Satisfactory (Early Access)

[Art Blade]

After creating a savegame, I started doing stuff with rebuilding the factory from the inside in mind. Until I realised what a crazy amount of w0#k that would actually be.

So I reloaded that save and now I'll go a tad less invasive about it I think I'll "simply" start with tearing down those complicated feeds and replacing them with the new simple variant. And only one at a time. Same goes for the output by the way. For some time now I have been using the exact same simple setting for outputs (maybe that made me think about trying to change the inputs) and there are still tons of modules with the complicated version around. Fixing all those in- and outputs of tons of modules should keep me busy enough without actually having to redo a whole bloody factory.

And if that isn't enough, I might start replacing floor tiles. The glass foundation looks really cool but with the whole building filled to the brim with moving parts, my frame rate is going down quite a bit, even with a 2080TI. As soon as I face the building from the ground level, my frame rate drops

That wasn't the case when I had only a few modules going but since I've established my oil biz, I had to get rid of fuel by creating fuel generators and they produce extra power. Some 6.7GW total including coal and those geothermal thingies. That's way more than I need. But now that I've got it, I've allowed the whole YellFac to do its thing and producing high-end stuff like super computers and turbo motors gets the whole factory going. Then the power consumption peaks at around 5.5GW which leaves me over 1GW buffer zone.

Oil is crazy. I only need plastic and rubber but producing that causes me to produce byproducts and I much rather try (which I've done) to produce something that I can use like fuel instead of stuff that I don't need like petrol coke or that blue crumbly residue stuff. Now the funny part is that I have to keep producing and processing plastic and rubber or the fuel power production grinds to a halt and that could cause the factory to blow the fuses. The simple solution is, once more, to feed excess goods, in my case that's currently plastic and rubber just started to add to it as well, to the magic sink. And because plastic and rubber are quite high end products, they are worth a lot. In the meantime, since starting with oil, I earned over 20 tickets and there's almost nothing left to buy for me, except silly stuff like the little factory car and statues. But still, like, one ticket had been worth way over 600k points a long time ago and now I got more than 20 of them simply by doing.. nothing. It's just a byproduct

[Dweller_Benthos]

Ah so the green goo is a puddle to land in, nice.

Sounds like you've got end game problems, everything running at top speed and nothing for it to do.

[Art Blade]

yeah, in a way.. it's running at maximum because I allow parallel production of all the high end stuff to continue until the containers are full

[BinnZ]

Nice resemblance with the real world... having to dump plastic and rubber in order to keep the fuel production running

[Art Blade]

Dweller, remember you once joked about the hyper tubes, to create a loop to lure someone in who can't escape it?

I managed to create something quite like that. I created an enormous loop all around the entire map, it takes nearly 8 minutes to "tube" around once. There are several entry/exit points which you may use but if you're in the loop, you will continue to go around forever unless you slow down to almost a full stop before reaching an entry/exit point. Then you can leave the loop. In other words, if you don't do anything, it will continue forever. You need to actively brake in order to exit the loop.

It's fun, you can enter the loop anywhere and then keep looping until you've had enough, slow down and exit It's a bit like a metro. Get on, get off, or keep going around. I created it while I was placing a radio tower in every corner across the map which is what those towers are for: to reveal parts of the map and meanwhile, I revealed the whole map. I left entry/exit points where a tower used to be. The process was comparatively simple: build a "nice" sky bridge (using metal structures like a catwalk) and plop down a radio tower, let it do its w0#k and meanwhile build a hyper tube and a power line from the last location to where the tower is, dismantle the tower, rinse and repeat until the map was revealed and the loop was closed.

whole map revealed
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map loop (passing desert area)
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[BinnZ]

Nice!
But, is that the whole map? It seems parts of the south East are missing... Are all those colourful things your structures?

[Art Blade]

The areas that are black are inaccessible. Like, there are waterfalls and cliffs and it's typically foggy and if you fall down there, you'll fall into an abyss and die without hitting ground. So yes, it is the entire map albeit zoomed out to the max. And I didn't scan the outermost corners top left and bottom left of the map as I don't expect to find anything there.

Except for a few, like to the right the white icon representing a radio tower, the icons you see represent manually placed beacons. Those are some sort of sticks that you stick into the ground and then you can freely choose any RGB colour for the icon and type in any text as the beacon's description. Those icons and texts will be shown both on the map and on your HUD's compass. I marked mostly resource nodes with them. However, you can see that I pointed my mouse on one beacon that indicates the location of something strange which I found while exploring.. it certainly doesn't belong there, you cannot interact with it in any way and it's immobile. Probably an entity that hasn't yet been implemented and somehow ended up in mid-air at a high altitude rather than in a body of water. I reckon a map artist slipped and then couldn't find it any more (if they actually knew it was placed on the map at all)

floating jellyfish
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[BinnZ]

Haha, indeed I think your guess is the cause. Funny encounter. 
Hope you won't have to deal with floating, un-interactable jellyfish that try to kill you in a future update

[Art Blade]

I know where it lives.. But chances are that I won't have to deal with jellyfish ANY time soon. The community manager said just a few days ago that they're not planning on anything "underwater" because it's too complicated so instead they focus on things at hand. That jellyfish might be from the earliest stages and nobody knows its there.

