Solid-Fuel Thruster

The Solid-Fuel Thruster is a Tier-2 propulsion item used for early interplanetary travel. It can be attached to any vehicle or structure with an available Tier-2 slot, and is most commonly paired with the Small Shuttle before the player has access to the Hydrazine Thruster, Medium Shuttle, and Large Shuttle. It is a limited-use thruster rather than a permanent engine, making it a practical stepping stone for reaching other planets at the start of a save.

A Solid-Fuel Thruster can be used up to 4 times. Each takeoff and each move to another planet consumes one use, while landing consumes none. In practice, this means a single thruster is enough to travel to one planet and return to the home base, but additional thrusters are needed if the player wants to visit multiple destinations before coming back. When the thruster is fully spent, it becomes debris that can be shredded.

The thruster can also be attached to Rovers and activated to boost them, sometimes launching them into the air. This can be useful for experimentation, but it can also leave the rover stuck because of how the game’s physics behave.

• The crafting cost is effectively 2 scrap worth of materials, and a spent thruster can be shredded for 1.5 scrap, resulting in a net loss of 0.5 scrap per thruster.
• That works out to 0.125 scrap per use, making it more cost-effective per use than Hydrazine Thrusters, which cost more per use despite having more total uses.
• A Packager can be used on a partially spent Solid-Fuel Thruster to restore it to a freshly printed state.
• This does not work on a fully used Solid-Fuel Thruster, since a completely burned-out thruster is treated as a salvage item.
• Whether unused or fully burned out, the thruster can be shredded for 1.5 scrap.