A Satisfactory thread

[Ciffo]

Since I didn't find any Satisfactory discussion, I decided to open one myself!

If you don't know, Satisfactory (https://www.satisfactorygame.com/) is actually a game (available in epic game and "soon" in steam), where you play a engineer sent to an alien planet in order to build a sort of "space station", using the materials of the alien word to build the increasingly complex machinery and objects needed for that project. You will have to build a growing automated factory in a somewhat hostile environment. The game is in first person and can be played in multiplayer (cooperative).
At the moment the game is still in early access status, but the essentials are there, the game is already great as it is and it works quite well

TLDR: build your own automated superfactory!

Some resources for the game:
reddit comunity (https://www.reddit.com/r/SatisfactoryGame/)
official wiki (https://satisfactory.gamepedia.com/Satisfactory_Wiki)
an offline calculator (https://satisfactory-calculator.com/)

Any other fan of this game?

Attention: this game may cause dependence and the urge to use spreadsheets.

[J-H]

I haven't heard of it, but it sounds like a first-person version of Factorio (www.factorio.com), which has been around for a while longer.

[endoperez]

I tried Factorio, but I didn't like it. It turns out that it's easy to improve on a game once the idea's out, and since the first resource management and conveyor belt builder I played was Mindustry (https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry), I found Factorio's systems clunkier by comparison.

In Mindustry, you plan out your buildings first, and then the creation happens afterwards. In Factorio, you choose to queue up buildings first, then wait until they're done, and then you can start placing them. That means you can't properly build things before you've spent the resources to make them... And Mindustry's conveyor belts have splitters, sorters and distributors, which make it much easier to control which resource go to which belts. The fact that Factorio doesn't have those (at least on the early tech levels) really hurts its appeal for me. I want to be able to quickly make working systems, instead of first spending time designing complicated blueprints or reading wikis to figure out how to make a conveyor belt system that feed a resource to two factories at once.

It's nice that the genre is being worked on. Every iteration is sure to improve on the premise, so even though I was somewhat disappointed in Factorio myself and didn't end up enjoying it much, I'm sure one of the games down the line will be streamlined enough for me. Probably one of the easier and more simple ones, perhaps. :D

[J-H]

Factorio does have belt splitters, and there's some way to program them to filter, but I haven't messed with it. I usually need full belts of every raw resource.
There are also filter inserters that only move specific products.

You can do a heck of a lot with the circuit/combinator network, up to and including designing a circuit network that plays pong or makes music. I don't have a programming background, so I haven't figured any of that stuff out. I'm just happy I have train routing down.

[Eurus]

I enjoyed Satisfactory for a while, but once I finished the space elevator I was done with it. I don't really get much out of the sandboxy Minecraft style games when I'm just building for the sake of building, unfortunately. That being said, the part I did play was fun! The general process is something like (1): build a nice clean assembly line, (2): slowly add in more bits to improve efficiency or fit in the stuff you just unlocked, (3): realize everything has become a tangled mess, (4): tear it all down and build a nice clean assembly line. Repeat four or five times. :smallamused:

[endoperez]

Factorio does have belt splitters, and there's some way to program them to filter, but I haven't messed with it. I usually need full belts of every raw resource.
There are also filter inserters that only move specific products.

You can do a heck of a lot with the circuit/combinator network, up to and including designing a circuit network that plays pong or makes music. I don't have a programming background, so I haven't figured any of that stuff out. I'm just happy I have train routing down.

Factorio has three-tile splitters, which output to three different conveyor belts. Mindustry has a one-tile splitter, which also output into up to three conveyor belts. the storage buildings (which replace chests) are easier to feed and it's easier to draw resources from them. There are interesting little blocks that make conveyor belt management much more pleasant than in Factorio's early game, which is all I experienced.

Some examples:

Feeding resources into a vault (2x2 "chest"). Once the vault is full, it no longer accepts resources from the conveyor belt. Once the conveyor belt is full, the little X-block, "Overflow Gate", starts feeding incoming resources into neighboring belts. So once a belt is full, you can feed the resources elsewhere. In this case, into another container.
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/792002086711960187/9D4E834BE31D0BCFD3F4C0BA259E26F9FA716A92/

Diustributors spread input equally among all outputs. Here you get all the incoming resource spread over two outcoming belts.
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/792002086711900009/50AB366EE77EC9F5944BDCBDAD17E1AA91ECEA25/

Here, it's two inputs spread over 6 outputs.
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/792002086711897263/A0233C9C20AB283DC2D356A76C51C0A43FB68733/


There are other things in Mindustry's belt system I don't like, but many of the individual conveyor belt logic parts that work with distributing, redirecting or sorting the resources on the belt work really well, and I missed that stuff in Factorio. If I had those with Factorio's belts with two resource lines and the grabbers, the combination would be more interesting than either alone.

