For the wall against the Dark Fog you should use Signal Towers. They have over 3 times the HP of most other builds and act like a taunt/tank structure against the incoming waves. Like you I got tired of losing turrets so I checked to see the highest HP building I could make and notes the Signal Tower had 3,000 HP. Then it hit me, it attracts the Dark Fog, it's meant to be a taunt/tank structure while your turrets are DPS and the construction building is the Healer of the group. The holy trinity of combat ;).
YouthCat already mentioned it in Steam update, just before New Year. Pre-patch drop rates were too high and they nerfed it to oblivion so player could not do 1 planet challenge based on drops. Your series were doomed from the start. "Dark Fog Drop Rates December 25th 2023 While many engineers enjoys farming Dark Fog (and it's a joy not to have to construct production lines!), we intend to adjust the drop rates of some key items to avoid disrupting the gameplay. Additionally, the drop of certain basic materials may be influenced by the planetary environment; drop rates will be tied to resource multipliers, meaning 0.1x resources will be more challenging." That means key items will not drop as often in general, some items are tied to a planet you are on and additionally resource multltiplier will further adjust them.
Oh I knew they nerfed it, but given the amount you get still it was worth a try to find out how viable it was. It was a fun challenge to try, at least at first!
@@TheDutchActuary Yup gotta try new things. It was fun while it lasted. Can't wait for the next big update to drop. I hope they will shape Dark Fog into a formidable and fair enemy. It would be a shame if they were just glorified space biters. The enemy needs some kind of upgrade and a dose of unpredictability. Maybe some kind of quest system or random events.
A quest system sounds like fun! "Go eradicate them from that system!" or something. Not that I think that will ever be in this game though, but the RPG player in me can hope!@@ScarletEdge
@@TheDutchActuary BTW, I was reading the description of the planets in the "V" view. Mariterra starting planet has a mention of "civilizations" that we could meet, and gain their co-operation to save some tedious tasks. If this is anything to go by, it seems like YouthCat plans to add some NPC civilizations into the game, that could potentially populate planets. Gaining their cooperation means, either paying them or doing quests. Additionally how big of a stretch is to add some boss monsters on planets that have potentially precious minerals. I think this game eventually will become quite deep, aside from the factory mechanics.
That's a very good catch! I mean, that sounds extremely ambitious, but not unfeasible at all and completely in line with mechanics that would actually work if done correctly!@@ScarletEdge
I had a great experience in farming efficiently by putting my turret outpost pretty much next to a dark fog base. Just close enough that they're bated to attack but far enough that their buildings dont get any damage. It creates a continuous stream of fog. Low risk of fog going elsewhere because by the time their "official" attack starts, those drones are already being blown up. The analysis buildings had multiple full mk3 belts exporting all of the resources. Much of it i often dumped to unclog because I hadn't thought of of your great splitter set up. Will keep optimizing. Thank you for the idea!
Dutch, you are the fourth or fifth content creator that I have started watching doing DSP. I think this is the first time that I watched an episode. I am intrigued by your style. I have subscribed and look forward, for the future, to check out your other videos on DSP. Thanks!
Also, there are much bigger challenges out there in the cluster: In my save, the Dark Fog has settled in almost every O, B, A and most F class stars, plus the Neutron star and the black hole. Then there are the sub light seed ships scooting about the cluster. I hope that the developers will add a setting to have the Dark Fog at a few starting planets, and then spread from there. Keep up the great work.
There it is,.. I figured the one planet had an inherent playability problem. To keep with the intent of the challenge, which is collecting resources through the fog not the planets, so it would be more of a "mining only on original planet" challenge. Thus you could maybe farm the dozen or more bases on the lava planet and use other planets for logistics or science or whatever is preferred. Shame it doesn't roll off the tongue as nicely.
