Satisfactory 1.0

The Game Room
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The refineries go in pairs, just find a youtube video which explains it. The water waste feeds into a loop and it all ties up. I tried looking for a youtube video myself but it has gone advert crazy and I ended up having 10 (yes, really 10) adverts and gave up. Yes, you need silica to to the ingots, and alternative recipes allows you to ramp it up once you’ve used a few hdds after you discover aluminium.

Going back into the game, you have some choices as to fuel for your drones (and you can have more than drone delivering to a place, so can make the fuel and drop it in to other places as a drone, with an intelligent switch sorting it out). You can have batteries, fuel, turbo fuel, rocket, ionized, uranium and plutonium rods too. All just burn at different rates.

(A nice little side note, is to watch a drones animation as it lands and empties its load (as frank from its always sunny would say), as it blinks, drops its antennae, has a little snooze, wakes up and flies off).

But as for rocket fuel, do go down that route if you can. A well made rocket fuel setup pretty much sets you up for power until the end game, and I think you can get something like 240 odd fuel power generators from one oilwell

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Last night I completely rebuilt my aluminum processing area, which I kind of half-assed from the start and was a disorganized mess. (Oh, who am I kidding - all of my areas are disorganized messes!) I hadn’t even put foundations down, it was all just strewn across a large flattish area next to a pond barely big enough for a water exteactor. Anyway it looks much better now. Right now it’s just cranking out ingots. I’ll probably add a floor on top for creating aluminum parts.

283

Instead of adding a floor – those refinery stacks are tall! – I just extended my foundation a bit and added a constructor to start banging out aluminum casings. Then I went exploring. I wanted to see if I could get to that big red mountain off to the east-ish. I was getting close, and jet-packing across a large lake that ended in a waterfall, when I got a warning that I had crossed the Ficsit boundary and quickly started losing health. I turned around, had to ditch in the lake and swim back to shore. So hmm, I guess that’s the edge of the map. I did pick up a ton of power slugs and a couple more hard drives on the trip.

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Ah you started in the first starting place, which I moved on from eventually in the pre-release, ending up in the north east. It’s resource poor, oil is distant, but a few other things are ok.

When you inevitably build your oil in either WNW or SE of the map, then definitely soup up the hypertubes, I wish I did it the first time, but didn’t realise how effective they are. Seconds to your oil spot.

285

A couple of “crafting bench” things I wish they would have fixed in 1.1:

  • The window is centered and sometimes overlaps the first “milestone” item in the upper right. And you can’t move it. I wish they’d either make the crafting window moveable or nudge it over to the left a little so that all the milestone items are visible.
  • When you use the crafting bench on the truck or tractor, instead of showing items related to what you’re crafting in the upper right it always shows biomass-related items for some reason. Sometimes I’ll just build me a crafting bench even though the truck is right there, just so the items I’m crafting display properly.
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Finally finished Phase 4. Before I even think about starting on Phase 5 (or any of the next milestones) I’m doing a massive rebuild of my factories, trying to get things even more organized and streamlined.

The rebuilds never end! One of my oil nodes was feeding into just a single refinery, but I realized as a pure node I could be feeding four, each of which could run two fuel powered plants. All of the polymer by-product was being collected and fed into another refinery to make plastic, but it backed up way quicker than I expected and I wound up rebuilding that whole area. And I still need to go back and rebuild some of my other oil production areas. Phase 5 is going to take a lot of power!

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I think my last one was fine with about 40 GW of power, probably 200 odd fuel plants off rocket fuel, don’t bother with ionised, not needed or worth producing.

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Did they ever balance power generation, particularly making nuclear more useful? I don’t like that the best way to provide power was HUGE rocket fuel power plants with 200+ generators. That’s just busy work at a certain point.

Nuclear is more complex, which fits the game flow better as you generally build more and more complex things as you advance – but nuclear (and especially the full reprocessing fuel loop) was never more efficient or effective than just making huge rocket fuel plants. So it felt like it was more complexity and challenge for less reward. It was one of the few flaws I saw in the game.

