Factorio Space Age Planet Order Guide: Choosing Your First Destination

Space Age gives you a rocket and then goes quiet. Three planets sit out there, Vulcanus, Fulgora, and Gleba, all 15,000 kilometers from Nauvis, and the game never tells you which one to visit first. Most players swing by Vulcanus, and that's a decent habit. The packing matters more than the pick, though. A thin trip to the friendly planet goes worse than a loaded trip to the mean one.

Requirements to Leave Nauvis

The research you actually need

Rocket silo research in Space Age runs 1,000 each of red, green, and blue science (automation, logistic, and chemical). That's the whole bill. Production and utility science got pushed behind space travel in the 2.0 tech shuffle, so don't sit around building purple and yellow packs before your first launch. Those come later, once space science is flowing.

The silo itself is a chunky build, 9x9 tiles pulling 4 MW:

| Ingredient | Amount | | --- | --- | | Steel plate | 1,000 | | Concrete | 1,000 | | Processing unit | 200 | | Electric engine unit | 200 | | Pipe | 100 |

Add a cargo landing pad somewhere on the planet before you plan any launches. The game won't fire a rocket without one, and only one pad is allowed per planet, so drop it where your bots and belts can reach it.

What a launch costs

A rocket is 50 rocket parts, and each part wants 1 low density structure, 1 processing unit, and 1 rocket fuel. So one launch costs 50 of each. Base game folks can relax, the old price was 1,000 of each per rocket.

Plan on at least three launches to start. One carries a space platform starter pack (20 processing units, 60 foundation, 20 steel plate, and yes, it hogs an entire rocket). One carries you. The rest carry everything else.

Passenger rules

You ride up alone and you ride up light. Armor stays on, guns stay in their slots, equipped modules stay put, and ammo doesn't come. Your whole inventory stays on the ground. Anything you want at the far end flies up as cargo, so pack rockets, not pockets.

The first platform

The starter pack spawns a platform: one hub with a small ring of foundation around it. From there you build in remote view, placing ghosts that the platform assembles on its own. The minimum kit for a working taxi:

• Asteroid collectors along the rim
• Crushers to grind chunks into iron ore, carbon, and ice
• A furnace or two for smelting
• Chemical plants brewing thruster fuel and oxidizer (fuel can't be barreled, so every platform makes its own)
• Thrusters along the south edge, the only edge they accept
• Gun turrets up front with ammo pressed from platform iron

An assembler up there turns the crushed goods into space science, and that white science drops down to your landing pad free of charge.

Picking the destination

Each planet needs its own planet discovery research before a platform can fly there. What's the price? 1,000 each of red, green, blue, and space science per planet. Rides up cost rockets, and drops never cost anything. That one pattern shapes the whole expansion, so keep it in mind for the last section.

What Vulcanus Offers

Vulcanus is the lava world and the community's default first stop, and the weather explains most of that. Day cycles run a minute and a half, solar panels produce at 400% of their Nauvis output, and nights barely exist. A field of panels plus a row of accumulators more or less solves power for the rest of the game.

The local economy

Iron and copper barely exist as mineable ore here. Instead you pump lava from the lakes, run it through foundries as molten metal with calcite as the additive, and cast plates straight out of the melt. Stone pours out of that process as a byproduct, which keeps concrete cheap. There's no crude oil, but coal patches are all over the ashlands and simple coal liquefaction (unlocked on site) turns that coal into the oil products you need.

Calcite deserves a special note. Vulcanus holds the only mineable calcite patches in the game, so every other world either imports it or crushes oxide asteroids for it. Gleba's best coal route specifically wants calcite shipped in, which is a nice little export business for a Vulcanus colony.

The foundry is the headline prize. It smelts and casts with a built-in 50% productivity bonus at crafting speed 4. Push 200 iron ore through a foundry chain and about 450 plates come out, against 200 from the same ore in plain furnaces. That one building quietly upgrades your whole mid-game economy, and finished foundries rocket home to Nauvis, five to a launch.