I'd say that would be a fair variant of the challenge. I'm a little worried if that would work though, considering you'd need to rely on laser turrets only for the farming (you simply don't get enough resources to use ammo like this)
Minimum starting places with maximum growth I think is a more practical challenge since you don't know when you will run into them and requires a more expansive strategy. (One Planet Challenge to me is just glorified tower defense) If you're gonna go, go big! One thing I noticed is how little analysis of the bigger picture, how many systems you can expand to and keeping it max efficiency, but also effectively displaying it via the starmap. Big data analysis comes to mind,
It can be done, but since the droprates got tied to the planet type and the starter planet having a malus on titanium its really really slow, especially since you need titanium alloy for dyson sphere related stuff. On the note of building with loot, in my first normal game to get aquainted with the fog I also used sorting hats. Now I am directly putting assemblers on the incomming lootline so the assemblers will just grab things they need comming fresh out of a base building. Its astonishing that you can make almost anything given the right drops are enabled. From powerpole to plasmacannon, nothing is impossible. With the loot itself, I am adjusting my factories on the home planet a little bit, to feed production lines directly, often prioritising the loot input. You really wan't to make sure you are using all the loot first when using a splitter based sorter, because if you don't it gets stuck. Especially the dark fog items drop in masses. So much that you won't be able to use all of it. Again, in my normal game I did start to build entire construction lines out of mark 4 machines, which are insanely fast. 3 x as fast as mark 2. It kinda would be possible also to push the yellow science a bit by having them drop logs and leaves and then use water to make more organic crystals, or use the dropped plastic and graphite to do that, but again titanium being the bottleneck. Good try though, I was speculating on whether or not someone would try exactly what you tried and seeing that yellow bottleneck unfold is giving me a good idea of how painful that must have been.
What I'd mention is that a polar bunker design might be a bit better for repelling the enemies. Especially once you add some artillery (pretty cheap ammunition!) and rockets (infinite range). Those explosive options push enemies back and make them less effective at attacking you. And later on the bottleneck becomes purple science with its broadband, and eventually - antimatter that just comes in at a trickle. Things last a little bit longer when you start proliferating key resources, but nanotubes are also a bit limited so that is a problem. On the flip side, if you don't poke the bases you don't have to deal with the hives so that saves you a potentially big headache. But you're still looking at 40+ hours to grind out all the needed research...
Poking the bases is needed to up the resource income. The hives aren't really a big deal once you have shields up. The polar defense is an interesting thought, but if you want some space for your own buildings you'd have to make that a pretty big bunker!
I forgot how important Titanium is for research. TY for this playthrough and looking for what you can up with if you decide to do another DSP challenge.
One thing that's missing is secret technology. I think it requires more research as a prerequisite and using those dark fog matrices together with some other alien items you can loot from high-level (15+) bases.
Yeah, I just did some testing in a sandbox game with passive mode Dark Fog: 30+ hours farming a planetary base, the Titanium and Titanium Crystal drops are so pathetic that it would be a perpetual grind. I’ll tabulate everything except the plant/log drops, personal conclusion though: very drawn out, the player would be idling a lot.
The droprates were indeed pretty bad. I sort of got around it by just boxing in 7 planetary bases that luckily spawned in a cluster and then pushing close enough to trigger multiple of them to bash their heads at my wall of lasers. Still Incredibly slow due to the double whammy of nerfing drop rates, and then again nerfing drop rates for items not available on the planet you are on.
Something that might be cool is to see how hard it is to land on a new planet with this level of difficulty. I'm assuming trying to do so means a lot of difficulty building out initially.
Extreme fog is only "difficult" in early games. Late games are the same difficulty as any other. Infinite techs eventually outpace Dark Fog's progress making the game trivial. You land on a planet, wreck bases with superior weapon modifiers set up energy distribution and shield coverage. Done. Dark Fog is still rudimentary, with some more development, it should be a way more enjoyable part of this game.
So it can actually be profitable to farm the dark fog? I'm doing a minimal resources, maximum fog run. I'm wondering whether my resources will deplete or if I can make it to a tipping point where I actually get more resources than I'm putting into defense.
totally get the reason behind abandoning the series but.. could a max difficulty maximum metadata run be on the cards, i gota get the dsp fix somewhere??
I am finishing modified challenge for this. I am using enxt to me ice giant for hydrogen and fire ice, since for me challenging part was energy, and amount of hydrogen. current progress for me, is I neeed 670 more white sciences. I ahve 135hours on my save, and it takes hours of nonstop gathering (since I dont know how to speedup game speed I let it farm over night.) btw to farm effectively I have huge setup, my farmed resource storage has 4 line of splitters to sort, with 8 rows of boxes, and at the end all resources are loaded to ILS
Could have moved the 1 planet to one with either more hives or resources you need. ie, abandon this one and set up shop elsewhere once interplanetary travel is ready.
I think your defense is not very efficient. The front line should be signal towers and battlefield analysis stations. They have much more health and good regeneration and work as a shield. Second line should be implosion tower, because they knock back the enemy, so they cannot attack anymore. Third line should be lasers, doing most of the work. And if you have the ammo, a close rocket battery is also great.
You're right, it could be done more efficiently for sure. I actually have been working on a few different designs, some of which include a few suggestions you just made!
