Space Age slowly changed how I think about planetary exploitation

[Alex von Stierlitz]

I think Space Age slowly changed the way I think about industrial expansion in games.

At first, my giant deep-space platform was supposed to be just another transport platform. But over time it evolved into something much larger.

The platform is still under active development, especially regarding science production, but already now it:
- produces white space science and two of the six Nauvis science packs directly in space,
- contains laboratories and performs scientific research onboard,
- harvests Promethium in deep space,
- and sustains enormous industrial throughput while traveling through dense asteroid fields at speeds of 150–250 km/s.

Besides the usual onboard production of ammunition, rockets, repair packs and platform foundation — necessary for continuous self-repair without depending on planetary deliveries — the platform is gradually evolving into a fully autonomous industrial and scientific ecosystem in space.

What surprised me most is that the deeper I went into late-game Space Age, the less I wanted to continue heavily exploiting planets like Nauvis and Gleba.

Those worlds feel alive.

Nauvis feels like a real living planet with forests, lakes and ecosystems. Gleba feels even more biological and alien. Even Fulgora feels more like the remains of a lost civilization than just another mining outpost.

Meanwhile, my deep-space platform already:
- produces fuel,
- processes enormous amounts of asteroid resources,
- sustains its own industry,
- performs research,
- and survives extremely dense asteroid fields completely autonomously.

At some point I realized that the gameplay itself had naturally led me toward a philosophy of minimizing planetary exploitation and moving heavy industry into space.

Asteroids already contain:
- iron,
- carbon,
- sulfur,
- ice,
- calcite,
- copper,

and because of that, the absence of stone/silicates in asteroid processing gradually started to feel a bit strange to me.

I know asteroid stone has already been discussed before, so I am not trying to “discover something new.” I simply found it fascinating that Space Age gameplay itself naturally pushed me toward the idea of a more sustainable and careful space civilization.

Even if stone could be obtained from asteroids, planets would still remain absolutely essential because of:
- unique science packs,
- biological resources,
- and their unique identities.

For example, Nauvis would still remain necessary because of biter eggs and several other unique scientific and biological production chains.

But basic bulk resources…

At this stage of the game, it increasingly feels logical that an advanced space civilization would move more and more heavy industrial resource extraction into asteroid processing instead of endlessly stripping living worlds apart.

Honestly, I never expected Factorio to make me think about industrial ethics and sustainable space civilization.

But somehow, Space Age managed to do exactly that.

And I love it for that.

[40880472]

You're onto something here, I'm now gonna install some mods to help with inter-platform logistics and see how much industry I can offload into space with fueling stations and dedicated asteroid mining vessels. Thanks for the playthrough idea.

[Hurkyl]

It may interest you to know that hard-leaning sci-fi of the past had a direct, practical reason to keep industry off planets: it's expensive to leave a gravity well. Unless it's entirely local, you don't put industry on a planet unless you have a very compelling reason to do so, because it's costly to move things off of the planet.

(assuming you don't have something to bypass the cost like cheap teleportation, or don't have such a glut of resources that you simply don't care about wasting them)

[sczsne]

The addition of intra-orbital transfers is definitely going to make play like this a major theme of my next save, I think. I really like pollution minimizing to the best of my ability, because I too have a conservationist streak. Despite the biters being obnoxious little things.

[ProMeTheus112]

It is really a very interesting aspect of Factorio that beyong reaching the final game objective (winning the game), you have various long-term goals that you can pursue after in different ways that justify continuing the playthrough beyond the win, but also give a direction towards how to win it. For me currently, my interest is geographical expansion (focused on Nauvis for now) by fractionning my factory over different parts ("decentralized") and trying to reach further areas. Also I am trying to adapt to the environment by cutting quite few trees and damaging as few trees as possible or no trees from pollution which is probably what led me towards this decentralized, geographic expansion goal in the first place.

Today, I was looking at the possible infinite techs to research and realized that as ideal as it can be, the game gives various infinite tech options that allow you to focus on just about any combination of techs as you want. If you have no or few space science, you get infinite techs that use metallurgic or agricultural without space. Some do use the space, with a combination of the others, or with only space + utility + chemical, etc. There's a lot of room for players to choose what to focus on and how much.