According to my stats I unlocked The Express Dark Colony achievement 23 Aug, 2016. It's the most difficult one and it was naturally the last one that i got.

Yesterday I decided to do it again but this time without loading an earlier savegame when things went wrong, I wanted to play through it in one session.

After, admittedly, a few false starts (I wasn't happy with the positioning of my first O2 generator), I managed to get to 300 by day 65 in one go.

There's different ways of playing this game, but this is how I did it:

1) The usual setup of the base, but with a size 7 solar panel and size 4 collector. (You will need 1 solar panel for each collector). I don't build a dorm immediately, but instead opt for a 12 pad bio-dome to be able to get more people in quick: 30% biologists and 70% workers. I keep processing plants and sickbay close to the mines, canteen close to the bio-dome. I get up to 20 people in.

2) I boost metal production and start building alternatively power and water on the one hand, and much needed structures on the other: dorm, storage, factory, lab, oxygen etc.

3) As soon as I have created a second bio-dome, I start bringing in more people. I slowly surround the landing pad with buildings, because I'm going for the corral solution to deal with intruders. This allows me to save resources and get into robot production faster.

The number of solar panels you have to build on this planet beggars belief: dozens of them in quick succession. I build them to the south, close to the spare part production, and the collectors to the east. The rest of the base to the north.

I keep boosting my metal and bioplastic production with more workers, mines, processing plants (12 metal processors, and 8 bio-plastic, 5 mines with priority setting eventually), all the while bringing in more colonists (you have to keep them coming almost continually.)

4) I reach 100 people by day 40 (I believe) but it's alright because things are going to speed up from here. I've got a massive overproduction, and bots flitting all over the place. It allows me to build things quickly but I also have to be careful. You don't have traders and can't trade anything away. I start shutting things down. Shuttles are coming in faster and faster, I have to keep an eye on them, while at the same time dealing with issues that crop up, meteors are becoming a problem, need to build lasers, need more storage, need more dorms, more canteens, need less bioplastic. It gets frantic. In my haste I accidentaly delete an entire bio-dome when I just want to delete a pad. I take the opportunity to delete all the resources.

I start switching back to 1x speed occasionally to give myself more time to think.

The corral solution works well but toward the end of an express colony it gets too cumbersome, you hardly have time for anything else. I should have built a funnel in the second phase of the game, I had plenty of resources then.

Just before the end I hit a snag. At 293 population at day 62 the shuttles stop coming. Overpopulation stress is taking it's toll. I'm also having oxygen shortages in spite of my good care. I quicky add small bars and multi-domes and set my robot production from 80 to INF.

At day 65 a shuttle finally arrives, naturally full of intruders.

They stand there on the landing pad, neatly in a row, while real colonists start arriving too. Fortunately the intruders need to keep up appearances that they are innocent visitors and don't attack the colonists. They stand peacefully side by side, except that the intruders who arrived first are running out of oxygen sooner than the others. There they go down, so sad.

Quick, quick, quick let in the others, they're already turning yellow, some of them. While they queue at the airlock some of them turn orange even.

Sigh of relief, we made it.