All in all it was a lot of fun!
A few things working in my favor.
1) Bob's adjustable inserters. This is pretty much a goto mod for me for complex modpacks. It allows inserters to have any source or destination within a 3 tile range, and place on near or far side of belts. Some close rotations with long arm can be very fast especially from machine to box or box to machine, and can easily fully compress blue belts.
2) I was running with my GTTS mod enabled and set to 160 UPS, so the speed of all belts, machines, movement speeds, and other rates are reduced to 3/8 their normal, and the game speed increased to 8/3 normal. Fluid flow rates are not adjusted, so while production and consumption rates of buildings are restored to normal, fluids flow substantially easier at the higher update rates. Some of the designs and decisions I made regarding fluids would not continue to work properly if the update rate was restored to 60. On the other hand, late gate I was only getting between 90 and 120 UPS, so the game was running effectively slower than realtime for me. When seeing the ingame clock of 1018:57:15 for victory, that's effectively 382 hours of normal game time, although it was probably closer to 500 realtime since I could not run at full target UPS as I got into the late game. I certainly would not recommend using the mod at such high UPS target for this modpack.
3) A few of the machines I have have 2x productivity bonus from T.U.R.D. upgrades, including a few key intermediates. My MK2 gene lab making cDNA for example, has +100% productivity bonus with 2 MK3 productivity modules. A MK4 gene lab with 4 MK3 modules and the T.U.R.D. bonus would only have +80% productivity. There are a few others scattered around with double bonuses, but the cDNA I think is the only significant one, as I replaced a bunch of buildings with MK3 before noticing the double bonus, and the cDNA (when I suddenly needed a ton for Adam42 Gene Samples for Zinc Finger Fusion Proteins) was the first time I consciously thought "Oh I better not upgrade this to keep this bonus". Even then the cDNA crunch was only because I had pretty high logistics limits on the latter gene mod products that was unnecessary, and the cDNA factory is not high utilization once I reduced the limits.
4) I spent some time idling instead of scaling production. Particularly when upgrading my logistics robots to high tech robots, and in the final stretch of space science needed for the tech. To be fair, this is not exactly an easy mod pack to balance things properly such that all your production can be left unattended, and sometimes you can have unexpected consequences from time to time. For example, when I needed to make Dingrit Fur for Cysteine I needed Sodium Alumate, not much so I just hooked a provider into my Sodium Alumate production in the aluminum processing chain. Hours later I am looking at why my duralumin supply has run out. No molten aluminum, no reduced, no alumate, none of the last few pulps, what is this? I cant make pulp 3 becasue this iron oxide output line is full? Well that's balanced with the 99.9% recued aluminum production, but pilfering the sodium alumate intermediate unbalanced it.
Some lessons I learned or things I would do differently:
1) Going past Fine Nexelit dust will eat any and all Glycerol you can throw at it. I have 43 MK3 mixers with 3 MK2 Pdoductity modules to feed less than 1 blue belt of nexelit plate. I should have used more tailings and made more sand and processed more nexelit at a lower processing step, but by the time I came to the realization that it is 1 skin and 1 sodium hydroxide per nexelit plate (reduced slightly by productivity on the glycerol production), I was already comitted to the giant glycerol production.
2) Logistics robots are nice, but in a very spread out base you need a lot of them at high speed. All my 5208 Logistics robots are of the high tech variety, but it was a fair bit of idling while they built up. It's convenient to have everything in one logistics network as you can request anything or do away with anthing you need to, but there is probably a lot of inefficiency in the system.
Interesting resources or methods:
1) While my initial power production was simple, things got more interesting with combustion mixture. With the combustion turbine MK2 and MK3 having bonus efficiency, steam turbines through standard boilers become insignificant. Through much of the game I was running on combustion mixture from fuel oil made directly from crude (There is something in the PY information at the top about "Bitumen Seeps and drilling fluid, but my world was created prior to that). That served me well for a while, but the big logistics difficulty with it was actually the coke or biomass needed to burn it. It went looking for alternatives.
