[drbawb]

I did a vanilla playthrough w/ no console commands to get my fair share of achievements.[1] That base is from beta, and doesn't really function correctly anymore.[2] At this point I feel pretty done with the base game, though I suspect I'll do another "from scratch" playthrough w/ the expac to celebrate its launch. I have something like ~1100 hours in the game, and it still brings me great joy. Vanilla certainly owes me _nothing._ However it's really the joy of finding mods and playing their scenarios (or creating my own scenarios) that keeps me coming back to the game. Ironically I'm currently working through Space Exploration with friends; I sure hope we finish before the expansion!

These days though I find the "burner" gameplay provides me very little enjoyment. I detest the "punching trees" phase of the game mostly because I've spent so many hours with my engineer at Max Power Level. (Maybe it'd be different if I had gotten bit by the speedrunning bug, and learned how to optimize that bit of the game.) Even my "most vanilla" playthroughs these days usually have at least:

- "far reach"

- a factory planner

- some kind of warehousing/loaders

- an /editor'd in crate of supplies to build power, some labs, and stamp down "the mall"

- some kitted out modular armor and a personal roboport (to do the more finnicky builds; though I've watched some speedruns and my base building micro has gotten a lot better.)

- LTN(!) - I love trains, and this mod's take on trains just gels with me.

[1]: The only ones I have left are to do a "lazy bastard" playthrough which requires enough consideration that I wanted to do it by itself in a challenge run, and the rest are all the top tier production based time sinks, which I'd rather do in a map tailor generated to be a megabase.