Satisfactory. How to be lazy!

If had to give some advice, go look for . Also, hunt around and try to find
I had to stop playing it, could lose hours placing and tearing down and rebuilding construction lines. Very addictive. Probably jump back in when another content patch or two arrives, stopped just before the Nuclear & Trains stuff came out.

I think its more the whiny opposition to the Epic Games Store than anything :rolleyes:

Getting computers up and running automatically takes a while but very nice to finally automate. Ive components coming from all over the map, I would post up pics of some of my factories but would give anyone with even slight OCD nausea! Do have a pic of the bridge I made to allow a truck to ship oil barrels to be processed.


Coal power!!!...and a very precariously placed space elevator.


More coal power...because f**k the atmosphere!


Nothing to see here! Just an ordinary, innocuous building!


Oh...apart from that. Oil refineries and the computer assembler (with parts coming in the other side).

Thats what I feel too. Satisfactory is a bit more of an exploration game given the 3d world, takes a bit more thought to navigate as you have to scale cliffs and such. Not played Factorio but can imagine the 2d plane is easy enough to explore (aliens eating your face being the exception)

That and some stuff can be hard to find; searched half the map looking for a sulfur node as needed just a few pieces more to unlock scanning for it....nowt! Checked online out of frustration....there was one 50m from my main site, tucked within a bunch of trees I had cut a path about 20m parallel to.

Ressssssurection!

The game is now on Steam and yeah while I have some epic games, eh, I’d rather it in my steam library, just an odd tick. I already have 100 hours in the last week but lots of that the game just ran in the background owing to it being so chill and non-survival like. Whereas in space engineers that game would have me playing in bursts online out of fear of other players and threats to my very survival, running out of power, etc. - here, once you have coal, and have killed all the rage inducing fauna in your surroundings they stay dead and things are pretty relaxed to the point you just slurp on your equipped coffee and whip out pen and paper to plan things. And speaking of space engineers **** that game over this one, I liked SE for automating **** anyway, this does it so, so, so much better, and I don’t have to spend hours searching for a resource I can just ping it? WHAT!

I took the mountain start, and I don’t entirely regret it but I’ve had to tear down the base every couple of tiers as I found new alternative recipes, unlocked new foundations and transportation options, cleared more brush, and over analyzed everything. But, it’s better than spaghetti, which gets really stressful. Then you just have belts and tubes Criss crossing everywhere. Getting quite challenging to keep the logistics straight for mid game items like rifle ammunition. I still haven’t unlocked the monorail and I know that will be a hurdle when I do, trying to see how that fits in with what I’m looking to do.

I went through hell and back looking for an alternative recipe for screws and I finally found one, though in the end I took to abusing saves and reloads, waiting out the awful 10 minute time-gating, not before a load of bountiful exploration though. The alternative was the default screw recipe which, by mid game, is woefully lacking in output, you either need to overclock (requiring ridiculous excess of power) or have dozens of constructors making screws if you want to produce anything downstream at the advertised rate. Ugh. Any other starting area I guess that’s less of a problem, and by now I’ve explored most of those. The desert looks like a prime candidate for base two, but will require me relying on all these pure nodes in the mountains.

A few days of scribbling on scrap paper, then notepads, I have now gone back to one of my unused college notebooks to use to keep all my recipes handy, my layouts, etc as well as I think will become a bit of a ledger on how my oil/petroleum products are consumed. The fluids are a recent addition to the game and they add serious curve! Coal power plants require water to drive their steam turbines, which can only be supplied by pipes maxing at 300 m^3 which becomes a math and routing challenge quickly at scale. I’ll post some screenshots of my coal plant and oil refinery setups when I’m back on the computer. Oil is particularly fiendish because you have to keep all your inputs and outputs balances almost perfectly between production and consumption: if you produce nothing but rubber and plastic and don’t process the leftover oil residue, it locks up the production cycle, for example, unless you flush it manually periodically from a drain tank or by further refining the residue into fuel etc - which itself must be used by some means or the same problem will persist downstream, requiring you to flush unspent fuel to keep the production of plastics and rubber going..

Stellar game that’s worth every penny and there appear to be tiers that have yet to be released by the devs, with a number of collectibles in the world still marked as WIP with future functionality in mind. I have to assume that, given the trajectory of the game they will add some sort of flying vehicle. I wouldn’t say no to them expanding the world map but I’d say that’s further down the pipe if at all, the size of the world may be a conservative limitation to keep the engine working properly, since all of your buildings and automata function normally regardless of where or how far away you are. I just wish there was a bit more flat open space where I was at, then again I can rip off the bandaid and start designing a multi story factory - the reason I hold off is uncertainty in how large a floor needs to reasonably be to house it’s own production.

Also this is not a spoiler this is a fair warning: don’t try to pick up the uranium until you are PROPERLY equipped to! I tried to just rush forward and grap some, hoping the intense radiation from the deposit would be a momentary hazard and collecting it would unlock more research like some other pickups in the game do. Instead it irradiated my inventory and therefore every effort to recover my items resulted in a chain of swift deaths. Don’t repeat my folly. Fortunately I was able to roll back my save before it auto saved past my blunder, it took me a few deaths to realize what was happening, once I noticed the radiation field was becoming localized to wherever my most recent corpse fell :pac:

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