Satisfactory 1.0

The Game Room
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There are no components that are dead ends, I don’t think. Each phase’s end product becomes part of the chain of some future product, until you get to the last phase, and then those products are the highest value for the awesome sink - they’re kind of an end game score card I suppose.

Do you guys keep a satisfactory notes file? I keep a list of things I want to build/transport, a list of troubleshooting issues where things aren’t quite working like they should, a list of inputs and outputs to balance stuff between bases (like calculating that one factory needs 15 radio control units and that the other one is producing 20), where I put my sloops, stuff like that. My notes are getting quite long.

I’ve reached a point of stability (again) after expanding my ballistic warp drive production so I can have 2 factories at 250% going (I should probably have 5 at 100% instead but that base doesn’t have room for it). Everything works, has enough inputs, and is running stable. I’m dropping about 35 million points per minute and coupons cost a little over 100 million. I never did start that new megafactory I meant to start. I keep getting indecision paralysis on where to put it. So I ended up awkwardly expanding my current factories, completing the nuclear refueling chain, and setting up a few single product modular factories.

Incidentally I read on reddit someone that did the math and figured out that the ficsonium fuel chain is 100% not worth it in terms of energy output or waste processing. Essentially it uses so much SAM and energy that even factoring in that you get to burn all that plutonium, it’s more energy efficient to sink the plutonium fuel rods instead, and you can use the SAM you saved to convert other materials to more uranium. So it’s a long complex chain that is actually a net energy loser – similar to burning iodized rocket fuel in fuel plants. But it’s still worth doing if you like the idea of doing everything you can do in the game - completing every cycle, making every product.

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Found something cool. If you go to https://satisfactory-calculator.com/ on the right there’s an upload save file option. It will let you see a map with all the stuff you’ve built on it as well as various stats. very cool.

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More than that. You can also add the megaprints from that website directly to your save file, and modify a lot of the game - inventory size, unlocked recipes and tiers, etc.

But the statistics could definitely be useful, as long as I have the self-restraint not to go flipping other switches, too.

Mine’s a Google Sheet. I’m not tracking inputs/outputs beyond Yes/No, because everything is backed up waiting for me to get my shit together - I think computers and bauxite are the only things not severely bottlenecked downstream, and they’re still getting close.

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It’ll also show you what sloops and hard drives you haven’t collected which is nice. I discovered all but 3 of each on my own but I didn’t want to scour the map for the last few sloops.

There are 106 sloops in total and I have 103… but I started keeping track of where I put my sloops in my notes, and my notes only account for 76 sloops. I have 27 missing. That’s quite a lot. And I have no idea where they are - I checked all the machines that I would be likely to stick a sloop in. I don’t think you can actually really lose them - they won’t deposit in a sink. I guess you could have them in a storage container in some random place but I don’t see why I’d have done that. Maybe you could drop them on the ground and lose them? I don’t know. I’ll check more machines.

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Yeah, the rest of your machines is a good idea. I cleaned up my first base last night and found at least a dozen sloops in random machines that didn’t need to be there - especially once I upgraded the Mk1 miners.

Once I got that cleaned up, the nobelisk factory 100% automated, an aluminum factory fixed, and the train built to haul it all, I was done for the night. My next endeavor is planning out the Phase 4 factory - just like it was two weeks ago.

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I know how you feel. Whenever I go to do something in this game, I immediately realize that there are eight other things I need to do first.

I wanted to get rebar automated (so I can automate some higher tier ammo too) which meant crafting rods at my new steel refinery and adding them to the pipes I’m sending over. It occurred to me that since I have a positively massive amount of steel now, and I went back to making steel pipes out of steel rather than iron because it’s actually much more efficient; it might make sense to apply the same logic to other materials, like rods, plates, and screws.

Specifically, I wanted the Rod blueprint. So I decided to do a quick loop through the unexplored part of the map, picking up hard drives. I ended up with about 10, and I did get a couple of potentially useful alternates… Including diluted packaged fuel… But no steel rods. So I’ll probably do another round at some point.

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I think the way that belts and splitters/mergers connect needs a rework. It’s counterintuitive and misleading and lacks some QOL features. For instance, let’s say I want to take an existing conveyor belt and split it off into a new one. I select the splitter, and it the hologram rides along the existing conveyor, suggesting that it will attach at any point that I want. So I attach it. And… the original belt just runs THROUGH the splitter without splitting off, as if the splitter weren’t there. Why make it look like I can add a splitter to an existing line in a similar way that you can add power poles to an existing power line?

