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I was doing stuff on Aquilo, and... well... is this not the essence of Factorio?
Ironically, in my faffing about I stuffed a flouroketone processor with legendary productivity modules but didn't get around to putting a speed beacon next to it, and a couple of hours later it absolutely shut down my base. No electricity. I had to rush over and throw together a nuclear reactor quickly before the entire place froze solid. Ah, hubris!

Congrats!
Are you transmitting heat between islands, or did you manage to get enough space to heat each island individually? I have never had more than one big island on Aquilo plus a couple of tiny ones... not enough space to support the fluid processing to heat on-premises without a lot of ice platform.

I would be interested to see closeups of of those islands, I never got that far out from the main island such that I couldn't use bots for most things.

J-H wrote: Mon Sep 14, 2026 3:39 am Congrats!
Are you transmitting heat between islands, or did you manage to get enough space to heat each island individually? I have never had more than one big island on Aquilo plus a couple of tiny ones... not enough space to support the fluid processing to heat on-premises without a lot of ice platform.

If they're close, I do. But mainly I have trains transporting rocket (or just solid) fuel around and I have heating towers on each island producing heat locally. The heat fall-off with distance makes running heating pipes out to distant islands kind of painful, not to mention routing around the pipes.

Since producing fuel is fussy, and requires several steps including ice management, I'm only making fuel on a couple of islands. Since trains run everywhere to transport all of the liquid, I either attach a cargo car or have a specialized fuel train running fuel out. I haven't decided which is better -- but transporting fuel and generating heat locally is really the only scalable way to manage it IMO.

Once you get legendary quality speed and productivity modules, the problem with ice inverts. I had to switch from recycling extra ice to transporting it back to the main island so the science factories had enough!

worph wrote: Mon Sep 14, 2026 7:09 pm I would be interested to see closeups of of those islands, I never got that far out from the main island such that I couldn't use bots for most things.

Oh lord. I don't want anyone seeing my hack-job; I'm _not_ very organized, and my bases grow organically. I only rarely re-organize things to look nice.

My main hope was that someone would notice the writing on the one island. The quote felt appropriate for Aquilo.

However... here are the two patters I have settled on. The first is an oil island where I'm producing fuel -- rocket and solid -- for pick-up by a fuel train that distributes it to other islands. Because it takes so much extra infrastructure to make fuel, I only create one of these when oil starts to run low on another one; all of the other oil islands only produce oil for pick-up, and consume fuel from the fuel train.
The second is a lithium island which is the pattern I use for most islands. It consists of a heating tower sufficient for the island, it offloads fuel from the fuel train to power the tower, and otherwise produces liquid for pick-up by other train(s).

Two other points: getting a stock of quality modules, speed and productivity, utterly changes the game. I put productivity on every single thing I can that consumes a limited resource, especially the rare stuff like lithium and holium -- or anything downstream that consumes such a product. Eventually, you get to stuff that can't. On the oil island you may notice I have speed on the ammonia plants... that's because (a) ammonia is infinite, and (b) once you have legendary productivity on enough stuff, the ice equation flips and you don't have too much; you don't have enough for the science plants. So I want extra ice created, and so I don't use productivity on the ammonia plants.

It only just occurred to me that quality heating towers would be useful on Aquilo, so I started creating those, but there aren't any there yet.

Oh, Spidertrons are indispensable on Aquilo. I mean, they're useful everywhere, but on Aquilo the islands nature means it's the only planet I have which has multiple disjoint robot networks -- and this means I can't as easily remotely manage islands. Therefore, Spidertrons. They've saved my butt on Aquilo multiple times.