Early Access unlocked today. Patch Notes
The preview weekend earlier this month had only Tiers 1-3 of the 10(?) tier tech tree. We now have 1-6 with the rest coming soon (roadmap)
Also we can now start in 3 different biomes. Desert, Forest, and Jungle.
Picked this up last night. Quite enjoyed the hour or so i played, looking forward to getting back into it this weekend when there is time
Played it last night for an hour then got into a MP game with Jmnitup. We had some firewall issues but once the game started it ran pretty well. The game does let you start individual bases if you want as you both start with the basic hub ingredients. We found out that only one can craft at a time, so you need to build a second workbench.
I played a bunch last night and today at lunch, so I got to do some stuff I didnt do in the free weekend. I built a building that takes iron ore as input and outputs the most advanced (early game) iron products, Reinforced plates, Iron Frames, and Rotors. It is SLOW though, so some serious optimization on my part is needed. Assemblers are so big that trying to fit 3 on a 6x6 factory's second story (including belt spaghetti to get items from Floor 1 to Floor 2) was a bit of a mess. There are conveyor lifts in Tier 4 I think, which would help a lot.
I also explored a bunch and found some neat things I won't spoil. There are apparently alternate recipes for things that you can unlock, like a version of Reinforced Plates that takes copper wire instead of screws. That could make for some much faster production, since that's a serious bottleneck to the higher end Iron things.
I found coal over 1km from my base once I unlocked coal power generation. I ran out and plopped down a little outpost, just a miner and as many coal generators as that one miner could support (which is 6! since it was on a Pure (rich?) vein) So I ran power back to the base and got to phase out biomass based power generation in one fel swoop.... then I learned you need coal + iron to make steel, so my distant outpost with no reasonable path back and forth is now less helpful.
I'll probably look for a more accessible coal spot and only do steel production there.
I played a bunch last night and today at lunch, so I got to do some stuff I didnt do in the free weekend. I built a building that takes iron ore as input and outputs the most advanced (early game) iron products, Reinforced plates, Iron Frames, and Rotors. It is SLOW though, so some serious optimization on my part is needed. Assemblers are so big that trying to fit 3 on a 6x6 factory's second story (including belt spaghetti to get items from Floor 1 to Floor 2) was a bit of a mess. There are conveyor lifts in Tier 4 I think, which would help a lot.
I also explored a bunch and found some neat things I won't spoil. There are apparently alternate recipes for things that you can unlock, like a version of Reinforced Plates that takes copper wire instead of screws. That could make for some much faster production, since that's a serious bottleneck to the higher end Iron things.
I found coal over 1km from my base once I unlocked coal power generation. I ran out and plopped down a little outpost, just a miner and as many coal generators as that one miner could support (which is 6! since it was on a Pure (rich?) vein) So I ran power back to the base and got to phase out biomass based power generation in one fel swoop.... then I learned you need coal + iron to make steel, so my distant outpost with no reasonable path back and forth is now less helpful.
I'll probably look for a more accessible coal spot and only do steel production there.
My Coal source was roughly 1km also. I bring it back on a conveyor belt into a storage bin at my main base, which fills up faster than the coal is used so I have stock piles of it now. I have the coal fed into 4 coal power generators as well as two other machines for steel. Its becoming a tangled mess of conveyor belts now.
polypusher wrote:I played a bunch last night and today at lunch, so I got to do some stuff I didnt do in the free weekend. I built a building that takes iron ore as input and outputs the most advanced (early game) iron products, Reinforced plates, Iron Frames, and Rotors. It is SLOW though, so some serious optimization on my part is needed. Assemblers are so big that trying to fit 3 on a 6x6 factory's second story (including belt spaghetti to get items from Floor 1 to Floor 2) was a bit of a mess. There are conveyor lifts in Tier 4 I think, which would help a lot.
I also explored a bunch and found some neat things I won't spoil. There are apparently alternate recipes for things that you can unlock, like a version of Reinforced Plates that takes copper wire instead of screws. That could make for some much faster production, since that's a serious bottleneck to the higher end Iron things.
I found coal over 1km from my base once I unlocked coal power generation. I ran out and plopped down a little outpost, just a miner and as many coal generators as that one miner could support (which is 6! since it was on a Pure (rich?) vein) So I ran power back to the base and got to phase out biomass based power generation in one fel swoop.... then I learned you need coal + iron to make steel, so my distant outpost with no reasonable path back and forth is now less helpful.
I'll probably look for a more accessible coal spot and only do steel production there.
