Plan B: Terraform City sizes & resource requirements

Introduction

Hello and welcome to my guide!

There aren't many guides around at the moment for V0.8 and as of writing the information below isn't explicitly listed in any of them. I may drop some game play tips later on but primarily this guide is just for quick reference so you can see what your city will need next as you progress towards 1 million global population and beyond!

The Table

PopulationResourcesRequirementsWasteProduced

The below table shows the start and end of each population tier for a city and how many resources it needs at the beginning and end of that tier. When waste becomes a thing that is also listed.

Alright enough words already! Where are the numbers?

3 - 10 Concrete 10 - 25 None N/A 10 - 100 Concrete, Oxygen 10 - 33 None N/A 100 - 350 Reinforced Concrete, Oxygen 15 - 35 None N/A 350 - 1,000 R.Concrete, Oxygen 35 - 75 None N/A 1,000 - 10,000 R.Con, Ox, Hi-Tech 37 - 187 Metal waste 56 - 280 10,000 - 100,000 R.Con, Ox, Hi-Tech, Food 100 - 500 Metal, Organic 150 - 750 100,000 - 800,000 Composite, Ox, Hi-Tech, Food 200 - 800 Metal, Organic, Plastic 300 - 1200 *Supply and production figures are all per year*

**The table stops at 800k because you probably hit 1 million population by then**

Immediate take aways Cities become a source of resources once you hit 1,000 population. This does require processing and will stop your city growing if it backs up but it can totally or partially provide the resources required to satisfy a need.

Once you hit a population threshold the amount of resources needed/waste produced reduces. This allows you to divert resources from city A to city B and use, what is now, excess production to grow that city instead.

production is 50% higher than the required resources. Useful to know if your supply and waste centres are on opposite sides of a city and you don't want to pan over to check.

Supply And Demand

Aside from the Factorio-escque mini production facilities you set up across the map and the actual terraforming you do later on, this game is all about being able to meet the demands of your cities.

If you can meet or exceed the requirements of the city for a reasonable period of time it starts to grow. As it grows the requirements of the city grow too. Once you drop below the requirements it stops. If you satisfy 50% or less than the required resources and waste handling the city will shrink. Hypothetically the city should stabilise at ~95% but it you have a problem with supply you could end up having to rebuild a city you thought was doing fine.

On the other side of things you cannot oversupply the city. If the city needs 60 oxygen per year but you have enough production for 240 it will take 60 and the rest just sits around. Gas extractors will still produce carbon while full of oxygen and vice versa so don't worry too much about slamming down a big factory and letting the city just take what it needs.

UnlessNaturally, there are always exceptions. Between 100 - 1,000 population your reinforced concrete needs to come from outside the city but once it starts producing metal waste (after hitting 1,000) the resulting steel produced, from recycling it, is sufficient to meet the supply of reinforced concrete. If you are still bringing it in from outside though you can end up with a build up of metal waste and have the city stop growing as a result. Obviously the answer here is just to stop the external supply of reinforced concrete. However, the aluminium you get from the metal waste is only enough to produce 50% of the hi-tech parts the city needs. This means you need an external supply of aluminium and producing too much can lead to a backlog. Basically don't just slap stuff down and hope for the best because you'll probably end up having to undo it.

Trains, Planes And Automobiles

Okay so there aren't any planes in the game but the drones at your depots are like tiny helicopters. You do get trucks, trains and ships to transport stuff around on though.

As tempting as it is to just chain a load of depots together it is much better to set up a proper transport line. In case you don't know; depots try to maintain an even balance of cargo between them. This means your depot supply line with hold on to lots of cargo in the middle where you don't want it to be!

Trucks are useful at the beginning and maintain some uses later on but ultimately trains will do most of the heavy lifting so you should try and upgrade to trains as soon as you unlock them. If you need me to explain why:

They travel faster over long distances

They carry 30 cargo at a time

Like that car in the James Bond movies trains can turn in to submarines at a moments notice and carry on working underwater

The ships are also good with a 330 cargo capacity but cannot transform and drive on land or anything so they lose points there. That added capacity is going to be very helpful later on at the higher populations and not just because you need to supply increasingly higher amounts of resources. You can essentially trick your city into thinking it is getting enough supplies and cause it to start growing. More on this in the next section where I will talk about the food problem.

Taters

I assume that food production in this game works like it does in the film/book The Martian and everyone is eating poopy potatoes but Matt Damon was happy about it so maybe I shouldn't judge.

We briefly touched on it earlier with the aluminium coming out of metal waste not being enough to meet your needs for Hi-tech parts but this kind of issue you will really notice with food. You get 2 food for each compost used to produce it but you need 5 organic waste to produce 1 compost. So a city producing 600 waste a year will only be able to produce 240 food a year. At the same time it needs 400 food a year to grow. What makes it worse is that besides organic waste the only other source of compost requires nitrogen. Nitrogen production is slow and, assuming you don't just leave the world frozen, the ice caps will melt making it progressively harder to produce enough.

So what are we gonna do about this? Well it turns out that if you dump a train loads worth of food on top of a supply centre then the people of the city forget they went without food for a month and the city can grow even though your production isn't actually enough. This is pretty simple to achieve all you need to do is have your production be reasonably far away so that you can guarantee full train loads. As the city gets bigger you will need to have 2 trains arrive back-to-back to get the same effect but you can make do without a large external supply for a long time by using this trick. In case you're wondering yes it works for all resources the same and not just food.

Use more depots than you need so the train gets unloaded as fast as possible and have more than one supply centre with at least half of them set as back-ups. If you can upgrade from trains to ships then go for it but be aware they have a capacity of 330, which means they take a lot to fill, and they need to be on the water while your resource production needs to be on land, this means you'll need to use dam walls/pumps or mess around with the ground level to get your depots in range of the ship without flooding your factories. Again, use as many depots as you can to load/unload the ship as fast as possible.

The End

Thank you for reading.

If you managed to read this far either you enjoyed it or are frothing at the mouth to leave a negative comment. If you are in the first group then I welcome any feedback or questions you have that can help tidy up this thing I call a guide. If you are from the second group feel free to shout in to the void, I'm sure somebody will care.

I should say I have no intention of writing a more in depth guide or making a proper walk through or anything. I don't see the point in buying a game and then asking someone else to play it for you. Make mistakes. Figure it out. Have fun.

Peace out, folks!

Pizzajon

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3299283936

City sizes & resource requirements