I had overbuilt my power supply and my whole system kept tripping. So I built more coal generators, but that strained my coal supply lines. So I built my first train.
The logistics of setting it up are very finicky, and I got it wrong numerous times. There are three freight cars so I need three freight platforms at each end, and all 6 have to be set properly to load/unload and what the cargo is.
Once I got it right, the coal started flowing freely, such that I could increase the production at the coal seams to allow for future expansion. The great thing about trains in the game - as in real life - is that if I want to add more capacity, I just add an extra freight car.
I am now cranking out over 2,000MW of power with a baseline consumption of 800MW and a peak of 1,500MW. So I have some room to build at least one more large factory before I run into capacity trouble again.
Bonus: train lines run power, so now that I have connected the base power station to the coal head, those remote generators out there are now connected to the main system.
With a train network, you have to name the stations in your system so you can direct the trains where to go. I have only two right now, so one is called “Selhurst” and one is called “Crystal Palace”. Both are real stations. You also have to name the train; given that this one is hauling coal, I called it “Robbie”.
There’s nothing for it; I’m going to have to go for oil. The next round of items to be shipped up to my orbit-bound overlords involve plastics and rubber, which are by-products of oil refining. I have found a deposit (akin to oil sands) and now have to figure out how to exploit the resource.
Now that I have access to trains, I think the trick here is to build a remote refinery - that hopefully will be self-sustaining powered by fuel from the process - and ship the refined products back to base. The rule of thumb is that you want to ship the lowest volume form possible that’s not too high up the production tree as to preclude manufacture of all possible derivatives.
For example: I am mining the gold substitute “Caterium” at a remote site. Like all other ores, nothing can be done with it until it is in ingot form, and it takes 3 units of the ore to make 1 ingot. As I can transport 3x of the metal in ingot form, I set up smelters at the mining location.
However, I am also remote-mining Quartz, which can be broken down into Quartz Crystals and Silica (used to make display screens and windows respectively). Both can be made only from the raw Quartz. While 5 units of Raw Quartz becomes 3 units of Crystals, 3 units of raw Quartz becomes 5 units of Silica. That’s 8 units to produce 8 units so it is a wash volume-wise but, as it’s far easier to transport a single resource, I opted to transport the raw form and process at my base.
ETA: I have gone this far building everything from scratch on site. The game allows you to build blueprints - of anything - so you can make modules that snap together on site. So you can make a run of, say, 4 smelters with a floor, a sub-floor for logistics and all the power connections already made. Then, on site, you just snap together the modules, laterally or stacked (or both) and only have to make the intra-connections between modules and the external hook-ups.
I should have done this when I built my main base factory. That build has the cleanest logistics I have set up to date, but it’s still terrible (and gets worse with each additional resources or production line).
I think I need to focus on putting the processing into modules/buildings and have the inputs and outputs on the outside. Trying to incorporate them into the structure means everything has to be custom which means I am going to fuck up which costs time and brain cells to fix. With blueprints, you already know that all the internal connections are correct, so troubleshooting is vastly reduced.
What I really need is a good Landman who can secure possession of the real estate from the existing occupants. Currently I have to do it using pipe bombs and a spring-loaded gun that shoots shards of rebar.
Before I had some rudimentary weapons, I was using a suped-up cattle prod or running the fuckers over with my tractor (very effective against the spider-thingies).
Digger. Probably a dillo, maybe a possum or raccoon. I’ve never seen a skunk around here, so I doubt that’s it. The thing that really annoys me is that they presumably wouldn’t do this if they weren’t finding grubs or something, so I’m going to have to solve that problem, too.
Once I get this starter set-up running, it’ll produce some Plastic and Rubber with a surplus of over 600MW of power. All it takes is for me to get it running is 160MW to crank the Extractor, two Refineries to make at least 30 units/pm of Oil Residue and one Refinery to convert that into at least 20 units/pm of Fuel.
That will require 160MW, which I can get from 6 Biomass Burners, which is not a problem as they’ll only need to burn for a few minutes. Once the Fuel is coming through, I can fire up a Fuel Generator which will be pushing out 250MW, so I can then start to bring the rest of the plant online (and phase out the Biomass Burners).
I have struck a veritable bonanza of crude at this location so, with all that excess power, I can start to produce a ton of oil products that I need for the next upload. I can also start diverting coal from power generation to the production of steel and other products.
Before I get to into the logistics of moving all my oil products up to my base, I need to scout this area for other resources. It might be worth moving all that shit down here (which means I get to rebuild properly this time).
ETA: A quick check with the scanner, and there is fuck-all else down here except oil.