My Coal source was roughly 1km also. I bring it back on a conveyor belt into a storage bin at my main base, which fills up faster than the coal is used so I have stock piles of it now. I have the coal fed into 4 coal power generators as well as two other machines for steel. Its becoming a tangled mess of conveyor belts now.
Embrace the sweet sweet spaghetti.
I played for about an hour last night before i had social commitments. Got up to stage 4 of the HUB. I still have to hand feed in ore, but i have a nice automatic setup of smelters feeding constructors stamping out iron plated and rods.
Leading up to the Early Access launch I was wondering if this game could scratch the same itch as Factorio for me.
Factorio lets you do more with a single conveyor belt, which is giving you rope to hang yourself with. You can put things on the wrong side of it, you can run out of room to have them go under each other... so the 3 main problems in the game are Getting things from here to there, Balancing input and output for efficiency, and figuring out complicated supply chains on a 2d plane (and bonus 4th: Biters)
If you look at Satisfactory simplistically, you see conveyors going directly from outputs to inputs, so Getting things from here to there seems trivialized (and it mostly is). It also seems like that would make balancing input and output trivial, but it's not. Take Reinforced Iron Plates for example. It requires 2 inputs which are the results of a 3 and 4 step process individually (Iron > Iron Ingot > Iron Plate | Iron > Iron Ingot > Iron Rod > Screws) and even with totally stuffed belts this big expensive machine only makes 5 reinforced plates per minute. So slow! So if you want a lot of them you're looking at a pretty complicated process. Throw alternate recipes in and you have some interesting problems to solve.
I learned last night that you can not just overclock machines but you can actually underclock them. This layers on a new bit of strategy. Smelter putting out far more ingots per minute than you're consuming? Well when idle its still using its full power. Go underclock it (part of the same tech that gives you overclocking) and save some serious power. Since I just graduated to Coal and was able to add 200MW of power to my base (which used 50) Im not too worried about it anymore but it would have helped a ton yesterday. Im sure it will come in handy again.
The last part, complicated supply chains, is definitely there. You build ever more complicated components for machines (components themselves), for big interesting buildings and vehicles.
What I haven't felt yet is Pressure. In Factorio, Biters provide pressure of course. If you dont get enough walls and enough bullets and enough tech they can overwhelm you. Factorio also has Time as a pressure, like realistic time. When you need hundreds of blue chips per minute and you're only trickling some in, you can just wait but it will be hours. So you need to go in and make a more efficient production chain.
I haven't seen anything like that yet in Satisfactory and really nothing on the road map. The closest has been when a new tech wants some dozens of Rotors or other complicated component but then I just go explore the world a bit and they're ready when I come back.
Yep, definitely a 'Factorio light' in that regard, but... in a 3D engine, from First Person perspective, I think that was always going to be the case.
I just reached the hub stage that allows miners - but I've skipped a few bits in order to rush them so the whole raw resource chain is automated. Even without the overall complexity of Factorio and (currently) there is no pressure, or threat, as you say, it's still been a fun time so far.
Yeah I find it extremely enjoyable and absolutely gorgeous. I chose a desert start and just looking around is a joy. Ruining the picturesque landscape with massive coal generators and big ugly factory walls is almost a crime itself, but then those coal generators are beautiful too! They are the tallest building I've seen so far with lovely chrome smoke stacks belching black smoke into the air.
Its Early Access. They've been working about 3 years on the game so far. My hope is that it's a foundation from which they build something extra special. There's a lot of directions it could go. Adding something like Biter waves would be in this team's wheelhouse (this team made Sanctum) Pollution mechanics would be interesting for the environmental message. Achievements like achieve production rates of 1000 reinforced plates per minute would be a heck of a challenge.
The game has barely tapped exploration too. I'm certain they'll do more with this. I found a cave that turned out to be a tunnel from one part of the map to the other, like a little shortcut. It had enemies I hadn't seen before and a power slug to grab. The alien flora and fauna is really well done, not just the typical 'hey look, big bugs and a blue tree'
My endeavors so far.
The two conveyors stacked on the right go to my Coal farm which is 1.1km from my base. That took a bit of time to build.
There are some interesting differences compared to Factorio. The most obvious change is the lack of inserters, anything with an input has a port for the conveyor belts to feed into directly. The second major change is that mineral deposits offer an unlimited supply and don't run dry. This means that your main limiting factor is throughput and belt speed.
Satisfactory belts start with a speed of 60 items a minute and top out at 900. Higher belt tiers look strange in 3d as items whizz past you at blurring speeds.
The throughput speeds are actually low compared to Factorio where belts have a speed of 15, 30, 45 items a second, or 900, 1800 and 2700 per minute of throughput. Of course Factorio belts are much larger because they have two item lanes and can fit about 5 items per "tile".
