Exploration and resource management are the heart ofTechtonica. Optimizing your factories early makes future construction much more streamlined. Learning as you go and discovering more on the glowing planet of Calyx could be part of the charm, but for planners who want an efficient industrial system, knowing the basics improves your experience.
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Since you can’t know everything about this alien planet the moment you get started, here are some tips on factory layout, handy ingredients, automation insights, and other details to help you prepare for your factory’s expansion.
7Keep Iron And Copper Production Close to Start
You don’t have much space to work with when you start the game, and few resources to make conveyer belts, so using both wisely is crucial. Iron and copper are among the early resources that can be used to build a ton of various items for expanding your base.
You’ll want them nearby to avoid a trek whenever you need more supplies. Once you unlock the M.O.L.E. terraforming tool and find an iron or copper node, explore around it to expand the minable surface or find more nodes.
Craft mining drills with a couple of inserters to gather iron or copper. These should empty out onto a conveyer belt that leads to smelters, also with two inserters each (and one on the opposite side for removing smelted ore). Putting down power floors and adding containers for temporary storage will be the finishing touch for your starter mines.
6Start Creating Biobricks Early
While plant matter will do at first, you obviously want to get the most energy to fuel your machines as soon as you can. Building an assembler and setting it to the biobrick recipe is a good temporary solution for this before you can completely automate fuel production.
You’ll need open space on three sides, so keep that in mind when you’re placing this machine. Keep it near your mining areas and other factory zones (until you can automate biobrick delivery as well).
Craft two storage containers, one to fill with limestone and the other with plant matter. Using fast inserters to load these materials into the assembler are ideal, since you should stay ahead of your needs for your other machines.
A third container should have inserters transporting biobricks into it from your assembler. You will need crank generators to create energy for all this through the power floors, but it’s very worth it.
5Automate Your Main Building Materials ASAP
Conveyer belts, inserters, and power floors will be used up quickly as you expand across thescientific and fantasticalbioluminescent world. Assigning these assemblers to craft specific recipes gives you a surplus of these products on hand.
This will take some strategizing as you get conveyer belts and inserters to direct the necessary resources into the assembler, but it will save you more time in the long run.
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Fast inserters are a must between assemblers and into your storage because you’ll want the assemblers to produce your new supplies at a quick pace. If you need to add other convenient materials to your production floor, like containers, keep in mind that you can limit how much is crafted by putting single items in the container slots.
Stacked items cap out at 500, so if you prefer no more than 1000 containers, leave only two slots open.
4Make Designated Mechanical Components Areas
Several items will require mechanical components, from conveyer belts and inserters to research cores. Save yourself from a factory floor that looks like a bowl of noodles by producing mechanical components in several accessible places.
Splitter conveyer belts and ramp belts will still be necessary, but your production spaces will be a lot easier to navigate and more streamlined by positioning your mechanical component assemblers somewhere that can send these materials off to multiple zones.
These materials start being necessary for fundamentals in construction, but your plans will quickly evolve to include the research cores that you need to discover new technologies. When you unlock the upgraded cores to access different options on your tech tree down the line, you’ll be glad your layout isn’t a tangled network of overlapping conveyer belts.
The room to stack cores neatly with Core Composers will go a long way for your tree progression and factory development.
3Have Assemblers Display What They Craft
When you press alt on your keyboard or press down on the right stick of your controller, you can see at a glance what each assembler is creating. That’s because an icon appears over the center of the machine that shows which recipe has been chosen. Knowing what you’re producing and where it is in the factory from across a cavern is incredibly useful.
This feature can be toggled, but playing with it on makes identifying your resources and expanding your industrial areas more intuitive.
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When you do have to rework your layout to accommodate more assemblers, conveyer belts, or other machinery, visualizing the new structure is much easier with an icon on your existing assemblers.
This information will also display on other machines such as drills and smelters, and they’ll turn yellow if production is slowing down or red if there’s a problem with the machine.
2Be Tactical With Your Upgrades
It’s tempting to always go for the maximum technology you have available. But Techtonica, like other popular games in the genre,challenges you to strategizefor optimal operations rather than throwing your best product at the problem. Fast inserters, for example, won’t always be necessary.
If your machines start to slow down or stop completely, you’ll need either more fuel or quicker inserters. Start by replacing a regular one with the faster model and see if your machine stops struggling at that point. Effective use of your materials means upgrading only what you have to.
It’s a similar journey once you unlock blue research cores. You might think it’s safe to discontinue producing the purple variety that you started out with, when the truth is that you actually need those to create more blue cores. Usually, you’ll need to keep one production area for the purple version to continue unlocking new options on your tech tree.
1Leave A Trail For Yourself
When you explore a new space, placing lights as you go not only makes it easier to see the terrain and find new ore nodes, beacons, and other discoveries, but it also reminds you of where you’ve already explored.
The compass is invaluable for spotting color-coded indicators and making sure you know where you are in relation to the rest of the cavernous space. Yet having these physical landmarks in front of you is a great way to keep track of where you’ve been already and where you haven’t.
This can help you uncover new technologies or resources sooner, not to mention giving you more to scan and gather information on. Scanning can fill your databank with lore on equipment, flora, and fauna in Calyx that builds your knowledge of the world.
Like with the smelter machine fragments that unlocked the tech tree in the beginning, scanning can also let you build recently found machines.
