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diff --git a/content/pyblock/stranded/ash-separation.png b/content/pyblock/stranded/ash-separation.png Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..30cceda --- /dev/null +++ b/content/pyblock/stranded/ash-separation.png diff --git a/content/pyblock/stranded/early-molecular-decohesion.png b/content/pyblock/stranded/early-molecular-decohesion.png Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..5daed91 --- /dev/null +++ b/content/pyblock/stranded/early-molecular-decohesion.png diff --git a/content/pyblock/stranded/fawogae.png b/content/pyblock/stranded/fawogae.png Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..bb7478a --- /dev/null +++ b/content/pyblock/stranded/fawogae.png diff --git a/content/pyblock/stranded/index.md b/content/pyblock/stranded/index.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f51df80 --- /dev/null +++ b/content/pyblock/stranded/index.md @@ -0,0 +1,175 @@ +--- +title: Stranded +date: 2026-01-02T16:39:39-05:00 +--- + +"You have crashed on a planet almost completely covered in water." + +<!--more--> + + + +That's where the game begins. With the settings I've chosen, and the mods I have installed, I'm stuck on a single tile, floating in the endless ocean. There's some driftwood, seaweed, and fish, and I'm near the wreck of a crashed spaceship, which has some starting supplies in it. + +It's pretty entertaining to me to see all the thrown-up dirt attached to the crashed ship graphic, since the ship has crash-landed in water this time and not on land. I don't expect Pyanodons' maintainers to change that graphic, though, and we'll put some landfill under it eventually to make it look a bit better. + +## Taking stock + +Taking the items in the crashed ship into account, my starting inventory consists of: + +* 5 iron chests. +* 4 fluid tanks of various sizes. +* 100 tiles of transport belts. +* 50 mechanical inserters. +* 10 construction robots. +* 1,000 tiles of landfill. +* 10 burner mining drills. +* 1 furnace. +* 2 fluid outfalls. +* 500 pistol magazines. +* 250 stone. +* 1 wood. +* 200 logs. +* 1 wind turbine, which can output around half a megawatt but fluctuates wildly. +* 500 copper plates. +* 1,000 iron plates. + +Some of those items are only accessible by placing landfill in order to walk closer to parts of the ship, but landfill is recoverable in Factorio 2.0, so the first thing I do is walk over and empty out the ship, ripping up the landfill as I return. + +The floating debris includes logs, seaweed, and fish. Unlike vanilla, fish don't spoil, and I know from past experience that all three resources will be important soon, so I grab anything within reach. In principle, items can float on the ocean's surface indefinitely, but they move around randomly, and since distant chunks are unloaded to keep CPU time under control, the quasi-Brownian motion of the nearby debris will slowly cause it to all end up in inactive chunks, inaccessible until I build near enough to release it. + +The mod's goal, eventually, is completing the Pyrrhic Victory research: + + + +However, that research requires thousands of all eleven science packs. We don't have any of those; we'll have to research them first. + +I have the ability to make a few basic supplies, if I have the resources to do so: + +* Wooden crates. +* Transport belts and underground belts. +* Mechanical inserters, which are very slow but require no fuel or power to operate. +* Small power poles. +* Pipes and underground pipes. +* Construction drones, which require intermediate products I can't make yet. +* Stone bricks. I can only make them in a furnace. +* Landfill. +* Boilers and steam engines. +* Burner mining drills. +* Water pumps. +* Stone furnaces. +* Mark 00 soil extractors, destructive distillation columns, and washers. +* Iron gear wheels, iron rods, copper cables, bolts, and small parts. All of the intermediates needed for early production, in other words. +* Soil, either from water or from muddy water. That needs a Washer. +* Raw coal, from something called a Fawogae mushroom. That needs a destructive distillation column. +* Rocks and sand, from soil, in a washer. This produces muddy water as a byproduct. +* Coal, coal gas, tar, and iron oxide, from wood in a distillation column. +* Spore collectors and Fawogae plantations. +* Planter boxes. +* Wood, from logs. + +I have access to a trigger technology, Early Molecular Decohesion, which will be unlocked automatically if I make 50 raw coal. + +## Immediate problems + +If I use up my starting resources without building a way to make more of them, then that's it - the game is effectively over. Fuel is particularly worrying right now, as nearly everything I could be building is either powered by an internal burner, or is steam-powered and requires a fuel-powered boiler to supply it with that steam. The major exception is Fawogae plantations, which are electric, and which can be powered with the single wind turbine in my inventory. Running out of wood, iron, copper, or stone would all be problems, and running out of landfill would force me to timeshare whatever foundation I already have. + +The trigger technology suggests that the fuel I should be using is raw coal, made from Fawogae. However, I can't make Fawogae mushrooms without two things: + +* Soil, to make a Fawogae plantation, and +* Spores, from a spore collector. + +A spore collector requires a whopping 50 bricks, which will require roasting nearly half of my initial stone. That means I'm going to need a new supply of stone fairly quickly, as well. + +We have no other fuel, so we'll be running the furnace with wood. To make the best possible