Star Technology: UHV and Ancient Stargate
UHV is here, and it's going to be here for a while, since UEV components are locked behind the Ancient Stargate. The stargate is, of course, going to take plenty of work, but there are also some other challenges on the way, such as making Utopian Akreyrium and UEV circuits.
As the one who made the UHV circuit setup, I was naturally given the task of expanding it to craft UEV circuits as well. Before that, though, we need an ingredient called Runic Convergence Infusion. Compared to what I went through earlier, this was a pretty simple processing line.
Now for the UEV circuits themselves. Thanks to my awesome infrastructure from the UHV circuit setup, most of my work was simplified to just adding patterns for various random plates and bolts and putting those in the requesters. For assembling the circuits, I decided to use the new Compact Assembly Lines, which are 2.5 times faster than the regular assembly lines (if my understanding is correct). Unfortunately, these take forever to craft, requiring lots of expensive UHV components, so I ran the autocrafting overnight. I also upgraded the old circuits to use the new neutronium wafers.
While I was working on that, and was also getting distracted by writing the UV blog post, Mazerak set up some basic Utopian Akreyrium1. There are two ways to craft it: the horrible slow way, which takes almost two hours per bucket (with 1 UHV machine), and the actually decent way which takes a handful of seconds. Unfortunately, the decent way requires both UEV circuits and having some amount of akreyrium already, so the slow way will have to do for now.
Maz also set up nuclear reactors for echo shards, which are used for void ingots, an important material for the Ancient Stargate. We had been completely neglecting nuclear reactors for this whole run, so this was quite the project. It's too bad their power output is negligible at this point2.
Now that we have a decent supply of UEV circuits, it only takes a bit of random crafting to finish off the Abydos chapter in the questbook. Look at how far we've come!
That leaves us with the next chapter, which is all about crafting the Ancient Stargate. Before we got into that, though, I put down a couple Component Nexuses, which are one of the new multiblocks. They help massively in crafting the LuV, ZPM, and UV components, as they run at double the speed and we don't have to send them ordered inputs like the assembly line. If you're making one, beware: the recipes for the UV pump and UV robot arm are slightly different than the assembly line recipes (this is a bug).
The first important resource for the Ancient Stargate is void ingots. I tacked this on to the echo shard production. Mazerak had already done all of the hard work so it wasn't all too difficult for me. I needed more industrial TNT, but we have an endless supply of toluene from bacteria so this isn't as hard as before.
Next, I made some Titan Forges. These are necessary to craft dense plates, but they also make other stargate components faster using the foil ream and wire spool recipes. No longer will we need that big stack of forming presses.
Mazerak built some Auxiliary Boosted Fusion Reactors, which are darn fast and will greatly help with our power production in the future. You can wallshare these in a sorta silly way, overlapping the rings, but we sadly put it too close to the other builds to take full advantage of this.
Maz also upgraded the akreyrium production to use the better recipe. The stargate needs thousands of buckets of akreyrium, and the bad recipe is really not going to cut it. This is one of the most complicated processing lines yet.
At this point, there's not much left to do other than add recipes, build multiblocks, and wait. Most of the Ancient Stargate recipes are just more expensive versions of the Classic Stargate counterparts, so after upgrading the old infrastructure to higher energy levels, we basically had everything we needed. And so on August 23, 2026, we... uh...
Okay, right clicking the base didn't form the multiblock, so we used the Create recipe to finish it off. (Why does something always go wrong with building the Stargate?) After deftly avoiding the kawoosh, we have unlocked the nether!
Technically we still aren't in UEV yet, since we need to do the hell forge stuff first, but this feels like a good spot to end this blog post. The next post will cover our adventures in the nether, the end, and UEV. See you then!