Terraforming - Notes on/How I completed each project

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Terraforming - Notes on/How I completed each project

Post by grapedog » Thu, 19. Aug 21, 03:57

This is from an un-modded Vanilla playthrough.

Memory of Profit - Bubblecity and Nvidium Workshop

Nvidium sink, which could be good or bad. Basically cash... leave your PHQ there, and you can harvest and sell nvidium pretty much as much as you like. Good cash earner. This was the first one I did, and probably the best one to start with... took some time as I hadn't done terraforming before. Learned how the process works, not a bad starting scenario, nothing too complicated. Decent location too, close to a lot of stuff. I did do one shipment of send Nvidium... every 170 nvidium is 100k credits, with I believe a 10 minute timer. The location is otherwise terrible for life if you just meet the bare minimums... but for an NVidium workshop, works fine I guess. The first project I completed, to dip my toes in and test the water... not bad at all.

Atiya's Misfortune - Tectonic Scaffolding, Volcano Caps, Geothermal Power Plant, Clean Refineries, Factories, Von Neumann Constructors, Methane Oxidisers, Oxidise Methane x2, Global Water Resurfacing, Import Water x2, Planetary Irrigation, Relfective Cloud Particles, Tailored Microbes, Fertilise Soil, Cyanobacteria, Forrestation, Wheat Fields, Arcology x2, Tropical Resort. Not in that order... i don't remember the exact order, but I flipped around a bit to use different resources at different times. You might be able to time these to be delivered between the quakes like Frontier Edge... but some of these projects are huge. I did this project second overall, and hadn't tried timing stuff between quakes before... i just stopped the quakes, wasn't dealing with that bull.... of progress getting reset.

This project is a pain.... Worse than the hub from X3... multiple times you complete a project only to find out that woops, that project caused a large problem that you now have to fix, which required a lot of resources each and every time. It's not impossible... but I'd say you gotta be pretty dead set on finishing it, if you want to finish it... it took me a lot of real world time to get that one done. It's not for the faint of heart, hell, it's not even for the strong of heart.. it's only for those who like to torture themselves in unpleasant ways for meaningless steam achievements. Reward is a new ANT shipyard in atiya's misfortune. I read somewhere that it also gives them another fleet... i never noticed it personally. All the biosphere options use the same pool of resources, similar to all the water projects and similar resource pools. So as much as I could, I flipped around...while one resource pool was restocking, I would work on a different project, and then let that resource pool restock. Though first I did the Tectonic Scaffolding... though possibly you could use timing and do volcano caps first, then use the time between quakes to deliver tectonic scaffolding. As quakes can reset portions of your progress... and I wasn't having that. Tectonic Scaffoliding requires a LOT of micromettalic lattice, but you're close to PIO/TER space, so it can be purchased from them too. Once that is done, quakes are no more.... and then the long long long long process of completing the other projects that you need, and that pop up, can happen. This was my second project... I would highly recommend you do a few other projects before this one, so you better understand how it all works, and you have your PHQ ready for this shitstorm.

Frontier Edge - Black Dust, Tailored Microbes, Fertilise Soil, Forestation, Arcology, Wheat Fields, Winter Resort, Arcology(I don't remember if this one required Arcology x2, or I just accidentally wrote it twice.)

Depending on where you place your PHQ, you can time your deliveries for between earthquakes, as long as you have all the resources on hand for a particular task. I had 8 S/M wharfs to deliver goods, and it was about a 6 minute travel time for my PHQ located in the upper right third of the sector. The drones for me wanted to fly to the far lower right area. So at the 6 minute mark till the next quake, I could start my project, and my drones would all build, but wouldn't hit the surface until just after the quake, allowing me maximum time to get all the materials on the ground, and then deal with any time remaining from a particular project. So a lot of Methane, Medical Supplies, Hull Parts, Advanced Electronics, Wheat, and ECells... those were the biggest ones to chew through. Also, for messner, because of the timing I was dealing with... i upped my PHQ to 8 S/M wharfs so I could produce a LOT of drones each time. The more drones you have the less time it takes to complete a project. All the other terraforming projects, except memory of profit which was my first, i used 6 S/M wharfs for pumping out drones. You will get a message about Ice Melt happening, which is because of the increased temperature... just don't futz with any other temperature projects, the goal is to build a winter sports resort after all.

Scale Plate - Clean refineries, factories, Reintroduce Local Flora, Sunrise Flower Fields, Arcology x5(UGGGGHHHH!!), Luxury Housing.

