I ended up abandoning the idea of optimizing my very first two trips outside of the landing pod. It really only saves like 30 seconds during the entire first hour. Much simpler to just play it straight up. Interestingly, at least to me, the opening I have decided on appears to have a fixed duration.
I basically run around the starting area laying down outposts with a living compartment and door and then set up windmills and drillers (4 to 8 per outpost), then move on to the next spot somewhat far away and repeat. Then I run around and upgrade all the drillers to T2 and the windmills to solar panels. In the very beginning I do this in the direction of where my base will be, then make a pit stop in the iridium caves to put up 5 t1 heaters as early as possible.
Then finally I do a big iron sweep and come back to set up the bones of the first floor of my base: 5 foundations and living compartments, 4 doors and stairs, 9 large lockers, then a crafting station plus the basic screens. Once all that’s done I move the 5 heaters into the base and add 5 more, leaving me with a grand total of 10 t1 heaters and between 25-30 T2 drillers.
You might think I would get better at this the more I try it, but apparently it’s pretty much a fixed 75 minutes to accomplish all that. The very first run was 76 minutes, this last run I just did was 74 minutes, and the other three were right in that same window. I have managed to sneak in a few extra niceties in this latest run like already having the t1 exoskeleton and flashlight, but still. It’s almost eerie how consistent the timing is.
Anyway, I’m finally pretty much happy with this first section and will finally move on to the second part of this opening section, which involves running straight to that giant wreck in the desert that has all the plants in it. Racing to food growers, essentially. That part is also remarkably consistent at around 40 minutes.
Based on my experience, by the end of that 40-minute section I will have t1 agility boots and jetpack with three food growers growing beans, with a ton of stuff already unlocked, including the advanced crafting station and possibly even trade rockets. I will also be into blue sky and moving at a good clip. I have yet to go beyond that point, but am very excited for it.
Regular rockets, not trade rockets. Otherwise I got everything listed above. Yay, jetpack!
As I’m flying through Blue Sky, I’m finding the biggest bottleneck is osmium. I simply cannot get it anywhere, and my heating capabilities to melt the ice blocking the caves is limited because my oxygen production is so weak.
I need the osmium to build an ore extractor because I will have already used most of the aluminum available in the aluminum field and iridium cave. It’s looking like I will have to resort to opening more chests, which is frustrating because I was just able to stop opening them now that my beans are growing. C’est la vie.
Those were all blocked by ice, though, I’m pretty sure. My issue is that I needed a bunch of aluminum before I had melted the ice to reach the osmium.
But fortunately things solved themselves super quick. Once I got the launch platform I launched a uranium rocket which multiplied heat production 10x, which melted that ice in short order. I only have four osmium to work with right at the moment, but that is sufficient to put down a couple aluminum mines to keep me going.
Hopefully I can also reach the other side of the osmium cave, the one that connects to the sulfur fields.
The weirdest part of all is that I’m positively swimming in uranium even though I still have never even gone to the uranium cave. I mean, obviously the rocket helped, but even before then my locker was full.
The saddest thing is that not only do I need the aluminum from the extractors, but I also badly need all the basic elements the extractor will produce as byproducts. Building this base is expensive. At least I got a biodome up after tossing up my first nuclear reactor.
New development branch just released. The two big ticket items are adding a new fourth species of animal and halving the warden ending requirement from 500k tokens down to 250k tokens. If I get to the ending of my video run before that dev branch has been pulled into the live version, I will be waiting until it does. Collecting 500k tokens sounds like the antithesis of fun to me.
First note: the warden ending requires keys. The Terra Tokens are for a different ending.
The part that annoys me for the token ending is that it’s 500k EXTRA. Granted, portal runs can net 25k a crack, with tokens and fuses alone, so the trade rocket launches is only a small portion of the total, but it’s ~100k just for token blueprints.
I have everything done to do two of the endings, just need the tokens for the last one. That’s the killer, because I know it’s just grinding some portals for awhile, but I just don’t feel like it. The other option is upgrading the entire supply chain to start launching trade rockets with fusion cells - just gobs of extractors everywhere, covering the central lake with lockers and auto-crafters.
Since my personal head-canon states the Convict terraformed the world that the FICSIT Pioneer from Satisfactory later lands on, I’ll be booting that back up soon.
Satisfactory 1.0 is probably coming out this year, so I’m waiting to replay it until then. Meanwhile I just finished my second playthrough, and have reloaded Factorio, with heavy mods (including Krastorio). See how that scratches my itch.
Has anybody explored the material in the new update? Explosives, a new biome, and new “ecosystem “ building? I’ve found the new biome and a crashed ship behind destructible walls so far.
Finished my “efficiency” run. I rewatched the whole thing after I finished and greatly enjoyed it, but of course it’s the kind of thing I love. I don’t expect many other people would be interested in watching this, but for anyone who is, here you go…
Planet Crafter full game in 12 parts:
No commentary, just raw game footage, and this is not me figuring out or learning anything. It’s knowing exactly where everything is and what I want to do and doing it all as efficiently as possible. I managed to do a pretty good job of keeping all the progressions balanced for pretty much the entire game. That might be the aspect I find most satisfying about this run.
Each part is 2 hours except the last part is only 40 minutes. So, yeah, a little over 23 hours in total. Definitely a niche interest kind of thing. In all honesty I think the first part might be the most fun to watch. I get slowed down in a couple places but still manage to reach 100 kti right around the one hour mark.
I wouldn’t necessarily say I sacrificed gains as much as I just wasn’t as good as that guy at going quickly. I mean, I do sacrifice speed throughout my entire run – for example, my base is more built up than it needs to be – but even if I went purely for speed I don’t think I would have caught that guy.
