Are they effective? I didn’t bother with them at all. If things need shot, then use homing bullets, blown up, use explosives. I tried the nuclear explosives and they were mostly usless as well as the cluster ones.
They’re not bad early on and the explosive ones can clear out small obstacles like gaseous plants similar to nobelisks, but I haven’t used them since I made a rifle.
I started setting up aluminum at scale. My plan was to use batches of 4 refineries producing the solution to 4 producing scrap to a bunch of smelters or foundries producing the ingots. It was all very elegant, the water perfectly balanced, the wastewater being recycled, everything fit – except I didn’t think that 4 aluminum scrap referinies at 360 per minute is 1440 per minute. Too much for any belt. It wasn’t a very difficult fix, I had to open up a gap in my smelter line to do a mid-line injection so I could get more transport, but it did ruin the nice symmetrical elegance of everything.
It can take a while for everything to get to 100% and for you to make sure everything is working correctly because the wastewater feeds back into the intakes - so if any part of the factory is slow for any reason, it then affects something down the chain that also uses that water. Currently everything looks like it was built and balanced correctly, but all the refineries are also working at 80-99% and I’m not sure why. I think maybe it might just take a little while for the water to shift around and reach a steady state. I’m writing this post while I wait for it all to sort itself out. Now that I think about it, I may need to over-feed the system with a little more than it needs for enough water to get in the system and saturate the pipes so that they push the flow properly. If you only give it exactly as much water as everything needs, some of the water you use is going to fill the pipes and therefore not be used by the machines. I’m not quite sure how to actually work out the math on that.
I know some people just put waste water into concrete but it seems more elegant to feed it back into the process and recycle it.
Does anyone know what the window it looks at for uptime is? Like if your uptime number is 93%, is that a rolling average for the last minute? If you had a machine that was under-fed, but then you fed it fully, how long would it take to be reflected by having the machine go up to 100% efficiency?
I don’t understand this question. “If your uptime is 93%”? Where do you get that number? Is it an addon?
I found directly pair aluminium refineries with a water pipe fed in, looped back (no tank, ruins it all), left for a while, then throttle down the water extractors to exact requirements, and it seems to tick along. At the east coast swamp there’s enough quartz for silica (I know you can do it without, but less of a rate) that I have that bit chucking out the ingots and I ship them off by train ( a couple of drones might also suffice).
I did on my earlier run sink the water with concrete and that worked long term and never ran short of concrete, at an earlier point I had 4 large tanks for output (a short tem fix), then flushed them when they filled and production stopped. But really refinery pairs were just problem free for it. Shipping the ingots meant I could be flexible on what they got made into, sheet, casing, bottles, and indeed some alternative recipe for fused modular frames used the ingots too.
I’m guessing SenorBeef is referencing the efficiency panel on the refinery’s production screen.
It’s the last five minutes.
There’s a good chance your recycled water system is backing up your refineries. Use a pipeline junction to add your fill water from extractors from above everything else. Water will be used from the horizontal connections first - keeping your refineries from backing up. That’s also why a lot of people find a different way to use or dump excess water.
Am I going insane? There is no “efficiency” panel on the refinery’s production screen.
Unless you mean the three little pictures and numbers, which read 30MW, 6 secs, 90% on the screen I see, and there’s nothing here to indicate what that means. Is that supposed to be efficency? There’s no tooltip to indicate what it means.
Yep, that’s it. If you start a new game, you’ll notice that stuff isn’t there until you unlock the efficiency productivity panel with logistics.
Well, I went back to my 600 bauxite node into 3 refinery pairs with Sloppy Aluminium/Aluminium scraps and saw one was 100% and then others were about 50%. So I tweaked the belts on the constructors to all be mark 6 and still it was backlogged feeding aluminium ingots into a large container and then into a railway freight depot (need a storage before a freight because all the input stops when loading a train)…
It wasn’t until I fed the overflow into the sink (because always full), then it went to 100%. So that pairing seems to be good.
It’s just the percentage number on the production panel next to power used and cycle time. “Efficiency” is kind of misleading, it really just means uptime – the amount of time the machine is running versus not running. You aim to always make that hit 100% of course.
Good to know. It’s a long time window which I suppose is helpful if there’s an occasional loss of productivity, but it’s a bit annoying when you make a fix and want to make sure your machine is running at 100% and have to wait 5 minutes to be sure.
