Space Age is the one Factorio expansion where the map is fixed and the route is the decision. Wube replaced the vanilla rocket-launch ending with a platform that has to reach the solar system edge, and put four planets between you and that flight. The Factorio pieces already on this site cover what 2.1 changed in rocket logistics (/news/factorio-21-mixed-rockets-platform-logistics-guide/) and in circuits; neither answers the question an expansion owner asks in the first hour, which is which planet to open with. This is that route, built from the discovery-research infoboxes on the official wiki, the four planet pages, and Wube’s own Friday Facts. It assumes Factorio 2.1.24, the version the wiki’s changelog lists for 27 October 2026.
What this covers: the order through Space Age — what each planet’s discovery research actually requires as documented, what each planet unlocks that no other planet can, and which of the hops can be reordered without wasting a launch. Why it matters: Space Age moved artillery, cliff explosives, the Spidertron, the tier-3 modules and several personal-equipment upgrades behind specific planets, so the first hop decides what your factory is missing for the next several dozen hours. Who should care: anyone starting Space Age from a fresh Nauvis, and anyone who already picked a second planet and wants to know whether the choice was merely suboptimal or actually blocked them.
The order in one paragraph
Vulcanus is the cheapest first hop and the one whose discovery research asks the least: a single prerequisite technology, and a cost paid entirely in Nauvis-side science. Fulgora and Gleba can then be taken in either order — the documented requirements do not force one before the other, and Wube’s own announcement post describes the sequence as “an impactful strategic choice” rather than a script. Aquilo cannot be moved: its discovery research needs five technologies drawn from all three earlier planets, including their science packs as ingredients. So the shape is Vulcanus, then the other two in whichever order your factory needs, then Aquilo, then the 100,000 km run to the solar system edge that ends the expansion.
That is the whole answer at the level of the research tree. What follows is the evidence for each hop, because the reason to write it down is that the four planets ask for genuinely different things and the bill arrives later.
What each planet gates
| Planet | Unlocks that nowhere else can | Discovery research needs | Route from Nauvis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vulcanus | Metallurgic science pack, foundry, big mining drill, turbo belts; the only mineable calcite; tungsten; molten iron and copper from lava | Space platform thruster | 15,000 km |
| Fulgora | Electromagnetic science pack, electromagnetic plant, recycler, lightning rod and collector; holmium, which comes only from recycling scrap | Space platform thruster, electric energy accumulators | 15,000 km |
| Gleba | Agricultural science pack, biochamber, agricultural tower, heating tower, rocket turret, Spidertron, stack inserter, biolab (built on Nauvis only) | Space platform thruster, landfill | 15,000 km |
| Aquilo | Cryogenic science pack, cryogenic plant, fusion reactor and generator, foundation, railgun; lithium, fluorine and ammonia, none of which can be barrelled | Advanced asteroid processing, asteroid reprocessing, electromagnetic science pack, heating tower, rocket turret | no direct route; 30,000 km from Gleba or Fulgora |
Distances are the ones printed in each planet’s “Space routes” table. The column worth reading twice is the third: Vulcanus needs one prerequisite technology, Fulgora and Gleba each need a second Nauvis-side one, and Aquilo needs work done on three separate planets.
Why Vulcanus is the cheapest way off Nauvis
The Vulcanus discovery research lists exactly one required technology, Space platform thruster. Fulgora adds electric energy accumulators and Gleba adds landfill, both cheap in themselves but both another research queue before your first launch. All three cost 1,000 of each of the four packs their infoboxes list — automation, logistic, chemical and space science — which is the important part: none of the three first hops requires another planet’s science pack, so the first choice is genuinely free.
Vulcanus is also the planet Wube’s designer describes as a place to start. Friday Facts #386 opens its tour with “it’s a splendid place to start your interplanetary travels”, and the planet page backs the claim with a short list of things it hands you that nothing else does: a foundry, a big mining drill, turbo belts, and lava that can be cast into molten iron and copper. Calcite is the one resource you can only mine there, and the same Friday Facts #417 that documents exportable planet buildings notes that the foundry “only works well as long as you have a steady stream of calcite coming from Vulcanus”.