A mk2 miner on a pure iron deposit will extract 480 ore per minute. Smelters can smelt 30 or 45 metal per minute depending on tier. What makes things a little awkward is that splitters work in multiples of 3 and there isn't an easy distribution scheme you can use here. If you split into 3s 480 becomes 160 which becomes 53 which becomes 18, none of these numbers perfectly match up with a mk 2 smelter. If you split into pairs with one wasted output on each splitter the 480 becomes 240, then 120, then 60 then 30 which matches a mk1 smelter. However this results in you needing 16 smelters, which is horribly inefficient in terms of space and power usage, not to mention the belt spaghetti needed to tie all of this together. A mix of 2 and 3 splits would produce a more favourable result but increases the complexity needed.
Even if the ratios don't match exactly you could adjust things around using overclocking modules. Overclocking can increase production up to 2.5x. However in the case of this miner a multiplier above 1.875 would be pointless because even the highest tier of conveyor belt can't unload the mine any faster than that. If you overclocked some mk2 smelters to 2.22x they would each consume 100 each and you could then split the output twice to evenly feed 9 smelters for full throughput and belt compression. However overclocking requires rare and finite resources and you probably wouldn't want to "waste" 10 of them just to maximize iron production out of a single deposit when you could just tap more of them.
I'm sure someone will figure out the optimal way of doing things, or these stats will change before release. But it's still fun to speculate.
or these stats will change before release. But it's still fun to speculate.
I'd count on this one. Splitters and Mergers feel pretty awkward. They're big and bulky and splitting into 3 in 3 directions is weird. I'd bet on a 1 to 2 splitter with parallel tracks and a lower overall profile to simplify things a lot. If it was stackable and linkable (side by side) that would be even better, then you could design a splitting system that works for you instead of working around the clunky thing.
Its probably more likely they'll just tune the standard rates of ore extraction and smelting to be a better match.
Im loving stacked conveyors. Its become a landmark feature of my base, and the lowest level is perfect height for me to be able to walk under it. I just unlocked Tier 3 belts and wow are those fast. I jumped off one and got launched, nearly off a very high thing!
Some general tips and thoughts from this weekend
* Don't build a long 45 (4x4) degree ramp and expect a tractor to drive up it on autopilot. Maybe try the shallower ramp. I ended up building conveyors instead.
* Stackable conveyor belt pole things make great (if expensive) makeshift ladders of any height you like
* Caterium is a hard to spot but important ore, mostly for the tech it unlocks, like better power poles (6 slots instead of 4) and Blade Runners, which enhance your speed, jump height, and fall damage
* Those spitter guys are dicks. The one with the red glowing mouth one-shot me. I may have had reduced health at the time, Im not sure, but I was so far from base that I just gave up on my body with TONS of goodies on it for several hours. The corpse/box stuck around though and I retrieved it later.
* Tractors are pretty effective for long distance transport. I have a steel outpost that just does ingots, so there's a simple one way transfer of a single good. My oil outpost though is basically 1.5-2km (after all the winding) of Mk2 belts. Its expensive and has been annoying to set up but I can't figure out a driving path that gets me here. I should have had the conveyors just take the oil barrels to the nearest driveable spot and put a station there. I ended up running back and forth 2-3km * 5 to set it all up. A little iron production outpost and a concrete production outpost about halfway ended up speeding things up a lot at the end.
* Stackable conveyor poles can be used to have a conveyor scale a cliff with a lot of time, effort and materials. Set two pairs about as far apart as a belt will go (a little less for slack). You can zigzag a conveyor up nicely that way. Over a long distance, a belt can go up many levels so you wont need to zigzag too much, but a tall cliff will cost you a lot!
* Running power lines all over the map seems easier than trying to maintain separate grids, unless you have easy access to coal at some remote place
* Maintaining health is actually kinda tricky. You respawn with 3 bars of health and all of the healing items 'grow on trees' so to speak. They regrow pretty slowly, so if you go out exploring you might burn through a ton of it. So stockpile it!
* When you have lots of storage, make them 'stick their tongue out' Put a short conveyor at the output so it spits one or two of whatever is inside onto the belt. This makes it easy to see what is where
* Be careful with Tractors around water. If you get too deep it will say it's submerged. Other than deconstructing it, there's no way to recover it as far as I know. If it has a lot in storage this can really be annoying. Also some water isnt actually behaving like water yet, like in the pink forest, so you can just fall straight through to the river/lake bed.
The steep ramp isn't 45 degrees. It has 4m of height with 8m of depth, which gives it a slope of 1/2, or about 27 degrees.
