Would it be possible to rework some aspects of the mods progression? I was thinking there should be an archotech terraformer. It would slowly convert normal stone into archostone. Which can then be broken down into archotech mass. Other mine-able things would be converted into archometal (including components). This archo metal could then be converted into fragments or converted into other materials like steel, plasteel and so on with some byproduct of archomass. Soil, sand, and so on would be converted into archo soil which would have 200% fertility and the only way to get that soil is with the terraformer. If you want more soil faster you would still need to make the primitive soil using fragments. Plants would also be converted into archotech equivalents of their base game variant. Maybe healroot would turn into archohealroot and so on, archotrees could be cut down for archowood. And archohealroot would be nessasary to make archomedicine. Your existing structures would be converted as well over time. Wood floors would become archowood floors. Walls would become either archomass walls if made with stone, archowood if made with wood, and archometal walls for all the other things. Basically they would become as if you just built those walls with the equivalent material. But if you want the indestructible archotech walls you would build those yourself once you have the materials. It could be a very slow conversion process and maybe there can only ever be one on a map at a time. Maybe about half the speed a defoliator ship spreads its radius or even less.


We could have a special start where you wake up as a lone archotech who is supposed to activate the terraformer before going into cryptosleep but you got distracted and forgot to turn it on before you went to sleep. Now 2000 years later and you wake up to find your terraformer still off and the planet is still just normal.

Another option could be a quest. Where a normal colony would find fragments of a map (kinda like for the archonexus) which eventually lead to the terraformer which spawns in the center of its map and can be settled. Maybe with a good chunck of the map already converted since by this point you would likely already have most of the tech researched to make use of the materials.