Video Games

[Limey (Ray Ward)]

I’m in the endgame now. Of the four items needed to fulfill the final Space Elevator order, I have already completed one (Nuclear Pasta, as this is a carry over from Phase 4) and I have already set up production of another - Biochemical Sculptors. I need 1,000 of the latter, so I’m just letting that line run and dumping the production into a storage bin. I will collect the number needed when I’m closer to completing the other items.

The other two items needed have very interconnected material requirements. They both draw heavily on parts that I am making already - which I had planned for - but they both get into things like Dark Matter and Excited Photonic Matter that I am not yet making.

Consequently, I have decided to make them both together in one final factory, which will be essentially a huge logistical base with a couple of machines to process the end products. Here’s what that looks like:

The green is the output, the brown is imported parts already being produced and the red is the new processing required. So I am looking at 10 machines total required to process all the inputs. They are all absolute hogs when it comes to power, but I am producing 110GW and currently using only 30GM sustained / 40GW max. Power is not going to be an issue here.

I already have some of the production set up for drone expert and some for rail export. Even though the inputs are in tiny numbers (because the volume of resources is already processed in making these late-game parts), I will still use trains for many of them as the infrastructure is already in place and the production as no other uses beyond feeding this factory. Plus, getting fuel to the drones is a whole other issue that I don’t want to deal with if I don’t have to.

But first, I have to do a tour of my existing factories to see what volumes I am producing, what it is being used for currently and what transportation method exists or is nearby. That way I know what my import dock will look like at the new factory.

[Lefty]

@Limey

I’m in the endgame now.

What will you do after this?

[Limey (Ray Ward)]

Given the pretty steep learning curve in this game, it’s entirely likely that I start again. There are four starting biomes in the game, of the two I have not used one is considered to be shit and the other to be the best for players with some experience.

The latter - the Northern Forest - is where I built my Supercomputer factory, and it is home to the most legendary starting location on the map. There are four pure iron nodes, two pure copper nodes and one pure limestone node, all within a few hundred metres of each other on the edge of a cliff. There is also quartz, coal and oil nearby, so it really has everything.

The challenge with this location is the verticality; that’s why it’s better for experienced players, which I think I can now consider myself to be. I know just from this play through that my building techniques and style has improved immensely; I cannot stand to look at the factories I built early on, and I completely rebuilt everything at my starting location. So beginning again with what I know now in a different location is going to make this a different game.

[Limey (Ray Ward)]

I mean, seriously, do you remember this shit?!

[Limey (Ray Ward)]

One wrinkle is the imminent arrival of Satisfactory 1.1. If I’m going to start the next run on the edge of a cliff, it makes sense to wait for the new version of the game that has an elevator available (as well as vertical splitters/mergers).

[Limey (Ray Ward)]

Final factory complete.

Five railway platforms and three drone ports bring in all the parts needed. Well, not quite all, as the game is not without a sense of irony. The second-to-last machine that makes Singularity Cells to feed the last machine that makes Ballistic Warp Drives, requires Iron Plates and Concrete. Those are two of the very first items you are able to make after being dropped from space in a pod.

In reality, I built this the wrong way around. I should’ve started with the end nearest the Space Elevator and worked backwards. Instead, the final parts for upload are farthest from the elevator, so I will just collect them and drop them in manually. Not very satisfactory, but better than trying to run two belts a mile back to the hub.

Now all I have to do is wait while these machines makes ones per minute of parts of which I need 250 each.

[Limey (Ray Ward)]

This is a cool shot, IHMO. In the foreground are my “starter” factories for basic iron parts (left) and copper parts (middle) - I did rebuild these mid-game. Off to the right is the mid-game factory onto which I bolted some late-game production lines.

Behind the Space Elevator and behind that is my final factory making the last two parts for upload. The contract between this and where I ended up first time through (see above) is astounding.

[Limey (Ray Ward)]

And just like that, it was done.

My overlords in orbit took all the product of my considerable labor, and fucked off.

Lessons learned this time:

• Make more and better blueprints;
• Plan for train platforms when making early factories;
• Ditto drones, and understand when to use which method; and
• Make Rocket Fuel asap, but save half to use as drone fuel.

