Sky Base

Overview

Building a base in the sky has many advantages over building on the ground. The most important is time. A sky base will save you many hours of digging and tunneling out rooms and corridors. Real estate can be superbuilt as needed. Until you unlock “Flatworld” this is the next best thing. Despite having “no correct way” to design your base with infinite design possibilities, this guide introduces the concept of building floors, or hiding functionality behind facade walls, as you would hide water pipes and electric wires in real buildings. This approach follows a set of laws to eliminate the complexity of “infinite” variations and will simplify your game.

Introduction

It’s a simple matter to begin your sky base from the very beginning of the game. The first law of Sky Base, is to gather up lots of wood, turn it into planks, and use this for the first level of the future base. The source of wood is these tube-like natural outcroppings

People complain wood doesn’t look good, or they can’t paint it, and that’s why they don’t want to use it for a base. But the point of using this early game resource is to give you something to stand on and work while your high in the air, so you can make the additional levels above your head out of nice paste blocks.

It is possible to build your first floor completely out of the garbage dirt blocks, but the problem is you need many thousands for your first floor, like ten thousand, and the only way to get these garbage blocks is to manually dig them out. So if that’s the approach your going to take, now you’re not going to save time, because of all that digging you have to do manually.

To get yourself up to the 65m level, simply build blocks under your feet and ‘noob tower’ your way there. Then, grapple down and repeat the process on a diagonal, about 30m away from the first tower. Now you can superbuild the platform between these two towers. Repeat the process to make the platform bigger.

Next, you need to have a way to get up and down without dying. It’s a simple matter to build people lifts using 5 Tin Plates.

Additionally, when you’re building your base on the paste floors, you will have to delete things in the process. This wooden floor prevents items from falling all the way down to the ground level. You can more easily recover lost items when they land on the wooden floor. Shown here, is a base build over 65m in the sky:

What you can accomplish:

• Not having to make, or power, Workfloor Excavators. The research points usually spent on this can go into power technologies.
• Save yourself hours of digging rooms, tunnels, and clearing ore with under-powered build guns.
• No tunnel bugs eating away the corners of your buildings.
• No worms at the corners of your base
• Spiderbot won’t walk into your field of view. He can’t get up to your skybase. You won’t be activating him until the O.E.T. charge.
• Hard Resin maxes out at a height of 64m, so your base will be on top of any growth. This lets you defer ablating resin, until you have a proper power source such as Jet Turbines.
• No random bug loot drops, plant seeds, or garbage, to clear out of your inventory
• Defer weaponry research to a later time. You don’t have to build and power defenses until you are ready to charge the Orbital Energy Transmitter (O.E.T.).
• Wood is plentiful and easy to turn into planks. Use them to make a working platform. Consider it the new “Level 0m” for the rest of your base. The point is to give you something to stand on, while you build the rest of your base out of paste on the next levels above you.

Basement

Second law, all power transmission is done in a “basement” below the production floor. This eliminates the clutter of lasers crossing the paths of conveyors in a production area, and having to devise routes using over/underpasses to get power or resources where they need to go. Demonstrated here:
Demonstrated here, is that coal power lines are 2m off the floor so that you may walk under them without jarring elevation changes. Similarly, Jet Turbines are attached to the ceiling so that you are safe from exhaust without having to block off the exhaust flames with paste blocks. The turbine is 1m above the coal line, so coal power won’t be interrupted when the technology of turbines is unlocked.

Here are some rules to follow regarding the basement:

• A basement is minimum 6m high which makes it easy to work on a ceiling, or Jet Pack your way around.
• It provides enough room for you to put all power systems at least 2m above your head, so you may walk underneath everything, and not have jarring elevation changes as you walk around.
• Coal belts, shown here on the left side, is always 2m off the floor.
• Jet turbines and it’s fuel delivery/return, shown here with LogiFALCOR systems, are attached to the ceiling, so that you can walk under exhaust without having to block exhaust with safety blocks.
• Lasers (L.E.T.’s) and Power Storage Blocks (P.S.B.’s) are attached to the ceiling because they link the floor based Induction Pads together with the minimal number of direction changes. They should almost never be blocked by Turbines if you keep your L.E.T. transmission lines short.
• Follow a substation model, stepping down power, until it gets to it’s destination, by using as few L.E.T.’s and P.S.B.’s as possible. Use coal belts, or FALCORS to deliver fuel to an general area, then build a substation which converts coal/fuel into power, and then distribute power with lasers from there if needed.
• It may appear that transferring power via L.E.T.’s is faster, and it is at first, until the time it takes for coal/fuel to travel the distance the laser covers. At that point, L.E.T.’s are less efficient. The exception is when transferring power below the surface, as coal doesn’t work past -40m.
• As Jet Packs are available, the 6m height will allow you to fly through the level as well. Feel free to make the basement 10m if you like. But I’ve found that making basements less than 6m high leads to complexity and inefficiency as you have to snake your systems around each other to fit them together. By assigning certain levels of your floor for specific functions, like 2m off the floor for coal, and 3m->6m for jets, you eliminate the possibility of systems crossing paths and blocking each other.

Matter Mover Transmission in the Basement

Depending on your world power settings, one generator may not be enough to keep the matter movers running at full speed. So for the purpose of this guide, I will almost always use 2 generators even if it’s not necessary to use that many. Shown here is how you would incorporate Matter Movers into the basement. A generator is sandwiched between two matter movers. The items go through the top mover, while coal goes through the bottom.

Items go through the top mover, so when the items arrive at their destination, you may beam them up through the floor into the production level above.

As you can see, minihoppers can be stacked to transfer coal through sharing, which keeps the whole system running. Not every transmission station needs a mover to send coal.
Coal is everywhere on the map, and it’s a good idea to keep your coal transmission limited to 1 or 2 hops. The longer the transmission line for coal, the more inefficient it becomes, as it uses 64 power each hop.

Generally, the footprint of each matter mover station should be considered 2×2 if you are using two generators to move items through the network. If using just 1 generator to perform double duty and power both matter movers, it only takes up one square. Matter movers can also be chained into an array
Notice that even though this array is built on the ground, the movers are always above and below the coal line. This allows you to easily account for odd situations where you need to get coal around corners, and it won’t interfere with matter transmission.

This section takes screenshots from the guide All-In-One: Component Maker, Smelter, Lift, Extractor. Here is how the bars would get onto the matter mover network from the smelting lift system.
Starting from this position, I’ll strip away the decorative blocks on the right side so we can modify the pathing of belts behind it.

This is what it looks like from the side.

i’m going to add three more smelters to this side of the lift, specifically for the matter mover. Notice, I’ve also turned the belts to the LogiHoppers on the left side.

These six smelters now feed into a Storage Hopper connected to a matter mover. Notice there are two upside down UpSloped Conveyors carrying coal diagonally. Here it is from another angle:

Those sloped conveyors feed a minihopper, which again is powering an array similar to what was screenshotted earlier. Here that is from another angle

Finally, a minihopper sharing coal will be used to transport coal to the next matter moving relay station.

Spread Out

Third law, is to spread out your base. You hear this repeated a lot, and I would just like to point out that there is nothing wrong with designing your machinery to fit tightly together. As you can see in the screenshot, it’s a densely packed cube to fit within a certain space. But, you can still consider this spread out, because there is plenty of space to walk around the densely built machinery.

A good base layout will take into account Jet Packs will become available, so any rooms or corridors need to be big enough that you can fly through them. Rooms can be built without ceilings so you can access them that way.