Krastorio 2 + Space Exploration: 200h check in

Around one year and a half ago I started what I kind of knew would be a very long journey when I first loaded a new map of Factorio with a pretty heavy modset which mainly featured Krastorio 2 and Space Exploration, which was freshly updated to version 0.6. I am now almost 300 hours into my play-through. As I reached around 200 hours into my save, I realised it would have been nice to keep a bit of a log of how my empire expanded, so I could go back to look at it once I would be done with the game.

This was not my first encounter with this mod-set: I had played a combination of Krastorio 2 and Space Exploration before, but when the research changes coming with version 0.6 were announced, I abandoned my run with the idea of starting over once these changes got released.

Because of this, I already knew how most of the early game would require, and knowing the amount of infrastructure needed for space exploration, I focused on building an easy to scale base that could serve as a good starting point to reach all my various universal goals.

By hour 200 of the save, I had built a massive train based mega base on Nauvis (the starting planet):

In this base, every squared enclosed by railroad houses one or two factories which produce one or two products each. Each factory is connected via Logistic Train Stops thanks to the Logistic Train Network mod: for every item the factory requires there are train station that automatically request materials when needed, and for each item the factory produces, there are train stations that make the product available for other factories to use. Trains sit in a depot ready to be summoned whenever a factory block requires a material and the system finds one available in another factory.

This type of design is a staple in Factorio and is particularly good with a mod set as heavy as the one I am playing: there are so many resources and intermediate product that you will need along the way and with this base there are no real constraint on how much I can expand. I can keep adding blocks that produce more items, and I can scale up production of items as I see bottleneck in the factory’s evolution.

This very extensive rail based production network supplies three main consumers:

• the nauvis mall, where every product needed for expansion is produced
• the space station, where further production and science research happens in this mod set
• various planetary outposts, where resources that are not available on nauvis are gathered and refined before being shipped back

The Mall#

Krastorio 2 and Space Exploration both introduce so many craftable items and resources with very complex recipes that building a belt-based mall becomes impractical very soon. The first ~100 hours of the playthrough I was 100% focused on unlocking logistics bots so I could transition to a bots-based mall as soon as I could.

The relief I felt when I could just put down more assemblers and just request materials for a new build to be crafted was incredible. I left plenty of space around to include more and more assemblers as I go on, but I am now comfortable that I will never run out of buildings required for expanding both on the main planet and the rest of the universe

The Space Station#

I would qualify my current space station base as a “hot mess”. In my previous playthrough I never really got far in the Space Exploration side of things so when I started building I did not really know what I was getting myself into. What I ended up is also a robot-based factory with a very messy spaghetti of pipes that bring the various liquids around.

Recently I managed to also connect this base to the Nauvis train network via the Space Elevator. This made it a lot easier to get resources to space and is allowing me to start expanding my presence here. This will likely be my next focus in the run. For now, this base already got me quite far through the tech tree so all in all it was successful enough.

Planetary Outposts#

By now, I have secured all the new resources introduced by Space Exploration and which can’t be found on the home planet. I have a somewhat automated system of rockets that consistently send more or less refined resources back to Nauvis to be further processed.

Each outpost is very similar in kind in that they all have some mines to get raw resources and a few crusher to turn it in a more transportable (higher stack totals) resource. Because of how rockets in Space Exploration work, a new one will not be launched until the landing pad is freed of all the cargo from the previous rocket. On every planet a rocket will slowly fill up and the moment the resources from the previous one are consumed on Nauvis, it will automatically be launched. In a similar way, every planet has a landing pad for rocket parts and rocket fuel which will request supplies from Nauvis whenever needed.

As time goes on I find myself having to expand these outpost from time to time, so some of them already have some smaller rail networks that move resources around. I have also started moving some of the iron and copper processing to these planets to exploit very large patches of ore that can be found there.

I recently acquired the Spaceship that can be found stranded in the initial asteroid belt thanks to which travel between planets has become a lot cheaper, so I plan on significantly expand my presence.

The rest#

This whole base is mostly nuclear powered now, I have a couple of nuclear reactor on the map that provide most of the electricity needed, as well as a whole bunch of solar panels I have laid around the map before gaining access to nuclear power. I still have my old coal power plant ready to start up in case the batteries start draining up, but that hasn’t happened in a while.

Still, in order to expand the base even further, and thanks to the power sharing capabilities that the space elevator provides, I have been expanding the solar fields attached to the space station as they can now also provide for the planetary base.

I have always been a great enjoyer of the Nyx’s tubes mod and I have been using it extensively in this playthorugh. In my main base I have a big display that shows me the count of all the items I care about in the logistics network, as well as a very nice display that shows me the amount of each type of science I have stockpiled so I can easily decide which research to work on next. Factorio doesn’t really provide a nice HUD for these kinds of information so the only choice here is to build one yourself!

I have been very much enjoying this playthorugh, if you enjoy factorio and a good challenge I highly recommend it. Here’s the full mod list I am running: