This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/factorio by /u/foxgradually on 2026-05-17 15:12:35+00:00.

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Well, I got COVID and thought trying out a new Factorio mod would be a nice way to recover.

355 hours of playtime later, I am well past having recovered from COVID, though now I’ve got to recover from my annual Factorio binge.

It was worth it. What an experience. The scale of the mod is vast. You work so hard to get that first rocket up to produce orange science. And then hundreds of hours later basic science production is a tiny corner of the factory, just an afterthought.

Similarly, the first cargo rocket you send to an outpost gets carefully filled with everything you might need, and it is such a relief when the first vulcanite block makes it back home. Later, you’re spamming eight rockets at a time to different planets, not even checking what’s in them, which is often just a stack or two of inserters to quiet a missing-construction-materials alert.

The secret ending takes scale to an absurd length, requiring you to build a multi-star mega structure to earn the right to attempt the puzzle. I was worried that this would feel like a chore, but it turned out to be one of my favorite parts of the playthrough, stressing my end-game factory in new ways and giving the feeling of having truly conquered the galaxy. I would love more of this, especially if your factory was rewarded with new capabilities, like the way energy beaming allows you to siphon energy from stars.

This was my first playthrough of Space Exploration. I played on the latest version (0.7). I suspect the changes to fluids and circuits in the 2.0 engine have made many of the mechanics more pleasant to work with. I didn’t encounter a single bug in the playthrough, which is astonishing to me considering how much work must have been required to migrate to the new 2.0 engine.

Many reviews mentioned repetitiveness and resource sinks. There is often the feeling that this mod is a marathon, not a sprint, that’s for sure. Though, in its defense, the feeling of repetitiveness was often a sign that my designs needed improvement and some effort put into standardization / blueprinting was necessary. I found it pretty rewarding when my designs would handle all the variations and edge cases of the recipes in stride.

That said, it’s clear there are aspects that are placeholders for something more. I am eager to see what future versions of this mod look like.

Definitely recommended.

****Spoiler Warning**** -- some major hints about the second ending are included in the screenshots below; avoid them if you intend to try to solve it from scratch yourself.

Mods used:

• Space Exploration v0.7
• Recipe Book

Final bases:

A modular cell-based train architecture. Uses a single three-way intersection as the basis for the entire base. Each horizontal space between cells is a fluid bus. A giant manifold distributes products from single-resource trains to mixed resources trains for science production in orbit.

A simple train loop and massive fluids bus supplies science production in Nauvis orbit. Each catalogue has its inputs provided by a single 1-2 train. Trains arrive via space elevator on the right side and do a single counter-clockwise loop.

Seriously, a massive fluids bus.

Standard design for catalogue production. Receive a single train of inputs on the left and fluids on the right. Distribute to a column of buildings in the center. Data cards and scrap belt along the bottom, while the final catalogue output joins a belt stack on the top.

Victory ship that just barely met the power and speed requirements.

https://preview.redd.it/4lanc4m2rp1h1.png?width=986&format=png&auto=webp&s=ecdc0c9f1dee143f9d846f1794da52776b5b0651

I wrote a solver + visualizer for the Archaeology ending. Props to anyone that could solve this from scratch; I spoiled it and still struggled to get all the details right.

Eventually, though, I did manage to track down all the off-by-one errors in the solver to find my way home

The Space Exploration experience: just one more color and then I’ll go to sleep…

Naquitite mining with only cargo rockets. Around 28 buildings were necessary to produce the required 300K rocket fuel per launch on-site from methane ice. Would it have been easier to just set up space ship haulers? Probably, but it felt like cheating (in a good way) to instantly teleport crushed naquium to Nauvis every 10 minutes.

The route for a big arcosphere / relic run

Base design aspects / philosophy of note:

• 24 SPM target was plenty for space sciences, though many could do 60 SPM.
• Automate Prod 3 + Speed 3 ASAP and use them everywhere. Stop there. Higher tier productivity modules are only used for science labs, naquitite processing, and cargo rocket section production. Higher tier speed modules used only for oil pumpjacks on Nauvis.
• Produce each data card from a single building with only one or two exceptions.
• Spam cargo rocket sections, fuel, and reusability research to make it cost nothing to send rockets.
• Consequently, no space ships (too much latency) or delivery cannons (too limited) for logistics.
• Schedule rocket delivery to each outpost every 20 minutes.
• Only mine stone, coal, and oil on Nauvis.
• Programmable speakers with alerts for anything that might go wrong; too much landfill, missing vulcanite, empty ingot storage, and so on.
• Send a request for what’s missing on a planet over the signal transmitter, not resource counts.
• Send excess rocket sections back to Nauvis from outposts to avoid clogging storage.
• 2x2 chests solve the “recipe outputs some of its inputs” problem trivially.
• Ignore core mining.
• Ignore scrap recycling (just made landfill and blew it up when it filled up a warehouse).

Some of my favorite parts of Space Exploration:

• Scavenging powerful items early on. Killing biters with bio weapons felt so unfair and really teased well what was possible in the end-game.
• Space elevators
• Clearing all biters from a small moon
• Streamlining spaceships
• Plague rockets
• Dialing in arcosphere balancing. It took three revisions to get it just right. I’d find myself clicking through the chests of balanced spheres from time to time in satisfaction.
• Beacon overload; it’s fun trying to avoid beacon overlap
• The = (“show all pins”) key
• The geometry required for the secret ending.