No spoon 3rd try

[Nich]

8:18 minutes

I felt like I was really moving well but at the end a couple emptying mines, pump jacks and biter attacks set me back a bit. Everything on the rocket went really well except blue chips. Just didn't have enough copper production to support enough green chip production.

Is no spoon meant to be done on default settings or is it pretty normal to go to easier settings?

[Xeanoa]

I did it in multiplayer with my fiancee. We used harder difficulty settings than normal and more or less got it without explicit planning for it.

Key to the achievement it focus on the right science, and having a 'blueprint' a what a good science area looks like in your head. We used 20 red bottle, 24 green bottle and 48 blue bottle assemblers with 40 labs, which allowed us to blast through the science very quickly.

[Nich]

I am guessing having someone to help build is a lot of help with that strat. I barely had time to build 5/6/12 with 30 labs. I think I would have done a lot better if I had built a dedicated 6/9 green chip factory with dedicated yellow lines right when I started blue science

[Xeanoa]

It hardly takes more time to build 10/12/24 over 5/6/12. 10/12/24 uses one assembly machine for each input, 5/6/12 only utilises half a machine. 20/24/48 is still not much extra work, since you just build 10/12/24 twice, but it's overkill for this achievement.

[Daid]

A larger starting area really helped me getting this one. As the biters never really attack and thus you can safely ignore building defenses.

[yousai]

A larger starting area really helped me getting this one. As the biters never really attack and thus you can safely ignore building defenses.

I actually ran into troubles collecting enough alien artifacts due to this. Somehow my large starting area meant that biters are very far away, but once I found a nest, it was often a gigantic nest impossible to conquer with turret creep alone.

[Mehve]

My own spoon runs tend to focus on minimizing everything. You only need a 3/3/6 setup to hit all the necessary research, you don't need faster belts, and you don't need modules (aside from the rocket silo itself). This minimizes infrastructure costs, which minimizes raw material costs, which helps minimize overall pollution generated, which makes things like solar and efficiency modules unnecessary, further reducing costs. Research isn't as fast, but you use that time to start stockpiling ingredients for the rocket earlier.

[Daid]

A larger starting area really helped me getting this one. As the biters never really attack and thus you can safely ignore building defenses.

I actually ran into troubles collecting enough alien artifacts due to this. Somehow my large starting area meant that biters are very far away, but once I found a nest, it was often a gigantic nest impossible to conquer with turret creep alone.

I started with a car and the mounted machine gun, and later a tank, just ram the bases.

[Grubsnik]

Is no spoon meant to be done on default settings or is it pretty normal to go to easier settings?

I got mine with just standard settings, did however restart more than a dozen times to get a decent starting position. Most of them had way too little oil (I want to count 16 nodes as a minimum), one looked perfect for oil but only had a tiny patch Iron. First thing I did was open the map, take a sceenshot and pause the game while placing everything in paint.net (dimensions was somewhat off, but it really helped)

built 5 red, 6 green assembly 1 for science and then 6 assembly 2 for blue science. Launched at 7:30, mainly because I messed up a few times when RL interrupted me (like coming back an hour later in the game and discover that only 2 out of 5 processing unit plants got the final sulfuric acid plumbing installed. I ran out of pipe, queued it, had to pause, came back and never used the freshly built pipes in my inventory. Also forgot to buffer things properly.

[Deadly-Bagel]

First thing I did was open the map, take a sceenshot and pause the game while placing everything in paint.net

Open the map and Shift + Space to pause the game. Not sure if the grid appears on the map when paused but you can turn it off in the settings.