Starting out, you have a rover that can move around. Moving drains energy and if you run out altogether the rover dies and a new one respawns at the charging station you're linked to. All items in your inventory go to the dead rover.
Your "Base" is a "Home Node" that has a charging station that can get your rover back to full, a small amount of storage, and a weak Lab that lets you unlock upgrades.
Your inventory is pretty limited initially. You also can't do anything yet besides collect resources, which takes a few seconds.
The terrain is wilds or something and resources spawn randomly -- there's a few that are palletized and handcrafted. 5 seems reasonable, with a couple being rarer. Unlike shatterloop you can move into any terrain, but switching colors takes time.
Stage Unlocks
A consumable lets you craft batteries to go further. Granted they're weak and your inventory space is limited anyway.
Local Scanner -- consumes a bunch of power, but basically maps the region so you can see where resources and caves are. Very very useful. The scanner basically fixates on a screen (starting wherever it is) and can move to an orth adjacent screen. This consumes one capacitor worth of power.
Capacitor -- a fixture required for burst power. It trickle charges from power supplies.
Crane -- a fixture that lets you go into Cave holes. Consumes a capacitor of charge to enter or exit a cave.
More misc upgrades.
Rig Station -- lets you modify the rover (more on that in its section). Requires metal for sure.
Industry Lab
Caves
Caves in the starting region are straightforward (caves in other regions much less so) but offer less resources.
Your rover has a flashlight that illuminates a triangle of tiles in front of you. Changing direction changes the flashlight direction. You can hold down shift to change direction without moving.
Some screens here have some natural lighting -- circles around illuminated minerals called Illuminum. Collecting these removes the natural lighting, but Illuminum is necessary for future upgrades.
You'll also find metal ores, coal ores, and Nodes of these resources and surface ones as well -- can't do anything with them yet.
Caves here are only one level deep. You also can't place charging stations down here, so it's important to bring batteries. Additionally, mining metal ore and coal takes 2x as long as surface materials. Illuminum is easy at least.
Using flashlights drains energy. You can turn them off.
Industry
The industry lab unlocks several fixtures:
Boiler -- turns coal into capacitor charge. Boilers can't hold anything yet, so you have to feed them manually.
Furnace -- turns metal ore into metal. Takes time, though you can manually use capacitor charge to speed it up.
Refiner -- refines surface materials into improved forms which are necessary for future unlocks. Takes time or capacitor charge.
Rig Station
This fixture takes metal for sure and probably also refined materials.
It allows you to customize your Rover, in a visual way -- the components are laid out on a 2D grid and you can mix and match provided the requirements are met.
Components are:
CPU -- controls everything. CPUs have a limit on the number of components that can be attached. You can add more to bypass this but it costs power.
Drill -- mines resources. Must be on an edge tile facing forwards. Adding more improves mining speed, but costs power.
Flashlight -- illuminates things in that direction. Adding multiple flashlights increases the strength of the beam, though it uses more power. You can also add some on the sides or back for better lighting, but same deal there.
Battery -- powers everything. You can add more to increase total power.
Container -- your inventory storage. You start with quite a few of these, maybe 2 items per tile or whatever so now you have an easy way of upgrading storage.
The Rig Station lets you craft components -- they cost refined materials, possibly refined metal.
You do have a limit to the size of your Rig, so you can't just add components endlessly, however the limit is based on the total number of components and connecting blocks, and this limit is dictated by the Core component, which you can't add more than one of. You can do all kinds of fancy stuff by building weird constructions though.
There are a couple new components as well:
Booster -- lets you move a few blocks forward, bypassing terrain issues. Costs capacitor charge. Adding more than one increases your range. Granted the power requirement is considerable just for maintaining it (the actual power used for boosting is capacitor power).
Bore Drill -- a specialized drill that lets you get through the barriers at the four edges of the map. Necessary for the next stage of the game.
In each of the four directions lie new regions with new resources and different types of caves. You need a bore Drill (and kind of a lot of range) to get there. These areas also offer new challenges:
Wetopia -- lots and lots of water tiles, and caves with rivers. Water is a big issue.
