Satisfactory (Early Access)

[Art Blade]

 

When you think about the game in terms of LGIO's visual splendour, you'll find that what you're doing is by far not as excessive but that you're still producing spreading chaos. I dismantled my factory piece by piece once just to be able to get a better structure out of it and less chaos which worked and was nice. For the time it lasted. Soon the chaos started to form left, right and centre again.

I think it's less a matter of planning badly but a matter of new stuff that you keep unlocking that require more machines, different machines, more conveyor belts, sharing resources and products with splitters and mergers, more conveyor belts, more power plants and power lines... you can imagine how that quickly gets out of hand regarding how orderly everything looks.

If you haven't created chaos yet, you will, once you have to incorporate resources that are ways away from your home base. Like coal sources and coal power plants, drills for coal and, you need water for the coal power plants. That requires pumps and pipelines and stuff. Water needs extra pumps to push it uphill in the pipes and the power of those pumps cannot be stacked so you need to spread them out if needed.

Now, do you produce coal energy "back home" requiring miles and miles of water pipes and pumps alongside an army of conveyor belts? Or is it better to do that locally? I did it where I found it.

The next problem surrounding that coal stuff was: I needed material. Lots of it. In order to draw a power line and conveyor belts and the power plants and all the stuff that comes with it, you have to bring the materials with you. Deep pockets is what you want and by the time you discover coal, you'll have had plenty of opportunity to expand your inventory space. Or now would be the time to actually do that. However, you'll find yourself going back and forth between old base factory and new coal resource site all the way building up supply lines, running out of materials but into hostile creatures.

I resorted to building what I call "sky bridges" which essentially is paving the way over the ledge, continuing mid-air straight across valleys and perhaps over higher terrain back down to where the sources are. Apart from not having to climb around in unknown terrain (especially at night..) it also kept me safe from any weird predators and that has been a bonus. And skybridges are pretty straightforward if you want to find the stuff at the end of it.

I ended up transporting everything resource I find to my mainland, the base factory. I rather produce everything here and be able to tweak around in just one place than having to make countless trips for whatever reason and back again if I want to change something.

Maybe I should mention at this point that it's actually fun to play this game

[BinnZ]

It seems more and more appealing to me

[LowPolyOWG]

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My friend's mess of a (Satis)factory

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A pure oil node. Gotta setup a plastic factory here, or drag a long pipeline to my home base

[Art Blade]

your friend's factory looks pretty well organised and quite impressive regarding size. But then again, he's already using nuclear power and that means, he's got almost or close to everything unlocked, resulting in that huge production I'm far from that. Both the unlocked stuff and factory size but I'm working on it

Now, time for some of my pics.

You'll see a lot of my sky bridges and how I used them to get down to places of interest like a wrecked shuttle of sorts which you can open (typically you need to get power to it and in this case some steel parts were needed, too) and may find stuff like a Data Disk that you can have analysed by your base's computer terminal and unlock new stuff. Actually, the landscape is full of stuff not necessarily typical for a factory game but somehow everything works 

One pic down here shows "power line." Best zoom in so you can see all those poles sticking out from the ground with a white lamp on top, you can guess how I worked my way across the valley through terrain, up and down hills and slopes, coming across predators, all that stuff. And that's when I created my first sky bridge because I found it WAY TOO time-consuming having to go on a safari every time I wanted to see my coal power plants. In a different pic ("sky bridge") you can see me "ride" on some coal chunks on a conveyor belt mounted on a sky bridge. It does transport you, too And yes, my coffee cup is what I prefer to hold most of the time

nice landscape
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shipwreck
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cave
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overlooking a valley
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on a sky bridge
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power line
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coming home
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[LowPolyOWG]

Nice screenies

Yeah, my friend has like 100+ hours on the EGS version. We tried co-op, but his nuclear reactors glitched. They were generating power, but not consuming anything nor producing nuclear waste.

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From my nuclear fuel adventure test save. I made a skybridge for the monorail.

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Ramps are useful for making a railroad

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Trains can be configured to travel to different stations.

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Didn't bother with pulling conveyor belts from the pure sulfur and uranium nodes back to my base. I decided to make a train station and have the train automatically collect them

[Art Blade]

very nice

I'm still pretty much medieval compared to your game

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah watching Zisteau's videos I realize that a lot of planning ahead is needed, and for that you need to know what you're going to need, but you don't know you need it until you need it, so there's the rub. A lot of research on what the game has in store, or you build with what you have, then get the next tier of machines and tear everything down, and rebuild with the new machines. Or just abandon that base and build a new one. I do like Art's sky bridges, that's pretty cool.

[Art Blade]

thank you.

[Art Blade]

I managed to FLY on one of those massive stingray-like creatures. Nice view

Spoiler

[LowPolyOWG]

 

[fragger]

You guys have been busy

Do you w0#k towards any kind of final goal in this game, other than unlocking/building new things? I mean, once you have unlocked everything, where do you go from there? Or do you just keep building things until you get tired of doing that? I'm not being critical as I love building-type games, but I also like to feel as though I'm working towards some final objective other than building just for the sake of it.

