So I have been trying to beat shattered planet, trying various things. One thing I’ve tried is throttling by cutting off engine fuel to engines based on damage taken, on the theory that the slower the platform goes, the fewer asteroids it has to deal with. I have a big, 6 ending platform that runs between a max of around 190, and can throttle down to about half that by shutting down all but two engines.

To my eye, it doesn’t seem to make any difference in asteroid density. It just takes longer, with the end effect of using more ammo to go less distance. Coming to a complete stop, of course nearly shuts off the flow.

So now I have it in my head that controlling velocity doesn’t affect asteroid speed or volume, which would suck.

I also can’t get interrupts to work properly, and nearly stranded my platform before I noticed :-/ But that’s a different post.

Anyway, is velocity affecting asteroid density, or not?

Update, 2025-04-22

Thanks to everyone who had suggestions; I used most of them:

• Use foundries. This had the single biggest impact. I always forget about foundries except on Vulcan.
• Use lasers for little asteroids. Foundries are only an option if you have fusion, and if you have fusion lasers start to make sense. I’d given up on them when I tried to build a nuclear + accumulator platform, and was quickly annihilated, but they become useful later.
• Rail for huge, rockets for large, guns for medium, lasers for small. This is the magic formula for me, although I also have some logic that switches rails to include medium if rockets get low; rockets seem to be the bottleneck for me.
• Quality lasers are really effective for small asteroids – even just quality 2.
• 1 fusion reactor is not enough. I was a little surprised that fusion is so wimpy compared to nuclear, but with lasers and foundries, I was getting into spots where I didn’t have enough energy to keep the fusion reactor running.
• I have a bunch of logic controlling speed. This is a critical factor in success.
• I’m processing Promethium on the ship, rather than trying to use it as a cargo. This is much more effective, but requires all that logic.
• I’m not using interrupts. I don’t know why I didn’t notice before, but the Shattered Planet has “turn around when” logistics instead of the normal planet logistics.

So, now I load up on everything, hitting Nauvis last for one load of eggs. Then I make a speed run (175km/s max) for the shattered planet. As soon as I detect that I have shards, I cut speed to about 60km/s and cruise for shards, processing eggs to Promethium packs. As soon as I’m down to about 50 eggs, I turn around. I still have a couple hundred shards by the time I cycle around to Nauvis again, which gets me a few extra packs. This gives me about 300 packs, per run.

There’s a bunch of extra logic to throttle based on damage and/or ammo levels, and where I am in the system – I run at 50% on my way back to the edge, because otherwise I inevitably take damage running full speed at the turn-around point. With this set-up, it’s fully automated, I can make the run with no damage, and I am able to process all of the eggs before any spoil. At this point, I think most of the ammo management – designed before I converted to foundries – is unnecessary. I just need to hang out a bit before heading to Nauvis to let missiles stockpile, and I don’t think ammo has throttled speed lately.

Egg management is a pain, and there’s more logic to make sure there are no unprocessed eggs in the cryo factory or on the belt; I used to toss them overboard, but found it was faster to run them through a recycler until they’re gone – there are never more than 9 left over, anyway, and that’s really just in case I get a late batch from Nauvis and a few spoil on the way such that I end up with an odd number at the end.