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Obviously there's no oxygen on Fulgora since the entire planet is covered in flammable hydrocarbons, there's constant lightning (which doesn't start fires when it hits the ocean), and no photosynthetic life...

But boilers and burners work.

Video game logic!

The Heating Tower and Boiler do have a minimum pressure requirement (do not work on Platforms), so there is at least the idea of physics in Factorio, but yeah, it is indeed a bit loosey-goosey…. The other planets’ atmospheres aren’t much better for combustion:

• Vulcanus surface temperature is likely to be very warm, at or near the auto-ignition point for wood (hence the carbonized trees). The lack of plants and closeness to the Sun would likely exhaust any naturally-occurring Oxygen in the atmosphere.
• Gleba is entirely covered in green-ish chlorophyll-containing oxygen-producing plants… even with the quantity of Pentapods I think that the O2 content would be VERY high - leading to uncontrolled wildfires. The surface is very wet and marshy, which may slow their spread.
• Aquilo is heavy on Ammonia. I’m not sure how much of this would sublimate at the ambient temperature…. Lighting the first frozen Solid Fuel cube on fire sounds about as difficult as getting icy kindling to spark in the rain.

Given all of this, Nuclear Fuel actually starts to make sense: you don’t need Oxygen if you’re combusting Uranium!

Fulgora is the only planet where I feel that I'm really limited by the resource patches. I recycle and reuse almost everything, but the number of patches I need to be mining at the same time, and the logistics of trying to get all of that together across islands is sort of a chore.

NineNine wrote: Thu Mar 06, 2025 5:56 pm Fulgora is the only planet where I feel that I'm really limited by the resource patches. I recycle and reuse almost everything, but the number of patches I need to be mining at the same time, and the logistics of trying to get all of that together across islands is sort of a chore.

Hm, strange - for me ressources were abundant on Fulgora, it was the building space which was limiting.

Look out for small islands which are basically only a big ressource patch - these contain a lot more scrap than the random deposits on the larger islands.

As for not burning, there's a couple of reasons why that might be: oxygen balance rather than a lack of the stuff. Fuel additives. There's extra magnets in the ground, those always help things like this.

The stuff with space is like... I mean you have to make explosives. You should be able to handle steam. It's kind of one of those things where the fantasy material science doesn't support the engineer not being able to make an internal combustion engine. On the one hand it prevents a player from being able to just solve some problems. On the other hand, it's very transparently because a solution was not found and simple was considered too easy. There's a few things like that in Space Age, so it gives me a degree of frustration. When I have empathy I'm not suspending disbelief; it causes cognitive dissonance.