I've found the automated vehicles to be impossibly fiddly. They can work, but it's really easy for them to get hung up on things. You have to be really careful when you record the route, with an eye toward reducing the vehicle's speed in tight maneuvers, especially around the truck stops. Once you have a route set up, the throughput of items the vehicle can move is very high.
One thing I've noticed is that the game doesn't seem to bother fully modeling the physics for vehicles when they're far away from the player. This means that vehicle routes seem to become much more reliable while the vehicle is away from your factory and out of sight. As far as I can tell, the game is just teleporting the vehicle from node to node in the path. Once it gets back home, however, and the real physics kick in, a truck can become a big dumb bouncing idiot, and it seems to just love whiffing that last turn into the truck depot, and smashing right into it.
In the future, if I mess with that stuff again, I'll be much more generous when I space out that final turn.
Belts are much more reliable. I spent some time measuring out just how expensive it is to cover long distances with belts. Roughly speaking, one unit of whichever resource is used to make the belt will cover two meters, and you'll need to make a pillar every 48 meters. Also, a single power cable can reach 100 meters. So, keep those numbers in mind the next time you need to drive a belt from a resource node that's 1km away: You'll need at least 500 of whichever sort of plate you're using, plus the stuff for at least 10 power lines and about 21 pillars.
Conveyor stacker ladders are pretty great, but going down ladders is a death trap in this game. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of using walkways for changing elevation, with a pattern of three ramps, followed by two turns for a landing, and so on in a helix.
I've noticed there's some weirdness with collision detection when it comes to placing splitters and mergers. They're fairly awkwardly large when you place them first, but it's also possible to drop them in-place on top of existing straight stretches of belts, and the game seems to completely ignore collision detection when they're placed in this way. This makes it possible to lay down splitters when belts are immediately stacked on top of one another, which makes it quite a bit simpler to organize belts when feeding them into the buildings that have multiple inputs.
Whooooooly crap. I just lost my entire weekend to this game. Really pushes my buttons.
Re: vehicles. I've had really good luck with them not malfunctioning. One gripe is that I wish you cloud have an "unloading" truck stop that would also refuel if needed. They allow you to fill the fuel holding tanks independently of the warehouse area, so it seems like this should be allowed.
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.
On a whim, I bought this Saturday morning, and played it for a good portion of Saturday. I'm up to Tier 4 I think? Space elevator is constructed, and I've sent the first set of goods that it needed. My automated processing chain so far is pretty limited; just an iron miner -> (iron plate or iron rod) chain, which I switch occasionally based on what I'm more in need of. It feels like manual processing is in need of a nerf, to encourage more automated processing.
I spent a fair bit of time on this over the weekend. I've got some automation going with coal and around 12 coal generators, I did all the building out by the coal vein since it was 600m away from my base and then ran the power in on a line.
I had NO idea you could hit E on a power line to see the overall power capacity and consumption. I was hitting each unit and doing the math in my head. Saw a youtuber do it when I was trying to figure out how they stacked factories(they just built additional floors with foundations).
At this point I'm automating plates, rods, wire, cable, concrete, screws, reinforced plates, rotors, modular frames, and was just getting started on steel. Went to a second coal vein(that had iron nearby) and got the miners and belts set up into a side-by-side storage but need to do all the automation to get them crafted and then sent to base via smol truck.
I really love this and for some reason it's easier for me to keep track of than in factorio.
Played the hell out of this since picking it up last week, and last night I got through all of the tech trees available (mostly, I haven't bothered with the rebar gun or the jetpack yet), however, I haven't found and researched everything in the world yet, or built a mechanism to make high tier items like the computer.
I was lucky early on to find a place near iron, copper, limestone, and coal but when I eventually got to oil, it was probably 2k+ away... but by then I had so many iron plates and concrete that I just ran a three tiered conveyor belt shuttling coal out for power, and the oil back... kinda unseemly, but it works.
Some things I learned along the way really makes me want to go back and start over, try to build something neater. I'm not very good at building up, only out. Also, I only just last night figured out that you can connect multiple generators together for a larger overall power grid... I literally assumed you could only connect enough machines to one generator as the capacity of that generator...
Looking at the roadmap, there seems to be a lot of great items coming.
The hint I'll share, in case other people didn't realize this, as I didn't is: you can add a splitter or converger directly to an existing conveyor belt. You don't have to build the splitter or converger on the ground/platform then run conveyor belts too it. And if you add to an existing belt, it'll even point the correct way!
This game hooked me all weekend. I spent something like 4 hours designing building a powering a factory to get one assembler building motors at full efficiency. ended up being 3 assembers, 9 constructors, and nightmare stacks of conveyors running on stackable poles and along the walls of the room. I really wish spitters and mergers were a: a little bit smaller, and B: stackable.
