My guide to "There is no spoon" (14.X version)

[nevjmac]

Thought I should mention that I didn't go down the productivity road, found it was easier to just double my steam power to 40 steam engines and run extra speed modules through the bottleneck areas, green circuits/red circuits and blue science.

this allowed me to launch at 6 hours without to much pressure at all

[cartmen180]

05:02 It was fun and finally i realized i didn't had a spoon to begin with!

[Targa]

Just wanted to say that I love the economical base layout! I never would have thought to lay my base out in such a compact fashion. I think that people tend to get stuck in doing things a certain way (many, like myself, I'm sure, learning design layouts from YouTube videos), and lack the imagination to come up with something completely different. Kudos for that! I'm certainly going to give this guide a shot, since this is one of the last achievements I still need. My only question is: Did you make the majority of the belts, inserters, assembly machines, etc. all by hand?

[D0SBoots]

First off, thanks everyone! I'm glad this has been useful to so many people!

Targa: Yeah, I think all the buildings were made by hand, there's no reason not to. And there's every reason to do so - your character is essentially a flexible assembler 3 that requires no power and creates no pollution. If you're not hand-assembling something, you're wasting that productive capacity.

The belts and inserters were probably 50/50 - you can pick them up off the line eventually, since they're needed as intermediate products. I remember picking up a fair number of advanced circuits off the line as well.

[galabyca]

Thanks for this guide. I would like to know what is the meaning of "capacity" when you say " My build order was iron to about 1/3 capacity, then copper to ~1/4 capacity".

[DaveMcW]

The screenshot shows full capacity.

[D0SBoots]

Right. The screenshots show full capacity, I.e. the final form of the base. 1/3 capacity on the iron just means 1/3 of the mining drills and 1/3 of the smelters, but placed in the correct places. (And all the belts set up properly.)

There's no need in the early game to spend the time, resources, and electricity to fully build out the iron and copper areas when the rest of the base can't remotely consume that capacity yet.

[Permittivity]

First of all, many thanks to D0SBoots for the guide and Markavian for the great checklist. I managed to get a small pile of achievements in just over 7 hours, despite making numerous mistakes. While there was a lot of running around for the first two hours, at no point did I feel as if I was unable to keep up.

Here is some of my observations:

• I wanted to play my own map, and I probably generated thirty before I found one I really liked. The big factors were large uninterrupted patches of iron and copper and closeness of oil. Minimal trees in the way of building is also important.

• I read the guide first and then just kept the checklist open while I played. I find it a lot easier to build my own setups adapted for the map instead of trying to copy something from a screenshot. That being said, the screenshots in the guide provided a lot of ideas about efficient layouts.

• The downside of just building ad hoc is that most of my mistakes involved introducing bottlenecks by using slow inserters where fast were needed. There were also one or two cases where I accidentally left out an inserter and didn't notice it for a while. This caused one of my early game problems where one of my red science factories wasn't actually producing.

• The pacing of the checklist is loose enough that despite those mistakes I never felt like I was behind. I always had the option to build one or two extra factories to play catch up if needed.

• By building steam out to 40 engines, I was fairly comfortable on power without deploying any of the solar that I built for the satellite. It's easy to get the steam power only achievement at the same time. The downside to this is that I went though a lot of coal and needed several extra miners for it.

• Productivity Module 3 for the silo is faster. You end up saving 90 rocket control units, and 4x module 3 cost less than 90x module 1s and 90x blue chips. I just hand built the productivity modules in the last hour of waiting for blue chips and blue modules to finish.

Finally, the resources given to build the rocket at the end of the checklist are not correct for using Module 3s. The materials that I ended up needing are:

• 720 Rocket control unit needs 720 blue chips and 720 speed modules. Since the other figures were given for productivity 2, I'm guessing the 1100 blue chips was supposed to be the 1110 from 810 for RCU, 200 for silo, and 100 for satellite. With productivity 3, you need 1020 total blue chips. Silo and satellite need no additional speed modules.

• 770 Rocket fuel needs 7700 solid fuel.

• 820 Low density structures needs 8200 steel, 4100 copper, and 4100 plastic.

[D0SBoots]

I don't think the math is a slam dunk for using Productivity Module 3s. Each Productivity Module 3 requires 5 Module 2s, 5 Blue chips and 5 Red chips. Each Prod Mod 2 requires 4 Mod 1s, 5 Blue chips and 5 Red chips. Each Prod Mod 1 requires 5 red chips and 5 green chips. Total cost for a Prod Mod 3: 30 Blue chips, 130 Red chips, and 100 Green chips. Multiply that by 4, and you're at 120 Blue chips, 520 Red chips and 400 green chips. That's more expensive than the 90 Blue chips, 450 Red chips and 450 Green chips you save in rocket control parts, although not fabulously more expensive.

