So, the computer part factory is coming along well. I’m pumping out AI Limiters and Circuit Boards, and I am nearly done setting up computers as well.
I’d have been done by now, but I needed 60 more plastic per minute to run computers at full efficiency while also fully powering my circuit board assemblers. So I went to my oil plant and realized I actually had an untapped node that could give me 80 plastic and run an extra two fuel generators! Great.
But halfway through setting that up, I ran out of steel pipes, because ages ago I directed all the steel pipes I was making to be used in rotors and stators. I had a full storage bin so I put off adding more steel pipe construction… Until I suddenly ran out.
Luckily I can make pipes from iron, so setting up a new pipe plant was simple enough. Then back to the oil fields to add more plastic capacity, and finally back to the computer plant.
Final thing I needed was cable. Rather than bringing it in from elsewhere, I decided to just make cable from wife; there’s a nearby copper node that will give me all I need, even with simple smelters (the node is on a cliff so I don’t want to pump water in to make pure copper. Maybe later.)
I’m almost done with that step, but decided to call it a night before then.
Once my computers are up and running, I need Crystal Oscillators from the nearby Quartz mine I set up, and then I want to automate black powder and Nobelisk production.
So you definitely don’t want to use ionized fuel for power generation. The process for creating artificial power shards is extremely power intensive and there’s no way it’s more efficient than rocket fuel. It’s only useful in small batches for jetpack fuel, for which it is awesome.
My power shard line is using something like 10-12 GW (10000mw) which I think is more energy than I generated in total for my first 100 hours of playing the game.
I got a little lazy - when I pretty much maxed out my first fuel power plant line (the fuel and turbofuel lines were full) rather than building a new line off a new oil node I just put some sloops in the blender that made rocket fuel and made quite a bit more energy. I’ll probably go back and make another rocket fuel line so I can recover those sloops but I had a surplus of sloops.
I have 4 nuclear plants and about 120 fuel plants. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to make more nuclear or more refineries. Building nuclear is a little tedious because of all the water you need to use, each plant needs 2 water extractors. In comparison fuel plants expand easier - you have a section that converts fuel to turbofuel, then turbofuel to rocket fuel, and you can just stamp out power plants with nothing but a pipe connection (don’t really have to worry about pipe capacity) and power connection. And at this point I can just jam 3 power shards in each power plant to significantly increase my power for little work. Annoyingly, you can’t copy/paste those settings like you can for other buildings.
I had like 30 minutes to play after work, when both kids happened to be napping at once. I got my copper into wire into cable setup running, and plugged it into the computer manufacturer.
The next project, which I was working on when the kids woke up, is to get the computer factory’s various outputs down to the train station and then to my base. I’m thinking I’ll load all the products into a single car, which will go to my main base’s storage area to be sorted by smart splitters.
Next up: Crystal Oscillators, finally. Then, an ammunition plant.
If you’ve got all the ingredients there, I’d just assemble it there and deliver the computers. If you’re dedicating resources and production to a specific product it’s good to have a small factory for it.
In phase 9, computers have become a real bottleneck. I think I have three different recipes running for making computers, and they are all getting sucked up. I need to go off somewhere and create a dedicated computer factory.
I’ve realized my oil processing on the west coast has been so backed up as to be unused, and nothing is going to use those in the near future, if ever, so I’m in the process of switching that entire section (minus the circuit board factory) to rocket fuel-powered generators. Sharding a single oil node should give me somewhere in the range of 288 200% fuel gens for 144 GW of power. The biggest issue currently is getting all of the sulfur there. Sulfur is so dispersed across the map it’s a nightmare to run a train line for it, but the sheer number of drones to pull 1600/min of throughput is crazy.
Looking at it, I might be able to get away with three drones, assuming the nearby pure sulfur can support both this AND the battery factory. I might just run four and call it a day. Even five drones total require 1 GW for power, compared to the roughly 5 GW for the factory itself.
While I sort that out, the manufacturers building T8 parts should finish that off and leave me ready to run elevator parts.
Gathering from resource nodes is kind of the opposite use case for drones. They’re really for delivering low volume finished products across the map to/from remote outposts. They’re also better than running a belt when you need transport both ways - pick up one thing and drop off another. I use them to deliver encased beams and control rods to my nuclear plant across the map and bring back nuclear grenades for example.
Trains are cool and work, but if you’re just delivering the products from single resource nodes running a long conveyor belt is really the way to go. Or I suppose two, if you need all that 1600.