The big mining drill is the other keeper. A 13x13 mining area, 2.5 mining speed, and it drains ore at half rate, so every patch under it lasts about twice as long. It's also the only drill that can chew tungsten, and tungsten gates the local tech tree.

Crafted only on Vulcanus: foundries, big mining drills, turbo belts, metallurgic science. Unlocked here but buildable anywhere: cliff explosives, artillery turrets and shells, the coal liquefaction recipes, speed module 3, and asteroid reprocessing research. Cliff explosives sound boring and aren't. Vulcanus and Fulgora are both cliff-happy, and that terrain tool pays for the trip on its own.

The catch: demolishers

Giant centipede worms, one per territory, with territories drawn in bright red on the map. Build inside the red and the resident worm comes over to delete your factory. The starting area sits outside every territory, so build tight at first and treat those red lines as walls. Once you're ready, killing a worm frees its land forever, since they never respawn. Artillery, which you research on this very trip, makes that job a lot more polite.

What Fulgora Offers

Fulgora is the scrap planet. No ore patches, no enemies, just islands poking out of oil oceans with ancient trash piled on top. Days run 3 minutes, solar limps along at 20%, and each cycle rolls about 90 seconds of lightning storms around nightfall.

Scrap is a sorting puzzle

You mine scrap and recycle it, and every recycler draw rolls on this table:

| Output | Chance | | --- | --- | | Iron gear wheel | 20% | | Solid fuel | 7% | | Concrete | 6% | | Ice | 5% | | Steel plate | 4% | | Battery | 4% | | Stone | 4% | | Copper cable | 3% | | Advanced circuit | 3% | | Processing unit | 2% | | Low density structure | 1% | | Holmium ore | 1% |

The second pass is where the planet lives. Recycle gear wheels and batteries again and iron plates fall out, melt the ice for water, and hoard every holmium ore, that 1% line is the entire reason you came. Belt control is the real skill here. One backed-up lane of concrete stalls the whole loop, so sort aggressively and push the overflow straight back into more recyclers.

The machines

The electromagnetic plant carries a built-in 50% productivity bonus that applies to everything it crafts, not just intermediates, plus 5 module slots. It's the only home for superconductors, supercapacitors, and electromagnetic science packs.

The recycler matters just as much over a long run. It hands back about 25% of an item's ingredients on average, and with quality modules sprinkled into the loop you can upcycle a cheap item into a better copy of itself, over and over. That loop is the quality grind, and quality gear is the strongest permanent upgrade in the expansion. Both machines only build on Fulgora, and both happily run on any planet or platform afterward.

Lightning pays the bills

Every bolt packs 1 GJ. A basic lightning rod captures 20% of that, a lightning collector grabs 40%, and storms hit each map chunk roughly every 10 seconds while they last. Roof your base in rods and the weather becomes the power plant, you just need enough accumulators to stretch the harvest through the day. Leave a gap and the lightning finds your assemblers instead, which hurts.

Heavy oil is infinite here, just stick an offshore pump at the edge of an oil ocean. Coal and uranium don't exist at all, so plastic either gets recycled out of advanced circuits and low density structures or shipped in from home.

The shape of the place

Islands, not continents. Most of them sit too far apart for power poles or roboport coverage, so elevated rail does the commuting, and cliffs crowd the shorelines right where you'd want ramps. It's a compact, puzzle-shaped world. As a first stop it's workable but slow to pay out, since holmium science takes a while to spin up. As a second stop it's great, and the unlock list (mech armor, tesla turrets, quality module 3, personal battery MK3) keeps paying for the rest of the run.

What Gleba Offers

Gleba is the farm planet and the difficulty spike of the three. Nearly everything on it grows, rots, or hunts. Days stretch to 10 minutes, solar gives 50%, and the natives are pentapods, spider-like and drawn to the smell of your industry.

Spoilage runs everything

Almost every product here carries a timer, anywhere from a few minutes to two hours. Hit zero and the item turns into spoilage, and nothing stops the clock. Nutrients, the fuel that runs biochambers, spoil in 5 minutes flat. Buffering a big stockpile does nothing but create future trash, throughput is the whole game, and a belt that stops is a belt that's rotting. One mercy: heating towers burn spoilage for power, so the garbage at least keeps the lights on.

