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Hi r/factorio. First thing first, I love the game and the community here. You guys are the best! Today I come to you asking for help with the Space Exploration Mod.

I have my main base in Nauvis. I have launched some satellites into orbit to explore the solar system, and I also have launched 2 cargo rockets and started with the space science stuff in the space platform.

Due to the mod balance there are few resources on Nauvis, while there are moons full to the brim with ore. The issue is transportation, you can either use cargo rockets, delivery cannons or spaceships.

A cargo rocket can hold 500 stacks, so a max of 25k ore. This is not really that much, barely 1k more than 3 4-wagon trains worth of ore, and it requires a lot of fuel, as well as the cargo sections for the rocket. This options seems quite expensive, at least until you can get rocket reusability and reliability quite high. And fuel can't be easily mass produced in planets with not much oil, vulcanite or water.

A delivery cannon can fire 1-stack capsules, but require a non reusable capsule each time, as well as consuming 50 MW for full time use. Not as expensive as the cargo rocket and not reliant on fuel and rocket parts, but with limited throughput.

As for spaceships I'm still very far from that so I can't tell yet if it's worth.

I'm guessing that late game you just can set up a network of launch facilities and cargo rockets that distribute resources where they are needed. But right now it seems a bit far out for me.

It's likely that I am missing something as I'm fairly new to this mod. My question is:

When (and how) is offworld mining worth it?

Sorry for any weird english and thank you in advance

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about 4 years ago - /u/V453000 - Direct link

I stayed on Nauvis resources for a long time. I was in the exact same thinking as you, thinking I am in critical desperation for copper. But when I went far enough on Nauvis, I found patches worth millions. I don't know if that was just my luck with generation, or if there's some inner range that SE just reduces resources, but basically for normal resources Nauvis is fine for a very long time. I'm running a bit low on uranium and I need to push into biter territory a lot, but nothing unsolvable. Also I've been using a lot of uranium ammo so that's probably why.

My first planets were when I needed vulcanite (I switched my entire smelting to vulcanite block infused for the +50% ore efficiency), and later the special resources for space sciences.

The rocket reusability tech, together with the aeroframe scaffolds used in Low Density Structures alternate recipe, and on top of it all the best productivity modules you can afford, are to me the most important things - trying to reduce the resource requirements for rockets as much as possible. The space sciences will need a lot of resources.

I didn't use the delivery cannons, even with blueprints they require quite a bit of manual setting up for every resource, and their price per transported item does not really decrease much over time in compare to the cargo rocket.

about 4 years ago - /u/V453000 - Direct link

Originally posted by craidie

The second you get a cargo rocket.

For example the only source of vulcanite on Nauvis is from deep core mining. And you'll be getting a metric shit ton of stone to dispose of if that's the only source of vulcanite you have. And you need Vulcanite for space science...

When you start thinking of bringing back things that are found on nauvis surface It won't be immediately profitable.

First we need to figure out the cost of a launch.

  • Capsules are reused completely, so no need to factor that in, we do need to bring them though. Sections are a bit more complicated. A single rocket can fit 23 rockets with pods(18 slots leftover.). you get 20% reused from the rocket that brought it. 80 sections take another 16 slots. That leaves 2 slots for whatever for a delivery of 24 rockets. That leaves a single rocket build cost back to nauvis at 104 ish cargo sections

Rockets crashing complicated as hell

0.9^({ Rocket Survivability lvl }) * 0.5 * [x / (x + 500)] Where x is the amount of cargo rockets launched.

Luckily it doesn't affect much. You lose the rocket but cargo is intact. So the cost is not that big at the start. It does increase the cost of a rocket by another 4 sections at the start(the more reusable your rockets are, the bigger penalty a crash is) 108 sections per rocket.

  • It costs us 18.5k iron, 13.5k copper, 9k stone, 2.6k coal and 75.8k crude to build a 84 sections from scratch with t3 productivity everywhere possible and yellow assemblers. With recipes that use nauvis only materials.

depending on how far you're going you'll lose some of items from each stack(not a problem with single stack items though) shouldn't be more than 5%.

All this means that IF you source oil and water from nauvis you get to 45k ish raw ore/stone/coal in total needed per launch back to nauvis. So yeah not going to happen. You would need to halve the costs for it to be in remotely profitable. around reusability 9 you'll probably be better off compared to delivery cannons

Ooh the cannon capsules are reusable? I didn't know that. :)

about 4 years ago - /u/V453000 - Direct link

Originally posted by fatpandana

Please tell you have been scrapping them!

You mean the cargo rocket sections? No, I thought they meant the capsules for the cannons. I reuse rockets as much as I can, I don't use cannons at all.

about 4 years ago - /u/V453000 - Direct link

Originally posted by fatpandana

Ops. I miss read that, still havent had cafeine. Cannon capsules are not re useable.

Yeah and I misread the previous post thinking it was about cannons, with a lot of caffeine in. Didn't help apparently.






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