The cost is that Vulcanus is waterless and awkward. Water comes from acid neutralisation and steam condensation; stone is a byproduct of processing lava; crude oil is absent, so heavy oil arrives through simple coal liquefaction. Wood cannot be obtained at all, and the planet page carries an explicit warning that this can soft-lock a player who has not unlocked the research for medium electric poles. Power looks generous — solar panels there produce four times what they do on Nauvis — but the 500°C steam from acid neutralisation wants steam turbines, and the planet page points out those need nuclear power from Nauvis or heating towers from Gleba researched first. Early Vulcanus runs on steam engines.
Then there are the demolishers, the planet’s boss-like enemy. Each holds a territory marked in red, only one spawns per territory, and building inside one is what provokes it. Their deaths are permanent, because they only spawn during world generation, and the territory stays free afterwards. The practical rule is the one the page states: do not build inside a red outline until you can kill what owns it.
One further wrinkle is internal to the planet. Friday Facts #386 notes that Vulcanus’ mountains hold two resources you need immediately but are hard to build on until you have cliff explosives — and cliff explosives are themselves unlocked on Vulcanus, not before it.
Fulgora second, or Gleba second
Here the sources stop recommending and start listing, so the honest method is to compare what each planet gives and pick against your own bottleneck.
Fulgora is the scrap planet. Its only resources are scrap piles and oil-tainted sands left by an earlier civilisation, holmium ore can only be obtained by recycling scrap, and the recycler itself can only be crafted there. That last detail matters outside Space Age: the wiki’s expansion page lists the recycler as a dependency for both Space Age and the optional Quality mod, and describes it as turning most items back into their ingredients “albeit at a 75% loss”. Fulgora also carries the personal-mobility unlocks — mech armor, personal battery MK3, energy shield MK2, personal roboport MK2 — plus the tesla turret, superconductors and quality module 3. Its environment punishes inattention: lightning storms at night damage buildings, which is what the lightning rod and collector are for, and solar panels produce only 20% of Nauvis output there.
Gleba is the biology planet, and its output is more about the rest of your game than about Gleba. The biochamber, the agricultural science pack and the four soil recipes can only be made there, while the agricultural tower is merely unlocked there and can be built elsewhere, though the planet page restricts its placement to Gleba and Nauvis. The biolab is also unlocked with Gleba science but, as the planet page states, is exclusively produced and placed on Nauvis, where it processes research at double speed with 50% science drain — a doubling of research progress for the same packs. Gleba is also the only source of the heating tower and the rocket turret, and both are prerequisites for Aquilo, alongside advanced asteroid processing, which itself requires agricultural science. Its downside is spoilage: agricultural science packs rot, and the wiki’s science pack page states that their freshness reduces their science value, so the pack cannot sit in a buffer the way metallurgic packs can. Pentapods are drawn to the spores your agriculture produces, though they can only build nests on shallow water, which makes landfill a defensive tool as much as a construction one.
Wube does not print a recommended order for these two. Read off the unlock lists, the split is: take Fulgora earlier if the thing you want is a stronger engineer and a quality chain, or a machine that eats surplus stock; take Gleba earlier if you intend to push on to Aquilo soon, because Gleba is where two of Aquilo’s five prerequisites live, and because the biolab pays back on every research you do afterwards. Taking Gleba early also means shipping perishable science on a route you have already built, which is a logistics problem rather than a research one.
Why Aquilo cannot be reordered
Aquilo’s discovery research lists five required technologies: advanced asteroid processing, asteroid reprocessing, the electromagnetic science pack, the heating tower and the rocket turret. The heating tower and rocket turret come from Gleba, asteroid reprocessing from Vulcanus, the electromagnetic pack from Fulgora, and advanced asteroid processing needs agricultural science, which is Gleba again. The research’s own cost block goes further and lists metallurgic, agricultural and electromagnetic science packs among its ingredients, so the game asks for all three planets’ science before it lets you leave for the ice.
