Satisfactory Is a Fun Game

[LonesomeLamp]

I forget how I ended up watching a YouTube video comparing three games I’ve barely heard of as alternatives to another game I also have barely heard of. I saw the title and thumbnail and decided to see what factory-making games are out there. I watched it and decided Satisfactory was likely a good option. In a good way, it was not a good choice (keep reading lmao).

Satisfactory is an exploration-focused logistics game. It drops you (literally) into an alien world and tells you to go collect resources and make stuff. You also have tiers of stuff to unlock and several things locked behind other [types of game] mechanics. For example, you build a bioreactor to power your factory. You build drills to mine ores. Build a smelter to turn the ore into ingots, then build an assembler to turn ingots into parts. Use the created parts to unlock: more factory machines, space elevator (this is part of the “story”), the AWESOME Sink and AWESOME Market. Eventually, you unlock coal power, steel production (you only have iron up to this point), vehicles, a better weapon. Some things have to be unlocked via the AWESOME Market or the tool workshop, or MAM (material analyzer), or even hard drives from crashed space pods.

So yeah, there is a lot to the game. The funky gameplay is funky. Low gravity means you can jump fairly high and fall from large heights without dying (but you still can, so be careful anyway). The tractor eats fuel at an alarming rate. So do the coal power plants, which you also need to connect to a water source. You also need pumps if the plant is too far above the water source. You also have to worry about power management. Last night, I accidentally let a steel ingot enter my coal drop off point. Actually, I accidentally let several enter. I tried to clean up the mess, but apparently one ingot got away. It ended up trying to get fed into one of my coal plants. That plant went down (no fuel), but I had two auxiliary bioreactors running to supplement the extra power draw from the AWESOME Sink I had just built. When coal reached a different section of my operation and a machine started trying to make stuff, it killed my power. I quickly realized what was wrong when I restarted the plants and only one started throwing smoke. I pulled the steel out of the one plants coal intake and it came back online, so I shut my bioreactors down since I turned the Sink off earlier.

I started off with the easiest world in the game and named it Pyr (pronounces similarly to “tire”). Oh god, that was a wreck. I knew absolutely nothing about the game other than “build stuff” and “kill aliens,” so I ended up screwing myself over in the end. I have about a day’s worth of work on there, but I decided I needed to just end it. I’m thinking of going back and redoing it since all the resources that went into building it get recycled (it’s basically a complicated way of moving things).

Anyway, I started my second world, Ayreon. I think my issue with the first world was that I was trying to do everything the game told me to as it told me to do it. You can craft everything by hand, which is mostly what I was doing. Crafting by hand, though, is…not the best idea. Crafting by hand, you go at a rate of two ticks per second. Some things take one tick to craft (for a rate of 2/s), some take two (for a rate of 1/s), while some take 8 (one per 4s) and some take 12 (one per 6s). This may not seem too bad until the game asks you to make—literally—1500 of one item, 500 of two others and 100 of yet a third.

When I started this second world, I started by watching a help guide on YouTube. It didn’t help too much to let me know how to figure stuff out. It basically said “do exactly this because we need this,” but it never explained why we needed to do ‘this’ or anything. I’m still lost, but my second attempt went much better than the first. I was able to pull enough info from the video to get an idea of how I should do things. I figured out how to balance the flow rate of resources. I think one of the bigger things I learned from the video was to automate everything (and I do mean everything). In my first world, doing anything was a struggle. I didn’t automate everything, so I’d end up needing to spend about 20 minutes hand crafting parts. I figured it would be easier to hand craft everything, until I was being asked to make thousands of a part that I didn’t even have the base material for (I’d have to make the base materials before making the parts themselves).

In world 2, I had the foresight to allow myself access to everything I made (via storage containers) and I didn’t limit myself to only a couple hundred square meters of space. One of the biggest things holding me back from progressing in Pyr was the un-automated process of making reenforced iron plates. I set up an automated system in Ayreon so that I can just leave and explore, and now when I get back, I have hundreds waiting for me. I used to cry at the idea of making thousands of reenforced plates to upgrade my conveyor belts. Now, I just grab a couple stacks from their respective storage container and build the upgraded belts directly without giving a second thought.

In conclusion, I have lost a lot of sleep because of this game, and I’ve only owned it for three days (today makes four). No really, I stayed up all night the last two nights playing it. I slept for four hours or less last night and about as much the previous. I’m tired today and neither of my two alarms went off, but all I can think about is rebuilding Pyr. I had just unlocked coal when I stopped for the night (when I came back the “next day,” I started Ayreon).

