ICARUS Crafting Calculator and Planner

ICARUS starts you off with just some basic tools and your wits, dropping you right into the simulation. You has to construct your initial shelter before sundown. But it’s not as simple as finding some sticks and lashing them together. You’ll soon see that crafting a Machining Bench require iron nails. This means getting ingots, which means smelting ore in the furnace you haven’t quite figured out yet.

And this is where most players stumble. They grab a bunch of random resources. They lug around huge rocks on their backs. They gets slowed down and weighed down by encumbrance. Then they find out they’re still short of a stack of rope or three units of epoxy.

Why Planning Is Important in ICARUS

They treat the planning stage as if it were optional, when it’s realy what separates a smooth mission from one filled with frustration and lots of trips back to base camp. Once you’ve determined your goal, the calculator do all the math for you (saving you from mental arithmetic, which will fail you when the stakes are high). It lays out the whole dependency chain for you. It shows not only what to use to produce your end goal, but also ingredients that feed into those items.

Want a Fabricator? The tool tells you that the hard work starts with concrete mix and electronics long before you ever approach the bench. That’s critical, because in ICARUS poor logistics hurt you far worse than nearly anything else. There’s no sprinting to make up a shortage of resources.

This is where the refining queue become an underutilized part of playing efficiently. You only have a limited amount of stamina and oxygen in game and, well…time = money. Literaly. Because the tool can accounts for multiple furnaces running simultaneously, it will adjust the overall waiting time accordingly. For example, one furnace may require 20 minutes to melt a batch of copper for electronics, but with four furnaces running in parallel, the wait-time decreases dramaticly.

That’s also why your base layout matters; players who groups together all of their refining stations minimize idle time and keep those production lines going. The calculator estimates how long it will take to refine everything in total by accounting for speed bonuses and number of furnaces. It’ll help you see the refining bottleneck.

That’s when things get complicated. Simple checklists don’t account for carrying weight. Ore is heavier than the ingot it creates once refined. While refined ingots are lighter and easier to stack, ore is heavier. Carrying around ore mean more trips. You could of being making just one trip instead if you smelted it first.

The planner takes all this into account; it calculates your current load, carry capacity, round trip travel time, and then estimates based off all that how many expedition it should take you. If you notice that you’ll be making quite a few trips, consider rethinking whether it’s worthwhile to make the item now. You might want to wait until you’ve got a better way of getting stuff out, such as a mount or a teammate who will serve as a mule for you.

For experienced players with existing stockpiles of orbital supplies, it also give them a tactical edge. You can set a workshop assist percentage that calculates the amount of material cost your workshop shifts from your back to your inventory credits. It’s great for when you need rare ore, like platinum or titanium, for high tier items.

But be careful; over-relying on workshop assists can cut you out of the gameplay loop of refining and gathering, which in many cases will yield more experience points and rewards than in missions. The tool lets you calculate both types of mixes. Including just planets vs. You can compare different mix types to see if the convenience is worth what you might lose.

Other errors are ones of omission: underestimating copper requirements for electronics or forgetting where to get ropes. Depending on your setting, rope may come as leather or fiber; toggle that option and suddenly you’re looking for completely different stuff. Late-game items tend to sport lots of copper, which also happens to show up in “small” wire components that increase fast when making multiple pieces of armor/weapons. To understand what each craft really costs, check out the reference tables (on the page), they’ll show you the hidden expenses.

So, realy, ICARUS gameplay boils down to anticipation: You’re running a supply chain in hell. You’re not simply making things, you’re planning ahead. You avoid scrambling because you’ve already mapped it out with those planning tools. When you pull up that recipe next time, you’ll no longer just see ingredient needs, you’ll see a timeline of needs, a mix of weight, work, and resource balance that need careful consideration. That forethought transforms a scramble for survival into a well-controlled operation. It allows you to focus less on what you don’t have and more on the horrors lurking in the dark.