Foolishly Potshot let me name the first base we established on the planet Aqualis and I chose to name it Sumatra.
Certainly A Planet Crafter
It makes a bit of sense when you learn that Aqualis is, as the name implies, a water planet with islands. And, once the theme was set, further islands were christened with with names from the region until you might think you were in the Strait of Malacca as you navigated our expanding archipelago. (Sans gulags, unless you have a particularly dim view of our base.)
That is how we ended up with Krakatoa being somewhat to the west southwest of Java, mostly due to me naming things before remembering which direction is on the right side of the map. That Krakatoa decided to erupt a few days after I used the name was something of an odd coincidence. (The name of the post is a reference to a film about another eruption.)
But I am way ahead of myself here. When we last left off Potshot and I had only just landed on the planet Aqualis, having opted to travel with only some food, water, and a bit of backup oxygen. Thus modestly provisioned, we did touch down on a sandy beach on a desert island that would have seemed so sparse of resources that the crew and passengers of the SS Minnow might have decided to just swim for it rather than spend their time figuring out how to power a radio with coconuts.
Aqualis Beach… it is all beach
Well, soon to be Sumatra wasn’t entirely bereft of resources. You can see in the distant background the sand littered with the usual mineral bounty that we found initially on the first planet, Prime, when we started out journey. Iron, titanium, silicon, magnesium, cobalt, and silicon were all to hand in a modestly generous way, scattered about the sands for us to pick up at our leisure.
A new mineral was available to us as well… phosphorous… which had no immediate use.
Also scattered about the island, and the three other islands that seemed to make up the geography of Aqualis, were clams.
Some clams by the beach
These bivalve filter feeds seem to have the most curious of diets as opening them up yielded all sorts of things, like uranium rods, seed packets, various quartz, fuses, and like rare materials that don’t just show up in the starter zone of the first island.
Later I did a bit of inventory in my head and figured, all told, the initial clam yield lined up with the ingredients necessary to build an extraction launch platform and an interplanetary rocket.
The devs were keen not to leave the foolishly intrepid stranded on the beach.
We did not build that structure. Instead we started in on building out a base of operations.
The clams could also be deconstructed, yielding another piece of an otherwise growing pile of as yet to be useful phosphorus and a much more useful piece of super alloy.
In exploring the near but not too near other islands it became apparent that the draw distance and the rather flat ocean that made up most of the terrain was going to make having a beacon at our base handy.
While Potshot laid down the 3×3 buildings that would make up the base, putting the second floor on at a jaunty offset, I took our ONE piece of aluminum and put up a beacon. Since I built the beacon I got to name it, which is when I went with Sumatra as a name. From little things.
Welcome to Sumatra base
Not very much later we discovered that the map module on our suits worked, that we didn’t actually have to put up new satellites for that. Somehow the ones on Prime counted.
At that point there was a very serious discussion about taking down the beacon to reclaim our one piece of aluminum because, while we had lots of basic minerals and a selection of rare ones, not to mention an over abundance of super alloy nuggets and a few rods, aluminum clearly going to be our gating mineral right away. We needed some for so many things.
But we also needed ice. We needed ice for the initial vegetubes to generate oxygen. There were a lot of minerals laying about, but no ice.
Potshot, remembering the old saw about running the sausage factory backwards to make pigs, managed to pull together the pieces to make the basic recycler.
This device takes anything you put into it and returns the pieces used to make it. In the case of our bottles of water… we had brought quite a bit only to find ourselves on a water planet in fully upgraded suits that included a water filtration system, so water was not going to be a survival problem.. it would turn them into ice.
As Potshot noted, the international scientific community has a warrant out for anybody using these machines, given how readily they violate the laws of thermodynamics.
(Though, if they really want to go after violators, the whole planet… or is it a moon… of Aqualis should be on the list. Liquid water and sandy beaches on a planet with no atmosphere? Pull the other one!)
Having done that and built a couple of the oxygen producing vegetubes in order to get terraforming under way, we were still stuck on finding aluminum when I suggested we recycle one of the super alloy rods. They are made with eight super alloy nuggets and a piece of aluminum. And, it worked. Now we had a couple of pieces of aluminum and an ever growing supply of super alloy nuggets. We could barely store them all.
Then, about an hour later, after griping about still being shy of the aluminum we needed the whole time, I suddenly asked if we couldn’t recycle the super alloy nuggets.
Potshot immediately rejected this, forgetting that we spent some time back on Prime making them, the ingredients being one of each of the basic minerals and one piece of aluminum.
About two minutes later we had all the aluminum we needed and a pile of other resources as well thanks to the magic recycler… and we still had an abundance of super alloy nuggets.