use of my resources, I'm going to avoid moving the furnace once it's placed, at least until I have Fawogae-based coal synthesis going, to avoid losing the buffered heat energy. + +Making more foundation will require stone, and sand. The initial 1,000 foundation will go quickly. That's enough for about a 30x30 square, which is tiny by the standards of vanilla Factorio and even more cramped with Pyanodons' larger buildings. + +## Wood as fuel + +Wood comes in two forms right now: + +* Logs, which have a fuel value of 4 MJ per log, and +* Wood, which has a fuel value of 2 MJ per wood. + +Logs can be broken down into wood by hand, at a 1:5 ratio (four logs creates twenty wood). That means that a log is worth 10 MJ when cut up, as opposed to the 4 MJ it's worth as-is. We'll be using wood, not logs, for our initial fuel. + +Converting wood into coal would raise the energy of the fuel back to 4 MJ per coal, using ten wood to make ten coal. This would effectively double the energy of the fuel, minus the energy needed to perform the converstion. However, the process generates coal gas and tar, and I have no way of dealing with those byproducts yet. Using the burner distillation columns I have would also mean that the process would consume around 10% of the additional energy generated. + +## Getting to work + +First, I expand the starting platform to give me some room to work. In the resulting space, I set up the furnace and feed it 100 stone, along with some wood to fuel it. While that bakes I collect sea litter for future use. Once it's done, I assemble them into a spore collector. + +Since I'll need soil for Fawogae plantations, for stone washing, and for sand washing, the next item on the list is a starter soil extraction plant. They're large, and require input steam (for power) as well as water, but they can directly output into a chest. That's a good use for my starting chests, at least until I figure out how I want stone and sand production laid out. The soil extractor gets its own tiny, hand-fed steam boiler for now as well: centralized steam power production requires pipes for distribution. + +Stone and sand are next - but they produce muddy water as a byproduct. It's clear enough how to deal with that, as there's a washer recipe immediately available that separates muddy water into soil and water. Somewhat arbitrarily, I decide to use a single plant to capture the output of both soil and sand processing. For now, the water output of muddy water separation goes back into the ocean: I lack any good way to balance it with water pulled up by pumps. + +Washers, like most Factorio buildings and distinctly unlike soil extractors, require inserters to output their solid products. Fortunately, sand and stone production only have the one product, but the limited throughput of mechanical inserters motivates me to use bent inserters, dumping the products into dedicated chests. Their inputs will be hand-fed for now. + +Somewhat unexpectedly, outfall vents - which is what dumps excess water - require power. This is a Py Hard Mode change: the equivalent in Pyanodons is sinkholes, which are free to operate. I have a free wind turbine, so I initially set it up near the outfall, but we'll need an actual generator soon. + + + +This design is not on-ratio. The two soil-washing plants produce more muddy water if they're both running than the muddy water separation plant can process. However, it works well enough: backlogs of muddy water cause stone and sand production to slow down until the muddy water is processed, rather than clogging entirely. + +This setup gives me a supply of everything I need to make bricks, landfill, and a Fawogae plantation. However, it requires steady feeding with fuel, and the only fuel I have right now is my starting supply of logs. I've collected more logs from the water than I've used so far, but the supply of driftwood is very finite, and will not last me forever. I need renewable fuel, quickly. + +## Storage limitations + +I almost immediately encountered another Py Hard Mode change. Pyanodons uses vanilla Factorio's container sizes for chests and boxes. Py Hard Mode reduces the stack count dramatically: wooden chests have four inventory slots. My very finite supply of iron chests each have eight slots. Digging around in Recipe Book shows that steel chests have been reduced to 20 slots. + +## Fawogae + +Fawogae mushrooms can be made into raw coal by destructive distillation, and I started the game with all of the required industrial processes unlocked. The basic cycle is: + +* Convert any fuel (eventually, raw coal) into steam to power a spore collector; +* Use the spores from the spore collector to seed plantations making Fawogae mushrooms; and +* Feed the resulting Fawogae mushrooms into a distillation column to make raw coal. + +When this whole process is also running on its own output, it additionally makes ash, since - unlike wood - raw coal produces ash when burned. + +However, Fawogae plantations won't run until their module slots are populated with Fawogae mushrooms - meaning that you need at least one existing mushroom to make more mushrooms. This is a recurring design motif for agriculture in the Pyanodons mod, and Fawogae is my introduction to it. In this case, the solution is to craft a single Fawogae mushroom using a bootstrap hand-crafting recipe, and to use that to start the process of growing more mushrooms. The first batch of plantation mushrooms takes around seven minutes, but subsequent batches take 100 seconds and can be used to seed further plantations. + +Fawogae plantations also require power, and I don't really feel ready to set up even a simple power grid with