Satisfactory (Early Access)

[Dweller_Benthos]

I got one look at that diagram and my brain kind of froze over a little bit. Yikes. lol

I don't know, I find Zisteau funny, but then I'm watching his videos for entertainment, not a tutorial.

[Art Blade]

So far, I'm pretty much 100% self-taught. Even though the vid above is a tutorial, I didn't watch it to learn but simply out of curiosity.  As for entertainment, well, we're all following our own taste. If you enjoy Zisteau, why not, fine, I prefer LGIO. The difference between LGIO and Zisteau is, however, that LGIO is doing his vids exclusively for entertainment while I don't see that in Zisteau. But anyway, let's enjoy what we like best

[Art Blade]

man this game is getting complex which makes it complicated.

The whole game is about unlocking new stuff. So you build what you can with what you've got so far, then you unlock new stuff and then you expand your factory, making use of the new stuff. Which typically means, your old factory pretty soon won't fit for the job any more. You need to restructure or expand really big.

Either way, all the new stuff requires power so you'll constantly hit the max power limit and blow the fuse. Then you add new power plants which in turn need resources which you'll have to start to share or discover new resource nodes (which are scarce and limited) so.. coal is pretty powerful but you need it to fuel ever more power plants AND you need coal for steel production along with iron ore. Steel is needed quite a bit so you need quite a lot of coal for that and increasing (coal) power consumption leads to well, shortages.

Now I've got oil but can't yet use it as a new power source. But I need it for plastic and rubber which is needed for high end products like various computer components and stuff.

I've just reached a point of "restructure the whole *bleep*" because I just blew the fuse despite of what, 6 or so coal-based power plants (600MW) which is funny considering that you start out with an abundant 20MW bio fuel generator that consumes leaves and wood (or that stuff compressed to bio fuel)..

[Art Blade]

Right, I've actually done it.. once more I dismantled the whole site which had grown into a massive chaos once more and on top had run out of power.

So.. time to rethink and reorganise the whole thing, once more

This time, however, it has been more fun dismantling the whole thing because by now I've got SO MUCH MORE inventory space that I can grab the content of two huge containers filled to the brim rather than having to do several trips for one. Also, I've got so much more and better equipment that it's actually going to be easier once I've reset the factory. But it takes time.. it's still manual labour for me tearing down and rebuilding everything

[LinkHero]

I saw a couple of gameplay videos on this, and was impressed. Many people have made quite substantial installations. to the point that their game lags horribly when moving through the world. I have also seen some footage of a pneumatic railgun-style device that someone made, using some kind of pipe (in the name of Science). It launched his character in a ballistic missile-like trajectory to quite some distance (he didn't survive the landing, though). It was  quite funny, and I would quite like to play this game.

[Art Blade]

this game is very satisfactory

When I first heard about it, I watched a vid from Let's Game It Out ("LGIO") with that tube and he showed off a lot of crazy stuff. I ended up watching his entire series about Satisfactory and the moment the game was released on steam, I got it.

What isn't quite so obvious when you watch all the crazy stuff people come up with, including planet-sized factories, is the fact that every machine, everything you see that a player had built, requires parts that have to be manufactured and those parts require resources.

In other words, you have to have been playing for a very long time to get that amount of parts and resources made into parts. I've "only" played for a little over a hundred hours by now and I was producing stuff yet it's only a tiny fraction of what those players had produced.

This is, in a way, a slow game. And I like that a lot

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah modded Minecraft goes that way too sometimes, depending on what mod path you're following, build something to make something to build something to make something ........ then tear that all down and build something new and bigger, or just abandon that first thing and build the bigger thing someplace new.

The thing I was amazed with watching Satisfactory videos was how huge all the machines were, they take up so much space. They are more on the size of real life industrial machines once they all get set up and take up acres of land.

Good thing the alien critters only attack you and not your machines like they do in Factorio. Or do they? Never saw that in a video so I don't think they do. Come back after being away and find some teeth marks all over your now malfunctioning coal power plant lol.

[Art Blade]

 

no, they only guard specific areas, typically that's where you want to tap a new resource node. Once you claimed that territory by killing the monster(s) you can tap the resource and the monsters will stay away.

[Art Blade]

Since I had blown the fuse I had to rethink my stuff. Like, everything. I didn't blow it because I jammed a screwdriver into an electricity cable with 600MW to see what happens.

It blew because I had added more machinery than the power system could handle when consumption peaked at over 700MW. So I either had to prune my factory or add power plants. Or something more radical. I went for radical.