Arcology x5 - that is a LOT of advanced electronics, and stuck at the far end of the galaxy, that can take a while. I think I had 25x advanced electronics fabs on my PHQ for this, and that still only produces like 10k advanced electronics an hour... and if you do the factories you're still needing 70k advanced electronics 5 times. I also moved a LARGE chunk of my roaming fleets and ships into Turqoise Sea and Scale Plate space for security reasons... but it was largely unneeded. As soon as you complete any first project, you get messaged by a SCA rep, and they tell you they will leave you alone. The reward for completion is AWESOME.... I received about 10 minotaur raiders, 9 phoenix, 1 behemoth... all of them came heavily modded. Even if you don't like the ships themselves, you can always take the mods off and re-use them elsewhere. Also, each ship has a 5 star pilot, and most of them had a couple 5 star crew members. I think I ended up with twenty 5 star pilots, a bunch of purple, blue, and green mods, around 15 elite 5 star marines, and probably the same amount of 5 star service crew. Not to mention the ships themselves which are kitted out with various races gear. Really sweet reward, probably the best reward from terraforming as a whole. I had zero issues with atmospheric pressure, but I had heard about issues beforehand, so I was pretty careful. I pretty much met the bare minimums for oxygen and whatnot. Didn't run into any issues, but I think if you do too many or any extra oxygen products beyond what is required, you can run into problems. Housing for 1 billion people, but only 100 get luxury homes... i'd be pretty annoyed... but it's good to be rich. The refineries were just to reduce the costs of Arcology x5... you could choose to do Von Neumann Constructors as well to get an additional discount, up to you if you have the CoH wares. You're on the far side of the universe, so you're not getting any help with deliveries from TER/PIO factories. With clean and normal refineries, you still need 1.4 million microlattice...

Eighteen Billion - Clean Refineries, Factories, Global Water Resurfacing, Planetary Irrigation, Tailored Microbes, Fertilise Soil, Forrestation, Sunrise Flower Fields, Spice fields(you could choose any project you want I believe, though I don't know how something like Cyanobacteria would effect atmospheric pressure), Arcology, Art College.

this one is a low/zero oxygen at the start scenario again, and low/zero humidity... which will require a lot of ECells, Methane, and Medical supplies as well as a crap ton of Ice. Otherwise, not bad... I did build the clean refineries and factories, but opt'd not to do the von neumann constructors. I had kept a LOT of methan and medical supplies from previous terraforming projects, so I wasn't too worried about the discounts. If you're starting from scratch though, and have your own source of CoH wares... like 1.2 million micromettalic lattice, you can choose to do this one. You'll also need a million micromettalic lattice for one of the humidity projects as well.

Getsu Fune - Genetically Modify Toxic Fruit, Wheat fields, Vineyards, Arcology x2, and Fine Dining.

Relatively straight-forward, nothing crazy... Arcology x2 takes a bit of time for advanced electronics. Decent location to buy components you need, though you'll get mostly no help from the TER/PIO sides except energy cells, as their economy doesn't support the commonwealth wares. ANT will build a trading station in Getsu Fune once this terraforming mission is completed.

Black Hole Sun - Wind Turbine Farm, Planetary Irrigation, Tailored Microbes, Fertilise Soil, Forrestion, Sunrise Flower Fields, Wheat Fields, Arcology.

I opt'd for Sunrise flowers fields for 2 reasons, the first it's relatively small amount of resources for needing to bump oxygen up 1 spot, and I was planning on doing the Teladi missions next, which required Sunrise flowers themselves... so building for a future project. Not a bad set of missions.

Ocean of Fantasy - Quakes again! Yeah! 25 minute timer looks like. The drones fly off to the 10/11 'o clock position. So putting your PHQ in the upper left sector will help cut down flight times.

500,000,000 credits needed for a research project. An absolutely ridiculous amount of plankton needed, about 13 million. 5+ million methane as well. Not to mention, just stopping the quakes... because that's always fun. So you're probably going to want to do Tectonic Scaffolding, which requires 6+ million metallic microlattice. First thing I did was start the research project, for 500 million credits, because that doesn't send any drones or anything... its just a 10 min wait time. Since I hadn't done terraforming in a while I had deconstructed a lot of my PHQ from when it was last used to Terraform. Didn't touch the stuff in build storage though, and it travels with you. So now I'm rebuilding a few more S/M wharfs, I'll have 6 total, which is enough to send down 48 drones at a time. I might build one or two more.

