OK, so I’ve just upgraded to version 1.4.9.3, and now I have spaceports.
Spaceports are upgraded warehouses. (If I’m reading the code right, which I might not be, you can do the upgrade at any time, but there’s no point until you start having storage facilities in space.) When you do the upgrade you lose all the warehouse storage. Buying spaceports doesn’t directly give you more storage but it makes your moon bases and cryostations store more. It also makes planet crackers store more uranium. By 0.85% of base capacity per spaceport in each case.
Spaceports cost a lot of starcharts – first is 100k, and in addition to the regular compounded 15% increase for each you buy (reduced by price-reduction metaphysics) the starchart-cost goes up by a further factor of 1.35 per spaceport (unaffected by price-reduction metaphysics). I think I wouldn’t start buying them until I am not feeling at all starchart-constrained. (Which is probably a bit too late. I don’t like feeling resource-constrained and tend not to start buying much of anything until they start feeling fairly cheap.)
They also cost a nontrivial amount of energy, which I guess means that energy-improvement things (energy challenge, Dark Novas) are a little more valuable now that spaceports are a thing.
So e.g. I just replaced 360 warehouses with 50 spaceports (some way into a relic run, fairly late game, 38K burned paragon, TT25, blah blah); the extra storage let me build an extra two chronospheres, elevators/outposts to the value of about 5% extra in unob production, three more markers, and a bit of extra housing. Net energy cost of about 1000 units. Net starchart cost on the order of 10^13 starcharts.
So far as I can tell, that’s the whole story: no other weird interactions.
I think because it’s a thing that happens, literally, every game day. It isn’t happening continuously, like the things displayed as per-second; it happens at the start of each day. (Why is that? I dunno.) This isn’t the only thing that’s displayed in a similar way; there’s also antimatter generation from sunlifters, which happens once per game-year.
(Necrocorn corruption rate is also displayed “per day” and doesn’t happen continuously, though it’s a different kind of not-happening-continuously and it’s not that you get a fractional necrocorn every day.)
Unless you’re talking about some very new feature, there isn’t anything called exactly a “spaceport”. I’m going to guess you mean “when should I start doing space things and in what order?”; if I’m wrong about that, then everything I say may be useless to you.
I think you should head for space more or less as soon as you can (enough catpower, enough starcharts, a decent rate of oil generation); the main tradeoff is about starcharts, which you also want for (1) ships and hence titanium and (2) geodesy, but once you’re in space you can build satellites which bring a substantial increase in starchart generation rate.
Obviously the first thing you do (because it’s the only thing you can do before you’ve done other space things) is an Orbital Launch. This opens up (1) satellites, (2) space stations, (3) space elevators, and (4) a mission to the moon.
Depending on your exact energy situation, you may want to leave launching satellites until after you have Solar Satellites, and you may want to leave launching space stations until you have plenty of energy. I suggest getting Solar Satellites as quickly as you easily can and then getting as many satellites as you can; they will pay for their own cost in starcharts quickly (and hence, via getting more ships, for their cost in titanium).
You can’t build space elevators until you have unobtainium. You can’t get unobtainium until you have reached the moon. So, moon launch pretty early: I would say as soon after reaching space as you are able to do it.
Once you’re on the moon you will want to get making unobtainium. That means making lunar outposts. Unobtainium is very useful and initially you will be making it at a painfully slow rate. You should probably prioritize things that help with that. Space Manufacturing is a big one. More lunar outposts. Space elevators, but note that they cost unobtainium as well as helping you make it. Your first space elevator will cost you 50 unob and make unob generation 1% faster, which means it pays for itself on a timescale of 5000 unobtainium. If you’re expecting this run to get as far as making 5000 unobtainium (which it might or might not – if this is your first time in space, you might e.g. want to get as far as unobtainium huts, then build all the housing you can and reset) and if you aren’t impatient to get unob huts or something as quickly as possible, then it’s probably worth it.
Unless you’re expecting to reset pretty soon, then soon after your moon mission launch you will also want to set off for Dune. Lunar outposts eat uranium, and you can make quite a lot of uranium with the planet crackers you can build on Dune. You probably want to go to Piscine too to build research vessels for more starcharts.
If you expect this run to continue for a good long time then launch for T-minus too to build cryostations there for more storage (especially of unobtainium). First cryostation costs 25 eludium so 25k unob, but actually it should probably be a lower priority than e.g. microwarp reactors and eludium huts.
Other destinations are relevant if you want to start doing relic / time crystal things, which you almost certainly don’t on your first visit to space. Helios gets you sunlifters -> antimatter generation. Kairo gets you space beacons which (with the addition of a lot of antimatter) get you relic generation. Yarn gets you terraforming stations, which means that once you can make a lot of antimatter you can increase your population somewhat. Umbra gets you “HR Harvesters” which are useful energy sources once you’re many thousands of years into the game. Charon gets you “entanglement stations” which improve relic generation and let you build more AI cores safely (which in turn lets you make moon bases store more). Centaurus gets you another energy source. All of these things are only relevant once you’re substantially further on than your first trip to space.
You can sacrifice unicorns and use their tears to build unicorn-theology buildings that generate/attract alicorns, sacrifice alicorns to get time crystals, and refine time crystals to get relics. (It looks to me as if you’ve already been doing this. You say “I can’t refine them from 25 time crystals either.” but I think that’s just because you don’t currently have 25 time crystals. You already have enough alicorns to get 25 time crystals by sacrificing them, though you might do better to wait until you’ve built more Utopias and Sunspires.)
That’s a rather slow way to get relics. Once you have a few hundred time crystals and at least 5 relics, you can build some Sunlifters (space, Helios; you’ve already got a couple), which generate antimatter very slowly, and then buy the Chronoforge workshop upgrade, and then “Combust TC” to move through time more quickly and so get antimatter faster. Once you’ve got a big pile of antimatter – you’ll need to buy some Confinement Chambers, which it looks like you’ve already started doing – you can use it to buy the Relic Station workshop upgrade, at which point your Space Beacons will start generating relics.
BUT! All of this will be significantly less painful if you have a substantial amount of paragon, which you don’t at present. Perhaps you have philosophical or aesthetic objections to resetting; if not, before starting to chase relics at all you should do the (get as many kittens as you easily can, reset) cycle several times. This will give you more storage as well as faster production. Once you’ve got a reasonable amount of paragon, you should probably do a unicorn-religion-based time crystal run, not worrying about relics but building up enough time crystals that you can e.g. buy chronospheres so that subsequent runs are faster.
Doesn’t look much like it from the save they shared. Only one AI core, 12.44K gigaflops.
@argonplatypus I’m pretty sure I know what’s happened but I don’t know how or why.
You had 186 warehouses. Somehow these got upgraded to 186 spaceports. Spaceports are very energy-expensive, more so when you have more of them.
I’m guessing that somehow you switched from a version of the game without spaceports to a version with spaceports and something got confused.
Anyway, there’s probably a better way to do it, but here is a nasty hacky way to fix it if the situation is still ongoing:
Open up the web developer tools in your browser and find the Javascript console. In it, type the following:
s = game.save(); s.buildings[11].stage = 0; game.saveImportDropboxText(game.compressLZData(JSON.stringify(s)), function() {})This should turn your spaceports back into warehouses.