Latest revision as of 02:22, 3 July 2023

Rendghasts 2020 Colony Guide for the completely incompetent

SO, I have decided to make a colony guide!

“But your incompetent.”

Yes, that is WHY I am making a colony guide. Most of the colony guides on this wiki are written by people who are very good a colonies and thus understand what things like “Colony pumping” are without protracted explanations.

“Colony pimping?”

Exactly....

Lexicon

Colony Pumping - Shoving lots and lots of peasants onto a colony the first day of uni, either by building the colony blueprint multiple times or by selling the peasants to the colony really really cheap.

Suitability – How nice a planet is for colonists to live on. Effects how fast the colony grows, capped at 125% (not, this IS NOT 1 to 1 with growth rate!). Anything lower then 70% WILL NOT GROW!

Growth Rate – How quickly a colony grows. A 125% suitability colony will grow at a rate of 2.8% every two hours up to 1 billion population, then it slows to half that.

Terraforming - Using prefabricated blueprints to increase the Suitability of a planet.

1) Why Colonies?

So why do colonies at all? IC are faster right? Yes, that is true, they are faster. But like the dark side of the force IC are fast, not strong. Lets do a comparison, account to account.

IC income (based on Silicon);

500 silicon = 1 sentient chatbot Sentient Chatbots by mid uni sell for 4000 each, so that is 8 credits per Silicon.

1 tech 16 fusion extractor extracts 34,500 silicon per day

A tech 16 base takes up 7 base slots so that's 7 bases per character maximum (assuming Station Management 20 and 5 ranks in Station Research)

A “Loads” level planet has on average 100 extraction points

SO 34500 x 7 x 100 x 7.6 (extraction expert) x 8 credits is 1.45 billion credits per day, or 145 billion per uni (we are assuming 120 day unis, the tech 16 fusions take some time)

Colony Income

Observe the pic at the right. That is a colony in earthforce with no Colony Admin helping, making 7 million a tic. Tics are 2 hours. SO that is 84 million a day, or 840 million for a full account of 10 colonies. BUT WAIT, if you have colony Admin you would have the full 2 billion population AND sell 2.8 times what that is buying, so with CA on EF layer that is 25 million per tic, 306 million per day or 3 billion per day for 10 colonies. BUT WAIT AGAIN, we are still talking Earthforce layer! Instead of the 2 billion max population WS colonies get a 6 billion max. SO lets suppose and average of 4 billion population for 100 days. That's 600 billion credits for a full character of bases for a full uni. You have 2 characters assuming you use one for defenses. Also, ANY prom source will double that income.

In short, any reasonably competent builder is going to make MASSIVELY more money with colonies vs IC.

2) How Colonies?

To start colonizing you will need a Colony Blueprint as well five other things before you begin.

1) several Thatches

2) A particle Brake

3) Several Million Peasants

4) Several Terraforming Prefabs

5) a Planet Scanner

A few crates of Precision Juice and a thatch filled with station extension Y are useful but not required

We will address each of these in turn.

1) Thatches can be bought in Nihilite, and the recommended Aug setup up is a combination of Good Capacity Augmenters and Hephaestus Augmenters. These are to store your Peasants for when you pump them into your colonies. A properly auged thatch should hold about 1 million space worth of items, 90/10 peasants to Rations is generally recommended for Compact Colony Blueprints. After Purchase you either can wait for next uni (setting you back a full 4 months) or use a combination of Transwarps, Suicide, and a particle Brake to move your thatchs to pickup Peasants.

2) Particle Brake comes from the Particle Brake Blueprint or purchased from shops. The reason you need a particle brake is that it is a warp device, and even if your thatch HAD engines it certainly would not be moving anywhere with 200 million weight of peasants on it. What the Particle Brake does is allow you to warp to a solar object within 2000 range, hopping your way across the universe with your peasants.

3) Peasants. The beginning and end of every colony. In general you want to start a colony with between 1 and 2 thatchs full of peasants. There are two ways to get the peasants you will need. 1) find a friend who will let you buy them off their colony. 2) make a primer colony.