If you try a 2nd floor of a factory, give the 2nd floor a few extra height steps above smelters, like leave some head room for the smoke. I built a 2nd floor directly above some smelters and the smoke from them is pretty much all I can see (The effect clips through the foundation). Its really annoying.
If you try a 2nd floor of a factory, give the 2nd floor a few extra height steps above smelters, like leave some head room for the smoke. I built a 2nd floor directly above some smelters and the smoke from them is pretty much all I can see (The effect clips through the foundation). Its really annoying.
Have you come up with any clever designs for lifting stuff up to the second floor of a factory? I built by motor line on a seconf floor it it is just a tangled mess lifting stuff up there.
Mine was also a tangled mess. I dismantled the 2 floor factory and reformed it into a mostly 1 floor thing, just with some distant (about .75 conveyor lengths) stacked Assemblers.
I think with some clever use of the wall mounted conveyor supports you could get 1 or 2 products up cleanly. Trying to get 3 or more is probably asking too much. The stacked factories I've seen on Youtube don't move products up or down.
Basically everything clean I've tried to do has turned out not to work very well.
Take this smelter array for example (hope this works, also sorry for the big stupid beacon in hand!)
The ore input is on that middle line and the splitters nice and cleanly split the input out to 8 smelters, which merge onto 2 output belts. The belt speeds all handle the required load, but when you split a split a split a split that last smelter pair basically gets 10% efficiency. I didnt have much use for the Caterium it's creating (its only directly used for wire at the moment) so its fine, I just left it, but for something like Iron it would be awful, even if its pretty.
What I learned is you can't really do linear splitting and get very good throughput. Instead you want it to look like a decision tree, which you can't really do in a pretty way
Wow... I didn't think of doing something like that...
I'm def stealing that smelter design, maybe with fewer smelters.
I had good luck with what was essentially 4 paired sets constructors facing a wall about 1 to 1.5 foundations back, merging the outputs and then using perpendicular wall conveyors climbing the wall, rising one wall section each time a new pair fed in so i eventually had 4 runs that circled the room then reversed the process to feed them one by one into assemblers.
At one point i had two copper smelters feeding 3 wire constructors and used a 'balancer' between them: each output fed into a splitter, and 3 mergers connected to the assemblers with 2 splitter outputs feeding each merger. That way the input across the three constructors was the same. I suspect there is some efficiency loss, but there was enough buffer between the smelter output and constructor input that the constructors never lagged.
What I learned is you can't really do linear splitting and get very good throughput.
Assuming you have enough input in comparison to your consumption, this can work excellently. You just need to let the inputs fill their buffers first.
When the ore hits the first splitter, it will send one-third to each of the first two smelters, and the remaining one-third to the entire rest of the array. However, each smelter is only actually consuming 30 ore/minute, and its internal buffer is limited to one stack of ore. Once that buffer is full, its input belt will begin to back up, and the splitter will begin to only send the 30 ore/minute that the smelter is actually consuming. The rest will overflow into the next pair of smelters, and this pattern will continue until every smelter is as busy as you might expect based on the total rate of ore being sent into this array of smelters.
Have you come up with any clever designs for lifting stuff up to the second floor of a factory? I built by motor line on a seconf floor it it is just a tangled mess lifting stuff up there.
I did a lot of playing around with double helixes, which seems like the most space-efficient way of having belts change elevation. My most successful design looks like this:
That's two sets of stackers, slightly offset from one another, with belts spiraling up in a double-helix. The whole arrangement very nearly fits in the footprint of a single foundation block, with the full curve of the belts just barely extending beyond.
Those helixes are great! Have you used the Jetpack yet? I wonder if that lets you hover well enough to make it easy to build vertically. I found it can be a bit of a pain to climb and get the angle you need to target the right rung of a conveyor stacker.
This was my switchback setup for crude oil which was super distant and had to scale a very tall cliff (something like 4 towers high). I wish I had thought of the coiling idea! but Ill pretty much never go back there so its fine 
Longer switchbacks like that are more efficient. You waste a few belts making each turnaround, so the more elevation you can attain with each ramp, the fewer resources you spend making the structure as a whole. In addition, you could (if necessary) wind several belts around those same two sets of stackers.
The much tighter coils shown in my screenshot are useful when you're in the midst of a factory, and want to change stories when there is a premium on floor space. When you're out in the wilderness like that, you have no such restriction, and so that sort of design may be preferable.
This is the sweet design candy i came here for. thanks!
Yeah, I'm literally doodling some new plans while at work based on what y'all are showing me here.
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