Lately this thread has served as something of a cautionary tale for me because I don’t need another game into which I could easily and obsessively sink hundreds of hours. I saw Satisfactory was on sale on Steam and said, “Not today, Satan.”
Then I was browsing my library on my Steam Deck last night and there’s Satisfactory staring right up at me. WTF? Forgot that I got it as a gift that I asked for about a year ago.
Time to go sink another hundred hours into Rimworld to compensate.
Satiscractory is the classic boiling frog scenario.
Just saw that Satiscractory won the Golden Joystick for PC Game of the Year.
It sounds like a great example that immersion can take many forms.
I’m not a fan of first person shooters (I play RDR/RDR2 in third person view). The first person perspective of Satisfactory is often frustrating to me, but I understand the reason behind it.
The immersion of it, though, is undeniable.
Here, accidentally, Steve Jobs describes perfectly what it’s like to play Satisfactory.
I have a grid. Every part of my production effort is now connected to every other part of my production effort. I am generating power in 3 different locations, but now I can check on my entire grid from anywhere, so I know how much juice I have to play with when adding new production lines.
I have (finally) automated manufacture of the last item required to complete the Phase 3 order to go up the space elevator. I “only” need 100, but its feed comes from 2nd and 3rd generation manufactured parts, which makes it a beast just to squeeze out 1 per minute.
One odd thing about this as a video game is that it’s ok - in fact, often beneficial - to walk away and let it play by itself for a while. With the things I’m making now, it often takes a long time before supply chain issues will manifest themselves so just letting it go for a bit can both prove up your production lines and add to the total produced.
I have been tempted to leave it running over night, but that feels a bit like cheating.
This is a crazy thing.
The Phase 4 big order involves items made from aluminum. Aluminum requires a three-step process just to get to Aluminum Ingots.
Bauxite & Water to produce Alumina Solution & Silica
Alumina Solution & Coal to produce Aluminum Scrap & Water
Aluminum Scrap & Silica to produce Aluminum Ingots
There’s potential for re-use of both Water and Silica in this progression, but the numbers are complicated so this shit is going to take some sciencing.
Aluminum production is frying my brain. Apparently only about 5% of players complete Phase 3 and a lot of those quit when presented with the logistics required to make the aluminum shit needed for Phase 4.
I can see it. Bauxite where I am based is way up on top of the highest cliffs and surrounded by stubborn beasties and uranium nodes that will kill you in seconds of blundering up to one.
Then you need water, coal, copper and quartz in order to turn the bauxite into aluminum parts, and they are all nowhere near the bauxite.
The Phase 4 machines all cannibalize production of other machines and parts in addition to the aluminum content. I think my first job should be to build out my infrastructure and improve my production at base.
I have talked about the blueprint designer, but I have yet to get serious with it. You can build entire “factories in a box” inside it (see below). This means that I can take down my existing production lines and replace them with one click.
My current production effort is as if Frankenstein’s monster went on Nickelodeon and got covered in spaghetti. It’s nowhere near fit for purpose if I plan to press on.
I use blueprints. I plan it out. I line everything up.
And it still ends up looking like something the cat threw up.
If you are wondering why no Satiscractory update, it’s because there’s no new Satiscractory activity.
I need to completely re-do my existing fabrication lines and, with the need to add much more remote resource gathering and/or remote fabrication, I will also need to upgrade and expand my rail network.
There is no point in starting on this until I have at least a basic suite of blueprints, because hooking up the belts and pipes to rows and rows of machines is tedious and ripe for fuck ups.
This is an opportunity to start out on a new path with better organization and design. So, as Gandalf would say, this is the deep breath before the plunge.
Following the announcement by NYPD that they believe the shooter is no longer in the city, they have issued a photo of a new person of interest.
Satiscractory update: my blueprints are shit.
They don’t line up and they don’t stack properly. I laid down a “factory” using my blueprints and had to spend hours trying to find/fix the connection issues and re-do the performative structural elements to make it even somewhat cohesive.
I suck at this.
From what I am understanding, you should be named to Trump cabinet position very, very soon!
Rapaciously exploiting an ecosystem in the most slapdash and incompetent manner? I should be the poster child for his cabinet.
One element of Satiscratory that I haven’t touched on is the Mercer Spheres and the Dimensional Depot. The spheres are alien tech left over from a prior civilization that are littered over the map, typically in hard to reach places with beasties hanging around. They are worth grabbing though.
The tech allows you to, essentially, upload resources and items to the cloud. Food, tools, parts, finished items, you name it - it can go into the Dimensional Depot. Anything uploaded is available to you wherever you are on the map. It is extremely handy. I mention it now because I have amassed enough spheres to be able to make proper use of it.
It has limitations as to upload speed and capacity, but these can be increased at the cost of spheres. So like everything else in the game, it’s a balancing act between having something now or building to the future. Ultimately, there are more spheres in the game than you need to max out storage and have a dedicated upload for every item, but the map is huge so it takes time to ramp up.
Right now I am focusing on setting up dedicated uploads for the basic parts that are used to build other parts. That way, if I get caught out needing something when I’m far from base, I can always craft what I need from parts that are constantly being refreshed into the cloud. As I acquire more spheres, I can expand the items that have their own upload.
In case you were wondering, while it is possible to shove everything up through one uploader, it’s not a good idea. The problem is that, once a particular item is full in the cloud, it will block anything behind it from going up.
I have 4 “pure” iron nodes not far from my base camp that are just begging to be exploited. “Pure” means that a single Mk 2 Miner will produce 240 units of iron ore per minute (without over/under-clocking).
Meanwhile, all of the Modular Frames I am making are currently being used to make uprated Heavy Modular Frames, and I need the basic frames for construction of certain machinery, notably at this time a Geothermal Generator. I can make them by hand at a crafting bench, but where’s the fun in that?
I have just devised a factory to take exactly 240 iron ore per minute and turn that into 10 Modular Frames per minute with nothing left over. I feel like a pro. Of course, I always do until I start building and then everything goes to shit and it looks like a pile of junk held together by conveyor belts.
Now, what to do with the other 3 iron nodes as well as the copper and limestone nodes nearby…
As to the Geothermal Generator, I have found some hot springs near a sulphur node. I will need sulphur later on to make Sulphuric Acid (for batteries) but, in the short term, it can be combined with coal to make Gun Powder, which can then further combined with Heavy Oil Residue to make all manner of explosive weaponry.
I can use the Geothermal Generator to power a Miner and then belt the proceeds to the nearby Coal head to make gun powder. For now, I’ll upload that into a Dimensional Depot so that I will have it in my personal inventory and can throw it into a machine at my oil refinery - at the opposite end of my map - to make the explosive ammo (you can only retrieve items from the cloud into your personal inventory, so you cannot use it in a fully automated process).
However, I will soon have access to drones, which are perfect for transporting relatively small amounts over long distances. Once I can do that, I can fly the gun powder to the refinery, automate ammo production and upload it to the Dimensional Depot so that I’ll never be unarmed out in the wild.
I occasionally have a pure iron noodle
Fun fact: when laying pipe, two of the build modes are “noodle” and “horizontal to vertical”.
No way is that an accident.