Really, all they need to do is massively increase the efficiency of the reprocessed fuel. It’s a lot of work to get to that point and it feels like there’s basically no payoff.

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Nope, they didn’t do that, I think it was a deliberate decision to allow it to be worthwhile, but not THAT worthwhile and have quite a cost to it. If they had forced me down that route then I’d probably not have completed the game once, never mind the three times from scratch that I have.

I did it on two of my runs, after the phases were done. The fuel generator stuff was too good, even before rocket and with a decent blueprint addon, and your resources feed from the dimensional storage (and later with auto connect), you could slap down and connect up a hundred easily in about an hour.

I think they understood that power was a pain, really. I remember before I got it sorted with fuel. Continual outages, stop your big redesign because you’ve got to go off and build more coal plants, or find more coal nodes. Even on my last run they reprocessed plastic eventually built up and brought stuff down and I hadn’t connected up half my turbofuel, so it wasn’t exactly trivial for an expert.

Maybe they could boost the power generated, ok, sure, but I suspect if you wanted that game design option they’d probably nerf the fuel stuff and that would be a gamekiller for me. The reprocessing of nuclear fuel and plutonium rods were far too endgame to make it all work to get to that point anyway, perhaps if they’d decided a scenario where you’d have a HUGE dumping area poisoning miles of stuff waiting for the reprocessing tech like some of the videos but I suspect that would have led to terminal unrecoverable game saves and they didn’t want that.

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It’s not worthwhile, though, that’s the problem. You’re always better off building giant rocket fuel power plants. The only reasons you would build nuclear is to 1) do everything that the game has to do, or 2) you’re building a giant map-spanning factory over 1000+ hours of playtime and you ran out of oil deposits.

This runs contrary to everything else in the game. It would be kind of silly if tier 4 construction buildings were worse than tier 1 construction buildings and the game incentivized you to build a huge mile wide grid of tier 1 constructors to do anything.

How would it be forcing you down any route? Quite the opposite, really – the game “forces you down” the route of greater tech manufacturing meet the objectives of each phase, but power is the one thing you don’t have to do that. You could complete the game with coal plants if you wanted to.

I don’t think your logic is correct. The game as it exists, as you’re justifying, basically guarantees that “advancing” power, like you advance everything else in the game, is a waste of time. Your worry about being “forced” to advance power tech if it was better makes no sense, since you’re not using nuclear now and you wouldn’t have to if it was better. I’m not suggesting that they should make rocket fuel worse. You could keep on doing what you’re doing, but it would open up options to people who wanted to take on the higher tech, more complex chains – which is exactly how the rest of the game works.

I think one of the reasons I’m not really playng the game right now is that I know the next step is to build yet another 100+ power plant rocket fuel setup and that just sounds tedious.

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I know you are not, but the effort involved to make it all work would probably force them to nerf it, so it justifies going nuclear. They actually made fuel plants a LOT better at 1.0 too, so the setup is much more worthwhile and that seems telling to me. I think that was a choice because they couldn’t work out how to make nuclear work well where it was.

If what you are after, and nuclear was boosted, it would be moved into later in the game and you’d be building those stacks of 100s of fuel generators before then anyway. Coal never scaled in the slightest, barely got me to the first manufacturer, fuel was THE choice at that point.

I’m not quite sure why you get it so early. It might be it was supposed to be a bridge to keep things going while you scaled up your fuel setup, stick on the nuclears for a while and rebuild the setup. Then when you could recycle the rods the power needed, speed involved and just faff of it all was never turned or made into a viable long term setup.

Hydro seemed the same to me, but that perhaps worked with stacks of 32-64 chunks of batteries and while i chucked a bunch down near the end, I never really tried that. Some of these seemed dead ends. Good ideas when pitched, balance and practicality was a big issue.

