Satisfactory - a Factorio-like First Person game

I got up to Smart Splitters last night and, well, learned how not to use them, which seems to be the Step 1 of Satisfactory. (To get them you have to research Caterium, so it can be fairly late in the current game.)

I set up 2 Truck Stations. One had a merged belt of all 3 Oil based products (Plastic, Fuel, Rubber) so I got equal numbers of each loaded on the truck. Then I set up the receiving station with a smart splitter. You get to set what goes left, what goes right, and everything else comes out the middle. Each was set with a different material and the 3 lines went into the big Mk 2 storage units. It worked great... until the rubber filled up! Basically nothing uses rubber right now and you make something like 8 units for every cycle, so there's a lot!

Once the storage unit filled up the splitter clogged with rubber it had nowhere to stash, so the whole station stalled and I ran out of plastic. Took an hour to clean up basically.

So a couple of things:
* The smart splitter would be great for anything you have high and equal throughput for
* LOTS Of storage is recommended
* The double high storage units don't stack all that well in the way people are building stackable storage, in that you can't easily get the output of one into the input of the one above/below it the way you can with the mk 1 unit.

Ugh, I need smart splitters, I didn't know they existed!

Since we're sharing builds... here's my crummy build I'm going to re-do.
Front:
IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/7AQddiBh.jpg)

Behind:
IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/HjD2LlHh.jpg)

So yeah, very sprawling.

btw, walk up to a Mercer Sphere and just sit for a bit with the speakers on

polypusher wrote:

I got up to Smart Splitters last night and, well, learned how not to use them, which seems to be the Step 1 of Satisfactory. (To get them you have to research Caterium, so it can be fairly late in the current game.)

I set up 2 Truck Stations. One had a merged belt of all 3 Oil based products (Plastic, Fuel, Rubber) so I got equal numbers of each loaded on the truck. Then I set up the receiving station with a smart splitter. You get to set what goes left, what goes right, and everything else comes out the middle. Each was set with a different material and the 3 lines went into the big Mk 2 storage units. It worked great... until the rubber filled up! Basically nothing uses rubber right now and you make something like 8 units for every cycle, so there's a lot!

Once the storage unit filled up the splitter clogged with rubber it had nowhere to stash, so the whole station stalled and I ran out of plastic. Took an hour to clean up basically.

So a couple of things:
* The smart splitter would be great for anything you have high and equal throughput for
* LOTS Of storage is recommended
* The double high storage units don't stack all that well in the way people are building stackable storage, in that you can't easily get the output of one into the input of the one above/below it the way you can with the mk 1 unit.

I made verticale large storage for the three oil refineries i made last night. I think if you want to do vertical storage that feeds up or down, it's probably better to use the small containers since one large container is the same form factor as 2 stacked small containers. I havn't tried it, but i think it should be easy to do a stack of containers with a stack of stack-able belt supports next to it at the mid-line just feeding up as high as you need. maybe two stackable supports at the corners of the containers? I'll have t play with it the next time I get on there.

Yeah stacking single Mk1 Storage units works fine. I put in a double to start with because I didnt picture needing more, but that was a mistake.

This screenshot is not mine:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/mYYGqvu.png)

Taharka wrote:

Yeah, I'm literally doodling some new plans while at work based on what y'all are showing me here.

If we don't see the doodles they didn't happen.

Thats exactly what i had in mind. Good to know i'm getting a sense of how much a belt can rise. I did notice the next thing on the road may is a conveyor list so... everything changes in may.

also i kind of want to build that, fill it up, and then take a few stacks out of the end line container just to watch the whole thing run

Wow, the Satisfactory Reddit is full of great ideas, like this symmetrical 2 belt elevator that finds a use for wall mounted conveyor frames.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/d3EJgix.jpg)

I try to avoid exploiting bad clipping when possible, rubs me the wrong way. I even build support pillars under my floating facotory because i find it more aesthetically pleasing.

