Industopia is coming along nicely. I redesigned the plate to use fewer materials and about half of the individual parts for performance reasons. It uses steel now which was dumb, a lot of this session was waiting for my very inadequate surface steel factory to give me enough beams to keep building. That was the first (and so far only) thing I made sure I was producing up top asap.
I've got the iron, concrete and coal storage up, plus steel ingot & beam production. Next time I can play I just need to set up the steel pipe & encased pipe factory, then I can dismantle one of my few factories on the surface. After that the ironworks is probably next, then copper. By that point the surface will only have a power plant and a bunch of mines/smelteries (no point bringing ore up here to smelt, if something doesn't have other uses I'll just process it down below).
I've got 2 trucks and a tractor zipping around, I could watch them all day. Can't wait to get some more vehicles moving, I'll probably chuck in a time lapse when it looks a bit busier.
I definitely need to set up the fuel production sooner rather than later though, everything is currently sharing a single petrol station and it will most certainly become a problem. The first time I played the game I had dozens of trains but only a handful of road vehicles throughout the map, I'm hoping my road system is good enough, but I really don't know much about these vehicles or how they work. The fun, as they say, is in finding out.
Here's the plan:
I think that's everything except radioactive stuff. If I don't burn out by the end of the game (assuming I make it that far) I might expand into nuclear power. Dunno. I'll likely replace the portal hub with a drone base to have project parts flown in for delivery.
Now that I have a roadmap I don't really need the pillars for signage, but they're still nice for motivational messages I guess.
Oh and the first project of this session was to build a hypertube so I don't need to die of old age waiting for the lifts. If anyone was wondering how long that'd last there you go.
The only thing that won't fit is the quantum encoder, which will need external lifts for the connections. It's not ideal but there's not much I can do there. Alternatively I can combine 2 plots (unwilling) or bridge between two buildings above a road.
Everything else technically fits in the space as long as I build upwards. I've limited factories to 1-2 items each, so each individual one should be fairly simple and won't need complex production lines. Underproduction of earlier materials will be an issue (mainly because building upwards is a pain, so I tend to convince myself that a lower throughput probably won't come back to bite me), I already feel like steel pipes and encased beams are going to be too slow. Later tiers are going to take a long time at this rate, but if I use that time to double up on earlier material production it hopefully won't be too bad.
Trucks, tractors and drones will move everything outside, no belts or pipes. I intend to make a heatmap of all roads to spread traffic out. I also wish we could just draw the routes instead of having to drive them the first time.