Planet Crucible

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Crucible

Crucible is a high-pressure planet with a crafting chain built around creating metallic hydrogen. It is designed to be as "vanilla-like" a planet as possible and still be different enough to be a fun and interesting challenge.

The Planet

Crucible is a large, dense rocky world with crushing gravity and atmospheric pressure. Its close proximity to the sun results in a scarcity of asteroids in orbit. Combined with its steep gravity well, Crucible can be a difficult planet to escape from—until you've mastered its high-pressure manufacturing.

Crucible is an "inner" planet that is intended to be visited before Aquilo. It can be visited first, and it is possible to bootstrap a Crucible base from nothing. It is moderately more difficult than Vulcanus, Gleba, or Fulgora; although there are no enemies, and no natural hazards, there are still likely to be some explosions...

Resources:

• Skarn: a single ore that is your source of stone, iron, copper, and emery (an essential intermediate mineral).
• Emulsion: a single fluid that is your only source of both water and oil.
• Coal: small deposits can be found here, but they are more difficult to exploit than on Nauvis.

The Industry

The main goals when designing Crucible's crafting chains were to:

• Offer a vanilla-like experience that is unique, interesting and challenging.
• Disrupt some assumptions/standards that most of us take for granted (such as the primacy of productivity modules).
• Explore new ways to utilize Space Age mechanics (such as spoiling and space platform design).

Some ways this mod tries to achieve these goals are:

• Most of Crucible's new smelting recipes take the same ore (skarn), with an additional fluid ingredient affecting what the output is.
• Many recipes have a probabilistic output and are designed to utilize rigor modules.
• Several intermediates in the crafting chain for metallic hydrogen spoil in interesting ways.

One result is that the ideal module setup for crafting the high-pressure science pack is different from the norm. It will also change as your factory grows, differ across different factories, and rarely revolve around productivity. This is a dynamic that I've always wanted in Factorio, and I hope you find it interesting too!

Note: this mod was also designed along with the Rigor Module mod, and the production chains were built with rigor as an important component.