[Jimorian]

Not quite sure what you're missing, but all of those functions are available in Factorio once you have splitters, which are a very very early tech. Mindustry is awesome, but the limitations of it being a puzzle leveler start to tell after a while.

But this is a Satisfactory thread. At first, it seemed to me like Satisfactory was fairly simplified in its resource needs and with ramping up production to new tech levels, but it really needs a much more robust and complicated setup when you start getting into the later tiers. It is really fun to be able to actually walk around your factories and experience what they're doing first hand as well. :smallsmile:

[Rydiro]

Things start to get messy real fast. It is also partly an Exploration game where you hunt for secret caches, which grant you more efficient recipes, which cause you to redesing you entire factory. Also 3D conveyor belts allow excellent messes.
Next thing i want to try is a map wide transport system that just shoots you from mountaintop to mountaintop.

The boring part is bringing in stuff from literal miles away.

[Ciffo]

I played a bit with factorio so I can tell there are similarities with Satisfactory, the main differences are:
- Satisfactory is in first person so you lose the "watch from above" perspective you have in factorio, but you gain the ability to play in 3 dimension!
- In Satisfactory the wild life isn't dangerous like factorio, your factory can't be destroyed by any mean (unless you want to)
- There are "few" mine node around the world but they last forever, so you can plan the logistic of the transport of the good and then you have only to worry if you got enough energy to make everything work

[Eurus]

I played a bit with factorio so I can tell there are similarities with Satisfactory, the main differences are:
- Satisfactory is in first person so you lose the "watch from above" perspective you have in factorio, but you gain the ability to play in 3 dimension!
- In Satisfactory the wild life isn't dangerous like factorio, your factory can't be destroyed by any mean (unless you want to)
- There are "few" mine node around the world but they last forever, so you can plan the logistic of the transport of the good and then you have only to worry if you got enough energy to make everything work

The wildlife can't destroy your factory in Satisfactory, which is great, but they will absolutely murder you as you try to go places. Honestly I found that to be one of the game's biggest pains, the combat system is more annoying than engaging and it felt like a huge chore to explore places because of all the enemies.

[Spacewolf]

Isnt it still in closed Alpha/beta? I was looking at it afew weeks ago and that seemed to be the current state

[IthilanorStPete]

Isnt it still in closed Alpha/beta? I was looking at it afew weeks ago and that seemed to be the current state

It's in early access still, but it's openly available on the Epic store.

[Rydiro]

- There are "few" mine node around the world but they last forever, so you can plan the logistic of the transport of the good and then you have only to worry if you got enough energy to make everything work
... until you realize you need more of it or a refined version. And that your belts arent high-lvl enough. At which point you need to upgrade all of it.

[Ciffo]

... until you realize you need more of it or a refined version. And that your belts arent high-lvl enough. At which point you need to upgrade all of it.

Yes that's the essence. What do you do in the game otherwise?

For Eurus:
For what concern the combat, at the begin alien life seems quite annoying, but when you understand how to engage the different enemy and manage to have some healing with you, they become more an annoyance that a true obstacle. After some time you'll die (like me) almost always for height-related issue

For Spacewolf:
It is in early access, more or less 80% of the final game is there, the steam launch has been announced for the 8th of July.

[Eurus]

Yes that's the essence. What do you do in the game otherwise?

For Eurus:
For what concern the combat, at the begin alien life seems quite annoying, but when you understand how to engage the different enemy and manage to have some healing with you, they become more an annoyance that a true obstacle. After some time you'll die (like me) almost always for height-related issue.

See, the healing items are part of the annoyance, to me. If you could produce or craft healing items in your base without having to go out foraging (and possibly fighting), I wouldn't mind as much! Also, I feel like it takes way too long for any of the other weapons to become available. Relying on the tiny little xeno-zapper is kinda miserable, but you're stuck with it for what feels like ages.

[druid91]

Honestly, once you unlock tractors, the aliens become utterly irrelevant aside from the spiders. You just shove them off the nearest cliff.

