Regarding balancing... in vanilla space age, it averages 60 jelly / 30 mash to produce a bacteria from scratch, so you're definitely making it a lot cheaper.

I also feel like the proliferation recipes are strong enough that a lot of people would just completely ignore the cultivation recipes ...

Presets are for novice players. If some veteran player needs more challenge then he can adjust sliders manually, use mods, do speedrun, etc.

A professionally tuned preset, however, comes with the advantage of having been professionally tuned. :p

And would also serve as a better basis for making ...

It's not quite the same, though. Power poles don't have any other relevant stats than coverage range and wire connection range. Roboports have charging speed. Further, there are more reasons for separating logistics networks that separating power networks.

And additionally you can manually ...

Is there any way in-game to tell when something is marked as a catalyst? This isn't automatic. Bacteria cultivation, for example, is not a catalytic recipe.

AFAIK, the only method is to do math with the production rates with productivity present.

FWIW, stack inserters are far more impactful than green belts on belt logistics. Upgrading to turbo belts gets you a modest 33% boost to throughput. Upgrading to using stack inserters is a 100% boost! 300% after you do the stack size researches!

That is yellow belts loaded with stack inserters ...

Your green belt is definitely not saturated.

It would be really weird for that one red belt to be mostly concentrated in its left lane, and you can see on the green belt that the left lane looks thicker than the right lane.

To balance the lanes, rather than take one green belt out of that green ...

I would assume a request would get ignored if it goes away before your landing pad is ready to accept a delivery.

However, it's not a several-minutes thing: each delivery slot has something like a 63 second cooldown. So if you get 3 deliveries at once, you won't get any more until 63 seconds later ...

The divisions by four are balanced by the fact you have a higher quality% in the process.


What ? It seems to me that the division by 4 are balanced by the fact that you have 25% chance of getting something as a result if the original value was 1. 1/4 = 25%

I... really don't understand your ...

Blue underground belts, underground pipe casting, big power poles, foundry concrete… Surely with these, it’s easier to see how they have more substance than asteroid rerolling. Which, again, is basically the same as ore recycling but with a return rate of >40% instead of 25%.


I agree with ...

Blue underground belts, underground pipe casting, big power poles, foundry concrete… Surely with these, it’s easier to see how they have more substance than asteroid rerolling. Which, again, is basically the same as ore recycling but with a return rate of >40% instead of 25%.


I agree with the ...

For what it's worth, from what I've seen from the Steam forum, wanting to move labs to Gleba seems to be a pretty common trope.

Back before release a lot of people expected that to be the obvious solution to the freshness of agricultural science packs. And to this day we still periodically get ...

The "challenge" you seem to refer to is to demonstrate the mere ability to deliver science packs to Biolabs on Nauvis with enough spoil time remaining to be useable in research, with interplanetary transport being the prime obstacle to be overcome.

I assert, however, the interesting gameplay is ...

Enforcing the "challenge" of shipping spoil-able packs gives up a lot for little gain. And you could still keep this challenge if you made a research after biolabs that allowed you to build them anywhere, so you'd still need to ship them initially.

The "challenge" isn't about whether you are ...

Enforcing the "challenge" of shipping spoil-able packs gives up a lot for little gain. And you could still keep this challenge if you made a research after biolabs that allowed you to build them anywhere, so you'd still need to ship them initially.

The "challenge" isn't about whether you are ...

Asking players to actively avoid efficiency and optimization if they want a better game experience is, IMO, a fairly significant sin in game design. Such a practice inherently makes for a poor experience for a lot of people.

This is especially true in a game that puts a fair amount of emphasis on ...

mrnikiter wrote: Mon Aug 25, 2025 12:18 amRebuilding all science logistic and setups for one science pack is just so ... asymmetric.

For what it's worth, you have other reasons to completely redo your lab build shortly after returning from Gleba anyways.

I still think it would be nice if on Gleba at least, the flora would regrow itself. Kinda like the fauna already does...

I understand the idea... but I really like that the game gives you the impetus to engineer a preservation function into your factory to avoid running out of conveniently ...

My opinion is that this incentivize players to make all their labs in Vulcanus and not on every planets.


I do see what you are saying (and kind of agree), but each planet has it's benefits for having your labs on it (other than Aquilo): Vulcanus has the ability to easily make a lot of science ...

Why should this proposal be a vanilla option rather than a mod?

Quality, as I see it, is primarily a post game challenge with some smaller challenges that can be done earlier (for example, asteroid collectors).

A particularly relevant earlier challenge is taking something you're making anyways, and using quality modules to get a stream of higher quality ...