Introduction
I was actually first introduced to FortressCraft Evolved years before I first played it; in late 2015, a friend had recently acquired it and streamed their gameplay to show me around. They gave me a copy of the game, but when I first launched it, I ran into a problem: The bloom/post-processing was so extreme that I could not actually see properly.
As a result, I ended up putting the game aside for "when it gets fixed".
Trying Again
Two and a half years later, in January 2018, and with a new graphics card (which might also have helped the bloom issue, as I was now on Nvidia hardware vs AMD), I decided to look at the game again, and this time things worked properly. The game had changed substantially, of course, but most of those changes were the fleshing out of the techtree and the creation of Frozen Factory, making the new playthrough better than the old one would have been anyways.I started with one randomly chosen world seed ("WorldFord"), which ended up going poorly; I was extremely unlucky with ore and cave locations (there were no caves even reaching iron level anywhere nearby, and most ore was quite a bit deeper than its normal generation range) and overall terrain (I was surrounded by very close hills on three sides).
The problem with nearby hills.
Very early on in that playthrough, however, I got a look at the tunnel nukers, which due to a quirk of perspective and animation, looked like a cute bug carrying a glowing ball, which inspired me to make a creature based on them for my mods (they actually ended up being turned into two creatures, the luma fly from ChromatiCraft and the Bomb Fly in Nauvis Day).
It looks so cute from this angle.
Fed up with that world, I ended up switching seeds to "Reika", and got extremely lucky. In particular, right near the CPH was a vast cave opening that led past iron and lithium veins, into the cold caverns, right next to another giant opening down to the lower caves, not far from a small gap into the toxic caves, thus connecting them all, with plenty of available ore of all types.
However, it was midway through this playthrough that I started to get disgruntled with some of the balancing; in particular, the cost explosion in T2 was very hard to manage, and I found myself strictly rationing things like blue LPTs and especially minecarts. As a result, I created my first mods, PainlessCarts, CheapTorches, and Cheap Explosives.
After that, progress continued as normal, with me firing the OET and getting ready to prepare for Frozen Factory. However, a major real-world disruption at the end of February shelved those plans, and I did not end up returning to the game until that July.
When I did, I resumed planning for FF, building a large clear area in the cold caverns near the aforemenioned opening, setting up lighting and anti-camobot turrets, and reinforcing my power supply. However, those plans never really came to fruition, due to several factors. One, I was getting simply bored of the game; two, I started having some serious issues with segments/chunks and blocks within them either not rendering properly, leaving ghosts behind, or not responding to things like mining.
Three, when I finally did decide to do a "test run" of the C5 by backing up my world, I went to go investigate a cryospawner, I accidentally placed a torch on it, which made it scream, count as dead as if hit by lava, and gave me the achievements and unlocks. It further continued to mark other "octants" as "dead", causing the remaining few to go completely out of control, covering hundreds of blocks in seconds. In effect, I accidentally speedran FF in under 60 seconds.
With that, I put the game down and moved onto other projects.
Returning to Completion
In late 2019, I decided to take another shot at the game, hopefully this time completing it properly. The first section, up to the OET, went even better than before; this was in part a result of the fact I now knew the scale required and could plan accordingly, but also because successive rebalances in the base game had made the costs and recipes both more appropriate and more conducive to proper automation.
After destroying all four overminds at the end of October, I spent a week building up my cold caverns and deep caves infrastructure - building rooms, a very robust power supply, and pre-prepared and insulated-from-cryo item transport logistics - before finally activating the C5.
Placing this decorative magma would come back to haunt me, and not because I fell in it.
It was at this time that I invented Room Environmentals, since I was growing increasingly exasperated with the fact that my allegedly-heated rooms still behaved as if they were freezing cold. Having just learned of a C#-patching tool called Harmony, somewhat akin to Java ASM, I vigorously applied it to temperature-related code all over FCE, ending up with a massively redesigned thermal and room system, RoomEnvironmentals. Now knowing how to do this, I did it again to address some other headaches of mine; most of these became FortressTweaks, while the ones rebalancing the LPTs became a standalone mod. I also started work on Cryopathy, but that mod never reached a complete state.
Indeed, my time with FCE was already drawing to a close; I destroyed my first cryospawner after a short while, and was too burned out (no pun intended) to continue.
Not helping matters was that the very next day after that, I suffered a partial drive failure which made any kind of play impossible, and which required spending more than a week simply backing up the remaining data and transferring all that onto a new drive.
Return From A Long Hiatus
I did not end up touching FCE again until the middle of January in 2022, having spent the intervening two years on content for a lot of other games, notably Minecraft, Portal, Factorio, Space Engineers, and Satisfactory. This playthrough was ultimately prompted by having completed a LPT-inspired power transfer block in my DragonRealm modpack, the design of which ended up spurring quite a lot of nostalgia for past FCE playthroughs.This time around ended up being largely the same as the last time, except for more aggressive building practices in the Cold Caverns during Frozen Factory, and more extensive construction at extreme depths. In particular, now armed with a more-complete-than-before Cryopathy, I expanded into the Magma Caverns, having cleared a huge region of lava in preparation for pushing past to the (modded) uranium below.
From a modding standpoint, the increased time spent in this save resulted in a much wider set of features for FortressTweaks, which when combined with more active development for Cryopathy, led to a major overhaul to how I do C# and Unity modding. This laid the groundwork for my extensive Subnautica modding that would come a couple months later.