I vote for following the cave in all directions untill our energy production meets our storage/ we discover something interesting.
Sounds good, with our current flow we can assimilate over 50 squares a cycle though so a couple of cycles doing that means we will probably need to expand storage again.
we don't want to fill the cave eith low quality cristals. what I sugest is that we asimulate mater along the edge of the cave, as much as posible, then when we have it completly sourounded make a layer of low quality crystal to help keep it from colapsing and to provide an incubator for midquality crystal. we then grow in from the outside.
As a mid quality crystal replaces, and must be surrounded by, low quality ones then growing from the inside out is actually more efficient. Currently we can, depending what 'surrounded' means, either already convert a low to mid, just above our current one, or grow two more low and then convert.
@cerapa when you said surrounded did you mean the 4 cardinal directions or including diagonals for all 8?
Edit: When we built a medium crystal did the construction material come out of the newly assimilated medium density matter and had to be use the turn we assimilated or does the fact we've use 2 construction out of our 47 medium density supply mean we have 2.7 to play with?