At that point we were off to the races and started getting some stuff built. The terraforming was starting and there was soon some moss on the rocks.
Sumatra base getting going
As we learned back on the previous planet, you can start seeding trees and grass and flowers and insects and fish long before the atmosphere can possibly support them. Again, liquid water on a planet with no atmosphere… not to mention the temperature. This place, best case, should have been more like Callisto than Catalina Island during the off season.
We were still resource constrained. We had looted all the clams, picked over the satellite wreck, and cleared the beaches of useful items, and had an ample supply of super alloy to recycle, that did not provide everything. In particularly short supply was sulfur, a key ingredient in explosives and fertilizer. We started looking farther afield, but we had covered most everything. Even the shallows around the four islands were bare and the occasional asteroid strike wasn’t bringing much relief.
Each location so far had a mechanic for introducing new resources or access to additional resources, often related terraforming progress. On prime a sufficient rise in the temperature would melt ice that blocked access to other areas. On Selenea temperature and oxygen level unlocked access to the various terraforming structures.
On Aqualis your terraforming progress… makes new islands appear. Seriously, they rise right up out of the water and there they are.
A new island appears
Each of the new islands has more clams to find, a specific resource to harvest, and the usual crashed satellite to loot.
Usually contains the best loot
The first island was named “Austerity,” no doubt a reflection on the current state of supply. But as we progressed more rose up out of the water and we got back on theme with Java, Timor-Leste, and Borneo (with a second base at one end named Brunei).
I was there when Borneo emerged from the water.
Borneo arises
And it just kept going.
Borneo fully erect… or something
Borneo brought with it sulfur, so we broke that bottle neck at last. But there is always something else standing in the way.
For us T2 fertilizer, necessary for most advanced plant/oxygen structures, was in short supply. Its creation requires squash, and while we had found seeds for beans, eggplant, and mushrooms to use in our food growers, squash seeds had yet to be found and they are a key ingredient in the process.
Potshot had read somewhere that, using the magic recycler, one might get squash seeds by recycling rare larva. We had a few, so I gave it a try and… no luck initially. But rare larva did yield T2 fertilizer on each pass. Then, through experimentation, I figured out that recycling a butterfly larva could get you a rare larva, and we had a ton of butterfly larvae sitting around, so our T2 fertilizer problems were, if not solved, then at least mitigated.
The lesson in all of this was that because we landed knowing all the recipes for the all the upgrades, most of the challenge was finding resources. There was an exploration aspect to the planet. New islands rose up out of the water and there were things to find. But most of it was figuring out how to get a specific resource and, if we couldn’t, just doing without.
Once you’ve explored… and Potshot built a long staircase to get to that upper portion of the island we named Borneo above, so there was some work involved… it came down to figuring out ways to speed up terraforming.
We built a site to launch satellites and then eventually bit the bullet and built a trade rocket platform and a trade shuttle platform.
Looking at Cape Dead Kennedys from Mission Control
The former let us buy some missing pieces we couldn’t build. We had a decent balance of trade tokens as the automated systems we left behind kept just sending off materials and collecting tokens. The latter let us grab items that were stored in our bases on Prime and Selenea, including some items that only appear on those locations.
The locations available in the game
Humble and Toxicity are the two DLC planets you can buy, while Skeo is a new planet available to everybody who owns the game, which was launched last week. We’ll likely be headed there next.
Anyway, we’ll get to that.
The point is that eventually you get to where you either watch the numbers tick up to terraformed or you figure out ways to make them go faster. Launching satellites that boost progress is the go-to on the faster front. That also includes some comedy if you go up the gantry with supplies for two rockets and do a dual launch to watch the rockets spin out of control.
That does not look good Dr. Von Braun…
I managed to get a launch where the rockets passed by the gantry and I was able to hop on and ride one of them briefly, thinking about Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove as I did so.
But eventually you run short on resources to launch satellites. You can engage in base building and decorating. Potshot built us a nice little observation deck on top of our base.
Up on top of the base
As with No Man’s Sky, you can never take off your space suit, even when the planet has been terraformed. So I am not sure how comfortable I really am on the couch. But it probably helps to sit down now and then.
Also, as we have an atmosphere now and a day/night cycle you do get the occasional glorious sunset over the base.
Sunset on Aqualis
Now, as I write this, we’re in the final stretch for Aqualis. It will be fully terraformed before this post goes live. Our plan is to take the travel rocket to Skeo next, the newly added planet. We’ll just need to figure out what to bring along for the trip. Snacks and drinks and some extra oxygen no doubt. And maybe some selenium and phosphorus, which are minerals exclusive to Selenia and Aqualis, just to have a bit on hand.