Use blueprints for roads and rail, everyone said. It makes life so much easier, everyone said.
Blueprints do not snap together. You have to eyeball the “connection” on all three axes and then use the micro-nudge feature that is only available with a game mod. The trick basically is to position the blueprinted item adjacent enough that you can’t tell that it’s not snapped together. Now imagine doing this on an elevated rail line…
Even then, if you line it up perfectly, the rail lines aren’t connected. If you try to run a train over these approximated connections it would either derail or stop at the join. You have to delete some of the track to make a proper, snapped connection for the game to know it’s a contiguous rail line.
Blueprints are great for things like blocks of machines - like laying down rows of smelters to make ingots - because you can use the foundation tiles to line up everything. You build the blueprints with all the internal belt and power connections - the true time-saver - so then you just have to make the blueprint-to-blueprint connections for them to be properly hooked up.
I wasted far too much time last night building a solid looking 5 foundation tile-long section of double rail line with structurally sound-looking undergirding, only for it to be impossible to use in the “real” world. Once I abandoned that project, in about that same amount of time I built an extended line of double rail (sans undergirding for now) between two multi-platform stations.
Fun Fact: as soon as I connected one of the stations to power, it electrified all the new rail lines and blew my grid. I am going to have to build out a lot more generating capacity before I go any further. This is the classic Satiscractory conundrum of progress coming at a cost.
I’m starting to think that Satiscractory is just an elaborate personality test.
I try to build everything as compact as possible and maximize the resources at hand. I aspire to those long-time players who build their factories integrated into the landscape, letting the topography dictate the form of their buildings.
Others just brute force the thing. There is one YTer who has built a platform the size of the Pacific and has run along it an ocean of conveyor belts; one each for every resource in the game. His entire game is about drawing resources from all over the map to this location, and then building all the production alongside this belt-a-palooza.
Others, like the guy with the train vid posted above, just Jackson Pollack the whole thing.
No approach has any greater or lesser merit in terms of the game. As long as the FicsIt overlords are getting their goodies, you are “winning”. How you do it says nothing about the game and everything about you.
Trains are power hogs in this game. I added 3,000MW of power, and they took up almost all of it. I haven’t even started running trains yet (that won’t increase to power draw as the entire network is already fully charged).
It’s a little daunting knowing that I have to break my existing logistics in order to transfer collection / delivery from the trucks currently running to the trains. It shouldn’t be that big of a deal, but somehow it just is.
One side benefit of running train tracks is that they act as power conduits so I have been able to take down the runs of transmission towers. Also, the tracks charge the Hoverpack, so I can fly wherever there are rails.
My power crunch is solved for now. I have been busy avoiding completing my train network, though, futzing around setting up the production lines for the Phase 4 space elevator order; which is a fucking bastard.
The parts required - in significant volumes - require 5 or 6 generations of production to achieve. I don’t have the logistics in place to build one of those mega factories you see on YT with thousands of units of raw materials being processed per minute, so I have taken the slow road.
If I need 500 of a particular item, and it comes out of one machine at 0.75 per minute, but I can sustain the surprisingly large input demand required for such a meagre output, then so be it. It’ll take 7 hours of game time to fill the quota at that rate, but I can be doing a lot of other stuff in the meantime (plus I can cheat and just let the game run while I’m working or not even at my desk).
While the trains have been neglected, I have been busy collecting spheres for cloud upload and I now have everything I need to build machines, logistics and infrastructure being uploaded. Also, I have grabbed more hard drives from crashed pods so I have some more alternative recipes which can come in very handy. And while I’m on an extended scavenger hunt, the machines back at the factory are churning away, slowly filling the orders.
System Update: at the risk of dooming myself, my Mac and, more importantly, the CrossOver skinny Windows game platform, are performing admirably. I have experienced some brief stuttering on two or three occasions, but otherwise it has been rock solid.
My Mac has no trouble handling my regular Mac stuff, Citrix for work and this game simultaneously, which means I will need to find another excuse to buy a new M4 Mac mini.
Train lines hooked up and running. All of the crappy, floating roads have been dismantled. All the train tracks and stations have performative undergirding.
Here’s probably the most extreme of my stations. There’s a big drop to get in here, and I am pulling in resources from above at the back left, so I just stuck it up on monster stilts.
I am in Phase 5 now, and dealing with Tier 9 machines, including particle accelerators and quantum encoders. Early game machines, like smelters and constructors, use 4 or 5MW each. A particle accelerator when it’s gets going - repleat with thoroughly satisfying display of sparks and arcing - uses up to 1500MW. Just one machine. And it’ll spit out ones of items a minute while doing it.
Also, the resource usage of these new machines is next level too. I have to make Diamonds, which I do by running Coal through Cameron Fry a particle accelerator. Cool, eh? Yeah, but it requires 200 Coal per minute. To put that in perspective, my original coal-fired power plant with 16 generators uses 240 Coal per minute for the whole thing.
I knew I was over-producing Coal. Still, I checked on my supplies at the rail head where the coal comes in and levels were holding. Good to go. Until my whole grid shut down when the coal-fired power generation went offline. I hadn’t considered that the coal levels were holding at my base because I was depleting the reserves at the production end. Once they were gone, the relative trickle of Coal coming through wasn’t enough to keep up with demand.
Luckily, I hadn’t been maximizing coal production and I had a whole nother coal node that was untapped. So I cranked production to 11 and got everything back online. I am starting to understand why streamers are building factory with inputs of resources totaling thousands per minute.
I have a number of projects to do in the game, all of which will take gobs of power. Nuclear power is an option for me, but it’s daunting, even at this point in the game where my logistical skills are much-improved.
To give you a flavor, here’s a short summary about what is needed to create a self-sustaining, waste-free nuclear power plant.