If any of you want to waste a lot of time playing the game (it’s in early access and contains WIP material, but it’s a pretty damn solid game as-is), I highly recommend it. It was like $30 on steam for full price. If/when you start a game, get to coal power as fast as you can, but take your time with everything else.

[EDIT TO ADD]:

The game music is weird. One track, every time it plays, I tell myself “here we go with White Snake again” lmao. It sounds like (the original release of) “Here I Go Again,” which is slightly ironic, haha. There was another track in the game that stands out, but I can’t remember what it was it reminded me of.

Edited March 14, 2022 by LonesomeLamp
Added a detail

[mickey555]

I play this game pretty often. At least I used to, the last year I've been waiting it out for them to complete a bit more of the dev and all the map updates they tease. I'll delve deep back into it at that point soon. There is multiplayer too btw. I usually watch their weekly dev streams too.

[LonesomeLamp]

I did see multiplayer, but I have no one to play with, lol. It would be helpful sometimes so that one of us can run around and do the stuff while the other keeps the other stuff up and running (someone to fetch coal or something from the depot I built). Uhm. Do the trucks (“tractors”) get storage upgrades? I usually find myself making two trips when doing a coal restock.

[LonesomeLamp]

Ho-lee-crap

I wanted to create a rotor factory because all of my needed items/materials needed them and it made sense to build up a stock thereof. Problem was I kept running out of screws in the production line because other systems needed screws too. I decided to make a mini factory dedicated to only screws. Not too bad of an idea, honestly. And then I could tear down any other machines that made screws and have them working on other stuff. I did the maths and everything worked out.

The plan was simple. I built a mark 2 drill on top of a pure iron node. This makes 240 ore per minute (from now on, any number I toss out will be in parts per minute unless otherwise stated). So 240 in, but the smelters run at 30, so I had to build 8 of them to keep up. Then I needed constructors to make rods. They run at 15/min. So to keep up with the smelters, I needed 16 constructors making rods. This puts me at 21 machines and I still have one stage left: turn the rods into screws…at a rate of 10/min. To keep up with the 240 production, I needed 24 more constructors on top of the 16 from before. 49 machines total for my screw factory.

Dont worry, the story goes even more downhill from here because…everything worked, but the production line was being choked. Everything was running at half capacity. I looked around for just a small moment when I realized where the bottleneck was. Remember how I had 240 ore coming in, getting processed, converted to rods and then to screws? The rod - screw conversion is the only step that the input:output ratio is not 1:1. The ratio is 1:4. 240 in…960 out. My belts can only handle up to 270, and I had 2 of them being ran out from the production chain.

I wanted to upgrade my belts to the next stage because then my factory could run at full capacity, but I need to set up a motor factory since everything I need to make now to progress uses a lot of them. The reason this is impeding me is that I don’t have the next tier belts unlocked. There are a few things I could do about this, but all of them are slow to do. Very slow. So as much as I’d like to see the screw production run at full throughout, I’m going to have to tear it down and relocate it to a spot with less capacity so I can convert the current setup into the motor factory. And so, last night, I began the sad process of getting the factory torn down. I went to the drill/miner and turned it off and watched the hour-long process of of the entire factory run out of resources. I set up some garbage disposals (aka AWESOME SINKs) to dump the lines as quickly as possible beforehand. When the factory was finally emptied, it was a little past 6 am (yeah, I played it through the night lol), so I went ahead and called it a night and went to bed.

The good news is that I can keep the miner and the smelters, but that means I’ll need to build more when I rebuild the screw factory. I’d have to do that anyway, but still. I plan to move the crew factory to an ore deposits that produces half of what the current one can do (120 as opposed to 240), which means I only need half the machines. It also means my current belts I have unlocked can carry the throughput. It’ll actually be a little less than the current factory due to rounding, but still. The motor factory, once it’s built, I plan to do everything there. Screw production, steel pipe production (they’re needed to make rotors; I’ll just bring the ingots over since they’re already being produced elsewhere, as well as the copper wire). The maths says I’ll be making 10 motors/min.

So, yeah, I have a lot ahead of me, and that list isn’t even close to what I still need to do. I finally got oil going, but idk how to work with fluids. I don’t even think I can manage fluids right now. I just needed rubber and plastic, but one of the byproducts is fuel, which all I can do with right now is dump out once the containers fill up (if they’re full, the machines can’t run because they get full too, which means my plastic and rubber production stops too).

[Firefly 35]

Sounds like an interesting game.