That's... a lot of storage. Aside from one or two items, I've never needed that much

thrawn82 wrote:

I try to avoid exploiting bad clipping when possible, rubs me the wrong way. I even build support pillars under my floating facotory because i find it more aesthetically pleasing.

What's floating? If you're talking about the symmetrical 2 belt elevator, there are wall mounts for the conveyors (and at the bottom there's just no actual input belt attached yet.)

polypusher wrote:
thrawn82 wrote:

I try to avoid exploiting bad clipping when possible, rubs me the wrong way. I even build support pillars under my floating facotory because i find it more aesthetically pleasing.

What's floating? If you're talking about the symmetrical 2 belt elevator, there are wall mounts for the conveyors (and at the bottom there's just no actual input belt attached yet.)

He was commenting on the clipping of the belts. Floating is just another issue.

kazar wrote:
polypusher wrote:
thrawn82 wrote:

I try to avoid exploiting bad clipping when possible, rubs me the wrong way. I even build support pillars under my floating facotory because i find it more aesthetically pleasing.

What's floating? If you're talking about the symmetrical 2 belt elevator, there are wall mounts for the conveyors (and at the bottom there's just no actual input belt attached yet.)

He was commenting on the clipping of the belts. Floating is just another issue.

This.

I don't like how the belts pass through each other, even though it functions. Similarly, I don't like how it's possible to make entire factory floors that just float in midair with no support, so i periodically build foundations down to the ground (where possible)

I didnt even notice that I agree I avoid obviously broken stuff as much as possible but I do fear they'll one day add Conan style structural integrity requirements and stuff like my massive ramp up a cliff will collapse.

polypusher wrote:

I didnt even notice that I agree I avoid obviously broken stuff as much as possible but I do fear they'll one day add Conan style structural integrity requirements and stuff like my massive ramp up a cliff will collapse.

I hope not, it IS still the devs who made Goat Simulator.

I would like some kind of Conan style building physics but not as constrained as Conan was. I would hate removing a support beam and having my whole factory disintegrate.

polypusher wrote:

Orphu I think it can do what you want? There's a conveyor input near the 'fuel tank' looking part of the truck station. If you feed fuel (any fuel) into that input it will load the vehicle.

I've also had generally good luck with vehicles except for them running out of gas because I was feeding them biofuel instead of something automatic like coal. I did build the big 6 wheel truck and promptly got it stuck on a rock. That was annoying.

Hmm.. I'll try again, but it seems that if I have the truck stop set to "unload" the fuel side never empties and my tractors run out of fuel. If I set it to "load" they top off the tank on each visit. Maybe a bug?

Do you guys ever get annoyed by the fact that you can't carry premade buildings? In Factorio you can get away with crafting one single assembler, which then makes more assemblers and so on until mid game you just carry stacks of buildings around and slap them down dozens at a time. In this game however since buildings materialize out of raw materials (and disassemble back into raw materials) I constantly see people hit that moment of "oh damn I'm out of concrete/iron plates/rods/wire etc and they have to run back to another base to stock up again. It feels like it kind of defeats the point of automation if you can't automate everything. That's something I would expect them to change by the end of early access, along with giving the player some kind of blueprint feature so you can construct multiple things at once. Or maybe it's just hidden in the higher tech tiers they haven't unlocked yet.

I don't think it's in the game, but it's early access so I'm sure if enough people agree and you post it on the official forums it could be added later.

Suggestions go here! - https://questions.satisfactorygame.com/

I frequently go through and upvote things I would like or agree with. Everyone else should too, to help steer the things we want in the game.

I think i am blessed for having never actually played factorio, so there are things i never assume should be things.

thrawn82 wrote:

I think i am blessed for having never actually played factorio, so there are things i never assume should be things.

i went in with the factorio mindset so i did things like distribute coal plants around to minimize pollution. wasn't until 10 hours in i realized there was no pollution in this game.

thrawn82 wrote:

I think i am blessed for having never actually played factorio, so there are things i never assume should be things.

