Purple
(She/Her)
So there's this game, Factorio, where you are stranded on a planet full of very zerg-like bugs that hate pollution, and you are kind of a Captain Planet villain determined to build a spaceship out of several miles of interwoven conveyor belts. It's Pretty Great and full of actually 2D prerendered graphics. The ending to Factorio always felt weak though, because you build a spaceship and launch it and then get a little stat screen, but you're still on this bug planet, and probably continuing to play because there's more research on the tech tree.
So this one person made this mod called Space Exploration where you actually build spaceships and go to other planets and get other resources and while it has a lot of appealing concepts, the whole thing keeps going and it's this horribly bloated mess that takes hundreds of hours to play through and comes with instructions on how to delete large swaths of map generation periodically because the save files get oh so very bloated. But then the devs went "hey yeah, there's good stuff in here" and hired that person to try this concept again, but with way more pizazz and proper game design, and also a lot of restraint. So now we have the expansion, called Space Age, and the search optimization there is just The Worst, but it's pretty great!
Launching a rocket in the space is now a significantly easier thing to do, requiring you to only have 3 flavors of science unlocked instead of 5, and also not requiring nearly as many components to slap a rocket together. Except now, instead of causing the game to officially end and white science vials to come spewing out of the launchpad, you use those rockets to send up parts to build a space platform, which looks neat and uses grabby-grabby Doc Oc arms to grab small space rocks and munch them into useful materials, which can then generate that old space science sure, and after experimenting around with the weird finicky nature of setting that up and getting your infinite science stream, you can also use those same rock chewing resources to slap big rockets on the back and turn the whole thing into a spaceship to go to other planets, and then later automate them like you can with trains to ship stuff around between planets. But first you have to deal with the fact that as soon as you take off you have to deal with the rest of space being full of much larger, deadlier rocks. You will underestimate how big a problem this is.
Assuming you survive at least long enough to bail out and recreate the start of the game (or you like, design your first ship with more longterm survivability than first time players tend to) you can drop down onto one of three nearby planets which all have their own Weird Deal that essentially forces you to reinvent the wheel, devise a new tech-up chain, deal with a cool local hazard, and eventually learn to craft a new flavor of science to add to the pile and make cool new stuff with. In no particular order, or, I guess in distance from the sun order, but you can do these first 3 in any order is the point, we've got...
Vulcanus - The volcano planet where the lack of water and general lack of patches of stuff to mine mean you have to wacky alchemy with sulfuric acid geysers until you work out how to build forges, which let you just pipe in lava and pour out anything made from just iron and copper like turning on a faucet, but to expand you have to deal with these absurdly gigantic and tanky worms that kinda almost feel like facing off against Shadow of the Colossus bosses.
Gleba - The squelchy planet where you need to learn to do gardening or something I haven't been there yet, all I know is that the science fruit starts rotting as soon as you start picking them and there something about absolutely horrifying monsters who love the smell?
Fulgora - The planet where there's no raw resources, just the ruins of a long-dead high tech civilization. So you just get piles of late game end-products... but what you NEED is gears and copper wire and such, so, time to start recycling! Also there's lightning constantly and no other power sources.
And then later you can go to Aquilo - The frozen planet, where there's... ice. And ammonia? And your base keeps freezing over.
And then the endgame places that I mean I know about because there's a little location map in the game and achievements that mention them and an in-game wiki thing but they weren't mentioned pre-release, so, shh!
And it's not like when you go to each of these you're DONE with previous planets. You're juggling all these plates while still checking back in on your original base where you're probably out of iron or coal or something and maybe your base is being overrun. So it's not that you're playing Factorio 5 times back to back with different rulesets, you're doing that AT ONCE.
Anyway it's pretty great.
So this one person made this mod called Space Exploration where you actually build spaceships and go to other planets and get other resources and while it has a lot of appealing concepts, the whole thing keeps going and it's this horribly bloated mess that takes hundreds of hours to play through and comes with instructions on how to delete large swaths of map generation periodically because the save files get oh so very bloated. But then the devs went "hey yeah, there's good stuff in here" and hired that person to try this concept again, but with way more pizazz and proper game design, and also a lot of restraint. So now we have the expansion, called Space Age, and the search optimization there is just The Worst, but it's pretty great!
Launching a rocket in the space is now a significantly easier thing to do, requiring you to only have 3 flavors of science unlocked instead of 5, and also not requiring nearly as many components to slap a rocket together. Except now, instead of causing the game to officially end and white science vials to come spewing out of the launchpad, you use those rockets to send up parts to build a space platform, which looks neat and uses grabby-grabby Doc Oc arms to grab small space rocks and munch them into useful materials, which can then generate that old space science sure, and after experimenting around with the weird finicky nature of setting that up and getting your infinite science stream, you can also use those same rock chewing resources to slap big rockets on the back and turn the whole thing into a spaceship to go to other planets, and then later automate them like you can with trains to ship stuff around between planets. But first you have to deal with the fact that as soon as you take off you have to deal with the rest of space being full of much larger, deadlier rocks. You will underestimate how big a problem this is.
Assuming you survive at least long enough to bail out and recreate the start of the game (or you like, design your first ship with more longterm survivability than first time players tend to) you can drop down onto one of three nearby planets which all have their own Weird Deal that essentially forces you to reinvent the wheel, devise a new tech-up chain, deal with a cool local hazard, and eventually learn to craft a new flavor of science to add to the pile and make cool new stuff with. In no particular order, or, I guess in distance from the sun order, but you can do these first 3 in any order is the point, we've got...
Vulcanus - The volcano planet where the lack of water and general lack of patches of stuff to mine mean you have to wacky alchemy with sulfuric acid geysers until you work out how to build forges, which let you just pipe in lava and pour out anything made from just iron and copper like turning on a faucet, but to expand you have to deal with these absurdly gigantic and tanky worms that kinda almost feel like facing off against Shadow of the Colossus bosses.
Gleba - The squelchy planet where you need to learn to do gardening or something I haven't been there yet, all I know is that the science fruit starts rotting as soon as you start picking them and there something about absolutely horrifying monsters who love the smell?
Fulgora - The planet where there's no raw resources, just the ruins of a long-dead high tech civilization. So you just get piles of late game end-products... but what you NEED is gears and copper wire and such, so, time to start recycling! Also there's lightning constantly and no other power sources.
And then later you can go to Aquilo - The frozen planet, where there's... ice. And ammonia? And your base keeps freezing over.
And then the endgame places that I mean I know about because there's a little location map in the game and achievements that mention them and an in-game wiki thing but they weren't mentioned pre-release, so, shh!
And it's not like when you go to each of these you're DONE with previous planets. You're juggling all these plates while still checking back in on your original base where you're probably out of iron or coal or something and maybe your base is being overrun. So it's not that you're playing Factorio 5 times back to back with different rulesets, you're doing that AT ONCE.
Anyway it's pretty great.
