Planetbase

Planetbase

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Express Starport Atlantis Achievement
By NerakanDrac
Detailed guide to finishing the Starport Atlantis challenge in less than 15 days
   
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Starport Atlantis
Only 0.2% of players have this acheivement as of the time of writing this guide. Hopefully that percentage will rise and I won't be so lonely over here.

The Starport Atlantis challenge puts you in charge of a small base on a resource poor planet. Welcome to the interstellar truckstop! Your goal is to earn 1000 coins as fast as possible. Visitors will arrive with unfulfilled needs, and will leave (and pay you) when they are satisfied. Happiness is the most difficult to quickly raise, so the comfort of your guests is paramount.

The #1 priority to finishing this challenge in <15 days is minimizing your expenses as much as humanly possible, as nearly all of your income will be from tourism. This challenge locks you out of any meaningful goods production, so you have to squeak by largely on your starting materials and the food you grow in your minimum size bio-dome.

This guide outlines 3 phases of managing your base: early setup, the bulk of making money, and the last day.
Day 0-2: Setup
What you have to work with
You start out with enough bots, colonists, and spare parts to last you the duration of the (shortened) challenge. You also have a small starting stockpile of food, 20 metal, and 12 plastic.

Your base consists of a small O2 generator, a medium canteen, a large stoarge, a medium bio-dome, a medium dorm, 2 airlocks, a starport-sized landing pad, and a power array.

Construction
The very first order of business is to improve the physical base as fast as you can. The O2 and storage are adequate for your purposes and can be left alone. During the first wave of construction, simply dismiss all the traders that try to land; you can't afford anything from them yet. The order of improvements to make:
  1. Add another medium size power collector (-3 metal total)
  2. Build 2 landing-pad (smaller size) ports (-10 metal total)
  3. In the bio-dome: build 2 wheat pads, and replace the lettuce with tomatos (-2 plastic total)
  4. Add a medium cabin, 6 beds. Biologists are idiots at pathing, so place this off the side of the bio-dome (-3 metal, -9 plastic)
  5. Recycle the bed in the dorm, then the dorm building itself (+3 plastic, +2 metal)
  6. Build a medium multi-dome off the O2 generator. A small one is too small for the hamster wheels you'll be building next (-3 metal, -3 plastic)
  7. In the multi-dome: build 2 hamster wheels. These are the only thing people seem to use in multi-domes, so dont waste resources on TVs or plants in there. (-2 metal, -2 plastic)

This is what your base should look like now

You will have 1 unit of metal and 0 plastic left after all this, with 1 hamster wheel unfinished due to lack of plastic. You will need to buy 6 more units of plastic ASAP. You can trade the single leftover metal away, you won't be needing it. Between that metal, the starch you will have as a side effect of wheat, and your liquid cash, you should be able to afford all 6 plastic in one purchase. After you buy the plastic, turn off traders in the landing permissions panel (F5). You are now self sufficient and do not need to buy anything from them. This will keep unneccesary traders from clogging up your ports, leaving room for the all-important (profitable) visitor ships.

Use your newly acquired plastic to finish the hamster wheel in the multi-dome and build 4 video screens and another decorative plant in the canteen. The existing meal maker, table, and drinking fountain will be enough for the volume of tourists you'll have, so leave them alone.


This is what your canteen should look like now

Setup complete. Time to make $$$
Day 3-13: Profit
This is a largely passive phase. You will be watching as dozens of visitors land, eat your food, sleep in your beds, pay you 10-25 bucks per person, and then leave. At any given time you will have about 4-5 visitors in your base, and can expect to make about 100 coins each day.

Happiness will be mostly taken care of by the cabin beds and the pasta meals (this is why the tomatoes and wheat combo is important). DO NOT build a bar. Your tiny farm and 2 biologists just can't support enough vegetable production to keep up with both meals AND alcohol.

Your guests may bring the flu in with them. There really isn't anything you can do about it. People who get sick seem to just hang around until they get better. The "bad breath" symbol over their head will pass from red to orange to yellow, then disappear. Once it's gone people rest up until they are healthy, then either go back to work (colonists) or pay you and leave (visitors).

Your engineers will keep the bots in reasonable working order. Don't worry when the wrench symbols appear on your bots, an engineer will eventually get off their lazy butt to fix it.

During this timeframe starch will be building up in storage. You have plenty of room for it. This starch and potential food excess will be your insurance stash, in case things somehow go pear-shaped on you and profits are extremely low.

By day 13, your game will probably be warning you that you've run out of spares. Ignore this. You are only mantaining your base for a maximum of 2 more days, and the infrastructure will hold out til then even without further repairs.
Day 14: Garage Sale
You will very likely reach 1000 coins from visitor income alone. However, if night 13 rolls around and you are a bit short of cash, you can sell your accumulated starch and any extra food.

Open your landing pads to traders again from the F5 menu. When one lands, sell them all your starch and most or all of your stored food. This profit should more than make up any difference between your earnings and your goal.

Congrats! Mission accomplished.
38 Comments
piper.spirit 6 Jul @ 12:22pm 
Great guide that provides the necessary information to complete this challenge. No wonder it is such a rare achievement, it needs to be tackled in a very particular way!
The cabin, pasta meals and multi dome are especially useful tips, in addition to focusing on visitor payments. I completed in just over 11 days. Excellent work!
Some Random Dude 13 Apr @ 1:01pm 
Excellent guide, you can speed up the early stages by using some of your starting coins and other resources (excluding spares) for the bioplastic, I got lucky on my run with minimal flu cases and got all the profits I needed in 12 days.
khyrhis 4 Apr @ 7:49pm 
this saved me. thank you
Axeman 29 Mar, 2024 @ 5:19am 
Can't erase my comment. That was wrong. The mission with 1 person was done in under 7 days.
Axeman 29 Mar, 2024 @ 5:13am 
I've made this in under 7 days. :-D
Siawosh 20 Aug, 2023 @ 5:03am 
Perfect. Thank you.
Call me Lucy 25 Jun, 2022 @ 1:21pm 
thanks a lot for this guide
Bix 16 Mar, 2022 @ 3:49am 
@NerakanDrac: We need more guides like yours. Everybody is making Youtube videos these days, and although it can be sometimes useful, I find often tiresome to watch. On the contrary, a nicely written guide with screenshots and precise numbers, is a real pleasure and more useful to me :) Thanks again, you deserved that award ;)
NerakanDrac  [author] 15 Mar, 2022 @ 8:44pm 
@Bix it makes me happy to see that things i made forever ago (in game years) are still kicking around being useful :) glad to help!
Bix 15 Mar, 2022 @ 3:10am 
Only playing this game as of now, and struggling with the challenge(s). I was focusing on building a bar and keeping trade all the time, but clearly this was a waste of resources and time (plus the huge commission traders take is a pain...). You kept it simple and beautiful! - completed on the night of day 11.
This is an excellent guide, thank you. I followed rolenthedeep's suggestion in the comments with recycling the wind turbine and adding a 4th landing pad (if you do that, keep your original rermaining metal bar for the connection, or trade for a new one).
One thing surprised me: as soon as the visitors land, their initial bad mood seems to count in the general welfare of your base, I had never noticed that- so don't be surprised of the sudden drop from Excellent to Poor when a batch of Visitors arrives ;)