Perhaps moving the tech further down the chain broke a bunch of current saves. A new patch, and someones power is just completely trashed because they went down the nuclear route. Who knows?

I used blueprints of 4 of them at a time with the pipes and the lines all connected, 25 stacks down of those and you’re done. It would have been even easier this time with auto-connect of the pipes too.

But I didn’t even bother with that this time, I was so used to the interface (middle click to clone a building), slab them down, chunk of 8, tie them all up and the materials would be refilled from the dimensional storage (one dimensional storage per vital item, plates, screws, concrete etc, being refilled from a big storage of each meant unlimited supply as long as you gave it till to refill). It never took long and I don’t think I ever needed more than 1 pure node. My point of choice was East South East, just bottom of the swamp area near the sea. Though West had a decent spot, most of the refining and blending resources needed shipped in.

Perhaps their choice was that they’d like you to mass build like that. I had blueprints of 36 smelters set down all at once, but few were of the scale of the 200 odd power plants you need to complete the game.

(And I quite enjoyed a big build of fuel plants, but we all have our likes).

You never know, perhaps 1.2 will bring something better for it. It took 1.1 to get vertical and unlimited nudges, so they had made simpler prioritisation choices before that.

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I don’t know what you mean. All you have to do is make Ficsonium a better fuel than plutonium. It’s literally changing one value in the game. They don’t need to change the nuclear process, which is already fleshed out, they just have to make the endpoint of it not worthless. The work of putting nuclear in the game is already all done – they just made it not make sense to actually do. It would also be consistent with all the other game design – right now nuclear waste → complex process → plutonium fuel (which is 2x as efficient as uranium), plutonium waste → complex process → ficsonium, which right now is basically worthless, but would make perfect sense if it was 2x the power of plutonium.

They put all the effort into making this long nuclear chain and then basically told people not to use it, and to actually end up with less power/resources if you use it, I don’t know why that makes game design sense to you. What would be harmed by rewarding players building an increasingly complex construction chain with more output and worthwhile products, exactly how it works with everything else in the game?

I don’t understand your premise that if they make nuclear good, then they have to nerf rocket fuel so that people go nuclear. Nuclear being good would be its own reward, why would they have to make rocket fuel worse?

It’s not like this is a multiplayer competitive game where every tiny tweak can shift the game balance. Nuclear being bad doesn’t boost anything else. If you like building giant copy and paste complexes of rocket fuel power, go ahead and keep doing that.

In any case, I did see some super compacted blueprint designs for rocket fuel power plants that basically cram 8 plants into one and connect them all with pipes, so I guess that would help a lot with the tedium of building rocket fuel plants. It’s just such a bizarre game design decision that breaks the whole point of a game like this.

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I have the resource chain itch, but I’m not sure if I’ll scratch it with Satisfactory or Anno 1800.

294

Steam has the automation sale going on and I thought about trying a new game of that sort, dyson sphere project, captain of industry, shapez, or any of about 2 billion others.

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On another topic (I find nuclear to be pretty easy and sometimes even convenient for quick power ramp-ups): I went to see Jurassic World Rebirth today and there’s a creature that appears to be based on Satisfactory’s Lizard Doggo. Anybody else notice that?

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Are you talking about the little amphibian that crawls on trees in establishing shots?

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No, a cute little creature follows the humans around and is adopted by the young girl after she feeds it some licorice (same way you capture a Lizard Doggo). She carries it around in her backpack. It even closely resembles a Lizard Doggo except it isn’t quite the same rust color. It can’t be a coincidence.

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Found a YouTube feature about the creature (named Dolores by the girl):

https://youtu.be/ARXzTUzx_ec?si=_SsdfkIgnzsXGr11

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Gotcha. That’s an aquilops:

I didn’t think it looked that much like a lizard dog - if anything, it looks like a microceratus, which I assume is because they previously used microceratus in a prior movie.