Capsule

Lore & Background

When the player first crash-lands on this alien world, the only technology they understand is their own survival kit. The Science Pack represents the act of reverse-engineering the strange, pre-existing machinery scattered across the landscape—disassembling a belt, a furnace, a ghostly inserter—and distilling the principles into a consumable unit of progress. Each tier of capsule corresponds to a deeper layer of alien engineering: basic metallurgy, circuitry, ballistics, chemistry, automation, and finally the enigmatic utility systems that tie the entire factory into a self-optimizing organism. The lore implied by the game's progression is that the original builders of this world were a civilization far beyond the player's understanding. The capsules are not inventions; they are translations. Every research point spent is a page torn from a manual written in a language no one alive can fully read. The player is not a creator but a student, and the factory is the homework. Fans often note the poetic symmetry: the player begins by mining raw ore and ends by producing the abstract, module-based science packs that govern the factory's own behavior. The capsule, in the end, is the player's mind made physical—a small, glowing proof that understanding is possible, one recipe at a time.

In Their Own Story

The first time I crafted a Science Pack, my hands were still shaking from the crash. The assembling machine clunked, spat out the little blue vial, and I held it up to the sickly green light of the alien sky. It was warm. Not hot—warm, like a cup of tea held too long. I walked the four meters to the Science Lab, slot it in, and watched the progress bar begin to crawl. Somewhere behind me, the iron furnace ticked and the pumpjack groaned its endless rhythm. I sat on a rock and watched the bar move. Twenty minutes. Twenty minutes of a single blue line filling, and I understood, for the first time, that this place was not a prison. It was a classroom. And I had just turned in my first assignment.

Reader's Guide

Tier-1 Capsule (Science Pack) chain:

Inputs: 1 Iron Plate + 1 Copper Plate + 1 Plastic Bar. Output: 1 Science Pack. Machine: Assembling Machine (any tier). Upstream dependencies: • Iron Plate: Iron Ore → Furnace (smelting). No fluid input. • Copper Plate: Copper Ore → Furnace (smelting). No fluid input. • Plastic Bar: requires Petroleum + Coal. Petroleum is produced in a Chemical Plant from Light Oil (which comes from an Oil Refinery processing Crude Oil from a Pumpjack). Coal is mined directly. The Chemical Plant combines one unit of Petroleum and one unit of Coal to yield one Plastic Bar. Optimal ratio: 1 : 1 : 1 (Iron : Copper : Plastic). The Plastic Bar stage is almost always the bottleneck because it chains three distinct processes (pumpjack → refinery → chemical plant) plus a solid coal supply, while the two plates each need only a single furnace. Scaling: Early on, one furnace per plate and one chemical plant suffice. As research demands multiply, the chemical plant becomes the constraint—add more pumpjacks, refineries, and chemical plants in parallel. By mid-game, the Plastic Bar line typically occupies 30-40% of total factory area. Tier-2 through Tier-6 capsules introduce batteries, circuits, armor, explosives, and modules, each adding new sub-chains (e.g., Electronic Circuit needs Copper Wire + Plastic Bar; Battery needs Iron Plate + Copper Plate + Sulfuric Acid). The same 1:1:1 logic applies per tier, but the upstream tree widens dramatically, and the bottleneck shifts to whichever sub-ingredient has the longest fluid chain.

Did You Know?

• The Science Pack recipe is available from the very first second of a new game—no research is needed to craft it, making it the true 'entry point' of the entire technological tree.
• The Plastic Bar, a key capsule ingredient, is the only solid item in the base game that requires both a fluid input (Petroleum) and a solid input (Coal) in the same recipe, making it a natural early bottleneck.
• There are six distinct tiers of science packs in the full game, each with a unique color and ingredient set, and a single factory can be producing all six simultaneously to feed a fully upgraded Science Lab.
• The capsule's in-game icon is a small vial with a colored liquid—blue for basic, green for advanced, red for military, yellow for chemical, orange for production, and purple for utility—giving players an at-a-glance visu