Mountana -- contain lots of tiles you have to bore through. The caves are thiiiiick with rock you have to bore through. Very annoying without upgrades.
Irradia -- occasional radiation storms come in and you have to have shielding from it (have a solid tile in the direction adjacent to you that's between you and the storm direction. Otherwise your battery will start to drain. The caves have tiles that do the same thing and which ones they are changes over time.
Glacia -- has patches of ice that you slide on. Not as useful as it sounds. There are also freeze nodes scattered randomly that if you slide into will freeze you. The caves are entirely ice for the floor but there's at least some rocks to cling onto. Very easy to die down here a bunch of times.
The four new regions offer a few things:
They still spawn basic materials both on the surface and in caves.
Rarely they'll spawn refined materials. Very useful, particularly when you set up a scanner in the region.
Surfaces will spawn melange procedural materials corresponding to the area element.
Caves will spawn exotic handcrafted materials corresponding to the area element.
New Resource uses
Surface materials are used in the alchemy system (more on that in a bit).
Surface materials of a certain element are useful for crafting modules that make other areas easier to traverse. The pipeline there is Wetopia-->Mountana-->Irradia-->Glacia-->Wetopia, so I'm thinking Wetopia is east, Glacia west, Irradia south and Mountana north. The ability to do this requires surface materials in some capacity but isn't picky on what they are.
Cave materials unlock all the upgrades of this stage of gameplay. You're no longer upgrading things directly, you're instead using the alchemy system, so by "upgrades" here I mean Lab unlocks, fixtures, etc.
The ability to Mine is tied to the resource you're mining, which is paired to an element in an area cave, and they're spread evenly through them. Will probably be handcrafted. Different cave materials grant different bonuses (eventually), but any of them can be used for a basic Mining Platform.
All four cave material elements together will unlock the Portals lab. More on that in a bit.
Next Stage?
There are a lot of new systems here which I'll cover in a bit.
The overall goal is fully upgrading the Portals Lab, as that will allow you to shoot portals into some more exotic regions to begin the Automation process.
Melange materials can "tweak" basic resources in a variety of ways. When you craft things with them (say, charging stations or drill components), they'll gain bonuses according to those tweaks.
Starting out you have no idea what a tweaked material will do until you create it. You can however unlock an Analyzer that will analyze melange materials for all their bonuses to all materials. This however takes QPU (a new power type).
Starting out you can only tweak a material once. With more QPU you can do it more often, making the bonuses cumulative. However the amount you can do it is limited by your max QPU, and it's exponential.
Additionally with an unlock, you can create new rover cores from tweaked materials. This allows for crazier rovers, but will also grant bonuses around terrain switching. The actual bonuses applied to rovers is unfortunately not straightforward -- different cores will support more of certain types of components.
All other modules can be tweaked -- CPUs, drills, flashlights, etc. There should be some pretty great properties in here that you can tap into.
QPU
QPU is a new power source that powers processing-intense activities (like the Analyzer, but also Mining Platforms, Portals and more Automation down the road).
Placing a Quantum Computer gives you some QPU, and requires power. However, QPU requirements scale exponentially rather than linearly.
To get around this, you need to place a QUAAM fixture (quantum alignment machine). This will give you some set of recipes to shoot for and every time you complete one, a new one drops, and you get a QPU multiplier accordingly. The recipes are PGCS and call for *specific* resources, melange or tweaked or whatever, and generally a good bit of them too.
QUAAMs placed in different regions will give you different recipes. You can leverage this to your advantage. This also applies to exotic regions unlocked later on.
Once you portal to a melange region in the next stage, its resources get added to the QUAAM pool, but the multiplier bonus also goes up. Additionally you can get different recipes on the QUAAM out there.
The Hazard Station unlocks when you get to Stage 4. Basically you feed it materials from the opposing element and it improves your ability to traverse hazards in different areas. Upgrades are probably PGCS, calling for specific tweaked materials in the opposing element (surface materials) in question.