By the way, I went to the South West corner, that bit of (is)land that you can see there to the left of the yellow beacons. At some point I experienced warnings of Ficsit property damage being detected along with a rapid decline of my health. That's the invisible death barrier as in "end of map" I ran into. There's no reason to go there, apparently.

The "Ficsit property damage" warning translates to "your employer, Ficsit, whose protective suit you're wearing and who's monitoring every instant of your life, was alarmed by the sensors in your suit detecting damage to it.. STAY CLEAR of the source of the damage." So much for empathy.

[fragger]

"Ficsit property"

I like the travel tube concept. "Around the World in 80 Days 8 Minutes" Or around the map, anyway.

[Art Blade]

hehe, thanks.. without tubes, I wouldn't have had the motivation to build that radio tower taller than the space elevator.

Those 8 minutes are quite long. I want to clarify that "around the map" isn't riding tubes on the outermost borders but close enough to see them. Still it takes around 8 minutes

[Dweller_Benthos]

Pretty cool, Art. I haven't had a chance to visit here since you mentioned it in chat over the weekend. So if there was multiplayer, you could definitely trap someone in a tube system by removing the entrance/exit tubes once they have passed that point. Then, even if they slow down, there's no place to get out.    Then, start removing sections and connecting them to itself so that the tube system gets smaller and smaller until they are trapped in a short little section going around at top speed.

Too bad there's no multiplayer.   

[Art Blade]

thanks

as to your idea.. you are starting to worry me slightly.

Actually, there is a multiplayer option. Only within the game already there's a warning from the devs that it's buggy meaning you shouldn't try it. I remember LP telling me about his experience with multiplayer, that machines/power plants didn't w0#k properly and stuff like that. I'm not going to risk my massive build by breaking it through multiplayer. However, once it's implemented, I might try and perhaps test that loop thing on LP

[Dweller_Benthos]

I might try and perhaps test that loop thing on LP

No one would deserve it more !! LOL (j/k LP, but it would be funny)

[Art Blade]

you're so mean! (alright, I won't mention that I came up with that idea in the first place..)

There's a new teaser by the devs



As to whatever progress I've made:

I've actually slowed down quite a bit after unlocking tier 7+8. The hyper tubes around the map while having radio towers unveil the black unknown areas of the map was the last big thing I did. Actually it was just one radio tower. I had it scan to its maximum reach and then moved it to the next area and so on.

You know I got a jetpack. It uses packaged fuel that comes in plastic canisters. When I was setting up the oil biz, I played around with stuff and temporarily produced some packaged fuel and kept it in an industrial container so I could finally use my jetpack properly. Before, I had bought a few canisters (packaged fuel) with those coupons from the sink but damn, back then it was actually a silly waste of coupons. Now I don't need coupons any more, I bought everything. The only stuff left that I can still buy is statues. Since I keep producing coupons as byproducts, I'll get statues eventually.

Today I decided that it was time to build a stand-alone module for jetpack fuel so I wouldn't ever run out of fuel. That module comprises an oil drill placed on an "impure" (doesn't yield much) oil node that had been unused, a refinery that takes that oil and produces fuel and polymer resin (that's the blue crumbly stuff that in other oil-related modules I keep feeding to a sink) and another refinery that produces plastic out of water and that stuff. Then a constructor that produces empty canisters out of plastic and last but not least another refinery that packages fuel into those canisters.

So I finally found a purpose for that until then useless impure oil node. And I don't have to worry about packaged fuel any more That fuel can be used for other means of transport, too.

fuel canisters on their way to the YellFac
(fuel on top, then rubber, then plastic)
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Some time ago I bought the last item for 10 coupons, a factory cart that I thought was useless and expensive. Well, turns out that you actually buy a blueprint to build it. I found out that the funny little factory cart doesn't even need any fuel and that you can build as many as you want, you can even pick them up and stash them in your inventory, more than just one

factory cart from close distance..
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..and from a little more distance for size comparison
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What is even more amazing is the fact that enemies don't recognise you when you're in that cart. I drove to the massive crater not far from the YellFac because there's a power slug waiting to get picked up. Of course it's being guarded by hostile creatures. The moment I got out of the cart, they attacked. I managed to grab the slug and hopped back into the cart—and the monster instantly ignored me. Now I've got a "secret weapon" against that kind of encounter.. pop out my portable panic room and buzz off

Monster & "portable panic room"
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