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The process

The platforms you can see here today achieve quite accurately what kovarex's initial idea was, however we have spent a lot of time finding the right path to get there. The rocket logistics and space platform mechanics were changed very significantly many times. We weren't afraid to rework systems related to the platform in order to make the experience of building them as good as we can imagine.

Apart from the technical mechanics, we've created interesting recipes which don't get too complicated. At the start we had a rough idea of what we want to achieve (somehow craft ammo and something for thrusters), and Earendel has laid out a creative set of recipes. Since then I (V453000) have done a lot of balancing passes and tweaks and we've got something quite solid now.

As you're probably already used to by now, the graphics you can see in this post have taken a lot of effort to make. Though this time it exceeded the trend by quite a bit, and the space platform has been a real team effort more than anything before it.

From the surface of the space platform tiles and decoratives done by Lucas; 우주 플랫폼 transitions, thrusters, crushers and the hub/cargo bays done by Jaroslaw; Asteroid collectors and starfield shader done by Jerzy; to the asteroids done by Fearghall; with all the concept art from Earendel; and oversight from Albert with V453000; we can safely say close to everybody from the GFX department has been involved, and pretty much every one of these tasks has tested our sanity.

Conclusion

It is an undeniable fact that the factory must grow, always. But sometimes it just transcends to the point where it seems like nothing matters anymore and all of the challenges have been trivialized. Survival, space constraints, items feeling like they have any value, and so on.

With the rules of how space platforms are built, we can enjoy these feelings of puzzles to be solved for quite a bit further. While building a platform can be easy by sending more platform tiles to space and giving yourself more room to build, it is always motivating to try to keep the platform compact so it can fly as fast as possible.

Space platforms can specialize in different tasks, so it can be motivating to optimize them for different design goals. You can aim to make a huge platform that can load thousands of items, or a small platform with capacity sacrificed for speed. Would you like a minimal platform so you could get to that first planet as soon as possible, or do you perhaps fancy a gigantic platform that can craft its own components mid-flight? There are quite a few more things to try, but more about that some other day...

It's obvious to compare Space Age's space platforms to Space Exploration's spaceships. While they're both chunks of metal traversing space, their gameplay is very different. Thanks to the asteroid processing, space platforms can operate completely independently without the need to refuel, and it also automatically means they are little (or gigantic) space factories, where space really matters. Due to modding API limitations, SE's spaceships get rather complicated to automate with combinators and so on, in contrast space platforms automatic scheduling is literally as simple as automating trains.

All in all, creating your first automated space platform should be quite easy, but there is a lot of room for making something really big and complex too.

As always, thank you for reading and let us know what you think on the usual platforms.

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