It’d be three total (Mk5 belts only do 780/min), with one of them being 2.5km long.
There’s no good way to do it. With the two closer nodes being less than 1200m away, drones would have fairly decent throughput.
And I really hate long belts through bad terrain.
Another option is to pave over the swamp and build there. Sulfur is a BIT less of a pain on that side of the map.
Third option is slooping the rocket fuel blenders and cutting resource need in half, which makes the sulfur runs far more palatable, but essentially removing 15% of my somersloops from the world semi-permanently.
Last option is sucking it up and starting nuclear power.
You might want to build a sky road using raised foundations and then run belts along that. It’s pretty simple though it makes the map look ugly as you roam around it and I’ve avoided it for that reason. But it’s easy to set up.
When I finished the objective part of the game last week I was saying how I’d build a new base with a fresh start with a better design, and I’ve played a lot since then and… just never got around to it. There’s always so much to do in the game. You optimize this or that, which means now you’ve got to expand production on some sub-product, which means you might as well open up that new resource node, etc. I ended up optimizing the base enough to have 2 manufacturers for ballistic warp drives running at 250% constantly as well as biosculptors and AI network expansions. I’m sinking about 35 million points per minute. I think I’m probably generating enough spare singularity cells to run a network of 8 or 10 portals. I set up a few single purpose small factories dedicated to one or two products - one of the new bases I made is outputting something like 200 dark crystals and 50 time crystals per minute, which is more than I need and I can ship the excess to the new base.
But I’ve finally balanced and optimized and pretty much got everything I’m going to get out of that base, so I think it’s finally time to start a new one.
I’ve found something like 90% of the hard drives on the map and 85% of the somersloops and it’s becoming a bit of a slog to find the remaining ones. I had the idea of having hypertubes launch me across the map in different directions to try to find them quicker, but I suspect the vertical distance of being high up would reduce the detection range significantly.
I think my artificial power shard operation operation ended up being bigger than it needed to be. It already cranked out a storage case full in a few hours. There’s not really anything to do with thousands of power shards except put them into ionized fuel, but if you’re doing that for energy you’re better off just not making the power shards. But… I want to make sure I do everything you can do in the game (next up, I guess, is reprocessing nuclear waste) so even if I shut it down it was worth setting up.
If you didn’t know, radar towers will show you how many hard drives, spheres, and sloops are in their range. It won’t give you their exact location (and the detection distance could be increased by 50% with virtually zero complaints), but it will at least give you an idea where to search.
Unfortunately, I haven’t unlocked phase 4 yet (though half the factory to do so has been built).
Instead I should have two way rails that pass stations, and then have “exits” off the “highway” that lead to stations that are perpendicular to he main path instead.
Then trains can pull off into the station coming from either direction, and they can depart in either direction too.
As I said before, I really hate laying tracks, partly due to the tedium of laying all the foundations necessary to make the tracks look nice.
I have two completely separate rail lines that largely run parallel to one another, each one ending in a little loop where the station is. I have not played at all with the switches and signals. Maybe that would make it much easier for me to build a lot of satellite factories.
Chained signaling (which Satisfactory doesn’t have) supports rail stations with no annoying bottlenecks. You can have multiple parallel stations for loading/unloading, with trains that slide into any open slot without blocking any other slot.
I don’t recall if Cities: Skylines supports anything like that. Been a while since I played.
I think this works in Satisfactory (not going into any open slot, but being able to go to one of multiple slots, for sure).
The issue is that trains will never take a longer path, so you can’t tell a train to bypass a station if the station is on the main path. So I have to build stations off of that path.
The difficulty is when all of the slots are occupied. Say you have two stations, both of which are occupied. A third train arrives and edges forward to station A, either by random choice or because it’s a shorter path. The train at station B now leaves. But the new train is stuck behind the one at A, which might take a long time to leave. And it likely blocks the path to B as well, so if a fourth train arrives it can’t squeeze past.
Chained signals fix this. They only allow proceeding when one of the subsequent signals goes green. So new trains can’t proceed past the split point unless at least one of the stations is free–which it’ll do after the first train leaves. Otherwise it waits.
So I think the way around this would be, the main train line bypasses the station entirely; there’s a single exit off the main rail, and it splits into two rails for the two stations, then merged the two together and finally merged them onto the main highway.
Then by default trains bypass the station entirely, because it’s off the main path and thus always a longer route. Only trains that want to go to one of the two stations at this factory are going to stop.