Overview
After 100 hours of play, here’s everything I wish I knew when I started playing FortressCraft Evolved.
Things I wish I knew
I’ve been playing a lot of FCE recently, and there’s a lot of things I didn’t realise when I first picked up the game. So here’s my list of things I wish I knew when starting. Please feel free to add your own in the comments!
- Hiveminds and Overminds are different things. Hiveminds grow hard resin (which can be useful), whereas overminds don’t grow resin, and send attack waves. You want overminds dead.
- You can build conveyors vertically as well as horizontally.
- Conveyors move items into the block they’re pointing at. It doesn’t matter if the conveyors look like they join up or not. This is especially true when switching from vertical to horizontal belts.
- Ctrl-M will disable ambient music.
- Looking at a hopper and hitting ‘T’ will transfer your currently selected hotbar item into the inventory. This is much faster than opening your inventory and dragging. Having a hotbar just for bars and ore in the early game is a huge time-saver.
- Clicking the middle-mouse button acts as a pipette tool, letting you easily select an existing block for building. This is particularly useful with aesthetic blocks, which will auto-build if you’ve got paste in your inventory.
- Always carry lifts with you when exploring underground. They’re cheap to manufacture, require no power, and once set up gives you an easier way of getting back to where you left off.
- Open your inventory and hit ‘S’ to see your suit inventory. Arther and suit upgrades can be placed in this grid. Power boosters and ampules placed in the suit inventory will be auto-used when you’re low on power or health. In a pinch, the suit inventory can be used as a backpack for extra storage.
- Bring power boosters, a power storage block, and auto excavator with you when exploring. Boosters are cheap to automate (copper coils + power), and running an auto excavator is much nicer than digging a lift shaft by hand.
- The flashlight (‘L’) uses a lot of power. Glowsticks (‘G’) are often more thrifty if you’re low on juice.
- You can right-click on an item in your hotbar to clear it. This makes it easier to have newly crafted items appear in the hotbar slot you want.
- Ctrl-left-click will ‘build to me’. For aesthetic blocks this will also remove rock and debris before placing them.
- Building pyrotechnic generators and conveying coal to a logistics hopper next to them is often easier than using Laser Energy Transmitters. When you get enriched coal you won’t need to change your base to reap the improved power benefits. This is especially true for high-power items, like the laboratory or coil chargers.
- Hitting ‘K’ will open the holobase view, which is especially useful when trying to find your way back to a lift after exploring underground.
- Mk2 turrets are significantly better than Mk1 turrets, and are easy to build once you’ve got a primary module upgrade machine running.
- Cargo lifts are great for hauling up deep ore (lithium and below), and are unlocked with “basic logistics”, one of the first technologies you can research with the laboratory.
- “Metal Alloys” research unlocks a huge number of items. You need it to unlock crystal dynamics, which lets you make crystal clocks that are used in many higher-end machines and teleporters.
- FCEdb[www.fcedb.com] has oodles of information, recipes, and total construction costs.
- If you’re brave, you can use the grappling hook (‘F’) to travel very long distances, or up shafts. If you’re falling, you may be able to grapple to avoid the ground.
- The grapple has a cooldown in the cold caverns, which can be a surprise if you’re used to grappling up shafts.
- Lifts choose their direction based upon where you’re looking when you set up. Look up to go up, down to go down.
- Fitting a lift compressor allows a lift to extend to 256 metres, but you still need to look at the base of the lift to adjust the height upwards.
- You can jump while on a lift and looking in the direction you want to change direction.
- There are lots of great mods for FCE. I especially recommend the Extraction Storage Management System and Paste Builder.
- Mass Storage takes only a single block to build, but will grow up to six blocks high if you change its settings.
- Mass Storage lets you set a stocking limit on a per-item basis, making it a way to build up to a given number of an item and no more.
- HEISTs can be configured to restock your inventory only to a certain number of items. You can Shift-click and Ctrl-Click to change the stocking limits by 10 and 1 respectively.
- Non-pristine bug drops can be macerated to produce T2 ores (goal, nickel, titanium). An organics thief will only remove these junk drops from your inventory.
- Up, down, and corner conveyors will auto-craft themselves on build if you have any regular conveyors in inventory.
- Hoppers built next to each other with add+remove permissions will auto balance their inventory of unrefined items (ore, junk blocks, junk bug drops) only.
- Any machine that needs multiple counts of an item (eg: the lightweight machine crafter) needs a hopper to pull from.
- Some machines don’t like dropping their products onto curved belts.
- You can have an extruder feed directly into a coiler, without a belt between them.
- You can place priority splitters upside down if you want to reverse their output directions.
- You can never have enough iron gears and rack rails, lightweight machine housings, copper wires, or charged lithium coils.
- Energy grommets can be used outside of rooms, and are cheaper to produce than energy storage blocks. They only transmit power in a straight line.
- When mining iron and below, you’ll want to place turrets to protect your belts from mynocks (which look like glowpods) which will spawn and eat your items.
- Mynocks only spawn deeper than 80m. If transporting ore by belt, then digging up to above 80m first can reduce the number of turrets you need compared to digging horizontally first.
- Enter holobase (‘K’) mode and hit left-ctrl to enable tactical mode. This will show the range of all your turrets, which can be used to check all your conveyors are covered.
- Tunnel nukers are flying insects with a large abdomen that can spawn soft resin when impacting terrain. Soft resin can spawn terrifying worm bosses. Digging out soft resin near your base can help prevent untimely deaths.
- Turrets can kill worm bosses, it just takes a long time.
- To use research parts from drop pods, place them in a hopper next to your laboratory and click ‘alternate mode’ on the lab. It’ll start researching the part automatically, and give 5 research points per part researched. Hive brain matter can be researched the same way.
- When you get the ‘incoming orbital debris’ message, you can look to the skies to see the cool flaming drop-pod enter the atmosphere. Drop pods can also be found by looking for the plume of smoke they emit.
- The huge spider robot is your friend, but you can’t make use of it until you’ve researched the appropriate tech, built a spiderbot docking bay, and provided it with a weapon (researched separately) and charged lithium coils.
- Power consumption makes a big impact to how much threat your base generates. If attack waves suddenly feel much harder, it might be from your laboratory and coil chargers sucking up juice.
- After collecting research, open the [H]andbook and scroll to the end of the research section to see what you’ve unlocked.
- There’s a discord channel[discord.gg] which is great for asking questions and getting advice, especially when getting started.