Oh good call. I even read that water guide someone put out a while ago and I forgot that horizontal is taken before vertical. My system ended up working – the problem is that I hooked up the whole system minus the water extractor connection and then once I connected that, the whole thing started. But the pipes were empty at that time, so the incoming water was split between filling the pipe network and running the machines. And since I had exactly the right amount of operating water coming in (the amount that would be loss each cycle), because pipes need to be full to flow properly, there wasn’t enough water in the whole system to work. I just had to run the extractors at above the rate they needed to be at for long term running of the system to fill the system up a bit first. Partially filling up an industrial buffer would’ve worked too – technically those are never necessary but they do help smooth over some balance issues and also let you see at a glance whether an entire fluid system is going up or down.
One of the downsides of when you don’t centrally plan factories from the ground up is that if you change one piece, you can affect a lot of pieces upstream or downstream. For instance, I was using sloops to make enough fused modular frames and that’s fine when I had plenty of sloops but they aren’t really worth using on that in the end game, so I instead took the sloops out and built another factory. Ah, but now I don’t have enough nitrogen for 2 factories, so I’ll run another pipe. And of course my heavy modular frame production isn’t adequate for the new fused frame manufacturer, so I better crank those up a bit. Oh, now I’m short on regular modular frames, so I gotta overclock that factory a bit. And of course now I’m short on aluminum and my little aluminum factory can’t cope with another 120 casings per minute. And I’m maxed out on my current aluminum production. But rather than expand my aluminum production just enough to cover the new need, I might as well build a new medium sized aluminum factory using better alt recipes and giving me some extra production for future needs.
So I ended up spending 2-3 hours just to remove the sloops from a minor manufacturer. Removing sloops from a higher tier factory would’ve been even more work.
But you also can’t really centrally plan big factories your first time through the game. You don’t know what alt recipes are coming, or what future production will need. So all my early factories are sort of ad hoc collections that kept getting redesigned. Only once you’ve unlocked everything and understand everything you need to produce and what your options are can you really start planning everything from the start.
I did make a nice little aluminum factory coming out with 300 sheets and 340 casings per minute though and I could scale it pretty easily to double or triple that if/when needed. Incidentally during the process I fired up pure copper production through the refinery and that seems WAY more efficient than the default recipe. I didn’t look but it probably uses more power, but you get 2.5x more ingots per copper ore and water nearly a free resource.
This sounds exactly like the game which I struggled with at one point, then learned to embrace so much that when it came to the last of the Space Parts, it was almost trivial with everything turning over and most items in sets of 5 full storage containers (and half of those feeding into the quantum storage). But the amount of evenings when all I did was try and fix fuel production was huge.
So, ironically, I’ve decided to start stockpiling ficsonium and ficsonium fuel cells. The entire point of these things is to process nuclear fuel in a way that eliminates the waste, and here I am, stockpiling that waste. But I think ficsonium sucks so badly that they’re probably going to rebalance or add some use in the game for it, and I’ve decided to hold onto it until that time. It’s pretty dense waste so you won’t need a lot of storage for it and radiation really isn’t that big a deal anyway.
I doubled my uranium fission output - granted, that’s not too much, I just went from 4 reactors (running at 200%) to 8. The infused uranium fuel cell recipe does make the process a little easier because you don’t have to involve sulferic acid. I find that mixing solid and liquid ingredients can make things a bit of a hassle to implement. But it’s kind of a pain in the butt to tile manufacturers with 4 inputs. I guess I should work on a nice tileable blueprint design for a 4 ingredient manufacturer.
It still seems like rocket fuel is the way to go. I think for the amount of time that I put into adding just 4 nuclear reactors I probably could’ve set up a rocket fuel plant that could supply 150+ generators. It’s super easy to scale that up in comparison. I hope they buff nuclear soon so it’s not an end-game, complex chain that’s ultimately a downgrade. Just making ficsonium really energy dense like it seems like it should be would fix the whole thing – if you had three chances at burning the output (uranium, plutonium, ficsonium) I would imagine that nuclear would then become a clear upgrade over rocket fuel. More work and complexity but ultimately more payoff - exactly how progression in a game like this should go.
Yeah, nuclear is useless. Had a go at it a number of times.
I stopped using it early on (yes, blueprints for a manufacturer with the inputs underfloor was essential, as was refineries with their inputs) for the same reason I stopped hydroelectric: bursts of power are pretty much useless in the game without huge battery stacks to smooth them out. I used nuclear when fuel fell over on the usual (backed up resin, starved sulphur/coal/nitrogen), but left until the endgame.
Then I tried everything (except hydro electric, which was just pointless by then). I had sufficient uranium fuel rods to keep them going (but probably not normally, because I had taken days to get those), but the plutonium kept dropping out and ficsonium just stop/start. Same with power augmentors with power matrixes. Even though theoretically I had the supply sorted, something wasn’t running at full speed so far down the chain, that all it did with claw/unclaw all along.
