I play My Colony on a spare monitor while at work. It sorta just runs idle while I focus on other things, and I give it attention when a resource is maxed out and I can continue building. I also load it up when updates are released so I can keep progressing. However, the firewall at work makes it impossible to go online, so I have no way of buying and selling resources on the online market. Therefore, my human colony (under United Earth, not LIS) has no methods of getting ether. This normally wouldn't be an issue, except the Advanced Simulations Unlimited requires ether to build. I can deal with not having upgraded cloning facilities, but I'm kind of...stuck.
I remember something from the Alpha Draconis buildings that use ether, something about ether being a depleted form of uranium. So I propose a new building for humans as well as a concept for early/mid-game production:
Nuclear Reactors and Quantum Nuclear Reactors produce not just power, but ether as well. I sort of see ether as being "radioactive waste", and seeing as how games like Satisfactory and Factorio utilize nuclear waste in some form, why not My Colony? We can either have nuclear waste as a health hazard, similar to trash, which can then turn into ether, or just have the reactors produce ether directly. For late game, I propose the following building:
Name: "Ether Production Plant"
Description: "Just a building that takes Uranium, depletes it, then mixes it with some ant paste, rum, and oil to produce ether. Functions similar to a nuclear power plant."
Size: 3x3
Cost-
12,000 water
9,500 ant paste
2,000 rum
1,000 charcoal
65,000 ore
10,000 regolith
4,000 clay
12,500 obsidian
50,000 steel
10,000 oil
35,000 gold
20,000 aluminum
8,500 diamond
50,000 uranium
3,000 crystalline
10,000 plastic
25,000 microchips
5,000 robots
Uses (approximates):
10 water
5 uranium
4 rum
4 ant paste
4 oil
Produces:
50 ether
3,500 power
I'm not an artist, so I can't do any buildings, and this is a rough idea for how humans can create ether, but having at least something in the next update is crucial for offline colonies like mine. Any input from everyone?
Ryzen 9 5950X
RTX 2080Ti
64GB DDR4 RAM at 3200MHz, CAS 16
1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD
1TB SATA3 SSD
16TB HDD
1000-watt 80+ Titanium PSU.
It seems The Octagon already does this, so I'll build one of those right away.
Ryzen 9 5950X
RTX 2080Ti
64GB DDR4 RAM at 3200MHz, CAS 16
1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD
1TB SATA3 SSD
16TB HDD
1000-watt 80+ Titanium PSU.