On that last point, here’s how my grid ended:

I am making as much shit as I will ever make, and still using literally half the available power. Next time I will get into drones earlier, and have trains run fuel to drone hubs. I had drones flying only where one end or the other of a round trip had fuel available, but that was naïve.

What I didn’t understand before - and do now - is that you can daisy-chain drone routes, so that they can go from pick-up to drop-off to fuel to pick-up. So I can have drone “gas stations” around the map where the fuel arrives in bulk via train and the drones can swing by to refuel as part of a loop. So I can run drones from anywhere to anywhere, as long as there is a fuel stop in range.

[Limey (Ray Ward)]

Oh, and in case anyone is curious, here’s what the ending sequence looks like:

Satisfactory - End Sequence

I cannot stress enough how out-fucking-standing the sound design is in this game.

[Limey (Ray Ward)]

I’ve been trying to get a good snap that shows just how much I have blighted this landscape, but nothing really does it justice. Partly because my blight is dispersed and partly because the game does not render things past a certain distance.

Anyway, here’s a decent effort at it:

[Limey (Ray Ward)]

Satisfactory 1.1 comes out next week with a bunch of new toys including splitters and mergers that can be placed on vertical lifts, prioritized mergers, belt counters, placeable conveyor wall holes, vertical nudge (to assist in placing build items) and the elevator which looks very sophisticated with the ability to customize the button panel.

All stuff that will be useful for someone planning to build a base on the edge of a cliff.

What's in 1.1?

One other nice thing to me is the ability to deconstruct drop pod crash sites. It’s not the resources that this will yield - although this could be handy very early in a playthrough - but it means that you can clear a site once you’ve recovered the hard drive so you don’t waste time going back to it later only to find you’ve already been there.

[Limey (Ray Ward)]

Satisfactory 1.1 is out and people are finding lots of fun stuff that wasn’t included.

• Elevators carry power, which takes away a long-standing issue of carrying power up (or down) through a building without ugly wires and poles everywhere. Now you can just draw power from the elevator on each floor. It also has elevator musak, which is a fun touch.
• Blueprint connection mode means that it will connect the conveyor belts automatically when you put two blueprints side-by-side, removing the perennial issue of forgetting one of the connections and then not understanding why your factory isn’t working properly.
• But what is a bonus is that Blueprint connection mode works also for train lines, which is going to save a shit-ton of time. Previously, you could only blueprint the train platform/bridge and then you’d have to go back and run the train lines.

[Limey (Ray Ward)]

In other Satisfactory news, I have discovered where my saves are on my Mac; they are buried deep in the CrossOver app’s file tree. This allows me to do things like upload my save into the online tools that give me the ability to see what I have added to the map, which is not possible to do with the in-game map (which is why I would occasionally “lose” a factory).

Also, I can now copy my blueprints from save to save. So there is no longer a need for me to recreate lines of smelters and the like when I start a new play through.

Here’s how my last game ended up, and this is about 1/3rd of the map:

[AstrosFanInBigD]

I watched the finale video you posted earlier.

What’s the setup? Are your overlords in orbit above you?

[Limey (Ray Ward)]

@AstrosFanInBigD

What’s the setup? Are your overlords in orbit above you?

Yes. You’re dropped onto the planet on your lonesome, and then earn upgrades by sending constructed parts up to the station in orbit. The orders get larger and involve more complex parts as the game goes on until you complete the Phase 5 order at which point they fuck off and leave you stranded.

The game does a very good job of lampooning corporate culture, with the ending being the final joke at your expense.

The game does have a multi-player mode, where you work in collaboration with other players to achieve the same goals as a single player. It needs someone to host a server for your game which, as long as it’s live, players can drop in and out when they like so you don’t always have to be online at the same time.

[Limey (Ray Ward)]

I have not yet taken the plunge on Satisfactory 1.1. It’s free, but I assume there will be some bugs and people playing it now are helping the devs find and fix them. I will be using it for my next play through for reasons stated above, but it seems that these .x iterations of the game go from beta to proper in about 4-6 weeks.