Now all of this is to make the fuel and then treat the waste to the point I can dump it into a Sink. It all has to flow smoothly and without interruption, otherwise the areas where the radioactive shit sits for too long become uninhabitable, even in a radiation suit. So if I dump my grid (like yesterday), I am in danger of turning my shiny power plant into Chernobyl.
All of this - which involves 12 different raw materials - is to produce 12,500MW gross. That doesn’t take into account the cost of the huge amount of manufacturing, including two Particle Accelerators that require 1500MW each, so I would guess that the net yield is going to be less than 9,000MW.
Conversely, I can make 12,500MW of power from the fuel yield of 375 units/pm of crude oil (and I get some plastic as a byproduct). If I infuse the fuel with coal and sulfur (called “TurboFuel”), I can triple the power output and if I infuse the TurboFuel with nitrogen (“RocketFuel”), I can double even that!
Coal, sulfur and nitrogen are all required in the nuclear power process, so that is a wash. Not needed in the oil-based process is iron, copper, steel, bauxite and a shit-ton of processing thereof.
The logistics of bringing in all the resources and components to where the uranium node is located is a nightmare all on its own. Maybe if I’m still needing more power once I have run out of crude then I’ll think about it, but I’m not there yet.
Here’s an accelerated run through Satisfactory, which I found amusing but that may be because his frustrations have been my frustrations.
It’s not really spoiling anything, as the goal of the game is to satisfy the ever-increasing orders from the orbit-bound overlords. How, where and when you go about getting it done is completely up to you, and that is the genius of the game.
Some of the alternate recipes you can find in this game (by collecting hard drives from crashed drop pods around the map) are shit. They save on abundant resources by substituting in limited resources, which doesn’t make a lot of sense in most cases. Others, however, are spectacular.
To wit, I was producing 120m3 per minute of Crude from an oil node, and this was being turned into 80m3/m of Fuel, which in turn was burned in generators to produce 1,000MW of electricity. I had the option to overclock the oil extractor to 300m3/m, which would’ve upped the power output to 2,500MW.
Now, however, I have access to two alternate recipes: one allows me to get more Heavy Oil Residue and less byproduct from the Crude, and another lets me dilute the HOR with water when producing Fuel to increase the yield. So now that same 300m3/m of Crude that would’ve generated 2,500MW is in actuality - because I tore down and rebuilt that part of my grid - generating 10,000MW.
Next up: TurboFuel. As mentioned previously, I can lace regular Fuel with coal and sulfur to produce TurboFuel. The advantage here is that regular Fuel burns at 20m3/m while TurboFuel produces the same power output while burning at 7m3/m; meaning that I can run more generators on the same liquid volume. Nearly 3x as many, in fact.
Amazingly for me, when I rebuilt this part of my refinery complex, I had the foresight to make space to run a train line right up through the middle of everything. I can bring Coal and Sulfur up from the south right into the middle of my refinery which will not only allow me to make an ocean of TurboFuel, it will allow me to automate the manufacture of munitions.
If I add in some Nitric Acid to the mix, which is next on the list, I will have the power to destroy an entire planet.
That grey pipeline snaking along the beach in the background is carrying Nitrogen to my Aluminium plant. I can take a tap off that line, add some Iron and Water to the gas, and I’ve got Nitric Acid…
A banner moment: I have just thrown the switch on the machine that is making the last part required to complete the last space elevator order. I need 200 Ballistic Warp Drives, and the machine cranks out a robust 1 per minute.
There are four items required to fulfill the Phase 5 order, and I have completed two of them. The other two are churning away and should be fulfilled in about 3 hours more.
To get here has been a test. These Phase 5 items are all 4th or 5th generation part that combine multiple 3rd or 4th generation parts. And that’s not counting the aluminium parts that require three stages of processing just to get to aluminium ingots before I can even make the parts.
Because these last items are sucking on literally every part of my production infrastructure, it has stress-tested everything and much of has broken down. For example: I ran out of Computers, which shut down production on multiple “child” parts and “grandchild” parts. Did I get the maths wrong, or is it something else?
The maths checks, so crawling through the production lines like John McLane at Christmas, I eventually find that I had omitted to upgrade the belt speed on the Plastic input to make an item that is used to make Computers. With that fixed, the machine that makes Computers was getting properly fed, but now Plastic was running dry elsewhere…
Rinse, repeat.
I long gave up trying to make my factory in any way shape or form “satisfactory”. It is an absolute nightmare of conveyor stacks, power lines and machines shoehorned onto platforms jutting out into mid-air. My goal of late has been simply to work with what I’ve got and get to the end (TWSS).
Absolutely I will play this game again. It has four suggested starting locations, each with their own benefits and challenges, so new starts will not be just a re-run like so many games. I have learned so much on this first play-through such that I should be able to avoid making such a chaotic mess, even though I suspect perfection is unattainable.
Lessons learned:
Go big: lay out massive floor plans for your production, you always need more space
Go tall: leave plenty of headroom between production floors for logistics
Go wide: don’t try and bring everything into one hub and then build all from that supply
Go local: build complete factories for complicated parts from the raw materials up in situ, and transport only the final item back to base
Go slow: don’t be in such a rush to fill parts quotas that you do so at the expense of logistics for later manufacturing
That main stack in the middle is virtually unnavigable inside due to the “logistics” moving parts around. There’s a whole nother stack just past it that you can’t see that is worse. The lower left is just a bunch of late-game machines plonked down and linked together in an effort to complete the space elevator order.
The few remote production sites I have are far more organized. This is going to be my plan for the next play-through: to make complete parts off-site and bring only the finished pieces to the hub for final assembly. It’ll take longer to set up, but it will pay off in the long run in both simplicity of troubleshooting and also being much more scaleable.
