Satisfactory just entered 1.0 earlier this week, so I’ve picked it back up, and thought we could use a thread to chat about it.
For folks who haven’t heard of it: it’s a factory-building game in the vein of Factorio, but it’s also a 3-d exploration game in the vein of Planet Crafter and Subnautica. The joy of the game is mostly in making the conveyor belts all hum along smoothly. The graphics, though, are gorgeous, and the map is carefully and beautifully crafted, and exploration is a real treat.
So far, I’m not finding the story especially compelling. I think that’s on purpose, although given the emotional heft of Subnautica’s story I wish they’d found a way to add a bit more. And I put enough hours into the game in early release that my new playthrough is feeling a bit like a retread. I’m solving problems I’ve already solved before.
But it’s beautiful, and figuring out how to maximize my new coal vein is still super satisfying, and the lack of time pressure is just great. It’s very meditative to pave over an entire planet.
Are other folks playing? How’s it going for y’all?
I’ve been enjoying Satisfactory for, what, a couple years? I too love it; I play in chunks of about 10-15 hours spread over a week, then set it aside for a bit while I fly or shoot or visit the Rim.
Generally, I don’t care about Story in games like this, so I have little interest or distaste for it here; whatever they do will be fine with me.
One of the big attractions for me is it lets you leave it running unattended for basically forever without negative effects.
I started up a new world with the family and turned the fauna to passive. You’re right, the lack of pressure is fantastic. No having to worry about food or water. The only time constraint in the entire game is making sure biofuel generators are topped up. The exploration really is great, and the efficiency goals make me happy. And the building aspect is fantastic. 1.0 definitely got some QoL improvements - there’s now a setting to make conveyor belts straight.
The voices when doing some of the research and exploration can be pretty creepy - maybe less so than “Harvest!”, but commands about rivers of blood are…harrowing, to say the least.
I suppose it’s time to reinstall and fire it up again.
I played a decent amount but it still never quite grabbed me the way Factorio did. The problem, I think, is that Factorio offers the tools to just keep scaling up to enormous sizes. You start by gathering coal with a pickaxe and you progress to managing huge drone fleets and dropping down nuclear power stations in one go. And at every stage you have to solve new sets of problems.
Satisfactory just never gave me that sense of increasing scale. Too much manual intervention, too hard to make really clean layouts, etc.
It’s not bad by any means, but I’m more looking forward to the Factorio space expansion.
BTW, any suggestions on whether I should start a new game or not? I forget which tier I reached previously but I had a pretty decent size setup. Not sure if I need a new game to unlock new resource veins, etc.
Sorry, reflex. Have you tried since they added in blueprints? It really helps scaling stuff up. My wife and I play (this is her favorite game of all time, having finally displaced Skyrim) and we’ve put together some pretty massive structures.
IIRC, blueprints were added just at the tail-end of when I last played. They seemed kinda awkward and I now forget how they work, except that you had to build everything in a box or something. I guess I’ll try it again.
I fired the game up again and built up to the space elevator. It’s still slower going than I’d like. There’s just more manual stuff you have to do compared to Factorio… you can’t ride the curve of automation as steeply. FWIW, I’ve done the “there is no spoon” achievement and have a >1 rocket/minute factory going.
The post-game summary says that only 3.3% of people have unlocked the space elevator so far. In fact most of my achievements have the “rare” highlight right now.
Now I have a few achievements that only 0.1% of people have gotten. Weird. Maybe it only triggers when you do it for the first time, and people aren’t restarting their games.
Agreed. It’s a decent game, and doesn’t have to be exactly the same as Factorio. I played for about 6 hours today and got to the first space elevator threshold. I’ll probably play a bit more over the weekend.
I think I might turn off hostile wildlife, though. It’s seriously annoying that they’re all so aggressive.
For folks with a lot of experience in the game: how often do you rebuild your production lines from scratch? And at what point do you focus heavily on aesthetics?
In the abstract, I love the idea of building pretty structures. But in the early game, I feel like I am just scrambling to get things up and running, and there is spaghetti everywhere. It is very hard for me to bring myself to delete a factory setup it took me a long time to build, even if that is clearly the right choice.
I assume everyone here has seen Josh, of Let’s Game it Out, and his versions of factories in this game? Equally, some “professional” players of Satisfactory react to Josh and that’s fun, too.
I wonder if Josh will continue his Satisfactory series? Or does the game force you to start over with the 1.0?
I played it a while ago but as someone else said, I like Factorio’s automation progression better. No, I haven’t played Satisfactory since blueprints, or if they were in there, I didn’t use them. I think the 3d first person aspect is a strike against this game for me. I try to plan things out. Since I can’t see it all, when I miss a connection and it ends up “wonky” I have no motivation to make it clean. I can avoid that by zooming out in Factorio.
I think I got to the highest tier a long time ago in EA and it’s more difficult now. That means I spend a lot of time in early game so I get bored and don’t get as far.
I finished Factorio once, to a full rocket escape, and that’s it. I keep trying but another game I haven’t played ends up distracting me.
I’m too old to be in the watching-“Let’s Play” demographic, unfortunately, and I’ve never heard of Josh or Let’s Game it Out. Looking him up, it looks like he does ridiculous things with games, which isn’t really my jam, although I get the appeal.
I’m at the point where the math is becoming important: with two normal coal veins and two mark 2 miners, how many coal plants can I build? How much water? How long will this meet my energy needs? Lots of multiplication practice for sure.
This is one area where Satisfactory tends to be better than Factorio. The ratios are generally much nicer–usually some multiple/fraction of 60. You end up building things in nice 2:1, 3:1, 3:2, etc. ratios. And of course you can adjust things with the overclock and production rate systems.
That’s fair. In EA, Josh pushed the game so hard, he got the frame rate pretty low. The devs asked for his save and from it, improved performance on it. What stuttered before was better after they were done optimizing.
I never got into games at that level. I mean, I want things moving and to keep producing but ddon’t count it out. I look at the lines that are full and break off those when I create a new line.
I don’t set up every line to be perfectly balanced, but sometimes you find that you need more of some resource and it can be helpful to do some basic calcs to see what you need to do upstream. This is especially important for power since it can be tricky to restart the grid.
I’m just about to hit phase 2 and haven’t changed any of my factories yet. Eventually (once I have fuel and thermal generators providing ludicrous amounts of power) I’ll rework everything with better miners and such. But I still need plain ol’ iron plates and rods and copper wire, so those factories are just dumping into storage for now.
I’m terrified of my grid going down, so my max consumption never tops 90% of my constant production. That gives me overhead for starting up a new power plant. Currently, 24 coal generators are giving me 1800 MW. My assembler finishing versatile frameworks is pulling 200MW of that with 250% production and a somersloop, and I might add a second to knock out smart plating. Already found a great location for oil just down the shore, too.