How the farm works

Agricultural towers harvest yumako and jellynut trees and drop seeds, so a grove replants itself forever. The fruit becomes mash, jelly, and eventually bioflux, the ingredient that branches into everything else. Iron and copper come from bacteria grown in biochambers, coal comes from coal synthesis, and plastic, sulfur, lubricant, and rocket fuel all have bio recipes. The biochamber is the workhorse of the whole setup, and it runs on nutrients instead of electricity, which keeps the spoilage loop honest.

Pentapods

Processing fruit makes spores, spores are Gleba's version of pollution, and pentapods follow the smell back to the source. They only nest on shallow water, so the dry midlands and highlands act as natural walls, and landfill can seal off a swamp you'd rather they never reached. Bring a real loadout. These fights are a clear step up from Nauvis biters.

The prizes

Agricultural science (crafted here only), plus a fat list of unlock-anywhere tech: stack inserters, spidertron, rocket turrets, heating towers, productivity module 3, and efficiency module 3. The biolab, a big research boost, gets built back on Nauvis. And once the farm hums along, rocket fuel from jelly is close to free, which quietly turns Gleba into the fleet's gas station.

Its orbit is the crossroads of the map, too. Gleba links to Nauvis, Vulcanus, Fulgora, and Aquilo, with the Aquilo leg a long 30,000 km, and solar in orbit runs at 200%.

So who lands here first?

Honestly, not most players. Spoilage logistics plus a real enemy threat at the same time is a lot to learn in one trip. Gleba as planet two or three is a much better time. You show up with turbo belts, real weapons, and the patience a farm world demands.

Preparing a Return Route

Here's the rule that strands people: dropping from a platform down to a planet is free, but leaving a planet's surface always takes a rocket from a local silo. Land with no way to feed a silo and congratulations, you're a farmer now.

Keep the taxi running

The platform that carried you out is the ride home, so treat it like one. Park it in orbit, keep the collectors and crushers running, and let it brew its own fuel. Thruster fuel can't be barreled, so every platform refuels itself out of asteroid chunks. Design note: a narrow platform flies faster than a wide one, width hurts speed far more than weight does. But speed shakes more asteroids loose on the way, so fit the guns before you crank the engines.

Platform schedules work like train schedules. Add stops, set wait conditions, flip it to automatic. A two-stop loop between Nauvis and the new planet, hauling science one way and supplies the other, is the standard rig.

Ship a silo kit

The rocket silo is literally too heavy for a rocket, so you ship the parts and craft it on site:

| Ingredient | Amount | | --- | --- | | Steel plate | 1,000 | | Concrete | 1,000 | | Processing unit | 200 | | Electric engine unit | 200 | | Pipe | 100 |

And alongside that:

• A cargo landing pad, your first building on any new planet, since everything you send later lands there
• 50 each of low density structure, processing units, and rocket fuel for every extra rocket, bring two or three rockets' worth
• Starter machines: furnaces, assemblers, belts, bots, and power, plus whatever the local science recipe needs that you can't build yet

One gotcha is worth the ticket price: electric engines need lubricant. Build them on Nauvis before you fly, because cooking up oil products on day one, on a planet with no oil, is a chore you don't need.

Leave Nauvis on autopilot

The home base keeps ticking without you, and you can still reach it from anywhere. Remote view lets you open the map, place ghosts, and set requests on Nauvis from another planet, with bots on the ground doing the actual building. Leave a stocked mall behind, keep a silo or two fed by logistic requests, and your taxi keeps hauling both ways.

Keep the platform itself safe, too. If the hub dies, the whole platform dies with it, and anyone aboard respawns back at the last planet they visited. That's the closest thing to a game over that Space Age has, and it's fully avoidable.

Last concrete point: your new planet's science rides the platform to Nauvis orbit and drops into the landing pad for free. Set the pad to request the fresh packs and research keeps rolling at home while you're still flattening your first demolisher.