The route table enforces the same thing geographically. Aquilo connects to Gleba and Fulgora only, at 30,000 km each way, and has no direct link to Nauvis or Vulcanus. Beyond it sits the solar system edge, another 100,000 km out, where huge asteroids appear that the wiki describes as resistant to anything but the most powerful weapons.
Aquilo is also the planet you cannot bootstrap. Friday Facts #432 puts it plainly: “On the other planets you can land with nothing and build your way to another rocket. On Aquilo if you land with nothing then you can do nothing.” Solar output there is 1% of Nauvis, so the first machines need imported power or fuel; machines freeze without heat, which is what heat pipes and heating towers are for; the surface is a liquid-ammonia ocean extended with ice platforms; and the fluids you come for — ammoniacal solution, fluorine, lithium brine, ammonia — cannot be barrelled, so the processing has to happen on site. What you get for it is the cryogenic science pack, the cryogenic plant, fusion power, the railgun, foundation, and the promethium science pack.
Quality belongs to this stage too. The wiki’s expansion page notes that with Space Age enabled, the two highest quality tiers require technology from Gleba and Aquilo, which places legendary-quality production after Aquilo rather than before it.
The vanilla items that moved planets
This is the part that makes the order decision stick, because Space Age rebalanced the tech tree so that items available in vanilla are unlocked later, on a planet. Friday Facts #373 names the categories: artillery, cliff explosives, Spidertron, the best tier of modules, and some personal equipment upgrades. The planet pages give the specific destinations.
| Item | Where Space Age moves it |
|---|---|
| Artillery turret, artillery wagon, artillery shells | Vulcanus |
| Cliff explosives | Vulcanus |
| Speed module 3 | Vulcanus |
| Spidertron | Gleba |
| Productivity module 3, efficiency module 3 | Gleba |
| Toolbelt equipment | Gleba |
| Quality module 3 | Fulgora |
| Mech armor, personal battery MK3, energy shield MK2, personal roboport MK2 | Fulgora |
| Portable fusion reactor | Aquilo |
If your Nauvis base was built around any of these, the first hop is not a preference, it is a restoration order.
Where a first playthrough can deviate
Three deviations are safe, and one is not.
The safe ones are all documented. First, the order of Fulgora and Gleba: both discovery researches are paid in the same Nauvis-side packs, so neither blocks the other. Second, you do not have to keep a base everywhere — Friday Facts #417 records that planet-specific producers were deliberately made exportable to other places, which “greatly increased the motivation to expand”, so visiting a planet for its buildings and its science and then running it lean is intended play. Third, quality can wait; the expansion page describes Quality as a recommended but optional mod, and the two top tiers need Gleba and Aquilo technology anyway.
The one thing you cannot skip is space science. Every one of the four discovery researches consumes it, and platforms are what produce it, so a working platform with asteroid processing comes before any planet at all. That is the real first gate, and it is a logistics project rather than a research one.
The thing not to deviate on is Aquilo resupply. Because nothing can be bootstrapped there, the first trip needs heat, power and construction material already in the hold.
What the sources do not settle
Wube publishes no recommended order for Fulgora against Gleba, and nothing on the pages read for this piece compares their rocket costs or travel times, so any claim that one is “faster” would be invention. The 80-hour figure in Friday Facts #373 is a 2023 design target for an experienced player, not a measurement of the shipped game, and should not be quoted as one.
Two things are worth flagging as unconfirmed. The discovery research costs above come from the wiki infoboxes at their current revision; the wiki’s 2.1 changelog, which runs to 2.1.24, contains no entry changing a planet discovery technology, but that is absence of evidence rather than a statement that the values were re-verified against the running game. And the exact rocket cost of supplying a late planet is not documented on any page used here, so this article gives none.
The rest is stable: fixed planets, fixed prerequisites, fixed distances. Which is why the order question has a durable answer at all — it is set by the research tree, not by a patch note.