I have, however, been trying to finish up the trophies in my old game. One of these involved producing some Encased Uranium Cells, with uranium being something I have literally avoided in the game. Whatever part of your factory into which you bring uranium will end up as radioactive and, as I have not needed the power, I have just whistled past that particular graveyard.

What I did know is that drones are ideal for uranium because it’s typically found off in some remote, inaccessible location. So I set up a production line to make the cells and had everything ready to go before sending the drone on its first uranium run.

As it turns out, I needn’t have been so worried. Yes it brings radiation, but nothing so dramatic that the hazmat suit cannot handle it. It doesn’t even use up the suit’s disposable filters very quickly, which was a worry (nothing comes without a cost in Satisfactory). So uranium is not as scary a beast as I had thought.

Now, the steps to get from Uranium Cells to usable fuel rods are many and steep. Here’s what it looks like to go from raw materials to fuel rods:

I did only the very top blister of production for the Encased Uranium Cells. The volumes of raw materials needed to make just 10 rods is staggering:

To put some of these numbers into perspective, the fastest belt speed available in the game is a Mk 6 - only available in Phase 5 - which carries 1200 items/min. That’s barely enough to move the uranium and not enough to move the limestone. When you start the game, the Mk 1 belt can move 60 items/min.

And, once the fuel rods are spent, there is a not insignificant amount of processing to be done to either turn it into a secondary nuclear fuel, power packs for drones or to make it safe to sink. You have to do something with it to stop it piling up and eventually backing up your power plant, so you have to have this figured out before you start running the thing.

The waste processing requires nitrogen, which I have recently discovered is easily transportable over long distances by drone. The trick is that drones will drop off and pick up at each end of a loops, so you can “bottle” nitrogen and send it on its way and have the drone bring back the empties for refilling. This was one of the hurdles I was struggling with before, and now I know it’s not really that much of a problem.

So the next go will be in 1.1, and will likely involve dipping my toe into the nuclear power pool.

[Limey (Ray Ward)]

ETA (yes, really, there’s more):

This is why the game is so replayable, IMHO. You are not hand-held by the game in any way and, without any external online help, you’d learn only from trial and many, many errors.

My first game was dominated by that ungodly mess of a mega base, where I was cannibalising production and papering over multiple cracks in order to limp to the end. But that’s because I did not understand properly the transportation logistics available.

Second time I embraced trains, but I learned why blueprints are so important, because you are repeating production lines many times that I built only once at my mega base. I also got sooo much better at building factories.

Now that I understand drones better, my third go will have much better transportation links and even better factories that are laid out with trains and drones in mind even before they’re unlocked in the game, instead of added them on later in whatever space was available.

I wonder what techniques and skills I will learn next time? Maybe how to encase my factories in walls and under roofs…

[Limey (Ray Ward)]

On thing about dispersed production - which is definitely the way to go, IMHO - is that you end up repeating production lines for the same basic parts over and over again. This is why you see a lot of content about “one click” factories.

These are blueprint factories that are designed to output a particular part if you feed it the necessary raw materials. The idea being that you put down the factory in “one click”, hook up the input(s) and power, and it will start spitting out what you need.

The blueprint designer is a blank space in which you build whatever you like - as complex or as simple as you care to make it - and then save it so that you can use it repeatedly. The Mk. 1 blueprint designer is a 16m x 16m x 16m cube; basically four foundation squares in each dimension. The Mk. 2 is 5 foundations and the Mk. 3 is 6 foundations. A result of this limitation is that blueprint factories tend to be boxy, especially those built in the Mk. 1 designer because there’s just not enough room to get fancy.

As an exercise, I decided to build a “one click” factory. I chose stators as the part as this requires three stages of production: ore to ingots; ingots to wire and pipe; wire and pipe to stators. Not only was this my first blueprint factory, it was the first one I have enclosed and decorated.

At the bottom right corner, there is a sliding door on both walls. Inside there is easy access to all the machines and a staircase to take you to the upper two floors. The input, output and power is all on the back side, which has a solid wall rather than the glass I have used on the other three sides.

Due to the height restriction of the blueprint designer, it’s pretty tight overhead inside. I may play around and add some lighting, although the windows mean it’s very bright inside during the daytime at least.

