Technology

Technology represents acquired knowledge of the colony. It can be used to unlock 3 categories of upgrades:

New buildings.
New recipes.
Player tools.

Improving technology is fairly straightforward:

Select a technology choice whose prerequiste technologies have already been researched.
Produce tech points of the appropriate varieties until the technology is paid for.

Acquiring technology points

Emergence leans directly on genre conventions for technology research. There are several varieties of technology points. These are produced via a research recipe, which is crafted at a specific research building using research ingredients. When the recipe is complete, tech points of the correct variety will be supplied. These recipes cannot be crafted if there is no use for the tech points.

We diverge from base Factorio in several ways however:

each variety of science requires a unique research building
research recipes can have other crafting requirements, such as requiring workers, only being able to be performed in the dark, or needing cold temperatures
research buildings are sometime reused to craft other recipes

Building and recipes

These make up the majority of the technology upgrades. Each of these upgrades either:

unlocks a useful end product or structure, and any new recipe needed to create it
provide an alternative way to create an already useful good

Critically, new recipes are never unlocked without a use. This avoids "dead" upgrades, and encourages players to immediately play with the research they unlocked.

Player tools

Several categories of upgrade belong here:

basic upgrades
- alerts
- undo/redo
- pipette
- clipboard
- basic encyclopedia
- terraforming
- map
informational upgrades
- local, regional and global production statistics
- recipe lookups
- organism statistics
- soil and water statistics
- signal overlays
- geographical status overlays
- unit goals and actions
- expanded encyclopedia entries
simulation sandbox upgrades
- this is a special creative mode, used to test designs quickly and at no cost
- time is paused while in this mode
- further upgrades unlock the ability to further modify environmental conditions, speed up time, get more space and so on
- production planner capabilities belong in this tree
quality-of-life upgrades
- blueprints
- customizable alerts
- map notes
complexity upgrades
- domestication
- guided evolution research
- maximum number of strains of each species
- tame and perform guided-evolution research on multiple species at once
- complex game mechanics unlocked via guided-evolution research
- research queues

Types of Technology

Technology is split into several variants in order to provide more diverse resource sinks and gate technology behind mastery of prerequisite systems. Each variety presents a puzzle that teaches a lesson about an area of the game through the ingredients required and the crafting requirements of the research recipe.

Some technologies may require multiple distinct varieties of research, and may depend on research from other trees.