You should be able to easily turn mergers into splitters and vice versa, and you should be able to rotate them in place so that they’re merging/splitting on different directions than they were before. If I want to take an output merger line that was going right, and instead make it go left, I have to delete all of the existing mergers and belts and re-create new ones. Why not just allow me to rotate them/rebuild on top of the existing ones?

It’s also silly that belts retain their direction even when you delete the other belts or mergers they were attached to. If you had a belt that was attached to an output, but you change the direction so it’s now attached to an input, it goes the wrong way. You have to delete it and re-create it.

If you delete a splitter/merger at the end of several lines, it looks like it snaps on and attaches to the existing points (as well it should, since you’re just replacing a splitter/merger that was already there, they should all be the correct length to attach to the new one), but in practice only one of the belts actually attaches and the others, even though they appear to attach perfectly, do not.

What’s even weirder is that it seems like sometimes, for no apparent reason, it does work the way I suggest it should work - I can delete a splitter or merger, put a new one in its place, and everything is hooked up. But 80% of the time only one of the conveyors attaches correctly.

It seems like it’s designed to be able to do this (things snap in place), but in practice it doesn’t work right. But occasionally it does. I can’t really make sense of any of it. So I just delete any splitters/mergers/belts entirely if I’m going to change anything, but that’s a lot of hassle.

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Connections in general would benefit from another QoL pass. My most common annoyance (and the reason drones get overused in my game) is the stacked conveyor belt poles. For some reason, my belts always want to connect to the backside of the poles, so the belt ends up turned backwards. Since my poles are always max distance apart, this results in a convoluted mess at the pole that won’t build, but I simply cannot get the belts to easily connect the correct direction. Literally everything else will do it correctly - just not belts, especially on those poles.

I finally ran out of time-wasters important projects, so knocked out P4. It took about 300 minutes to build the factory, and 100 minutes for the factory to build the parts. Now it’s chugging along while I start on the final tier run around and waste time. I already have the parts I need for phase 5, except nuclear pasta, and even that’s a quarter done.

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I don’t understand this. This works for me. Though I might have to press control,to lock it into the conveyor. I have had splitters (and mergers) placed onto lines which didn’t attach correctly, it does work to split off a L/R on an existing conveyor…

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Ok, so I really should have went looking for this thread a month and a half ago, so there will be a few posts following this.

Just finished second playthrough, first was from my start in June in early access, and took it to full space elevator at that point, then afterwards rebuilt my base in the north west, and took that through to add trains (which I had skipped, and used drones instead) and reorganised my storage solutions.

Restarted on 1.0 in the north east dunes, near middle, and started building skyways and went back to using the explorer again. Reworked my storage solution and in the end satisfied with the blueprint chunk by having a measure of throughput of a 4 large container chunk, a spare storage container always on hand, and input into the Remote storage for all major sources (allowing me to go extending roadways using blueprints without going back to base for more materials).

Once that one was complete, I went back and finished off the my early access save to send all to space, and get that golden nut (which was harder because I’d bought everything else before that, so more sinking needed, had 3 tripled speed slooper ballistics dropping into that sink for days before I got the rest. Sounds like I should have just slooped my alien protein dump when I did that. Always another way.

Thing I would say though for advice is blueprint. Early. Immediately. With a underfloor for the conveyors and pipes, I had chunked up multiple prints of every type, so I was slapping down 36 smelters on a pure node near the end, and even then I was going to go with a set of categories where the blueprint for the big slabs being preset to copper/iron and constructors to the big items.

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Portals. So on my first playthrough I had mods, but the two main mods I used bled through into the game (the teleporter, which I thought was justifiable because I’d already finished the game), and blueprints (going up to mk5, so had I think 8x8 ones then, though 6x6 was enough in the end apart from long refinery and constructors).

When I restarted I lost all these, but the portals once I hit them sounded good until I saw the costs. Except, I solved that.

You really only need to burn through about 2 singularites per jump. You use priority power switches on each portal, with the main portal being on the list clearly labelled.

You connect a portal on main, fire it up, go through portal once powered, and immediately on the other end access the priority power switch to switch off the power to the main portal.

Also advised is to disconnect the linked portal at this point too. You can only do this on the main and the linked portal. When you do this, you can explore, and navigate to (or even build a new) portal, link it to the main, power up the main portal, and boomf, home.

Always leave the power on the remote portal, otherwise its a pain locating and switching it on. That might accumulate power usage, but since I largely never needed power past about halfway through my first playthrough, this never was an issue.