All this was theoretical, really, I don’t think my usage ever went above 50GW and I was seeing if I could get 200GW at this point.
Around the same time I was blueprinting up roughly 7x7 battery stacks (lots of non heavy modular frames), on foundations to stack. I found those easier to blueprint when I realised that you could connect TWO powers to a battery. So a general battery solution with a LOT of batteries (like 300) might be for my next playthrough.
So I have my heavy modular frame factory set up, finally. I also messed around with my rail line, adding a couple more stops near places I want to build up.
I’ve also started making some of the project assembly parts at the same factory.
I didn’t want to make a whole new chain for rotors, so I figured I’d extend my train network to reach my existing steel mill and ship rotors in. That ate up quite a bit of time, and I decided to just close the loop on my rail. I now have a double network winding around the southwest quadrant of the map, hitting up 3 Caterium nodes, tons of copper and iron ore, the SAM site I’m mining from, and the oil I already use.
Since the network is fully signalled, I should in theory have a really easy time connecting factories to one another now. Especially if I build multiple little stations at each factory - I think I’ll be limiting train length to 3 freight segments, so if a factory has more than 3 high volume inputs or outputs I’ll build extra stations.
After all that, though, I changed my mind about the rotors and will probably make them at the crater factory.
So, this heavy modular frame factory is pretty massive. But it’s also cramped, and disorganized. When I go up a tier, I plan to build somewhere fresh. Maybe I’ll run my rail line to a new biome so I can keep using my existing infrastructure, but go for more of a mega factory instead.
Has anyone had any experience with large, centralized mega factories?
I’ve realized, the problem with the HMF factory is actually the exact opposite. It’s that I’m trying to do too many things in the same place, leading to sprawl and disorganization.
This started because I wanted to make those spaceship parts here, but that’s a mistake. It takes too many different components. I’d need a mega factory that makes half of my available recipes, or I’d need complex train stations that both load and unload parts.
That’s why I started having thoughts like “Maybe I should just abandon modular factories and go with a megabase”. The crater factory has halfway morphed into one. But that’s a mistake. I’d need to basically start over to have the room I would need.
Instead, I’m going to do the exact opposite. Right now, I’m making rotors, stators, and motors at the HMF factory, in order to combine those things with frames to make various ship components. I’m gonna tear all that down (eventually - it can keep running while I handle the next part of the plan) and go to my old steel mill, where I currently make small amounts of motors. I’m gonna tear that whole thing down and redo it with higher tier miners, overclocked to my belts’ current limits. I’ll make as many rotors, stators, and motors as this factory can. That’s all this factory will make, and it will then ship out those parts using trains to wherever they are needed.
Not mentioned it on here, but to fill my Satisfactory shaped hole in my life, I’ve been playing Techtonica as an alternative in the last few weeks.
Same factory based game, set underground, with burrowing to make more space. Bit too much plant gathering and a MUCH wider set of things to produce. Also might use a gaming engine from the mid 2000s.
However, one great thing in it which I’d love in satisfactory, is the ability to limit the storage space in a container. So if I only need a couple of hundred of something I just set a limit.
What isn’t so good is mining nodes running out.
Seems to be a Christmas update today, a FICS*MAS update, I’m not sure what it is involved, been on Techtonica (for better or for worse) in recent times having exhausted Satisfactory. I think there’s daily things to grab, so might go back in for a bit.
FICS*MAS is a pretty fun little holiday event. You get gifts dropping from the sky, lizzard doggos decorated like reindeer, a giant Christmas tree you decorate by upgades in the MAM, and an advent calander in your hub. You can craft some Christmasy decorations like candy canes and snowmen and if I’m remembering right you can have Christmaas lights on your power lines. You can also craft usable items like fireworks, a replacement for your xeno-basher that is a candy cane. But the best part is the exploding snowballs. They work like a standard noblisk but don’t require sulfer or coal to craft.
ADA is a real Scrooge though.
That’s the part I’m enjoying most–how much the AI loathes the holiday event.
I’ve been doing a second playthrough, very slowly, in the forest starting location. Everything I learned about making organized factories is being rethought, and I’ve not yet figured out how I should be adapting to the landscape. It’s pretty fun.
Ok, so I was on Techtonica for a while and finally have a conclusion.
Do not play it in it’s current form. Late game, it lags to absolutely unplayable status. Like .01 fps. I think I got to the point past n of a certain machine and the whole thing fails. Rebooted machine and started again, and cannot move. Avoid.
(It seems also that sales weren’t great so development is abandoned, so it won’t be fixed).
Later: I went back in my save and deleted a few of the machines and its playable again. Via this I found out that development has stopped which makes me very wary of pushing on.