Having said that though, it appears that there is more than enough to keep you occupied until you reach that point. And I can see how the game would have replay value. Once you've unlocked everything, you could start all over knowing what lies ahead and try to plan accordingly, like "I'll need to allow for this and that when the time comes".

Nice screenies you guys are posting, btw I enjoyed Art's "Flight of the Stingray" video

[Art Blade]

thanks

As to the goals, I don't know yet because I haven't finished the game. So far, you keep unlocking new stuff that typically involves using your old stuff to produce the new stuff. And that means your going to run into logistics and organisation problems quickly. That's one of the challenges. Then new resources tend to be farther away the more you advance and that creates new problems which you want to solve or at least cope with.

Then, on the way to new resources which, once unlocked, will be added to your scanner so you know where to look for them, you will have to cross uncharted territory. That typically means you'll run into some predators the type of which is already known to you but there may also be new types. Some of them are challenging but, having advanced in the "unlock tree," you'll have access to new weapons. Given you actually researched and produced them. Like evolving from a hand-held zapper (or phaser) over a sword-like "Xeno Basher" with much more OOMPH to the zapper on top, to some kind of a nail gun and later to "Nobelisk" (lol, greetings from Alfred Nobel) remote-controlled thrown explosive devices and other weapons.

There are also shipwrecks of sorts, more like crashed supply pods, that you have to fiddle with in order to retrieve a Hard Disk which, when analysed, will give you the option to choose between three alternative recipes for some of your products. That's interesting for the replay value because you might pick one recipe that may turn out to be useless to you so next time you might do better. I already unlocked 2 HDs and a third is awaiting analysis. Those pods are either randomly strewn across accessible places or, like one I found, on top of a rock formation like a large stone column, but thanks to my sky bridges, it was easy for me to get that one.

So.. I don't know what's at the end of it all, but the way there has been increasingly difficult but in a pleasant way. Difficult as in, you really need to think ahead, may have to adjust your production lines, even start new ones, combine them, rearrange stuff..

In other words, you're being kept very, very busy.

By the way, it is worth mentioning that this game cannot be paused, even when you're in the menus. That means, whatever you do (getting up to grab a coffee or some such) the game will continue. So if you hear that characteristic BANG when the power gets cut off because you blew a fuse, production will grind to a halt until you ficsit (that's the in-game's brand for all sorts of tools and machines and whatever, hehe)

Also, apart from building machines, there's that MAM computer terminal for analysis of whatever stuff you find. That will unlock new research trees. Like, find sulphur, and start the research that ultimately leads to firearms and explosives. So, if you're not busy with your machinery, you might be walking around and find stuff and start new research trees.. or bash some monsters.

Or you happen to literally get carried away by a stingray type of peaceful creature

I was on a new skybridge that crossed the flight path of that thing and suddenly I was standing on its back. I had already seen it fly and pass under a different sky bride and had already been thinking about risking my virtual life jumping down on it when it passes so, hehe, you can imagine what it meant to me when I was suddenly flying.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah that was a real cool video, calmly standing there drinking coffee as the ray flies majestically along. I like the detail of the smaller "air fish" flying alongside as you'd see in the ocean where the smaller fish follow the bigger ones to get in on whatever the big guy is feeding on.

[Art Blade]

  I was really lucky that I was able to end the trip so casually by jumping off and landing on yet another sky bridge. None of that was planned, it simply just happened.

[Art Blade]

By now I've kind of reached a point where I have to drill for oil. There are so many "unlock trees" which required stuff I didn't (yet) have that I decided to stop progressing the space elevator stuff and fill in the gaps. I had to find sulphur and caterium (lol, yeah, like to cater.. there are some funny names) and quartz and some other stuff and that took quite some time. Many of those resources were quite far from my base and had to be transported back. In the case of quartz, I had to bee-line (sky bridge, but I learned to first point a foundation tile towards the node and start to build from there, going diagonally across the map which equalled straight forward, rather than zigzagging as before) to the node about a mile away plus I had to overcome a height difference of like 40 stories. So, build a path a mile long and who knows how high up to the node, then slap down a miner MK2 and w0#k your way back from the node all the way to the base while building over a mile-long conveyor belts MK2 for speed. And power lines, of course. It really took quite some time to set up that stuff. Not to mention fighting off really aggressive and quite lethal monsters on site before I could start mining quartz.

Well, now I got more or less everything there is without using crude oil and its derivates like fuel, plastic, rubber and so on.

Which is why I now have to find and process oil.

For some reason, I came across a channel with satisfactory stuff and watched a few videos. The channel is different from LGIO's chaos and Zisteau's f***ing annoying style. Maybe you find this (at times self-inflated) guy's stuff interesting. At least he's efficient and project-focussed and damn, it's very impressive stuff.

I'm not (yet) planning on going pro with my factory stuff but damn, this is what pro looks like: