Rocket Part

Lore & Background

In the scattered logs and half-finished blueprints the player stumbles upon early on, the Rocket Part is referenced almost reverently. It is not a weapon, not a tool, not a trade good. It is a *key*. The alien infrastructure that once dotted this world left behind launch pads of impossible geometry, their fuel chambers long empty, and the only recipe that can fill them runs through this single component. The player's factory, in all its clanking, belching, conveyor-belt sprawl, is essentially a machine for producing keys.

In Their Own Story

The night shift at the factory is quiet in the way that only a fully automated plant can be quiet—not silent, but rhythmic. The smelters tick. The assemblers click. Somewhere in the chemical plant, water hisses into red and blue slurry. And in the far corner, a flexible assembler with a slightly dented housing finishes its cycle and drops a single Rocket Part onto a short stretch of belt. It rolls, stops, and sits there, gleaming under the sodium-vapor light. The player watches it for a long moment, then types the number into the fuel tank's counter. One more. The launch pad, visible on the horizon, does not yet know it is getting closer to the sky.

Reader's Guide

Rocket Part (assembler): 1 Electronic Circuit + 1 Processing Unit + 1 Advanced Circuit. Upstream chain per Rocket Part: • Electronic Circuit (assembler): 1 Iron Plate + 1 Copper Wire → 9 EC needed total. • Processing Unit (assembler): 2 EC + 1 Silicon (furnace: 1 Sand) → 1 PU. • Advanced Circuit (assembler): 2 EC + 2 Red Circuit + 2 Green Circuit → 1 AC. • Red Circuit (assembler): 1 EC + 1 Red Algae (chemical plant: 1 Water). • Green Circuit (assembler): 1 EC + 1 Blue Algae (chemical plant: 1 Water). Net base-resource ratio per Rocket Part: 9 iron plates, 9 copper wires, 1 silicon, 2 red algae, 2 blue algae. The electronic-circuit assembler line is almost always the bottleneck, since ECs are consumed in every other sub-recipe. Algae chemical plants become the secondary constraint once circuit throughput is solved. The chain scales linearly: doubling rocket-part output requires doubling every upstream belt, but the assembler count for ECs grows fastest. In practice, players find that a well-balanced factory needs roughly 9× the assembler slots for ECs compared to the rocket-part assembler itself, with chemical plants sized to feed 2 RA + 2 BA per part per cycle.

Did You Know?

• The Rocket Part's dependency tree touches every major production category in the base game—mining, smelting, assembling, chemical processing, and oil-free fluid handling—making it the single item that validates the entir
• Because the recipe uses one of each of the three circuit tiers (electronic, advanced, and processing unit), the assembler line for Rocket Parts is often the *last* new assembler recipe a player unlocks before the launch,
• The two algae ingredients (red and blue) are the only fluid-based inputs in the entire Rocket Part chain, which means a factory that neglects its chemical plant will stall at the very end of the game.
• In speedrun communities, the first Rocket Part off the belt is treated as a milestone roughly equivalent to 'clearing the boss,' even though the actual rocket launch still requires assembling and loading the full fuel ta