I decided to completely dismantle all machinery, reroute resource paths (cleaning up zigzagging sky bridges to diagonally "straight" lines and deleting random sky bridges) so they'd end up at my doorstep rather than all over the shop, and I flattened the whole power plant installation of 7 or 8 coal generators and created a new area for 12. Should be OK for now. Should be like 1/3 of my old power on top, like about 900MW.

The "new" factory, I've set up a couple of production lines for the stuff I was constantly running low on and sped up the whole process. I also replaced my coal miners with Mk2 versions AND cranked up the output of those Mk2 coal miners to 240 rather than 90 coal per minute. Now the old conveyor belt system (Mk1 and a few Mk2) literally wasn't up to speed any more so I had to replace them with conveyor belts Mk3 with up to 270 units per minute. Since I now got 4 times 240, I needed to run double and triple conveyor lines to transport surplus coal to the factory. That meant that of those 4 coal miners, 3 are now working to supply my factory and one is just for the coal generators. 240 coal per minute.. that's a lot.

When I decided to slap down 12 power plants the real problem was distributing those 240 lumps of coal equally. Split in two, split in six, split in twelve. Should result in 20 coal per minute per power plant. I hope it's enough I haven't yet tested it, only set it up. You can see the different lights on the conveyor belts from right to left, it's Mk3, Mk2 and Mk1 because after each split, the amount is halved so I can use slower belts to maintain a constant flow. However, I used a bit more speed than really needed, just to make sure, by going from right to left, it starts with Mk3, gets split, and continues with Mk3 rather than 2. But then it makes sense again: Mk2 when split in six, then Mk1 when split in 12.

Like so, see pics. And an old build to show the development..

By the way, the first pic, in the background, in the sky, you'll notice a floating square.. I managed to miss that when deleting some sky bridges. Now I have to build one back up only to be able to delete that floor tile 

On an aside, I built "towers" of splitters even though I left many unused. I did that to space out the conveyor belts just so it wouldn't turn into something that looks like spaghetti. And I made the coal inlets like pipe organs, tall to small, again to avoid spaghetti. It is also set up higher than ground level (where the normal inlets are) so the water supply doesn't have to fight against gravity by going up and down and anywhere. I wanted the water to stay on ground level and put the coal supply above that.

coal power rebuild #2
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coal rebuild #2 different angle
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old coal power build
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[Dweller_Benthos]

The new plant definitely looks more extensive than the old one!

So, when you upgrade from mk1 to mk2 machines, for example, can you "scrap" or get back the materials for the mk1 machines, or do they just sit there taking up space and become a waste of resources?

[LowPolyOWG]

You get the materials returned, if you dismantle them

[Art Blade]

yeah, that's really cool. You never lose stuff unless you explicitly toss it in the bin (or convert it to coupons) which means you can tear down something and rebuild it as often as you want. Like, "Build it here? No, maybe here? No, better here. Ah, so it.."

And the power plants w0#k as intended Solid 900MW and man, that was a good feeling I can mirror the whole thing if needed to get 1,8GW

coal rebuild #2 with pumps
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[LowPolyOWG]

  Nice! Meanwhile, I still got to construct my oil refineries/power plants and research tier 5 and 6

[Art Blade]

cheers

Yeah, I've already done some of that but then the fuses blew. Now I'm taking my time to organise and restructure the whole thing before I move on with oil again.

By the way, each of those coal generators uses up 1 lump of coal every 4 seconds or 15/min while I'm feeding them 20/min. So there's some room for comfort

[Art Blade]

Well, I've completed tier 5 and I'm now on my way to get the first milestone of tier 6 which will include a generator that runs on fuel, a product made of of crude oil. YES!

Tier 6 will finally add oil power to my coal power

Also, I've unlocked almost every branch of all those trees in that MAM analysis computer thingy, only a handful of things remain and they require really heavy high-tech components.

Same for the space elevator, some of those projects are still on my to-do list and they require really a lot of high-end stuff and require 4 components for 1 part. I've got access to some machinery that assembles 4 components, it is massive.

But I'm taking it slowly, step by step. But I can't help thinking about it: that I've got enough power to get the basics sorted and then I really want to unlock that tier 6 so I can pick up on the oil refining business and run bigger fuel power plants.

I've mainly done some "map clean-up" by reorganising supply lines (getting rid of zigzagging sky bridges) and I replaced the power line that used to run across the valley and hills. Instead, I drew the power lines along the coal conveyor belts. There I added sulfur and iron ore which leads to 3 coal conveyors, 2 iron ore and 1 sulfur conveyor belts STACKED. Like a wall of conveyor belts mounted on my sky bridge which connects my factory with the coal power plants and coal resources.

It's getting big now