[BRC]

Played it quite a bit, got pretty far, until things kind of seemed pointless, started over and still had a pretty good time. It's a great game if you just want to zone out and lose yourself in an experience for a few hours. It's not going to give you an exciting rush, but it's fun to build, explore, and see what you've built.

Complaints

1) The 3d building can be iffy, especially when trying to build conveyor networks. What is or is not a valid space to pass through or conveyor path can sometimes seem to change second-to-second. No matter how much you plan, your neat assembly line is almost certainly going to devolve into a big mess of tangled conveyors.

2) while the combat isn't BAD, it's never really fun? Getting some alien organs is nice when you're still running biofuel generators, but most of the time you just want to explore the beautiful map, and fighting off random aliens isn't especially engaging. Hostile aliens are usually more annoying than anything, requiring you to fill your inventory with weapons and healing items so you can wander around the map. However, none of the weapons really feel fun to use, none of the aliens are fun to fight, and it's not what this game is about. Even when you had aliens guarding an important resource node or something important, it mostly just felt like a chore.

3) The game has a bad habit of withholding tools and toys that should really be available much earlier. For example, Trains.

The map is set up so that none of the spawn points will be near Coal, so using Coal means going out, finding some (Using your Scanner), and then setting up some sort of transportation method to get the coal to where you need it to go, either to generate power or steel.

Long-ranged transportation of this form can take three forms
1) Build a really long conveyor belt, which is simple, but very expensive, and quite tedious.
2) Build a Train! Which is (Theoretically) fairly easy to understand (It follows the tracks) feels very cool to get working (Seeing the impact you've made on the world), BUT trains are high-level, and you won't get them until well after you mean coal, which means
3) Setting up an automated tractor/truck network! Which means engaging with the quite frustrating and obtuse Vehicle Autopilot system. Unlike the Trains, which follow the tracks you lay out for them and run off your power grid, autopiloted vehicles are finnicky. They have a habit of getting themselves stuck in holes, or even just wasting a ton of time re-creating every mistake you made when initially recorded the route, plus you have to keep them fueled up.

Something similar happens with Power Poles, you need to upgrade power poles to fit more than 4 connectors on a single one, which means that your factory often ends up with ugly clusters of poles, since they're easy enough to make. You don't really gain that much upgrading your poles compared to just building a cluster of 4 poles (1 connected to each of the others and then back to your power grid) except aesthetics. They could have just given a pole more connections by default.

In both cases, you're forced to do something more complicated and frustrating (Program truck routes, build pole clusters), and then unlock the simple solutions (trains, upgraded poles) later.

(mind you, trains are still finnicky, and quite expensive, and they can only run one direction if you want them to actually detect stations, but hey).


4) Managing the power grid is an exercise in frustration.

Early on you need to use biomass generators, which need to be manually fed. It will be a while before you can automate power production with Coal, until then you need to be on constant watch to keep your generators fed.

Except that Coal generators, as I learned, require Water to run, which means you have to keep track of how much water your water pumps are producing. I once kept trying to solve my power woes by building more and more coal generators, only to find out that none of them could run because they were out of water, and since the power failed immedietally as soon as I switched it on, my water pump never pumped water to them. So I ended up needing to kickstart my power grid by building and re-attaching a bunch of Biomass generators, so I could get enough water in my coal generators to let them work. Since the coal generators required water to run, which required power to supply, restarting a power grid by hooking up a new coal generator doesn't really work.

Power generators only run when needed, which is great for biomass generators, but can lead to a problem later on. An automated grid that appears perfectly stable (I have 8 coal generators, full of fuel and water! everything is working! Time to expand my factory) but unless you did the math to confirm that it can, in fact, run at max capacity (am I feeding these generators enough coal and water for them all to run), it's easy to build yourself a grid that just, fails later on.

And this is part of the game, but be warned, this is a game that likes to throw frustrations at you.

[Eurus]

The "huge conveyor belt/walkway system in the sky" solution is definitely a bit of a gripe I had. It's extremely inelegant and tedious to set up, but it's arguably the most efficient solution by far once it is set up. So it feels like the game is giving you a pretty big incentive to do it.

[druid91]

Played it quite a bit, got pretty far, until things kind of seemed pointless, started over and still had a pretty good time. It's a great game if you just want to zone out and lose yourself in an experience for a few hours. It's not going to give you an exciting rush, but it's fun to build, explore, and see what you've built.