the resources I have. Instead, I relocate the wind turbine to run the plantation. I'll have to relocate it back to the soil processing area when I want to make more sand or stone, since without power the outflow can't dispose of the excess water. Making a more capable power grid will require at least some logs and copper, and I'm trying not to burn through my starting supplies of either one too quickly. + +This process becomes self-sustaining, but for the electricity, very quickly. Fawogae mushrooms make raw coal at a 2:5 ratio, and (with Py Hard Mode) each piece of raw coal is a 1.5 MJ fuel source, which can be fed back into power the spore collector and raw coal distillation processes with enough excess to run other things. + + + +At this point, I have a functionally unlimited, if slow, supply raw coal for fuel, and stone, sand, and landfill. Making raw coal also unlocks the Early Molecular Decohesion technology quickly. + +However, burning raw coal gives me a new problem to solve: ash management. Most fuels in Pyanodons produce some kind of byproduct when they're burned. For early-game fuels, that byproduct is ash. Wood and logs produce no ash when burned, but they're the exception and not the rule, and in any case I don't want to burn too much of my starting wood supply. Ash stacks to 1,000 items, so it doesn't need to be removed from burners immediately, but anything that burns ashy fuel will eventually stop running if its ash storage fills up. Py Hard Mode amplifies this problem: raw coal's fuel value is cut so that processes burn nearly three times as much of it, and each raw coal burned produces a unit of ash. + +## Unlocks + + + +The Early Molecular Decohesion technology lets me make a second product out of Fawogae mushrooms: iron ore, in the Mk 00 atomizer building also unlocked by the technology. + +It also unlocks shunt inserters, which are cheaper to build than mechanical inserters and which operate slightly faster, but which also require a steam connection to power them. This constraint means I won't be using them much - I rely on Inserter Configuration's support for 90° bent inserters, while shunt inserters' steam passthrough runs perpendicular to their normal operating direction. I can use one or the other, but not both, and it's not quite worth using different inserters for different roles given the infrastructure cost of more steam pipes. + +Unlocking Early Molecular Decohesion gives me access to a second trigger technology: Ash Separation. That technology will unlock automatically when I've made 200 units of ash - a process that takes next to no time given the rate at which I burn fuel right now. In point of fact, I unlocked it in the background, while writing up the Early Molecular Decohesion technology. + + + +Ash Separation, in turn, unlocks the Mk 00 solid separator, which can separate ash into soot, coal dust, and iron oxide. Iron oxide smelts into iron plates at a 2:1 ratio, but each run of ten ash only produces one iron oxide 5% of the time, so it's not a reliable source of iron in the long run - just a byproduct that needs to be handled. Coal dust is an alternate fuel, with the same 1.5 MJ fuel value as raw coal. + +Soot is the valuable output. Ash Separation unlocks two soot processing recipes. One produces a spread of resources - ores for iron, copper, zinc, lead, aluminum, and nickel, at a random distribution weighted towards iron and copper. The other, however, produces eight copper ore per ten soot, plus a distribution of the other metals. This recipe is, for now, the only way we have of obtaining copper ore. + +Ash Separation also unlocks the circuit network, which we haven't yet been using, and a new intermediate: air core inductors, which are made from an iron stick and eight copper cables. They aren't used for anything, yet. + +Unlocking Ash Separation gives me access to the final introductory trigger technology: Automation science packs, which will unlock once I've crafted ten copper plates. + +## Final situation + +Out of my starting resources, I have 512 iron plates, 426 copper plates, and 254 logs remaining. The surplus of logs is from harvesting driftwood, which is starting to become scarce near our platform. + +In addition to the logs, I've collected a small supply of fish and seaweed. + +I now have an unlimited supply of raw coal, which is a versatile, if inefficient, fuel. Burning this fuel makes ash, which is not being processed. + +I now have an unlimited supply of sand and stone. However, disposing of the muddy water byproduct requires moving our wind turbine around to power the outflow temporarily. This also means I have an unlimited supply of landfill with which to expand the platform. + +I now have an unlimited, if slow, supply of Fawogae mushrooms. I'm going to need a lot more Fowagae production to meet my immediate needs, however: a single plantation is only sufficient to provide a trickle of fuel. + +Walkability on the platform is an issue already, but it won't be solved until I can make a lot more foundation. diff --git a/content/pyblock/stranded/landing.png b/content/pyblock/stranded/landing.png Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..a653e3f --- /dev/null +++ b/content/pyblock/stranded/landing.png diff --git a/content/pyblock/stranded/soil-processing.png b/content/pyblock/stranded/soil-processing.png Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..dcf3b63 --- /dev/null +++ b/content/pyblock/stranded/soil-processing.png diff --git a/content/pyblock/stranded/victory.png b/content/pyblock/stranded/victory.png Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..eb27d63 --- /dev/null +++ b/content/pyblock/stranded/victory.png |
