Regarding fields

Bear with the noob here, but what are these fields of which they speak?

If you go to the overview section and look at the fraction in parenthesis to the right of "diameter" that is how many fields you are using/ how many fields you have. Everyones homeplanet has the same amount of fields (163). Fields determine how much you can build on your planet, so every building takes up one field. This includes everything under the resources tab (including storage) and everything under the facilities tab. Hope that helps

I cant believe I got this far and dont know jack, but yeah, thanks, learned a lot on these forums in just last 24 hrs

haha thats what there here for, I wish more of our new members used them to their advantage, theyd probably move up faster

Fields are the number of spots on a planet suitable enough to build things upon, such as your facilities and mines. For instance, deut synth need ocean spots, metal mines need rocky spots, crystal mines need mountains/volcanoes. Defenses do not use fields though.

Each slot has a range of fields available to them with slot 7/8 having the highest potential number fields with 1/12 having the fewest.

Fields limit how many structures/upgrades you can build on a planet. For example, you get a slot 1 planet with 50 fields. Slot 1 is usually for graviton research, so you need 12 fields for the research lab, at least 1 for the shipyard and at least 2 for the robotics factory. For the minimum requirements, you need 15 fields, so you have 35 more to speed things up. You want graviton quickly, so you upgrade robotics to 10, shipyard to 10 and nanite to 1. You then have 17 fields open for other uses, such as solar plants (so you don't have to build as many sats) and fusion reactors (same reason). You can only get 17 levels between them before running out of fields. Once you hit 50, you can't build any more buildings.

Thus planets with lots of fields are more desirable. The only way to increase the number of fields on a planet is with the terraformer facility. Each level of the terraformer gives you 5 more fields. Note that in order continue to expand, one field must remain available for the next level of the terraformer. This gets expensive quickly.

My most developed planet is using 123 fields of 223.

A note on moons: Moons always start with only 1 field. In order to make the moon useful, you have to build lunar bases. Each lunar base provides 3 fields, with 1 needed for the next lunar base. These are also quite expensive and so you rarely see moons with lots of fields. Moons have an absolute max number of fields, based on their size. Smaller moons have a lower max, and vice versa. While this sounds bad, people that have done the math know that even with small moons, it will take more than a person's life time to upgrade the lunar base high enough to reach that max. It will also require billions of resources to upgrade it that much.