I did the research, then I did the first import methane, 180,000 required. Pretty easy. Then it was reflective cloud particles, 425,000 graphene, which helped clear up a good chunk of space. Now I've started to buy up other parts I'll need for other small projects. I'm collecting ice at the moment, going to do 2 ice dumps, about 6 million ice... it looks like there are some events that only happen in certain conditions, and I'm going to see if I can skip out on the 6 million micrometallic lattice project. But I'll have to dump ice twice to see what happens... regardless, I'll need to import water/dump ice... so we'll see what happens.

So, you need almost 3 million ice like 5 times or 6 times. Thankfully Rolks Demise has a LOT of ice. When you skip the scaffolding and just import ice to stop the quakes the two times, each time is blows up any humidity the ice would have added. Though once the quakes are stopped and you import ice one more time, you should be able to do some of the other projects while waiting on ice. The ocean dwelling you'll have to do 10 times to get the alloted 50 million housing. You can also do the final project the art academy, but almost everything else will have to wait until you import ice a few times to get the humidity into an acceptable range. There is a hydro power project you can do to cut the amount of ECells you need for the art academy in half. I skipped it because 250k ECells isn't that hard to collect or produce in a reasonable amount of time.

Some of these need to be switched up a bit. Like allow for the first two reintroduce fauna and microbiome at yellow humidity, instead of unlocking like 5 large projects once you hit green humidity. You still need the deeper reintroduce projects that could remain double green humidity, but at least this way you can kind of mix things up... right now you need to import 3 million ice like 7 times in a row with very little to break that up. Sure you could build the ocean dwellings, but that doesn't take a whole lot. It gets really boring. If you put some early projects on yellow humidity, it would allow for people to mix things up a little bit, to use different resources while collecting others. You go from needing so much ice to not needing any more ice and needing other stuff. Where people could be working on two projects at once... one active that you're sending drones for, and another one you are collecting for. Collecting 3 million ice 7 times in a row is pretty boring. It takes so long to get 21 million ice, that I just stockpiled everything else i need for the entire rest of the project. And its just sitting and waiting, on ice... which 2 more times and I'll be in the green. Ill just keep sitting on everything else.........

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edit/add: 1 last note... the biosphere projects tend to use a lot of medical supplies... medical supplies that your workforce needs to stay working. So be careful, and try to have more medical supplies on hand than you actually need. I lost something like 10k or 15k workers once because when I was sending medical supplies down, it was chewing through my workforce supply as well. If it cuts into your base amount needed, and your workers shift changes, then you'll lose some people. Just be careful of that... there is nothing that can be done for it except to make sure you're over-stocked by a minimum of what your workforce needs. Depending on where your PHQ is at, getting that workforce back might be fast... other sectors it might be very slow.

edit/add: 2, updated post with Ocean of Fantasy terraforming project.
Last edited by grapedog on Tue, 5. Sep 23, 22:42, edited 2 times in total.

gorman2040
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Re: Terraforming - Notes on/How I completed each project

Post by gorman2040 » Sat, 4. Sep 21, 07:04

Nice summary !

I was wondering if you saved before starting a project, especially where there is quake.
I would personally reload my game if I lost half of the resources because of quakes. It seemed too much hassle to be "realistic" and deal with the consequences afterwards.

I always found those problematic projects to be too much risk to try to shortcut through the whole terraforming process. I always choose the more costly but surefire option.

I wonder how many S/M wharf you had on your PHQ for the Atiya's Misfortune TF, I had 25, it greatly reduced the time it takes to ship all materials. Less quakes during the largest projects (Volcano Caps).
Anyway, definitely hard to do that as the second TF mission, I did it last :-)

Because I didn't have CoH DLC, I didn't have access to the Segaris projects, sounds like they can be quite helpful !
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Re: Terraforming - Notes on/How I completed each project

Post by grapedog » Sat, 4. Sep 21, 13:49

For Atiyas i had 8 SM wharfs... but i had CoH and my first project after the factories was the tectonic scaffolding which drops seismic activity to zero. By banking all the materials beforehand, i was able to avoid quakes for atiyas until the scaffoldong completed. Then it didn't matter anymore.

I did save before each project was started, just in case i messed something up, but i think i was ok. I only reloaded once to test drone flight time to see if i could do stuff between quakes. Once i learned the timing, i was able to get it done betwren them... but that is not including Atiyas... Atiyas is such a chore, i just stopped them completely.

It was only for the other quake planets that I did it between quakes. As long as you have all the materials on hand, and at least 6 SM wharfs, and you know how long it takes for your drones to reach the surface and register a delivery, you can time it for between them.

