Tips and Tricks
All your main resources will come from the sea, and all your trade goods will go out to sea. Don’t build your industry based on mine locations. Plan ahead and build from the coast inland. Your ores, coal, sand, water, and everything else will come from ships or the sea. Build your smelters near the coast. You will eventually make docks, and will be importing ores. If you plan ahead, you won’t have to move belts and industries.
Plan for 12-14 smelters per metal, plus crushers. For every little industry cluster, from electronics to glass, you will need the same amount of space at the end. You need a lot of space. Don’t build close together – spread out. The bigger grid square, made of 4×4 squares? I would say the smallest plot size for an industry cluster is 5×5 of the larger grid.
You will need around 9-10,000 people for a sustainable island. You can do it with less, but plan for that many people. That’s about 15 food farms. Save space for that. Farms need dirt. Each farm takes 50 water. Some less, but basically, 2 full large pipes of water.
Don’t be scared of contracts. It’s not super expensive or hard. Go into contracts for your sand and lime needs right away. The cost in modules is nothing, and it saves you a lot of trouble. It’s not a huge chain of industry. All it takes is 3-4 factories making the item. That’s like 2 extra smelters, 4-6 extra factories, and you won’t ever have to mine sand or limestone again. First sand (quartz) and lime, then coal, then gold, oil, and the rest.
To finish the game, offshore mining platforms are more than enough. But they take a lot of unity and people to run. Contracts are cheaper, both in people and unity. But you don’t have to. You can mine sulphur and uranium forever from the offshore map points.
Go into nuclear reactors right away, and change your economy from diesel to hydrogen as soon as possible. Use nukes to make hydrogen. You will need 3-4 reactors. 2 for power, 1 for hydrogen and water, and one extra if you need a lot of power and didn’t build a lot of solar panels. Do it right, and you will save yourself a lot of trouble. Hydrogen is used in everything, from fertilizers to ship fuel, and is also a by-product from splitting trade ammonia, if you have too much sour water coming in. It’s the most useful gas.
Build that statue of maintenance! Build 4 or 5! The savings are huge. You will always have extra 2-4 gas from the waste water / incinerator loop recycling water and garbage from the settlement. But if you are not comfortable running tight setups, build a special gas-making farm, and hook up the statues to it. It is the best thing since apple pie. ~10% reduction in maintenance is amazing value.
Don’t be afraid of covering the entire island in concrete. Build a special concrete-making facility. It has to be a big facility. 8 or so concrete mixers. (also uses hydrogen, by the way). And keep decking your industrial areas and busy paths in concrete. You will notice the maintenance reduction. Add statues, add edicts, and suddenly, you are paying half as much in materials for upkeep. It adds up.
Plan to have about 20 belts and pipes running along main logistics paths. And plan for that. You need space, and leave some space for roads too. Don’t centralize the belts, run them along 2-3 paths instead of one giant belt. But you will still have fat paths, so leave space.
Industry loops are very interesting. Everything you make, all the by-products, are balanced to be used somewhere else. If you do it right, the system will be more or less balanced. So, don’t dump brine water, for example. First, send it to a distribution node to forward to all the places that need salt! It’s small amounts of course, but it adds up.
Or a better example, extra water from sour water processing. Easiest to just dump it. But once you start making a lot of gold, you will have a pile of slag. Slag you will sell for sour water. You will need 2 large ships by the way, if you don’t crush slag into concrete. That’s a serious sour water facility. And 12 or so sour factories make 1 full pipe of water. By the way. That’s a lot. That’s in addition to pretty much supplying all your ammonia fertilizer needs.
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