Fulgora: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 04:14, 27 May 2026

Space Age expansion exclusive feature.

Fulgora is a new barren desert planet. Its surface is split between island-like plateaus, and deep oilsands. During the night, the planet is ravaged by lightning storms, damaging buildings.

Planet discovery Fulgora (research) is required to travel to the planet.

Achievements

Visit Fulgora

Travel to planet Fulgora.

Exclusive Items

Scrap can only be found on Fulgora, in mineable scrap patches or from detritus scattered across the planet.

The following items are unlocked on Fulgora and can only be crafted on-planet:

The following items are unlocked on Fulgora but can be crafted elsewhere:

Surface

Properties

Fulgora Surface Properties
Property	Value
Pollutant Type	None
Day Night Cycle	3 Minutes
Magnetic Field	99
Solar Power	20%
Pressure	800
Gravity	8

Biomes

Fulgora is split between two distinct biomes.

Plateaus are islands dotted around the landscape. They are the only biome where factories can be built. Some plateaus are home to alien ruins, which have fulgoran lightning attractors, which can protect your buildings until unlocking your own lightning rods. Other plateaus hold scrap, Fulgora's sole resource.
Oilsands are the lowlands between the plateaus. No buildings can be built in them except for rail supports. You can walk through them, but occasional oilpatches will slow you to a crawl. An offshore pump can be placed on the edge of oilsands to produce an unlimited amount of heavy oil.

Terrain

Fulgoran terrain is mainly composed of oillands, on which nothing except for rail supports can be built. Traversal by foot across the oillands is possible, but slow. The oillands are further divided into deep and shallow areas, with deep areas slowing down player movement even further and not even allowing for rail supports to be built until rail support foundations (research) is researched.

However, the oillands are also scattered with islands of various sizes, on which normal construction is possible. At first, these are the only place on Fulgora where factories can be built, as foundation for building on top of the oillands requires research that can not be performed until much later.

The islands come in three size classes:

Small islands with high amounts of resources, but with little room to build on
Medium islands with lower amounts of resources, and with sufficient room for a small factory
Large islands with no resources, but with enough room to build the main part of a medium-sized factory

It is possible for two or more islands to overlap, potentially creating an even larger island that does have local resources. However, most islands are detached, meaning that transport between islands will have to occur by train. In many cases, the distance between two islands is also too vast for roboports or big electric poles to reach, thus requiring local logistic and electric networks to be built, as neither roboports nor power poles can be built on the oillands without foundation.

Islands are also scattered with fulgorite, Fulgoran lightning attractors, Fulgoran ruins and Fulgoran vault ruins, allowing players without the recycler to get access to basic resources.

Mechanics

Lightning

During nighttime, dense thunderstorms occur on Fulgora, with frequent lightning strikes occurring across the surface. Lightning will strike each chunk once, every 10 seconds or so (lightnings_per_chunk_per_tick = 1 / (60 * 10), --cca once per chunk every 10 seconds (600 ticks))

If a lightning strike is set to occur near a lightning rod, lightning collector, or Fulgoran lightning attractor, then the lightning will always hit said entity, rendering the lightning harmless. However, if such an entity can not be found, the lightning will strike where it occurs, causing damage to nearby entities.

Lightning will prefer striking the entity with the highest priority, choosing randomly between entities tied for highest priority.

Lightning priority above 1
Entity	Priority value
Lightning collector	10,000
Lightning rod	1,000
Fulgoran lightning attractor	1,000
Fulgoran vault ruin	95
Colossal Fulgoran ruin	94
Huge Fulgoran ruin	93
Big Fulgoran ruin	92
Medium Fulgoran ruin	91

Lightning priority 1
Entities	Category
Anything with the "Metal" impact soundset/category?
Pipe Pipe to ground Pump Offshore pump	Pipes and pumps
Small electric pole Medium electric pole Big electric pole Substation	Electric poles
Power switch Accumulator	Electric routing
Recycler Assembling machine 1 Assembling machine 2 Assembling machine 3	Recyclers and assemblers
Beacon	Beacons
Radar	Radars
Roboport Logistic robot Construction robot	Roboports and bots
Burner inserter Inserter Long handed inserter Fast inserter	Inserters (but not bulk/stack inserters)
Iron chest Steel chest Storage chest Passive provider chest Active provider chest Requester chest Buffer chest	Metal chests (notably not wooden chests)
Cargo pod	Landed cargo pods
Steel furnace Electric furnace	Metal furnaces
Heat exchanger Heat pipe	Heat exchangers and pipes
Fusion generator Fusion reactor	Fusion power
Car Tank	Cars and tanks
Train stop	Train stops
Electric energy interface Asteroid collector Thruster	Some modded situations

Lightning immune entities
Entities	Category
Legacy rail Rail Rail ramps and elevated rails Rail support	Rail pieces
Rail signal Rail chain signal	Rail signals (notably not train stops)
Locomotive Artillery wagon Cargo wagon Fluid wagon	Trains
Wall Land mine	Walls and mines
Tree Rock Fulgorite	Trees and entities that count as a rock for filtered destruction

Lightning rods and collectors

Lightning rods and lightning collectors serve a secondary function beyond protecting an area from lightning strikes. They convert lightning into stored power, which they quickly discharge into the local electric system. With enough accumulators to last during daytime or between lightning strikes, this can serve as the factory's main power source.

With this, lightning on Fulgora becomes both a curse and a blessing: players must keep their factory covered by lightning rods or collectors to avoid damage, and nighttime exploration becomes dangerous and risky. However, to an established base, lightning become a convenient source of electric energy, which is especially important given the weak solar output on Fulgora's surface and the difficulty of setting up a global electric network on Fulgora before foundation becomes available.

