I don’t think I used a mark 1 at all in my second playthrough, if I did, it wasn’t for long and upgraded as soon as I got mark 2. And a pump on ANY incline at all, never mind 5-10 meters. I was even pumping gas, which was supposed to not need it, and still I was sitting with full tanks and no flow. The reality is that for the likes of rocket fuel, the parts are not in the same place (mostly) and have to be shipped across the map (also my packagers never seemed to work, and I never worked out actual flow from one of those chunks of 8 I would put down).
I did have much more success when tanks were removed from the loop, and some things like aluminium worked very well with simple direct refinery connections of sloppy aluminium to aluminium scrap, with shared water outputs, but mostly I pulled the water up and sank the leftover, feedback with the dodgy fluid dynamics just left factories which broke an hour later leaving you going back down the chain of manufacturers, to work out what items were starved.
BTW, I was sinking 15 ballistic drives a minute to get the golden nut, and those calculations do seem an order of magnitude (pop pop) out…
Are you sure all your numbers are right? Even pulling out the recycled alternates (because I hate them) for plastic and rubber, and I’m only getting 1200 oil. Another 600 oil to pump out 144GW for power.
I was using satisfactory calculator’s production planner with all alternates selected. I don’t know what it’s goal is when choosing alternates - least raw materials, least power, least machines, most compact? It does make some bizarre alternate choices, for instance it chooses charcoal to make compacted coal. It wants to use a ton of rubber to make things that are probably better served using other resources, like adhered iron plate, and that’s where the bonkers oil usage comes from. I’m guessing it’s solving for the fewest buildings and so high-output recipes are selected regardless of what materials they use.
If you turn off alternates, it wants to use 15000 coal instead. 1159 constructors, 543 smelters, etc.
I ran the same calculation through satisfactory tools and it came up with a similar answer for no alternates. 1170 constructors, 545 smelters.
Of course these sites aren’t accounting for sloops which is a big difference but I’m a little shocked it’s that big. Of course putting sloops on the end product (the warp drives themselves) halves your needed resources and buildings. Putting sloops on some second-to-last buildings further reduces the resources needed. And of course you can overclock buildings to reduce how many you need. But apparently that’s what a no sloop, no overclock production chain for 10 warp drives per minute takes. The scale is a bit shocking. It still doesn’t seem right, but both sites seem to be in agreement.
I found someone on reddit that made a 20 warp drive factory using sloops and it looks like this so maybe that scale is right. A 20 drive factory using sloops will be significantly smaller than a 10 without sloops.
I found satisfactory calculator very limited with such calculations, and hand did anything past the basics (though it did help with things like the recycled plastic and rubber stuff). It doesn’t seem to choose sensible alternative recipes, so if doing that, you miss basic things like that spare pure iron can be used to make iron pipes and avoid any need for coal for steel pipes. So using it for such things isn’t great.
It’s good for locating hard drives and sloops and mercers (hard drives were problematic on old save moved onto 1.0, I had to visit a bunch before it detected I’d already looted them).
It is also excellent for editing the location of crates, so you can rescue ones buried under the ground, a problem which happened much more with the pre-release.
Looking at my clean 1.0 run, I had 9 coal nodes tapped, I think 5 pure, and rest normal, and that included at least 2 which were for diamonds. I don’t think I even Mk3 minered all of them too. I completed the space elevator without sloops too at that point.
Note that the calculator worked well before 1.0, and was broken for quite a while after that, so it’s buggy currently too.
I’ve reached the point where I don’t know if I want to make the final push to finish the game. I have all the P4 materials I need to finish P5, but the step up in required materials for everything else, just to finish the MILESTONES, seems crazy.
Instead, I’m contemplating just a massive project to harvest all of the resources - just a massive logistics problem of arranging miners and belts and trains and belts and storage. Just think of it - a global set of east/west train tracks, fed ingots from elevators EVERYWHERE, unloading at a north/south line transporting it all to the massive train depot, where everything is sunk for tickets (horribly inefficient) until I have it all leveled out.
Using concrete foundations, just laying a single north bound and a single southbound track, is 11k concrete and 1k each of steel beams and pipes. Using a dozen east/west lines - 144k/13k. Guess I should start stockpiling.
At P5 you should have blueprints of at least 8, maybe 16, or other multiples up to 36 (think I squeezed in that for smelters, though 40 is off a pure mark 3 node) of smelters, constructors and foundries. Assemblers in 3-6s (might be from Mk5 blueprints from mods on prerelease to do that, blueprints from mods work on non modded saves).
I also had some sort of measure of throughput for the base items when putting them into storage (ie: a conveyor between a first and second storage). Thus I could fly over and see what items were being starved (went from screws to plastic, to sheets, to rubber, back to plastic, quickwire, wire, back to plastic, beams and so on).
I could then fly off and build up a quick pure node mk3 for the lacking items, and also set mk6 conveyors to and from the areas lacking.
The only blueprint I currently have is a stackable 2x1 fuel generators. I might put together more once I’ve unlocked the Mk3 Blueprint Designer. That’s a lot of extra real estate.
Are ficsit trigons used enough that a 450/min factory would be worthwhile, or is that overkill? I think my main use would be in belts, and I’ll need multiple time crystal factories to keep up, as I think I can get 30 crystals out of a fully used pure coal node.
And now I’ve gone down the Converter rabbit hole. For 40 reanimated SAM/min (120 SAM ore) and 24 sloops, I can essentially create almost 2200 sulfur/min from 40GW of power. Given that will generate close to 200GW, with sulfur being my main PITA. I might dig in later to see if I can siphon out some coal from the process as well to have a balanced rocket fuel system that only pulls in nitrogen and oil. Screw efficiency, rule of cool is the name of the game.