Water -- normally movement through water is slow and drains your charge, draining it faster the further away you are from land. With some upgrades from Glacia, this is mitigated and eventually eliminated.
Improved Bore Drill -- boring just gets faster and faster, eventually matching your normal speed.
Radiation -- you get more protection from it, eventually it doesn't deal any damage at all.
Ice -- Alters the chance of moving normally on ice, from 0% all the way up to 100%. Probably by 25% increments.
You first place your Quantum Server, which is kind of the hub of quantum processing. It can only be placed on the same screen as the home node, so it's in the exact center of the map.
You can then place Quantum Computers which cost less and upgrade QPU (and then have the bonus applied with quantum alignment). However they have to be on the same screen as either the Quantum Server or another Quantum Computer. They can also be placed in range of an Entangler or Pylon.
The quantum server can always be warped to with the portals system. If you lose it you can also craft a consumable item that'll teleport you there.
Entanglement System and Portals
In order to place a fixture that relies on QPU it has to have an Entangler or Pylon on screen.
Entanglers can only be placed if the tile falls within the range of quantum attraction. You extend this by placing Attractor fixtures within range of a Quantum Computer or the Quantum Server. It doesnt take a whole lot of attractors to cover the map, and then extend into other elementia, however exotic areas take quite a bit more work (more on that when I get there).
Quantum Computers, Entanglers and Pylons placed on the edge of a screen will also be placed on the corresponding edge so you can connect your network more easily. I forgot this game was fixed screens. They can't be placed if there's a fixture or resource over there.
Entanglers consume a gigantic amount of power and also cost a bunch of resources. No QPU or capacitors thankfully, just straight power. They need a name, otherwise they get assigned one. They are however also the portal system -- you can go from anything paired to an Entangler to it, from it to the Quantum Server, and from there to any other Entangler. Very useful.
Pylons are more cost effective -- they have to be placed when an Entangler or other Pylon is on screen. You have to place a Pylon on a cave entrance to have access to it within the cave. The cave entrance still works as normal. Pylons do have to be within the Attractor range, however.
With materials from the caves of Elementia (the new regions) you can start to mine Ore Nodes found in Caves.
Starting out, Mining is a pretty complex endeavor, but it's well worth it since you get materials for free over time.
Mining requires QPU, so they need to be within range of an Entangler or Pylon. Starting out you can only mine Ore Nodes found in Caves so this limits you to Pylon connections.
Tier 1 mining will mine the resource in question but also a lot of Rock and other resources. With more QPU you improve this, along with tweaked material bonuses.
Miners at least have their own storage so you can stop by and pick up the resources (and useless rock, which just disappears when you pick it up since it isn't useful). Later on you can automate their transport.
Miners can be assigned an arbitrary amount of QPU, increasing their efficiency at the cost of (obviously) QPU. You can mix and match though, prioritizing different resources more maybe.
The first unlock lets you place arbitrary portals and name them. Portals have to be placed in range of something on the quantum network -- quantum computers, the quantum server, Entanglers, pylons or some fixture connected to the network.
Portals cost QPU, but you can then warp to any other named portal on the network. Very useful, even moreso than Entangler portaling.
Tier 2 portals don't have to have something else in range. They also don't have to be within range of an Attractor. They do however cost the next tier of QPU.
The final unlock is the Singularity fixture. When placed you have to feed it a gigantic amount of materials, so some form of Mining is pretty essential here. You can feed it anything though. Once it works fully, you can Portal out to exotic regions, opening the next stage of gameplay.
At this stage you have miners and portals and now you can go to exotic regions. Exotic regions are procedural so there's a bunch of them, and they offer useful new materials, though they also complicate the PGCS.
To work with the Singularity, you plug in an address, shatterloop style. Not sure the number of bits here or the symbols used. The amount of symbols is limited by QPU. Nonetheless you still have a lot of options from the outset even with one symbol.
Once connected, you get a readout of what's in the region and what it costs to actually get there -- it'll be some specific material and a bunch of it. You can scan around and try to find something more efficient or useful or whatever.