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With power, oil based stuff was all I really needed, and theoretically, you’d get about 72GW off a single 300 producing oil node with sulphur and coal and nitrogen to get to rocket fuel, into 287.76 fuel generators. Big blueprints (possibly mk5 addons) allows for 8 generators in a chunk at a time, and I leave them paused, and leave the whole setup to fill up before unpausing them (otherwise they have brownouts). I tended to build in chunks of 40-48 generators using this video for a guide for the generator chunks with the interesting flow control setup at the start of each chunk.

I did do the nuclear stuff in the end, but in reality, I really only used it as a bridge when my last big powerout occured about two months ago in early access. I had one outage in 1.0 savegame and only because I’d not sunk my resin offshoot, and fed it into plastic which had backed up.

Now with about 12 encoders, 20 odd convertors and hundreds of manufacturers, I’ve not broken about 50GW. Slooped 10% additions made it not even close too.

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One thing I would say is a downfall of the game is the fluid dynamics never seems to work (though I may be wrong, I didn’t read that plumber manual guide floating around, just seemed too much like a profession). But a full rocket fuel setup above never seemed to work at full efficiency and saw this multiple times on different setups and gave up and just built more than one of these fuel powered setups.

But even on a 160 node version of a rocketfuel fuel generator setup, there was still. perhaps about 5% of them fuel starved, so doubt that the 287 figure would ever work. If I’m bored one day, I might try it out.

In other setups on the game, I found things like shipping oil and nitrogen by train to be decent (much better than pipe which never worked over distance) except it never flowed right too. I’d have storage tanks full to the brim, feeding into a setup and it just wouldn’t flow, you’d see a rocket fuel blender starve on nitrogen when there’s 2400 sitting in a tank, being pumped to it.I just stopped using tanks after that and trains to ship into critical parts like power. But, as I said, it still never quite worked consistently.

I suspect a few years down the line someone will redo the fluid dynamics and find that was broken all along. But its a game, not a professional simulator, I just build redundancy and overpower.

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Splitters absolutely work the way you’re expecting them to. For the longest time, I thought they were buggy, because it seemed like it worked sometimes, but other times the belt would just clip through the splitter, like you’ve been experiencing. I eventually figured out that, when I was putting splitters on the ground, I was instinctively aiming at the ground where the splitter would sit, which gave me the clipping belts. If I was aimed at the belt then it would properly insert the splitter into the middle of the belt.

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Phew! Finally finished. The final phase took forever to get set up–and then it seemed to finish all at once. I spent the last hour or so collecting more sloops, and got back and found I needed just another of the rocket bits.

Good times! I think I’ll play it again in a year or so.

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If you want a break from giant factory building, Factorio: Space Age just dropped:

And by “break”, I mean “e-heroin injected directly into your veins”.

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Definitely read it. Fluids are tricky but once you understand them they work very reliably. The process of learning how they work is a delightful journey and will clear up many otherwise confounding problems.

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Lord have mercy, I’ll pass. I’ve already played through vanilla Factorio several times, and anyway am currently wearing a wrist brace to deal with the carpal tunnel from Satisfactory. Gonna take a break, then try Abiotic Factor.

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I almost always use mk 2 pumps for moving fluids even when there’s only a climb of 10 or 15 meters. It just doesn’t seem to work very well with level 1 pumps even in use cases where it should. Otherwise they more or less work like you expect them to, given that it takes some time for the system to hit equilibrium.

In preparation for the mega factory I’ve been talking about for 3 weeks but not actually building, I was thinking what the end goal should be. I have never used the satisfactory calculator tools because I like to just wing it, but I think if I want a nice efficient factory it makes sense to do the design work first. I thought okay - so what’s the end goal here? I already make all the products so I guess I should just make valuable stuff to sink, because that’s sort of an end game score card. So I thought what’s a reasonable goal? Sink 10 ballistic warp drives a minute?

And the scale of that is just bonkers. Assuming 100% speed, using no alternate recipes would require 1159 constructors. 543 smelters. 305 assemblers. 16000 coal a minute. 9300 iron, 9000 copper.

Even using the best alternates, we’re looking at 500 refineries, 200 assemblers, 120 constructors. 11000 polymer resin, over 11000 water, 5000 crude oil. That’s almost half the crude oil on the whole map at max overclock. 90 gigawatts.

The scale of that seems… too much. I mean if my goal is 10, and I use some strategic sloops, I can reduce that a lot, but it’s still quite a lot.

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But even the Satisfactory team says that you must!
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