starve that, too. If you can manage to move at like, 30, I’d expect a clear difference in asteroids, for sure. Obviously that’s too slow, but it could show you whether or not it’s affected.
Good stuff. I’ve been working on it today. First, I freed up space by removing red ammo factories that were rarely being used. Then I added more explosive generators, and made sure some was always dedicated directly to railgun ammo. But the biggest thing was setting up a bunch of logic for shutting down engines.
I have 6, and today I set up pumps and logic controlled entirely by how much ammo was in the circuit. I shut them off by 2s as the reserves drop, coming to a complete stop if belt levels start to drop. I’m still tweaking it; I had it considering damage at first, then removed that because turning around resets it, and the platform started out full speed. I need to add it back in, but just need to figure out how it should affect things. I try to keep circuit logic as simple as possible.
Anyway, I didn’t get as far, but was in better shape ammo-wise when I turned around, and had filled up my storage capacity for shards, in any case. I’m using one of those horrible belt weaves, but the only alternative I can think of is to bring a bunch of eggs and process on-ship, which I suppose is what they’re trying to force us to do. I really hate that spoilage mechanic.
I really need to figure out those interrupt mechanics! Otherwise, I still have to baby each trip.
I’ve tried a lot of the things you have, and now the logic I have eventually gets to the point where one engine is running, starved, as you say, and I’m crawling along at between 10 and 30 km/h.
Another thing I’m trying to tune is targeting. I can’t get a balance - either the missiles destroy everything before they come in gun range, and I run out of missiles and have surplus bullets; or I let too much through and I burn through bullets and have surplus missiles. On one trip, I had the railguns shooting at everything, and that was both awesome, but terrifying when I ran low on ammo. I haven’t tried programmatically changing targeting priorities based on ammo - can you even do that? Right now, I have a couple missile turrets in the middle of the ship targeting medium and higher, and all other turrets targeting only big; and two railguns targeting big and huge and the rest only huge. It’s still not right, because now bullets are my bottleneck. I’m starting to think I need to redesign the layout so I have a couple of missile turrets positioned in the center so the range is just about covering gun turrets, and have those helping the guns without burning through missiles.
Are you processing on-ship, or ferrying shards?
And the print string is at https://files.catbox.moe/ic6bq5.txt
I tried to use factorioprints to share, but it rather stupidly requires the screenshot to live at Imgur, and the screenshot is required, and Imgur is hostile to VPN users… so, it’s at catbox.
You can program the targeting.
Just shove your desired signals into a turret. You’ll get to shove all of them, but a decider combinator can output each signal set to 1, so you don’t even need a constant combinator, the same decider that determines if targeting should change can provide the signals.
I haven’t done it myself, though.
I also am not actually farming deep space yet. I’ve dipped past aquilo once but I didn’t have biter eggs set up so I came back quickly. All my ships are still solar, since quantity makes up for the reduced solar in space, even on aquilo, with a few efficiency modules.
I will say with all that production and you still worrying about resource production, and having fusion set up, foundries are much more efficient. Less steps to make steel for railgun ammo, more productivity, and the liquid steel recipe is inherently much cheaper, also.
And copper cables, too.
Plus, with efficiency modules, they’re not that far off from speed beacon furnace power consumption, anyway.
Shit. Foundries. I keep forgetting about them; it didn’t occur to me to put then on a platform! I still mostly think of them in terms of processing liquid metal, even though I’ve used them on other planets.
Damn. Thanks!
I know, right? Only reason I know to say anything is because someone told me the same thing.
I had assumed they had an atmosphere limitation like the non-electric furnaces.
With how much electricity they devour, I’d be mad if they needed oxygen too.
They wanted to give Efficiency Beacons a purpose, clearly. I mean, they’re so lonely out there, not in any builds
Friendly PSA that efficiency modules also impact nutrient consumption on biochambers!
Can be very useful for setups that chronically starve themselves.
I believe asteroid density increases the closer you get to the shattered planet. Slower speeds definitely help for carving through the rocks. You will need a very beast onboard manufacturing system. My Fusion Cube goes about 40 (it can do 120 at ful speed) when it’s cutting into the Shattered Planet for prometheum, and from what I’ve seen from players who have made it to shattered planet, that’s about the speed they’re going too… and they’re also making and firing nukes to get through the rocks and using ablative armor landmine platforms.
My strategy was a bunch of forward facing railguns set to shoot at everything that moves (priority on the big targets). They do a ton of AOE work clearing debris. Rockets and gun turrets for finishing off whatever the railguns don’t get.
I wasn’t able to go 40, ended up setting mine to about half that primarily due to missile manufacturing speed limitations. On a v2 design, 40 probably would have been possible with beefier manufacturing lines. OP, 190 is absolutely too fast for getting to the shattered planet. I would start by aiming at 20-30 and see where that gets you. Just make your design speed adjustable and you can dial in whatever you need (I did it with pulsing fuel/lox pumps).
Anyway, is velocity affecting asteroid density, or not?
It absolutely does. From my experience it’s a linear relationship. A quarter the speed gets you a quarter the asteroids. Just be careful when you start going slow as the ones coming in from the sides do start mattering, because you aren’t just blowing past them anymore and them meandering sideways can get your tail chopped.
Oh, the side ones suck. Promethium asteroids in particular, I find, often blow chunks toward you at higher speed. Very not cool.
Wow. 40? That’s half my lowest speed. I might do that if I shut everything off but one rocket.
I need to work on the logic network some more, I guess, and put in some cut-offs shutting down engines based on ammo availability.
I’m getting nowhere near the red planet, though. The farthest I’ve gotten is, I don’t know, 9M? On the map, about an inch from the edge of space. I guess I really need to focus on production.
My question at the moment is whether I need to shift production from focusing so heavily on bullets, which consume not only space, but metal plate.
attack priorities too. Let the rails handle the big stuff, use guns for med and lazers for smol
I had a pretty good Enterprise model, with nacelles and everything, pretty early in the game running on nuclear, before I had fusion. Half of the saucer was full of lasers and capacitors, because I wanted Star Trek with phasers, dammit! It was fine on the inner planets, but got utterly annihilated on the way to Aquilo. I gave up on lasers in space after that.
But thanks - I’ll give this a try!