I finished the game underutilizing blueprints, but here’s what I did use:
8 constructors, with a central conveyor that fed out to 4 constructors on each side. The constructors outputting to belts that merged in a single merger opposite the input belt, so the whole thing looked like a hamburger (the burger being the feeder belt, the bun outlined by the output belts).
4 assemblers, neatly arranged with lifts and splitters and mergers
2 manufacturers, with everything keyed to a couple of double conveyor walls
6 storage containers, with stacked belts feeding them
4 smelters (arranged because 120 output is the minimum worth setting up, either 1 Mk2 normal or 2 Mk2 impure)
3 refineries, belted/piped for liquid and solid input and output
Nothing else seemed worth the time to set up. These blueprints were the setups I used the most frequently.
Did the math on break - it’s 682.5. The entire system is (numbers by resource/min):
Input 120 sulfur to start the cycle
First converter turns 120 sulfur to 720 limestone, which is then doubled via sloop to 1440
Second converter group (of 3) turns 1440 limestone to 720 iron ore, which is again doubled via sloop to 1440
Third converter group (of 4) turns 1440 iron ore into 960 coal, doubled to 1920 via sloops
682.5 coal gets shuffled out
Remaining 1237.5 coal gets converted to 742.5 sulfur, slooped to 1485
120 sulfur gets shuffled back to start the process again
The shuffled coal and remaining sulfur (1365) get combined with nitrogen and fuel for nitro rocket fuel.
Average power cost of the converters is ~37GW, power output of the resulting rocket fuel is ~123GW. After production and extraction is taken into account, about 80GW of net power for roughly a node of oil, nitrogen, water, and 110 reanimated SAM a minute, which is easy enough to drone in. That makes the oil lake alone worth 250GW. It also leaves coal untouched for diamonds and sulfur for batteries/nuclear power. AND you don’t have to run the belts.
There’s a similar loop for bauxite, using quartz and caterium conversion, that will generate a maxed normal bauxite node for 13GW, but that seems like a solution in search of a problem. Aluminum production may be bauxite limited, but 13k ingots a minute is more than I can envision using literally ever.
Factorio: Space Age came out and I’ve been thinking of picking it up. I haven’t played Factorio since 2021 but I got really into it for a while. I think Satisfactory is probably better and I’m not sure I’ll find Factorio as good now, though. I suppose I could start playing the base game again and see if I get really into it to see if it’s worth buying the DLC.
I’m at a point where I should expand my power generation and they really need to buff nuclear because I’m thinking I’ll probably just build another rocket fuel power plant. Nuclear is harder to build (you have to feed manufacturers rather than refineries, it’s a lot of hassle to hook up all the water), I’m not sure it’s actually much more power per space, per resource, per build time, whatever factor you want to calculate. The only edge I can see rocket fuel having is that uranium has no other use whereas oil does, but I’m nowhere near using even half the oil on the map so I’m not really worried about that. And I already have the waste processing infrastructure done, so half the nuclear work is already done, and yet I’m still not sure it’s worth it.
This does seem a massive hassle given that the west coast oil has some form of pure coal, sulphur and nitrogen (not pure though) shippable by pipe or conveyor to a few nodes. It can stand alone, just needs electric connected to power it all.
Stick a few power shards into a refinery and chuck out a few stacks of ionized fuel, and thats mostly all you need. Never really burned through about 4 stacks of those max. And yes, they are worth it, I did rocket fuel only for my second go, and bothered to produce the ionized and man it lasts for ages, conveyor mk 6 to launch, ionized fuel and you can fly over the length of the map.
I do a base of 4/5/6 foundations, one wall up (making a floor), and place the bits on top on another foundation, and with that I had…
2 4 6 8 12 16 24 36 smelters
2 4 6 8 12 16 constructors
2 4 6 8 foundries
1 2 3 4 5 6 assemblers (I really only used 3 and 6)
1 2 3 manufacturers (endgame only used 3, paused them if overflowing items)
1 2 3 4 6 8 refineries
1 2 3 blenders
2 convertors
Only one I couldn’t fit was encoders, but bet the addon ones would allow me to do this.
Once you’ve built one chunk of 1/2 on the base, you just deconstruct the foundations and walls, save that in a temp blueprint, and then stack them onto the same blueprint (you remove the foundations etc so you can squeeze them in closer). to make the multiples. Also mark the inputs and outputs with patterns, and maybe put a steel beam on end so you can see the direction when placing it. With it being wired up and conveyors running through to end, you can just stack these in chunks.
Organisationally the blueprint chunk helps a lot when say building a wall of manufacturers of different types.
I tried building some foundation squares (4x4 etc), but found it impossible to get them to snap to the world grid. Should I have snapped down a single foundation, and then the blueprint foundation square can snap to that?
You want a chunk of foundation, as an underfloor, then a chunk on top. Then put the connections from the machines down to underfloor,. The conveyors connect along to each machine, and lead out to the end.
If you have foundations and things like smelters which you can squeeze maybe 6 on a 4x2 foundation, you need to remove the foundations to line them up otherwise they snap to the foundations.
You can squeeze much more on a smaller space because the conveyors are going underneath too.
I’ve not had any trouble lining up foundation squares on the blueprint (and use R to go to zoop mode, to build a few in a line), and once you’ve got one set, you press control to line up with the foundations already there.
The thing about building a chunk of say 6 or 8 blueprints is that if you need 40, you can just slap one down, then use blueprint mode to build more connected to or above the others, and you only really need to connect the conveyors and power lines.
It was getting to the point (and perhaps on next playthrough), I was going to have blueprints big configurations, such as 40 smelters all set to copper, and another set all set to iron.
I ran all over the map and scanned at least 25 hard drives, but I finally got my steel rods. I can now turn a relatively small amount of steel into endless amounts of rods and then rebar.