Project SNOWFLAKE – A Discussion of Mega Projects in Factorio Space Age
When I started creating the giant white elephant that quickly became PROJECT SNOWFLAKE, I realised that the potential of space platforms was something truly special and unique in this new game.
The story started when I realised that in my early game of Factorio Space Age, I didn’t realise that I could have supply ships run back and forth bringing me what I need each time, so every new planet I created a megabase from scratch – it took weeks to do this. Kind of dumb I know.
When I got to Aquilo, I realised that I needed plastic to make red chips and this was going to be a bit of a head scratcher as I didn’t have anything really to hand. So after some thought and a lot of beer, I realised I needed an orbital station dropping down to me all I needed from space.
The birth of project SNOWFLAKE began around Nauvis orbit where I created a deployable base that could fly to Aquilo then deploy long arms that would then grab all the resources it could need. The video here here if you want to see the original design for the base
After some tricky piloting to Aquilo, the base was deployed and worked rather well, it didn’t take long for me then to realise that I was onto something here.
Fast forward to another drink fuelled session in front of the PC one night and I decided to fly snowflake back to Nauvis and extend it in all directions and at speed.
Obviously there is a video also for this, here:
So snowflake got 6 separate modules yet for a long time it sat dormant in Nauvis orbit until one day I realised that it could one day be the ultimate MEGASPACEBASE that could be the last ship I ever need.
Work began to make a single ammo snake belt to feed all the turrets, a resource collection system, engine units etc etc, again there is a video for all this, I will share here but the story was that the game allowed me to do all this crazy big picture silliness and didn’t stop me at any point, in fact it encouraged me to go bigger, better, bolder. That’s a true masterpiece of a game that allows me to do things like that.
So what we ended up with is a monster base that can do most things, make most things, go anywhere inside Aquilo orbit (soon further) and is basically a giant testament to this game that you can pretty much do anything, the only limit is your imagination and games like that get a huge thumbs up from me.
The story doesn’t end here, that is merely where my imagination has got me now, with JIT (just in time) manufacturing mechanisms and logic, it’s a thing of beauty but there is still so much more we can do with this thing. So stay tuned and watch out for some open play sessions where we will share the save and allow members to play on the save woohooo!
CEO P