Anyway, it works, which is cool, and - as blueprints are saved as individual files outside of the game - I can import it into new play throughs if I want.

[Limey (Ray Ward)]

So…blueprints. When you unlock blueprints in the game, it creates a sub-folder in your save folder where each is stored as an individual file. This means that they are transferrable from past play-throughs to new ones, simply by copying the files into the blueprint directory created in the new game.

It’s not entirely that simple. You have to unlock blueprints in the game first before it will create the blueprints folder, so there’s that. Sensibly, you cannot build a blueprint that requires items, machines, decorations or recipes that you have not yet unlocked in the new game, but that’s the only limitation it seems.

You can use blueprints that were made in a designer that is larger than the one available at first unlock. So, for example, an early item to make is Reinforced Iron Plates which require iron plates and screws - which themselves are made from iron rods. There are alternative recipes that can be found later that simplify this but, when you first need RIPs you may not have them all. Because of the machinery required, it really doesn’t fit into the small designer, but can be made easily in the big one.

It’s a pain to deal with the rods to screws thing (and screws are just a pain in the arse in general - especially early on as they are needed in large numbers and you have slow-ass belts), but all that pain can be alleviated if you have a one-click factory to build RIPs created in the big Mk 3 designer. No need to worry about alternative recipes and logistics because you’ve figured it out already; just plonk down a building and watch the machines go.

I don’t know if this is cheating; I don’t think so. The game is intended to have this feature and there is an online cottage industry of people sharing their blueprints for the price of a Patreon subscription or somesuch. I have no plans to use other people’s blueprints, but I have no qualms in copying forward my own.

So this is what I have been doing. Building a suite of blueprints - particularly for the early-to-mid game items - using base recipes and minimal infrastructure. I am also in the process of building road and rail templates to make it easy to build out such infrastructure when the time comes.

[Limey (Ray Ward)]

I have been building blueprints in my current save in anticipation of starting a new game when 1.1 moves out of Beta. I have also fixed a couple of issues that I had band-aided to get to the end. Nothing as egregious as the Jackson Pollack of megafactories I had first time, but just some production when 100% efficiency wasn’t achieved which meant it would need attention from time to time.

To wit, my final factory has a lot of fluids going in and as by-products, and these are notoriously difficult to balance. My factory would get over-saturated with liquid “Dark Matter Residue”, which would back up into the machines and cause them to shut down. As the DMR was a by-product, the machine shutting down also meant the main item wasn’t being produced and so the processes relying on such main item get starved of input and shut down. This will cascade across the entire factory eventually.

I figured out the fluid balance - everything has to be used or disposed of somewhere - but this highlighted that I was also not feeding the factory enough coal. It needed 1,000 coal per minute, and I was getting it maybe 960. I was producing enough, but the single train wasn’t able to deliver enough coal to satisfy the demand…so I added another train.

This is the beauty of trains in that they’re so scalable. I didn’t have to do anything other than plop down a locomotive and freight car somewhere on the track, set the load/unload locations and send it on its way. What happens now is a thing of beauty.

A coal train will sit until it is able to fully unload its cargo (i.e. the factory has used an entire train-load of coal and now has space to accept another), and then head off for a refill. In the meantime, the other train has returned with a full load and, as it pulls into the loop to wait its turn to unload, the first train is finishing its cycle, parps its horn and moves out. This is entirely by luck, but it’s just so…satisfactory.

The other issue was where I had a single station with two different products so it was being served by two different trains. There is a third train that uses the spur line this station is on and, when forces align against me, the trains will all end up in configuration where each is blocking the others from moving.

This is caused entirely by me not thinking through the connections from the station to the spur line. Going forward, I know how to avoid this. For now, in this save, I just extended the exit from the station and added some additional signaling to create new blocks from the trains to enter. It has run now for quote a while without getting jammed up.

You learn so much about how to play this game by playing it, but only by playing it. Nowhere on YouTube have I seen anyone discussing a situation where you have trains just pointing at each other like versions of Spider Man. I created the problem myself and had to solve it myself, and only because 2nd time through I understand signaling more thoroughly could I figure it out.