The first few hours of your hardcore game should be lean play to get to floor 3 and research only what you need to get threshers and farms. Any overproduction you do, such as hand-producing when you can use an assembler - or producing more mk1 drill bits, or more purple cores than you need for your next task - will mean more waiting, and worse, collecting more plant matter.

The ruined mini factory on floor 1 is really only useful for iron, as by the time you get the mole to dig out the copper node, your time is better spent collecting plant matter and kindlevine; hunting for chests on the other two floors,; and crafting what you need to get there.

A good iron to copper balance for this stage is 2 iron miners/smelters to 7 copper/smelters, as one of the early chests has a iron ingot pay day that should carry you for awhile.

By the time you research planters and threshers, and scour Floors 1-3 of kindlevine, you should have enough (or darn near, minimum 230) for 4 "farms." AKA, 10 planters, 1 thresher per farm; producing 120 stems/min (filling a mk1 belt with a little load balancing).

These 4 farms are going to carry you for a WHILE. I'll elaborate briefly.

Due to the way recipe multiplication and fuel consumption rate hamstrings biobrick production in HC mode, even though each bio brick is 4x the fuel power of a stem, they are consumed at only half the speed, and converting stems into biobricks will produce a net loss of fuel power until bio bricks are upgraded into the final two stages of efficiency. At which point you have access to unrefined diesel fuel. Yes: you will not be sending biobricks to miners/smelters aside from recycling extra kindlethron extract and extra plant matter you collect by hand.

Finally, a few numbers for some lean farms, and what they can do: a kindlevine thresher only needs an initial supply of 65-67 kindlevines to jumpstart 10 planters, but you should consider setting up a trickle feeder so startup is smoother. See pic.

(a trickle feeder for 10 planters:1 thresher)

Here's how I arrange single farms, though there may be tighter methods. Also, there might be a more efficient design with groups of 3 farms. At the end of the day, though: 1 thresher:10 farms. No fast inserters needed.


Make sure you put a buffer chest downstream of your farms - if your farms get backed up, they have some seed planting stagger issues that can only be solved by letting it rest and restart from the top.

(a corner buffer)

Next, your miner to smelter efficiency is 4 miners to 3 smelters , consuming 25.2 stems/min, allowing just under 5 arrays per 4 farms.

Upgrading speed (aka efficiency) of miners and smelters will eventually balance out at 10 miners to 12 smelters, consuming 90 stems/min. This will take 3 farms per array to fuel, and they should probably be local to reduce spaghetti.

After your first farms are shooting out stems, it's a good time to create an assembler array to automate your basics like belts, miners, smelters, purple cores, inserters, long inserters, and filter inserters. Up to you if you want to keep pumping mk1 drill heads into floor 4, or wait to automate mk2, but once you hit Hydro, things are going to take off and you're going to probably replace this array.

Wow, this is taking forever, eh?

Yep.
However, while it doesn't make sense to automate kindlevine stems into biobricks at this stage, hand collected plant matter is another ... matter.

If you managed to get your hand on enough fast inserters to supply 12 assemblers of bio bricks, you can change your paltry 14.4 ingot/min cap up to 72/min, as long as you're willing to do the collection labor.

For some perspective, you need 700 ingots a minute focusing on mk2 drill bits to make 16.7meters/min progress.

The difference in collecting for biobricks to get this done vs letting the kindlevine stems do their thing is 4 hours vs 20 hours. Up to you if you'd rather frantically collect plant matter for 40 minutes or spend 16 hours reading a book or watching shows (or making your factories more bootiful!).

If you choose the collection, you'll need no more than 60k plant fiber and 120k limestone. This also does not assume you threw all your pure biodiesel into your ingot arrays.

Once you get your last mining bit, you can keep the mining bit array going, but it is not your highest priority, and I would just save your mk2 bits instead of dumping them into the elevator.

Once you reach Hydro, clear the floor of all the goodies and report back to your factory.

Replace your mk1 assemblers for your purples with the three mk2's you just picked up. Dump your new stash of kindlevine into some stem farms to get some proper mining arrays going.

I setup on new nodes with 10 mk1 miners and 12 mk1 smelters. More on this later, but the short of it is: this is fit mk2 belts and will balance out with the first two speed upgrades for miners and smelters.

Now throw the mk4 drillbits into the mining elevator.

Below is a list of the big prizes on each floor up to 9 - which will quickly be unlocked. These can be nabbed in any order, and only need to be sought out as you need them - but planning your factory upgrade with as many mk2 assemblers and generators as I could get my hands on saved me some brain power, even if it wasn't probably the most efficient.

FLOOR 4
228 kindlevine (3.5 farms
2nd complex has 30 mk4 mining bits
3 mk2 assembelrs


FLOOR 5
2 mk2 generators
2 mk2 assemblers
2 mk3 drill bits
134 kindlevine

FLOOR 6
1 mk3 bits
4 mk2 generators
200 kindlevine

FLOOR 7
4 mk2 generators
139 kindlevine
(more after mining charges)
8 mk2 assemblers
4 waterwheels
4 mk2 generators
1 kn4 mining bit
16 purple cores
12 fast inserters

FLOOR 8
6 Mk 2 generators
100 adv circuits
28 blue science
6 mk2 assemblers
50 mining charges! Do NOT hamstring yourself by dumping them into PT Victor terminal!
12 fast inserters
10 stack inserters
1 mk2 smelter
51 kindlevine

FLOOR 9
24 mk2 assemblers
15 mk2 generators
2 mk3 smelters
86 kindlevine

So, hopefully after a little exploring, you've got enough purples saved up to tech into mk3 drill bits. You'll need to make 22. Dump those and what you've collected into the elevator and you'll get to floor 10.

FLOOR 10
13 mk2 assemblers
13 mk2 generators
15 purple cores
4 mk2 smelters
33 mk5 mining bits
1 sand pump
68 kindlevine
194 kindlevine seeds

You can dump 10 of the mkV drill bits you found on floor 10 to get to floor 11.

FLOOR 11
2 mk2 generators
16 water wheels
14 mk2 assemblers
6 mkv bits
500 mk3 belts
46 kindlevine

This should give you enough to dump 29 mkV drill bits to get to floor 12. There's no need to put any more in at this stage, as you are very far behind on tech, and your remaining drill bits wont get your to Floor 13. Not that you're going to be able to flush Floor 12 any time soon, for that matter. But if does have a few kindlevine up high.

FLOOR 12
61 kindlevine
2 sand pumps
(pre-drain)

If you've vacuumed up all the goodies up through floor 12 (pre-sand), of note, you'll have the following:

70 mk2 assemblers
50 mk2 generators
~1k kindlevine and 194 kindlevine seeds (18 stem farms, or 6 mining arrays worth)


You can try to push on blue tech, but realistically, you'll want to tear up your mk1 factory and start planning a more permanent setup. It is worth keeping your purples going, and pursuing mining and smelting speed tech. These are effectively efficiency techs, and a properly setup 10/12 mining array will pump out around 55 ingots/min without any higher fuel demand than pre-upgrades. Which will absolutely be vacuumed up by purple tech if you let it.

Don't even think about starting to drain sand on Floor 12. Your stem consumption rate on a single pump is 2280/min, or about 30% the stems you can produce. You're going to have to tech through fuel.

It's time to let the purples cook, make room for core composers (mining/smelting efficiency alone will be nearly half a composer), and take your time getting a nice production line for all your new toys.

(TBC)