For anyone finding this in the future, this question is now moot. As of version 0.15, purple science no longer requires you to gather Alien Artifacts. You can play the game without biters at all now if you want to. To disable biters completely, when generating a new map, go to Resource Settings and find Enemy Bases at the bottom of this list and set the size setting to "None".

@SergiiZaskaleta Beyond the GoL, I recently ran across a game of Pacman programmed in Factorio.

Yeah, once you have robots it can be worked around, but I thought I would mention it because in the early game it can be more of an annoyance to loose those relatively expensive materials.

Another thing that is currently lost is any red or green wires you have placed down, removing them destroys them presently. Hopefully they will fix that in the future.

If he is volatile I'm guessing he was starting the trouble and the guards were reacting to it. Check his needs, if he has a high freedom need being on permanent lock down would probably keep him constantly pissed off. Strange that moving him to minimum and back to protected custody seems to have fixed it, it might have been a bug that came out of a loop of some sort with the reclassification.

The new update that just landed now awards you gold for matches even if your chest slots are full. So, assuming that the the answers about the chests in the drop cycle not being skipped are correct, that would be another reason to keep playing aside from crowns. Also, the Crown Chests contain "twice as much" now, so that might also be a good reason to keep playing for crowns.

That and you may want to make your work regime longer too if you have room in your schedule.

+DMA57361 Thanks! I thought that was a factor but couldn't remember when it was added. I didn't include it since the laundry/cleaning cupboard wiki pages didn't mention it. Answer updated.