A primer colony is simply a colony you have no intention of making any money off of but is built purely to harvest peasants for a uni while you get all your terraforming items built. You throw a few thousand peasants onto a reasonably habitable world and then wait a couple months, then start buying peasants back and shoving them onto thatches. This will absolutely set you back a full uni but if you have no help that is what you do.

4) Terraforming Prefabs. The terraforming wiki is a little out of date, terraforming items now come in Prefabricated modules which can be mass built. I would suggest the following Terraforming Projects minimum;

Pre-Fabricated Atmosphere Scrubbing Project

Pre-Fabricated Atmosphere Cleansing Project

Pre-Fabricated Dark Matter Injection

Pre-Fabricated Project Little Greenhouse

Pre-Fabricated Orbital Habitats

Pre-Fabricated Sensible Living Project

These two are also recommended;

Pre-Fabricated Global Cooling Project

Pre-Fabricated Gravity Controller Experiment

It is important to note that ALL of the factories necessary to make the parts for these items can be gotten from the Junkyard system for Station Gear Tokens.

Now, you are probably wondering why I am only recommending using the FIRST in each set of terraforming Projects, and for that we need to look at Suitability

Where Colonies?

To begin with open the Suitability table and organize it by percentage. Now, Blistering/Heavy/Gaseous are “Red flags”, as there is not real way to colonize any planet with more then once of these quickly. However, so long as a planet has only one single red flag attribute, with colony admin 30 you can put 4-5 terraforming projects on it the first day and its suitability will increase to over 105%! While this is not perfect, it is not bad either, and better yet you get it on the first day so you have he maximum time to grow. A colony with 105% suitability will grow at a rate of 2.1% per tic ( a tic is two hours irl) vs a colony maxed at 125% growing at 2.9% per tic. So that is 27 days to reach 1 billion population vs 20 days for a 125% colony, assuming you start with 1 million population. However, as Thatches with Heph augs recently got raised to 3.6 million space, you are looking at around 16 to 21 days to get a colony fully prepped and ready.

Ok, nuts and bolts time

SO, you have your brake, you have your thatches with all of your peasants, and you have your Terraforming items. Now what?

Step 1) start Scanning Planets, you are looking for anything with only one single “Red Flag” attribute, Heavy/Blistering/Gaseous. If you are on earthforce layer and F2p ignore this, you need planets with at least two perfect attributes to colonize (Normal/Temperate/Terran).

Step 2) Build a Base, Tech 12 is recommended as you will want to equip Space Rat Slaughterhouses and Prefabricated Sensible living Project if you can get them, But if you do not mind slightly less effective colonies tech 9 will work fine. If you are on Earthforce layer you will want to fill ALL of the remaining planet slots with Attached Drones as other players can and WILL undersell you to your own colony if they can put a base on the planet.

Step 3) equip the base. Remember to set your tradebay to NEVER sell all of your rations. You will need at least 5000 on hand for the workers you will produce later. I would suggest the following, 5 hydroponics OR 5 harvesters (if you have oats) OR 1 space rat Hatchery and 10 space rat slaughterhouses. Colonies eat. SO do workers. Next you will want Microfabs, Galactic Training Modules and Crack Dens, one micro for every den and module. These do not need to be equipped.

Step 4) Add Peasants. Most bases do not have even half the space necessary for a decent Colony build, so you will possibly want a thousand Station Extension Y or so, but you can get away without them if you are willing to start the Colony Blueprints a few at a time. With fast moving planets you will possibly need to use Precision Juice to increase your docking speed of your Thatch.

Step 5) Wait. A 125% colony grows at 2.8% per tic. Tics are 2 hours each. SO it will take a colony with max Suitability 21 days to go from 1 million to 1 billion population.

Step 6) Start selling. Assuming 4 month Unis and 21 day setup, you should have about 100 days of profit from your colony. As shown in the above graphic most of your income will come from workers, entertainers, Nukes and Baobobs. Prom is HUGE but not always available or desirable as your team might want it for other uses.

And thats pretty much it. After you start selling you need to keep your colonies supplied but with 20 planets (assuming one character is defenses only) you will not really have that hard a time with extraction. 1.2 trillion income per uni, quick, easy, done.