The unlocks in this stage are driven by the new handcrafted resources found in exotic regions. And possibly some PGCS that gets increasingly more challenging as more regions are unlocked as well because of the pool widening.
Exotic regions will also offer normal resources of every type and novel melange resources as well. They're way more random though -- you can get all kinds of crazy stuff including tweaked materials and consumables. Very similar to melange planes in shatterloop, basically.
They can offer Quantum Hazards:
Screen exits don't go where you expect. Basically each screen has four directions which are usually paired to the screen opp's oppdir, but here they might be paired to a different one. There's bad (happens sometimes) and worse (they're all shuffled). Makes navigation hell, even with connections being two-way. Scanners follow the nat exits, not the coord exits, so scanning east, then south, then west then north doesn't do what you'd expect.
Screens change over time. They'll have the same amount of resources, ponds and caves but the positions of everything and all the terrain will swap out. Very annoying.
Quantum storms will occasionally happen that make visibility reduced, like that old shatterloop effect. Not sure how that translates into fixed screens.
On some, tiles will do the same thing exits do on the other one. This won't ever be 100% but it's still a giant pain in the ass.
Rotated and mirrored regions -- moving around is either rotated cc or cw or is opp.dir. Confusing but less so than other quantum hazards once you get used to it.
Resources/nodes/etc have a chance of teleporting somewhere else when you interact with them. Sometimes more than once. Can be annoying.
Debuffs to all fixtures and/or rover modules. Makes you feel like you're playing early game again if it's bad enough.
Screens occasionally wrap to themselves rather than going to the adjacent screen. The chance won't ever be 100%. Still annoying though.
You teleport randomly sometimes.
Items you're carrying will degrade and eventually disappear. Thankfully storage is safe so a good strategy in these. If bad enough, you'll spend a lot of time carting stuff between lockers.
Resources will slowly fade out of existence. Leaving and coming back, they'll disappear altogether.
Portals will randomly appear that transport you out of the region if you step into them. Something to I guess be mindful of. particularly bad if paired with the above.
Tiles will randomly appear that freeze you or drain your energy if you're on them. I think the hazard here has both types in differing proportions.
Improved versions of existing Elementia hazards that are resistant to your existing upgrades.
Quantum Hazard Spread
Exotic regions without quantum hazards are basically clones of the starting region or elementia. They don't affect the PGCS or anything, just a useful way of gaining more materials.
Single hazards are the most common, and they'll offer one of the new resource types.
N hazards will offer N of the new resource types, up to 3.
Exotic regions with 5 hazards are also the ones that offer bonkers resources (like tweaked materials, consumables, etc). High risk, high reward. They'll also offer 3 of the new resources.
The main thing here is full automation, which happens in the following ways:
Factories that let you combine fixtures together (and recursively with more QPU), controlling the inputs and outputs.
The ability to pair fixture and factory output to storage, and vice-versa. Starting out this takes time that scales with distance, but with more QPU it's instant.
Power Towers that slowly increase power or capacitor or QPU over time so you don't have to keep placing new ones. Very very useful. These require a steady stream of new materials but thankfully they can also be automated with the above.
Research Stations that increase various stats over time like rover charge capacity or whatever. Again require resources that can be automated.
With a bunch of Power and Resources gained from optimizing this stage, you can unlock the Tier 2 Singularity, which begins the last stage of the game.
So, your stats and resources are accumulating steadily, but there are still limits. Well, why not get other robots to work for you then?
In this stage you can send out robots to other regions to build factories/power towers/etc *for you*. The downside is you can no longer visit that region yourself, though you really have no reason left to explore at this point.
I'm not sure how this stage works exactly, but everything starts to increase exponentially (including storage capacity) and it's just a matter of balancing everything. Robots need to be protected from hazards/etc as well, so you'll need to funnel things to different groups accordingly.
The end goal is gathering enough of everything to open a tier 3 singularity to let humans in or whatever the story says.