Yeah. On the one hand I recognize that this isn't Factorio, and I don't want it to BE Factorio because it wouldn't interest me if the games were the same. On the other hand having played Factorio I can't help but think about it in the same terms and analyze everything in minute detail. There are some things in Satisfactory that just don't compute to me, progression in Factorio goes something like:

1. Harvest by hand, craft by hand
2. Harvest by machine, craft machine by hand
3. Harvest by machine, use machine to craft belts
4. Harvest by machine, transport using belt, feed into machine that makes more machines
5. And so on, until dozens of hours later all you have to do is point a finger and a drone swarm builds everything for you.

Satisfactory starts off more or less the same way. You can only craft using a bench but you still start harvesting by hand before building more and more machines to automate the process. In Satisfactory infrastructure isn't premade and you can build and deconstruct things at will just by pointing at the ground. The problem I have with this is that this process never becomes any faster. Take the basic conveyor pole for instance, you will never not need conveyor poles regardless of the tech level (and speed of belt) you are working with. That means that 10, or 20, or 200 hours down the line you will still need to carry iron rods and some concrete in your pocket on the off chance you need to put a pole down.

From a Factorio player's perspective this is unbearable because it's like going back to the stone ages. But from a Satisfactory player's perspective this is INTERESTING, it's a limitation that challenges you to find ways around the problems and exploit all the benefits it grants you. You have to remember to keep your inventory/vehicle/supply chain stocked with the right materials (and work out the ratios on the fly since they all stack to different amounts). But at the same time if you ever make a mistake there's nothing stopping you from shaking your entire factory like an etch n sketch and starting over again with the recycled materials. That's really cool.

I do find that aspect interesting. I'm into working on the last tier of stuff, but I still have to keep infrastructure running for rods and plates and concrete, and having to rework my infrastructure to provide enough iron to both keep enough on hand to keep building, and provide enough for increasingly complex and resource hungry advanced components, and also manage my inventory to keep on hand the half a dozen different components i need for advanced belts and constructors and power and belt poles etc

Perhaps they'll create a body mod (something that goes in the body slot) which lets you pull components from special containers as long as you're within proximity. (and its a direct rip from .. uh one of the dozen sci fi survival games. Planet Nomads I think) This would emulate somewhat the functionality of the bots in Factorio. They could even mod a truck with it so you can take it out and have a big inventory to work with more easily.

Im at the end of the tech tree on my game so my 'pocket dimension' is about as big as a Mk 2 Storage container. So a stack (or three) of a few of the basics and then using the To Do list to make sure I have the right set of non-basic components goes a very long way.

I love that To Do list. It's an idea every survival/building/crafting game should adopt.

thrawn82 wrote:

I think i am blessed for having never actually played factorio, so there are things i never assume should be things.

You may be blessed during this game. However, you missed out on hundreds of hours of pure joy.

escher77 wrote:
thrawn82 wrote:

I think i am blessed for having never actually played factorio, so there are things i never assume should be things.

You may be blessed during this game. However, you missed out on hundreds of hours of pure joy.

Oh i have no doubt its fantastic. I'm not even sure why i missed it. I think maybe it dropped around the time i was consumed with RImworld. Conveyor belts couldn't compete with human leather hats.

I have begun work on a Satisfactory calculator (in the same vein as my Factorio calculator). It is still missing a lot of features, but I'm slowly making my way through the list.

The Satisfactory recipe graph is acyclic, while the Factorio graph is not, which gives me additional options when it comes to making diagrams like this. Technically, Sankey diagrams can be made for cyclic graphs, but making such things automatically is difficult. Still, I might get there eventually.

escher77 wrote:
thrawn82 wrote:

I think i am blessed for having never actually played factorio, so there are things i never assume should be things.

You may be blessed during this game. However, you missed out on hundreds of hours of pure joy.

I put probably 5 hours into Satisfactory and I really like it. But it is funny because I pulled into a new Factorio session with Gaald and Jmnitup and played around 15 hours this week already. I will come back to Satisfactory but Factorio is so so good.