How is everyone doing?

Man, I bought and installed it 24 hours ago, and I haven't had a chance to even run it yet :-(

Ditto - my excuse is that I'm on a working vacation and have much better things to do but... the temptation is still there.

Working through early game so far. No rocket yet. The smelter stacks are taking shape, just need to find some more ore. Found Uranium before oil somehow...

i still haven't progressed past oil processing in the base game :)

I’ve got all the Nauvis sciences automated as well as getting my first space platform set up. That’s sending a steady stream of space science down now.

I’ve put in quite a few hours over the first two days, but won’t be able to play for a while now.

Currently torn between trying to set off for another planet or scale up my Nauvis base to better support things going forward. Former seems more fun. Latter seems more sensible!

It makes sense to go to other planets first since then you can use the new buildings to make the Nauvis base better. As long as you can support a steady stream of rockets to supply the planets, you should be golden.
- Yeah, that’s my dilemma. I wouldn’t say I can support a stready stream of rockets with LDS and blue circuits yet.
  
  I have a nice ratioed 45 SPM starter build set up, but because it’s all ratioed then if I’m researching yellow science I don’t have a lot spare to go towards rocket production.
  
  I think I might add a few more resources without going too crazy and then head to Vulcanus. Building a proper smelting setup with foundries seems very cool.
  
  Will be next week before I get to that point though.

Rushed to the rocket yesterday night. Took me about 12 hours. I shot a couple of platforms and buildings up just to make myself comfortable with the new mechanics up there.

Other than that I finally secured my base in a very wide area, so I don’t have to keep rebuilding the defences. But it looks like I still have to. The world generator thought it would be funny when I didn’t have any iron near my starting area. I’m fucking broke on iron and steel. I found a couple of rich patches but they are deep in enemy territory. It’s time to take the war to the biters.

So on today’s menu we have iron and blood.

We have just got to the platform stuff and man, the absence of artillery makes biters way more present compared to pre-SA vanilla game, we even had to dig up mines for the first time to make some perimeters really prepared for the behemoth bitters (though uranium ammo then made it kind of obsolete).

Researching the rocket silo, 46%. Still on yellow belts and inserters, mostly basic assemblers. Trying to stay low-tech to keep from having to expand a lot until I have full logistics.

Biters have evolved enough to be a pain in the assembly line.

Slowly building a wall of belt-fed piercing turrets to encompass base and a few resource patches so I can get some peace.

Think I'll aim for Fulgora first! It looks so wonderfully weird. Like a dead 70s/80s scifi comic world.

Just a tip that I got from seeing some stuff before launch, make sure you have elevated rails unlocked before Fulgora at least. The way it's set up, you have to move resources from island to island and can't landfill, so elevated rails are the only way to move resources mostly. Some islands are close enough that could could sneak them over using a bot network, but you have to get lucky for that.
Space science platform heck yeah!

I've built what's probably my biggest (mostly) vanilla base yet on Nauvis and I haven't even left yet. I want to have it situated before I leave. I think my Space Exploration base was larger, but I never finished it and it wasn't much larger if it was.

I'm really enjoying the fact that we can't destroy cliffs until later but they're also much better, combined with the new rail tools. My rail network is all currently really organic with two way rails and sidetracks. Previous versions I just built cliff explosives and plopped down two lane rail anywhere I went, which makes it brainless.

I have way less time to play than I would have liked haha

But currently still on navius, mostly just setting up train stations and testing the new interrupt systems and making new train blue prints

I love the new train system, which is huge with the addition of parameterized blueprints. I've gone through three stages with my stations. The first was basic dumb stations, but parameterized so their names and things were selected when you place the blueprint. The second was slightly smarter and enabled/disabled when it needed to. My new one should be set up so I can have cargo trains automatically select a resource to pick up based on demand, instead of being set to a fixed type. I haven't switched over to it yet though, as I just finished designing it, but it'll hopefully work and be really convenient. It should work similar to LTN but without needing it.

Ive always liked trains in Factorio, but I'm having more fun with them now than ever before.
- Trains is also one of my favorite aspects of the game!
  
  I also made the parametrized train stations first and the variable to for stack sizes is so nice!
  
  I also tried making a schedule with only interrupts for all trains. But that don't really works because the trains always just goes to the closest outpost. But I have been thinking if I connect every train stop to a radar. I can also check demand for a specific resource before I enable the stop
  
  And for my mall, I thought about making a single fluid train stop for all fluids. Because pumps can have a filter now, so maybe it can work, haven't tried it tho

Playing the vanilla Space Age campaign in multiplayer using the Factorio discord / Reddit community "monthly map" seed. Last night we had up to 11 players joining to help out, on Nauvis as well as Fulgora and Vulcanis. I'm pretty impressed how deeply the team integrated Space Age into the existing tech tree that we're all so familiar with. In order to reach all the benefits we've been used to having for endgame, you'll need to go to all the planets.

It's also been nice to see that the rocket launch requirements have been slimmed down so that 1) you can easily use rockets as mere transport and 2) so that multiple players in multiplayer can launch their rockets and not break the bank.

I got the "getting on track like a pro" achievement yay

Roughly like this...

For the past couple months, I've been having the sudden urge to play Factorio. I log onto Steam after being away for like a year and see that a couple old friends are playing Factorio. Then I see a post on Lemmy about Factorio's recent record breaking player count. Seems like everyone caught Factorio fever all at the same time.

New DLC just came out a few days ago. I've had the Factorio itch for months now but I've been waiting for it.
- Well that explains a lot

I had work that week, so I couldn't get much in. The day before I was itching so I started a space exploration save and got a little attached to that even though I never made it past military science. Now I'm playing space age and have just built a rocket!

I'll add more details:

The start was poor, with widely spaced starting resources, no choke points, and a dry climate which absorbs pollution the least. The only good thing was a nearby small oil vein. So for the first few hours, I intentionally didn't scale up as not to anger the biters. I actually researched military and gun turrets before automation.

Then, I scaled up but minimized pollution by switching to solar power with only 8 steam engines running, and made many efficiency modules. With that, I could focus on getting bots and trains, and heading to space, and that's where I am now.