You could argue that you make up for the chip expense with savings in steel and fuel. It's a reasonable argument, but only if you tune your base to take advantage of it, since those resources aren't fungible with chip production. In my trial run, chip production was the biggest bottleneck, but I had plenty of solid fuel and steel was pretty simple to scale. Thus, productivity module 2s were the sweet spot.

[Permittivity]

You aren't subtracting the cost of the T2 productivity modules out of the cost of the T3 modules. The four T2 modules cost 20 blue, 100 red, 80 green, so the upgrade cost is only 100 blue, 420 red, 320 green.

Compare that to the cost of 90 RCU at 90 blue, 450 red, 450 green. You use 10 more blue chips to save 30 red and 130 green. After you've built the 10 extra blue chips, you've needed 10 fewer red and 50 more green which is a negligible difference. I suppose it comes down to where the bottleneck in your factory is for the last hour. I was ready to go with rocket materials by the time that rocket research finished, so not having to build 90 of each part at 40 seconds each saved a couple of minutes. The material savings in rocket fuel and low density structures was mostly helpful from a power perspective since I got to shut oil and steel down earlier and grab the efficiency modules from those machines to use in my assemblers for the rocket parts.

It will be interesting to see what happens in 0.15 with the research changes. Although the stated goal is to make mid game research easier, the spoon run gets blue science up extremely quickly and will likely be hampered by the need to construct more types of packs. If research becomes more of a long pole than it is now, that will shift the balance towards using T3 modules.

[ttsgosadow]

Another 'thanks for the guide'; it was very helpful and I easily got my achieve on the first try

/cheers!

[absterge]

Has anybody done this since the change in research? Thanks for the guide, I'll use it as a rough outline for my .15 <8hr launch.

[D0SBoots]

I've been preparing to look into it. The research change means I pretty much have to redo all my calculations, and preliminary investigation seems to show that it's going to be a *lot* harder post 15.X. On the upside, the elimination of alien artifacts means you don't actually need any of the bugs around, aside from the bare minimum required to be eligible for the achievement, so that opens up some possibilities. There's also the annoyance that since I already have the achievement, that makes it harder to track - 15.X added bi-directional auto-syncing with Steam, so deleting achievements.dat doesn't do anything. I'm going to have to download a stand-alone copy of the game.

If you just want credit for the achievement, I'd suggest snagging it on 14.X while it's still easy to get.

[Mr. Mechanic]

I recently finished a No Spoon run on 0.15, so it's certainly possible. My first attempt ended after roughly 6.5 hours: I was setting up hi-tech science, but with low steel and plastic production and so little time left I abandoned it. I then sat down to determine the amount of production I would need and what kind of infrastructure I'd need to support that. The second attempt succeeded, but with only 3 minutes left.

If I remember correctly, I had red and green science automated after 1 hour, plastic and solid fuel production after 2 hours, blue science at 3, military science at 4, production science at 5, hi-tech science at 6. Rocket silo research finished around 7 hours, then the final push to create the silo, rocket and satellite took almost an hour. I spent the last half hour frantically adding assemblers for the various rocket parts (after diverting hi-tech science production to control units, and the lower science factory to low density structure) and doing some ad-hoc production for the satellite. Those level 1 efficiency modules in the silo may well have made the difference.

In the end I had 48 iron, 32 steel and 16 copper furnaces for the red/green/blue/production science factory, 24 iron, 8 steel and 16 copper furnaces for the military science factory and 32 iron and 64 copper furnaces for the hi-tech science factory. Also 5 refineries, 4 plastic plants, 8 solid fuel plants and 2 sulfuric acid plants.

I didn't use blueprints, but I had a lot of the factory layouts memorized after the first attempt. Actually building that much stuff takes a lot of time, and as things get larger travel time takes a toll, so investing in a car was a good idea. During the first attempt I tried to use electric furnaces as soon as possible, but I think they're probably too expensive that early on, and since coal wasn't hard to come by they didn't really have much of an advantage over steel furnaces, so I stuck to steel furnaces during the second attempt.

It definitely taught me a thing or two about production and throughput, as well as how expensive the various science packs are.

[Factorie]

Gonna have to try this myself. I love walkthroughs on the forums!

[D0SBoots]

OK, finally finished my 15.X guide. I take back what I said a few posts above - it's not really any harder in 15.X, just a bit more complicated. But the addition of blueprint strings into the base game makes it *so* much easier to follow guides like this one that I now recommend doing this in 15.X instead of 14.X unless you have some particular reason not to.