Well I got the oil refinery/powergen up and running…eventually.
At first, I couldn’t get enough fuel flowing to keep even one generator online. I checked and double-checked the pipeline connections, but to no avail. I had raised the pipes overhead for ease of access to the machines, so I re-worked the entire pipeline system - crude to refineries, oil residue from the those refineries to the fuel refineries and fuel from the oil refineries to the generators - and still the same problem.
Then I realized that the oil residue flow was much lower than it should be and needed to be. I tried adding more Biomass Burners to the system to bring online more oil residue production, but still no improvement! Then I noticed that only one of the crude refineries was actually running. While the others were “online” they sat idle. WTF? Oh…
I had omitted to connect the belts for the solid output from the crude refineries. They were not producing oil residue because they couldn’t export the solid product. I connected the belts and voilà! That was a good amount of time wasted on missing the point entirely.
Satisfactory is fun for me, but it’s not very ADHD-friendly.
Leveling up is hard. I have just cranked up my first Manufacturer. It has four inputs and everything it needs for what I’m making are the product themselves of assembled parts.
To give you an idea how hungry it is, I have been taking Iron Rods and breaking them down into Screws yielding 200/pm. For this whole time, that has been more than enough to keep all the manufacturing I have running smoothly with enough left over to fill a storage container with an excess being sent to the Sink.
This Manufacturer requires 240 Screws/pm. On its own. To produce Heavy Modular Frames at a rate of 2/pm. TWO!
One of the other required components is Enclosed Industrial Beams (iron ore and coal combined to make steel ingots, which are converted into steel beams and then encased in cement). I stopped making this when I broke down my original layout, and I have enough to make about 100 of these damned frames, which is what I need for now.
I can’t believe I have already outgrown my “new” factory. fml
It’s time to get serious about blueprints and modularization. I’ve been winging this for too long - resulting in nonsense like with the fuel production lines - and shit is getting too real. I can no longer live on the resource production at my base alone, and supply chain logic says that I should ship the lowest volume form of parts needed.
If I’m going to be making items that come off at a rate of 2 per minute, but take in 240 screws per minute, it’s insane to be moving the screws to the machine; take the machine to the screws. This is going to mean redesigning my storage location and building a large truck depot.
The good news is that I have a new weapon in this fight against ever-increasing production demands: a radar tower. Not just any radar tower, this one expands the utility of my resource scanner, so I can find clusters of resources where I can build remote factories to produce items from raw materials to as far along the production chain as possible.
Where blueprints come in is that I can build entire production lines, or modules of production lines, in a test bed and, once proven, I can slap them down as a whole. This will save me time and (hopefully) eliminate time-consuming dumbfuckery like forgetting to connect one or two belts that gum up the works and take literally hours to troubleshoot.
But, first, I have to get off coal power because I need the coal for steel production now. I need to connect my refinery area to the main grid, and then expand power production to offset the coal-generators. Should be relatively easy as I have an ocean of oil and only 8 fuel-powered generators are enough to replace all 24 coal-fired generators.
I was out scavenging for power slugs (an important local species that can be slaughtered to improve production) and I came across this view of my coal-powered generators and the associated train line.
As this is all going to go away soon, I captured it here for posterity (and to show that my logistics isn’t always a clusterfuck).
There are online tools for Satiscractory (like Satisfactory Calculator) to help you figure out the resources, equipment and power needs to create a particular number of a particular thing. Some even give you the process in a customizable flowchart.
But fuck that. I have been doing this with “pen and paper” (my own spreadsheets) and that is how I plan to continue. However, now that I am into the “manufacturer” stage of the game, where parts are being made from parts that are made from parts, I needed something better than endlessly checking the game’s internal database.
As this week is dead as a dodo at work, I have spent the day creating my own cross-referencing database of parts and their required resources. So now, if I want to make Computers - which comprise Plastic, Cables and Circuit Boards (which themselves require Copper Sheets and Plastic) - I don’t have to go rummaging through the database trying to figure out what I need.
My database tells me that one manufacturer making 5 Computers per minute will need 40 Plastic, 20 Cables and 10 Circuit Boards, which breaks down further to 60 Copper Ore and 120 Crude Oil and no other raw materials. If I want to make more than 5, I can update the output number and the resource requirements will calculate through.
I can also now identify clusters to see which items need to be made close to which resources and/or other items. For example, all of the electronic parts, not unsurprisingly, require copper and plastic, and are the only things I can make right now that need Caterium. So I need to build my own Silicon Valley somewhere that is close to those three resources.
As the Ficsit overlords demand more and more complex orders, I can easily add them to the database.
