And it turns out... yes. Yes it's possible. After 40 hours, I just researched landmines and should have the metals left to expand.
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I chose this seed despite the ridiculous proximity to biters making the starting iron unmineable and only allowing a single coal miner. Simply put, finding a good amount of claimable resources was pretty tough, so beggers can't be choosers. Far more important was making sure I had enough resources to get to landmines and (eventually) rocket launchers. This map had plenty of all metals, as well as an easily claimable copper, iron and quartz expansion.
Eventually over time it turned into this monstrosity (which may or may not resemble the cheat from homestar runner):
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Current resources:
Copper: 900k/1.6M starting, Level 1, Not worried
Starting with a lot of copper was important since you can't really atomize it. However, since I started with such a gigantic amount, I didn't really bother adding borax
Iron: ~200k/1M Level 1.5, Not worried
Iron was quickly depleting until I researched level 2. Simply adding the molten steel recipe and nothing is pretty much quadrupled the efficiency, and I'm running almost entirely on atomized shrooms at this point. If I ever run out I can just add more shrooms. There's technically the 350k starting resrouces but they're still like 3 chunks away from biters
Coal: 9M/11M Level 1 raw coal, level 0 coke Not Worried
Not worried in the slightest about coal. Eventually plan on going auog generators for infinite energy and convert my biomass to raw coal.
Titanium: 150k/~370k Level 1. Dangerously low
Titanium is a slight issue currently. My next research will be level 2 titanium, and I plan on just using the ball mill only recipe. There is a large titanium island in the northwest, so when I get rockets, I should be good. Worst comes to worst, I could go the full monte on titanium, but that required a ton of space
Tin: 80k/~160k Level 1. Moderately low
Level 2 tin will be the research right after titanium, and because it's very easy to complete the full path, I should have enough. It's also easily atomizable, at the cost of titanium for aoug cages to get meat.
Lead: Butt tons. Not very useful in deathworld pyanodon ironically.
Salt: Currently only using salt for desulfurization for explosives. There's enough for like a million rockets and landmines, no issue here
Aluminum: Plenty, and if I run out before capturing the aluminum patch, I can always get more from soot.
Biomass: I get all my biomass from ash->logs->compost. Filtrating flue gas for ash made this basically infinite, lots of gassifying tar and coal gas also helped.
Stone: All of my jaw crushes make a bunch of stone. It's not enough for hot air everywhere, so I only use that for glass. I could get more, but.... eh.
Zinc/chromium/nickel/niobium/etc, none of these honestly matter since you only need a few bars, but total lack of any zinc makes me sad. Processing niobium is a long term goal that I might get around to but might not really.
Biters:
Biter defense was entirely Pollution deletion for most of the game.
There's basically a few discrete stages of biter levels for this kind of run:
Stage 0: Squatting. Simply put, plopping buildings down discourages biters from expanding near you. My first iron, copper and quartz mines were actually on top of non-starter plots. Lots of jogging, much sadness.
Stage 1: Fencing: This time expanding fencing to essentially claim a large amount of area for building. A complete fence isnt needed, large gaps are fine. Your're not blocking anything, just discouraging expansion chunks. Not a huge priority to get this done really, so after botany probably.
From here on out the pollution cloud cannot touch the biters. Ever. Not once.
Stage 2: Pre-Military 2. This is basically a race against time for when the biters decide your factory is the best expansion candidate. Unfortunately, it's a race where you have no idea when the deadline is. My guess is ~50 hours, but honestly, it's pretty random. Simply put, if a single big biter attacks it will destroy the whole factory, there is nothing you can do. Thankfully, I reached this as early 23 hours in. Getting here is a major milestone that means you have a good chance of making it. You can't establish a perimeter aside from layered poor man's fences but you can at least chuck some grenades and drop some turrets before you whole factory is destroyed.
Stage 3: Pre-landmines. It's a long road to landmines, so it's a good idea to get any tech you absolutely need beforehand, like iron level 2 or coal processing 2 or whatever. Once you have landmines, you can establish a perimeter fully, easily, so it's just a matter of not running out of resources until you get rocket launchers at this point.
Stage 4: Rocket launchers. Basically victory.
Currently I suffered 4 attacks:
#1: Freak accident with pollution at evolution 0.27. Thankfully, no medium biters. Pistol goes pew pew.
#2-3: Random attacks that mysteriously vanished after a few destroyed buildings at the southern portion. If I had to hazard a guess, they were pathing through the factory on their way to an expansion or something. The first one could have ended the factory if it had a big biter but the second I would have had piercing rounds to stop it.
#4. Really dumb, was expanding fencing without zooming out and got in range of expansion biters. Nearly died because I thought fish healed you lmao. Big biters take a LONG time to die with turrets using red science piercing rounds, so I had to merry go round a while until I was at 10% health when the biter finally died. Panicked and completely forgot I had grenades lol.
Promptly made some dried meat afterwards
Research:
Hard to say what the best path is but I went something like this:
-Coal processing and low hanging fruit: obvious
-Energy/cooling towers/ fuild storage, raw coal, no coke, though. I hybridized combustion and boilers with crushed coal tech mostly, but left a bunch of coal destruction for syngas.
-Botany: Holy crap do you have to chop down a bunch of trees on marathon. Thousands. Wow.
-Iron1: Duh
-Quartz1: More science
-Genetics: Boron trioxide for quicker red science
-Everything needed for green science: Get military 2
-Finish up most useful red science
-Iron 2
-Landmines: I chose landmines instead of flamethrowers, since mines + rockets allows you to expand whereas flamethrower turrets + rockets... is technically possible but such a PITA.
Logistics:
Word of caution to anyone who tries this. You will be doing a LOT of hand dropping stuff into chests. Half the belts you do use will need to share 2 resources. Pre-Iron1, you can't even use ANY long distance belts. e.g. For this map seed, I had to hand cart all the quartz in the southeast all the way to the mid-west glassworks.
It's not as bad as it sounds, though, since the more you overproduce on early resources in a chain, the more they accumulate. Case in point: I now only have to plop coke/bricks/petridishes/agar/titanium/steel/etc around the factory every 2 hours or so.
Okay it's pretty bad, but it's routine. Someday I'll get trains and have beautiful cargo wagons on double headed trains with multiple filtered items all sharing a single main line. But I'll get bored before that probably.
Specifically I was using an fts reactor to turn tar(aromatics)/tailings into crude oil, then using the final petroleum to directly turn into sulfur rather than desulfurizing that.
So if you play deathworld marathon you mercifully get a simpler explosion recipe. Probably the only such bug as there aren't many expensive vanilla items in pyanodons that don't use completely disabled ingredients.
