This shit looks absolutely amazing. I have been transfixed lately by YT clips of people’s builds and how they figured out how to get them done.
In this clip, the builder makes a curve in a road (and builds a ton of other shit) by placing a series of blocks, rotating each subsequent block one “click” and overlapping with the previous. The game merges elements when they overlap so you end up with a curve.
With that built, you can then “snap” roads or foundations to the blocks in the curve, and the game will crop the square road elements to fit inside the blocks. Take away the blocks (everything is 100% recyclable) and you have a curved road.
Did the devs think of this or did players just figure it out? Either way, mind blown.
I think I have the logical and logistical mind to play this game, but my creative skills are sorely lacking.
I can confirm that Satisfactory plays perfectly well on CrossOver on my Mac. I don’t know how it will fare when the graphics demands of all those whizzing conveyor belts etc. gets going, but for now it looks awesome.
As to the game, it’s clear it’s going to be a grind early on. You’re dropped onto the planet with zero resources, so you have to build everything literally from scratch, by hand.
I’ve only just started, but I think I’m still quite a while away from my first automation.
In my first Satisfactory session yesterday (about 4 hours, tbh) I got the hub base fully upgraded, unlocked all Tier 1 equipment and had automated the production of iron plates, iron rods, screws, copper wire, power cables and concrete, with which I can build all the machinery and infrastructure unlocked at this point.
The problem is that this early on you are reliant on biomass burners for power, and they will chew through a full tank of biomass in about 1 hour of real time depending on the power load. As my production is necessarily scattered to be close to the raw materials, that means having to run around to put more biomass in the hoppers to keep production running.
I can’t wait until I unlock coal so that I have a sustained power source. Fuck the planet.
My company is closed today for Election Day, so I have been spending my free time exploiting the resources of an alien planet.
The logistics are already getting complicated. I am now in a position to start crafting some complicated products, but my existing set-up (which is pretty decent IMHO) is in the wrong place as it’s not expandable and too far away from some of my resources.
I am on the cusp of my first “proper” factory layout, and I am struggling to figure out where to start.
This is the shit I’m talking about. A Mk 1 Miner will produce 60 units of iron ore per minute which is then smelted into ingots and the ingots are then “constructed” into various items. The Constructors are limited to what they can intake per minute depending on what they are making, so you have to Mark Watney the shit out of it and use the Judean People’s Front splitters and mergers to feed the right amount of materials into the machines.
If you mess it up, it will cause a hold up that will back up into the machine before and the machine before that until everything is running at the pace of the slowest machine.
So I’m making production line models on a spreadsheet.
Now that I have unlocked Assemblers, I can take things like iron plates, rods and screws and assemble reinforced iron plates that are needed to build constructors. So I will have to divert some of the production going to storage into one of those, as long as I can the make the numbers work.
Who knew that exploiting the natural resources of a planet was so complicated?
I have been keeping my brain busy today to avoid dwelling on other things. Here’s my uber-optimized production line for “Smart Plating”. I have to make 1,000 of the fucking things and they come off the line at a rate of 4 per minute.
[Edited to show improved logistics for the produced screws]
FYI, the little numbers around the outside of the items of machinery are the maximum inputs/outputs per minute. I have those because the entire thing is connected by formulae, so if I upgrade any of the machinery at some time in the future it will calculate all the way across.
The trick is to have everything flowing in sync as a backup anywhere in the system will flow all the way back to the start. I do have a surplus of 10 iron plates, and 1 each of reinforced iron plates and rotors, but I am using storage bins as buffers to collect the surplus and I can use those for other things later or just forget about them.
I have unlocked coal, and it’s all over 1km away from my (current) manufacturing base. It’s also surrounded by beasties that kill me, so I have now upgraded to unlock the Xeno Blaster, which should take care of that problem.
The bigger problem is that there is no room to build near the coal deposits, so I think I’m going to have to build a power supply then run terribly long power lines to my base.
Also, I can report that running Satisfactory in CrossOver on an M2 Mac mini works just fine, even when running a VPN simultaneously. I can also report that the TrackPad works just fine with the game. The only thing missing is the scroll wheel button, which is used to copy a piece of machinery during building. I am nowhere near advanced enough yet for that to be a problem.
I brought concrete production up to my main base of operations, which is now about the size of an Astrodome parking lot. This was so that I could take the steel beams I’m now making and create Concrete Encased Beams. Oh, and I’m making steel now.
My whole plant is about to shut down because I have run out of wood for biomass production, but that’s ok because I have very little coal anyway - just what I could carry in the little runabout I’ve built.
Tomorrow’s job is going to be recording a drivable path for runabouts to go back and forth collecting coal from the coal seams. That’s the quickest way I can think of to bring coal into my plant before I am able to build a train network.
The steel production is important because that will allow me to build transmission towers so that I can build coal-fired power stations near the coal deposits and zip the juice across country to my base.