Along with Moondrops Stage 3 and Phytoming Stage 2 comes a really interesting possiblity using one of the few combustion mixture recipies that requires no Coke or Biomass. Kerosene production from Zinc-encrusted Moondrop Flowers has quite a good return, and can be burned with the addition of Hydrogen. With the Zinc enriched biomass from moss, along with Chelators from phytoplankton, and feeding the power houses rocket fuel made from kerosene and the excess oxygen from hydrogen production, it's a pretty simple and scalable build for lots of power. Just 138 MK2 Moondrop buildings can produce 2.66GW of power.
2) Don't try to make Boron with Hydrogen Chloride. If I did my math right, it's 3.5 boron per bio battery, and it's 10 bio batteries per intelligent unit, for 35 boron per intelligent unit. At 150 units of HCL per boron, that's 5250 HCL, and it's 5 units of saline water per unit of HCL (unless you also spend sulfuric acid), that's more than 25,000 saline per intelligent unit through boron alone. Alternatively you can make boron by particle accelerator at the cost of rayon. That's one rayon per 5 boron, and you get 5 rayon per craft at a farily reasonable cost, the big thing being the fiber, and you will need a lot of centrifuges and raw fiber production. The cermet, nichrone, propene, sulfur and power costs for the particle acceleration are not so big of concerns.
3) I mentioned Bio Batteries, and they were a thorn in my side. These things are used like crazy, especially when upgrading my robots. They go into the circuits as both circuit board substrates and as the fault current inductor, then into the robots as superconductors for the superconducting servomechanism, and it's not just that the lithium niobate and the neodynium magnets take huge ammounts of boron, but then it's 20 alien bacteria for each one as well, and that takes you in a completely different direction for resource demands. While the bacteria itself, along with the serine can take productivity modules, and the T.U.R.D. upgrades help greatly here too, I still needed a pretty big expansion of my Kmauts and a more minor expansion to my petri dish production. Then once I get all that done my niobium needs doubled for the lithium niobate, and even now that I switched all my boron over to particle acceleration, all my HCL is still being consumed by the Lithium Chloride, but hey at least I have intelligent units and can build some fracking plants to get some saline water in large quantities now!
4) Higher grade uranium processing was not quite as straightforward as I was expecting it to be. The recipies make a neat cycle,
5) There are some really interesting biotic resouces sources. I used simik blood exclusively for diamonds thoughout my playthough, which ended up being not as bad as I was initially expecting. Another interesting biotic resouce is actually Bitumen. At the cost of 100 Tall oil, a single Zipir egg, and at least Arquad Stage 3 you can get over 900 bitumen, 1200 or 1500 with upgraded recipes. Bitumen is a fantastic source of syngas through the dirty syngas chain you get 5x your bitumen in syngas at the cost of 1 filtration medium per 2000 syngas. Given that after nanofibrils and sub-denier microfiber, filtration medium comes in Costco sized megapacks of 75 or 100, you can produce a lot of syngas, around 4500-7500 syngas per 100 tall oil and 1 zipir egg. You have to deal with the soot, that's pure gold! Turning this source of syngas into power was my #2 option, and actually takes less buildings than the moondrop power, but only if you could supply an astonishing amount of coke or biomass to feed it properly.
6) Coke and heavy oil from Tar and vacuum. This recipe is surprisingly nice way to get coke. It basically makes 1 coke from 15 tar. It's also a very fast recipe, with a small number of oil refineries able to make a large ammount of coke very quickly. Large ammounts of heavy oil on the other hand not so much, but the heavy oil is great for powering oil burners, glassworks, smelters, and those sorts of things, so some additional heavy oil never hurts.
Victory
- Victory.JPG (18.62 KiB) Viewed 8998 times
- Victory Labeled.JPG (258.92 KiB) Viewed 8998 times
- VictoryKerosenePowerStation.JPG (620.9 KiB) Viewed 8998 times
- VictoryMall.JPG (394.35 KiB) Viewed 8998 times
It seems you beat the monster. 