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Re: Terraforming - Notes on/How I completed each project

Post by Raevyan » Sun, 5. Sep 21, 12:52

Did they already fixed all the dead ends you could run into with terraforming and not being able to complete the projects?

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Re: Terraforming - Notes on/How I completed each project

Post by Tempest » Mon, 6. Sep 21, 11:03

rene6740 wrote:
Sun, 5. Sep 21, 12:52
Did they already fixed all the dead ends you could run into with terraforming and not being able to complete the projects?
Air Pressure fix should be inbound, already present (and functional) in current BETA.

Code: Select all

Added two new terraforming projects to directly increase or reduce air pressure.
getting ready for Atiya's : 120 S/M contruction docks, 12M Microlattice sitting in storage, hoping i can launch that scaffolding mission in a single volley of drones.
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Re: Terraforming - Notes on/How I completed each project

Post by grapedog » Mon, 6. Sep 21, 13:40

Tempest wrote:
Mon, 6. Sep 21, 11:03
rene6740 wrote:
Sun, 5. Sep 21, 12:52
Did they already fixed all the dead ends you could run into with terraforming and not being able to complete the projects?
Air Pressure fix should be inbound, already present (and functional) in current BETA.

Code: Select all

Added two new terraforming projects to directly increase or reduce air pressure.
getting ready for Atiya's : 120 S/M contruction docks, 12M Microlattice sitting in storage, hoping i can launch that scaffolding mission in a single volley of drones.
The factories help with Atiya's quite a bit, and cut down a lot on required materials. I'd recommend those, which can be done between quakes, especially with that many S/M fabs...

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Re: Terraforming - Notes on/How I completed each project

Post by Tempest » Wed, 8. Sep 21, 11:50

just started Messner, (last 1 before Atiya's)

seems the materials for scaffolding are identical?, 6M Microlattice + assorted Silicon Carbide + Computronic substrate.

can atleast confirm you can completely cheese the Tectonic Scaffolding project, 600 drop drones in a single volley (500 + 100 , didn't pay enough attention sadly to small:medium ratio :x sorry )

as you mentioned earlier, launch-timing might take some practice/re-loading due to drone construction-time.
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Re: Terraforming - Notes on/How I completed each project

Post by gorman2040 » Sat, 11. Sep 21, 00:29

grapedog wrote:
Sat, 4. Sep 21, 13:49
For Atiyas i had 8 SM wharfs... but i had CoH and my first project after the factories was the tectonic scaffolding which drops seismic activity to zero. By banking all the materials beforehand, i was able to avoid quakes for atiyas until the scaffoldong completed. Then it didn't matter anymore.

I did save before each project was started, just in case i messed something up, but i think i was ok. I only reloaded once to test drone flight time to see if i could do stuff between quakes. Once i learned the timing, i was able to get it done betwren them... but that is not including Atiyas... Atiyas is such a chore, i just stopped them completely.

It was only for the other quake planets that I did it between quakes. As long as you have all the materials on hand, and at least 6 SM wharfs, and you know how long it takes for your drones to reach the surface and register a delivery, you can time it for between them.
I worked on the timing as well as I couldn't stop the quake completely with the "regular" projects (not from CoH). That and also luck because I still had to go through 1 quake to finish some heavy projects, hence my question about saves, I had to reload once or twice.
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Re: Terraforming - Notes on/How I completed each project

Post by Tempest » Sun, 12. Sep 21, 11:23

just single-volleyed Atiya's Tectonic Scaffolding, observations:

- 500 Small (5 Minute construction)
- 100 Medium (5 Minute construction)
- small batch is started first, (seems both variants can't be constructed simultaneously)

so assuming all materials at hand, start project with ~5 minutes left before the quake-timer, should get you a more than generous launch-window.

S/M constuction pads:
S x 18
M x 8

x 27,8 S/M construction modules?
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Re: Terraforming - Notes on/How I completed each project

Post by reemccoy » Mon, 12. Feb 24, 20:03

The ocean of fantasy part is very helpful.
我说中文,帖子内容都是用deepl翻译的。
I speak Chinese, the content of the post is translated using deepl.

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Re: Terraforming - Notes on/How I completed each project

Post by grapedog » Tue, 13. Feb 24, 19:51

reemccoy wrote:
Mon, 12. Feb 24, 20:03
The ocean of fantasy part is very helpful.
glad you found it useful! good luck with your terraforming!

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Re: Terraforming - Notes on/How I completed each project

Post by reemccoy » Thu, 15. Feb 24, 13:05

Thanks, but unfortunately I have a bug as same as this link:viewtopic.php?f=180&t=457950
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