There is no spoon - is it worth to ...

[vanatteveldt]

I'm trying to get the there is no spoon achievement / trying to get the fastest finish I can (without generating maps for 5 hours to get a perfect one...)

My current aim for science is to get to 75-90 packs per minute (10/12/20-24 g/r/b assemblers), which is 1 blue assembler for a lot of intermediate items (e.g. gears (red), inserters (green), smart inserters (blue)) so it gives nice ratios.

In general, do you think it is worth it to...

- build a "store" for belts, inserters, etc
- upgrade stone to steel furnaces
- upgrade to advanced oil processing

Also, what are reasonable enemy settings? I used very low / very small / very rich / very large starting, but the result was that in a one hour radius around my base I could find something like 50 artifacts in total...

[Daid]

I did it in 7 hours, without too much planning.

I used the biggest starting area, which caused me to drive around with a tank for about an hour to collect the needed artifacts. While the tank does take some research and resources, it makes killing bases a lot easier if you just ram them, and use the machine gun to kill off the spawns.

A store for belts, always. You need lots of these. I build a store for yellow belts, splitters, undergrounds, inserters (normal, fast, long) and lvl 2 assembling machines. The resources uses greatly offset towards the time lost manually crafting and collecting stuff otherwise. I manually crafted red belts, but I did also setup a store for gears, as red belts are quick to craft if you have gears already.

Instead of upgrading your forges, build extra steel ones and keep using the stone ones. Space isn't the problem at this point. So instead of doubling throughput you triple it.

Advanced oil processing, always, without cracking you need so much more oil. And crude oil is generally in short supply. Yes, you need solid fuel as well, but in much lower quantities then you need plastic.

[DerivePi]

I tried standard settings initially but didn't get it (almost). Make your resources bigger and leave the biters at their standard starting config. The 10/12/24 science config is probably about right. You will have some trouble supplying the ingredients but you'll get to the needed science quickly enough. The big thing is to store up material for the final push. Notably, plastic, steel, processing units and level 1 speed modules (electric engines and concrete should also be on your radar). Don't upgrade the furnaces, you need that steel. Other than the final push ingredients, don't store material. Definitely upgrade to advanced refinery. Plastic processing units and speed modules need a large amount of refinery capacity (and time). I'd say a 5 refinery setup is nice. process light oil into solid fuel initially. Once you have enough soilid fuel, change those chem plants to oil cracking to boost petrol production.

[vanatteveldt]

Thanks for the replies!

My reasoning for upgrading stone furnaces was that setting up furnace lines takes quite some time, just upgrading 48 of them is very quick...

Is a couple hundred steel really that important compared to the 7 or 10 thousand you need for the rocket parts?

[DerivePi]

It is when the clock says 7:56

[steel86]

I did it on my second attempt with very little planning. Didnt seem particularly hard. The only ratio I have ever learnt was 1/14/10 power and that is all I found I needed.

The first attempt I failed because I didnt realise the requirements for for making the rocket and SIlo were so high having never really played it at speed and usually having super excessive resources everywhere. I finished in 7:32.

[Deadly-Bagel]

Yeah I got this on my first try in about 7 hours, the trick is to set the starting area big enough that you don't need to worry about biters but not so big you need to drive half an hour to find artefacts. You should also have a pretty good plan of what you're doing, and I didn't bother with oil cracking. It's just as easy to set up more pumpjacks and if you set oil spawn settings to High then there's no shortage. It's easier than fiddling with cracking, you don't need to supply water and you need 10,000 Light Oil for the rocket fuel anyway.

It's interesting because artefacts are being removed from the game but science is also being made MUCH more expensive so how will that impact this achievement?