Natural resources

Aside from numerous items that can be collected by mining ancient ruins, only two "natural" resources occur on Fulgora, those being heavy oil and scrap.

Heavy oil can be obtained in infinite and non-diminishing amounts by placing an offshore pump on the shore of an island, allowing it to collect heavy oil directly from the oillands.

Scrap is found in deposits on small and medium sized islands, as if it were an ore. However, in stark contrast to most other natural resources, scrap is not directly processed into a single basic resource like iron or copper plates using traditional production methods. Rather, it is recycled to produce a variety of items. Players can also recycle by hand provided the recipe has been unlocked.

Input	Output	Chance	Rate
Scrap	Iron gear wheel	20%	0.5/s
	Solid fuel	7%	0.175/s
	Concrete	6%	0.15/s
	Ice	5%	0.125/s
	Steel plate	4%	0.1/s
	Battery	4%	0.1/s
	Stone	4%	0.1/s
	Copper cable	3%	0.075/s
	Advanced circuit	3%	0.075/s
	Processing unit	2%	0.05/s
	Low density structure	1%	0.025/s
	Holmium ore	1%	0.025/s

Since this list includes intermediate products, such as processing units, but no iron or copper plates, players are generally forced to further recycle many of these items in order to obtain their ingredients. Players are thus left with the decision of what items to recycle, all while having to avoid cluttering their belts with unused resources.

Access to basic resources

Water can be obtained from ice (from recycling scrap) via ice melting
Stone can be obtained by recycling scrap
Iron ore can be obtained by recycling concrete
Iron plate can be obtained by recycling iron gear wheel, battery, or electronic circuit
Copper plate can be obtained by recycling copper cable, battery, or low density structure
Coal cannot be obtained and must be shipped in from other planets. However:
- Plastic bar can be obtained by recycling advanced circuit or low density structure
- There are no enemies on-planet, so explosives-based ammunition or grenades are not needed
Crude oil is not available, but heavy oil is readily available using offshore pumps
Copper ore is not available as the only recipe it is used in is copper plates and smelting processes cannot be reversed
Uranium is not available eliminating nuclear power without importing from off planet

Power Considerations

The lightning mechanic offers free electricity, but this is not always adequate on its own and it may be desirable to setup auxiliary or backup power for when accumulators run low. The primary considerations or limiting factors to setting up power generation are water, and physical space due to the lack of usable land on the surface.

Using boilers with solid fuel offers 0.3 MW per unit of water, and offers an energy density of 0.05 per tile of surface area (36 tiles for two steam engines and a boiler).

Using a heat exchanger offers 0.97 MW per unit of water. To calculate the space efficiency as an ideal, we take the least common multiple that gives us a perfect ratio of heat exchangers to steam turbines, which is effectively 60 heat exchangers paired with 103 turbines. That gives a total area of 1905, and the 103 turbines generate 599.46 MW, meaning the ideal per tile density of energy is ~0.31468, slightly better than regular boilers. This assumes ideal conditions and maximal utilization though, which is unlikely in practice. Also unlike the the boilers which produce their own heat, this setup will require additional space usage to create heat. Given the low practical likelihood of getting ideal utilization combined with the additional appendage requirement, we can declaratively say this is the less space efficient option, though it is significantly more water efficient.

Regarding heat production, heating towers offer 4.4... MW per tile, making them initially superior to nuclear at 1.6 MW per tile for a single reactor, but at scale due to the neighbor bonus nuclear can achieve higher energy density. Any reactor array larger than 1x2 will effectively achieve a higher energy density than heating towers. Using reactors will require importing fuel since its not natively available on planet. Nuclear fuel offers 400 GJ per stack or 80 GJ per rocket. Meanwhile solid fuel offers 1.5 GJ per stack with the heating tower efficiency bonus, but is extremely abundant on planet.

Solar panels do not require any water, but receive an 80% penalty on fulgora, producing only 12 kW, or ~1.3 kW per tile. Note this is in kW, not MW. Given that fuel is abundant and space is limited and water is not impossible to acquire, this makes solar effectively worthless on Fulgora.

Water can also be imported from off planet if supply is a significant issue. A space platform can collect ice and drop it to the surface as a supplement, and if something more consistent is required water can always be transported from other planets. Transporting ice from Aquilo is significantly more efficient than the alternative of transporting water barrels offering twice the water per stack and 40 times as much per rocket. It is recommended to liquify the ice in orbit and then drop it in barrels. Electricity in orbit is free, and liquifying ice creates significantly more electrical overhead than unbarreling, which would lower net yield.

Another tip to consider is remembering the existence of burner inserters. Pollution is not a factor on Fulgora, and fuel is abundant often to the point of excess, meaning burners are an ideal choice as long as throughput is acceptable. This can help ease the burden on the electrical grid significantly under the right conditions. Steel furnaces are similarly viable if modules aren't needed

To recap:

- Boilers are more efficient for density
- Heat exchangers are more efficient for water usage
- Solar panels should be avoided.

Space routes

Fulgora is connected to 3 other planets: Nauvis, Gleba, and Aquilo.

Planet Distance
Planet	Distance (km)
Nauvis	15,000
Gleba	15,000
Aquilo	30,000

Asteroid rate graphs:

Space route from Nauvis to Fulgora	Space route from Gleba to Fulgora	Space route from Fulgora to Aquilo

Graph legend:

Asteroid type	Chunk	Medium	Big
Metallic	● Blue	● Red	● Cyan
Carbonic	● Orange	● Yellow	● Brown
Oxide	● Green	● Magenta	● Purple