Complaints

1) The 3d building can be iffy, especially when trying to build conveyor networks. What is or is not a valid space to pass through or conveyor path can sometimes seem to change second-to-second. No matter how much you plan, your neat assembly line is almost certainly going to devolve into a big mess of tangled conveyors.

2) while the combat isn't BAD, it's never really fun? Getting some alien organs is nice when you're still running biofuel generators, but most of the time you just want to explore the beautiful map, and fighting off random aliens isn't especially engaging. Hostile aliens are usually more annoying than anything, requiring you to fill your inventory with weapons and healing items so you can wander around the map. However, none of the weapons really feel fun to use, none of the aliens are fun to fight, and it's not what this game is about. Even when you had aliens guarding an important resource node or something important, it mostly just felt like a chore.

3) The game has a bad habit of withholding tools and toys that should really be available much earlier. For example, Trains.

The map is set up so that none of the spawn points will be near Coal, so using Coal means going out, finding some (Using your Scanner), and then setting up some sort of transportation method to get the coal to where you need it to go, either to generate power or steel.

Long-ranged transportation of this form can take three forms
1) Build a really long conveyor belt, which is simple, but very expensive, and quite tedious.
2) Build a Train! Which is (Theoretically) fairly easy to understand (It follows the tracks) feels very cool to get working (Seeing the impact you've made on the world), BUT trains are high-level, and you won't get them until well after you mean coal, which means
3) Setting up an automated tractor/truck network! Which means engaging with the quite frustrating and obtuse Vehicle Autopilot system. Unlike the Trains, which follow the tracks you lay out for them and run off your power grid, autopiloted vehicles are finnicky. They have a habit of getting themselves stuck in holes, or even just wasting a ton of time re-creating every mistake you made when initially recorded the route, plus you have to keep them fueled up.

Something similar happens with Power Poles, you need to upgrade power poles to fit more than 4 connectors on a single one, which means that your factory often ends up with ugly clusters of poles, since they're easy enough to make. You don't really gain that much upgrading your poles compared to just building a cluster of 4 poles (1 connected to each of the others and then back to your power grid) except aesthetics. They could have just given a pole more connections by default.

In both cases, you're forced to do something more complicated and frustrating (Program truck routes, build pole clusters), and then unlock the simple solutions (trains, upgraded poles) later.

(mind you, trains are still finnicky, and quite expensive, and they can only run one direction if you want them to actually detect stations, but hey).


4) Managing the power grid is an exercise in frustration.

Early on you need to use biomass generators, which need to be manually fed. It will be a while before you can automate power production with Coal, until then you need to be on constant watch to keep your generators fed.

Except that Coal generators, as I learned, require Water to run, which means you have to keep track of how much water your water pumps are producing. I once kept trying to solve my power woes by building more and more coal generators, only to find out that none of them could run because they were out of water, and since the power failed immedietally as soon as I switched it on, my water pump never pumped water to them. So I ended up needing to kickstart my power grid by building and re-attaching a bunch of Biomass generators, so I could get enough water in my coal generators to let them work. Since the coal generators required water to run, which required power to supply, restarting a power grid by hooking up a new coal generator doesn't really work.

Power generators only run when needed, which is great for biomass generators, but can lead to a problem later on. An automated grid that appears perfectly stable (I have 8 coal generators, full of fuel and water! everything is working! Time to expand my factory) but unless you did the math to confirm that it can, in fact, run at max capacity (am I feeding these generators enough coal and water for them all to run), it's easy to build yourself a grid that just, fails later on.

And this is part of the game, but be warned, this is a game that likes to throw frustrations at you.

Honestly, I thought trains were more of a curiosity because I found the tractors so easy to use. Admittedly, I found running multiple tractors in the same zone to be a tad..... risky. But that just required a bit of creative route building.

But then, the only thing I ever ended up using them for was oil and coal.

[BRC]

Honestly, I thought trains were more of a curiosity because I found the tractors so easy to use. Admittedly, I found running multiple tractors in the same zone to be a tad..... risky. But that just required a bit of creative route building.

But then, the only thing I ever ended up using them for was oil and coal.

my first truck route involved going up a ramp, and apparently the autopilot acceleration isn't quite as precise as it could be, so it kept falling off. Also, I'm a bad driver, so all the micro-adjustments I made to get the truck into the station left a bunch of ugly blue triangles everywhere.


When I DID get my train set up, yeah, it was more of a curiosity than anything. I had a big loop going on with four stations, but only actually moved cargo over my old truck route. Almost certainly wasn't worth all the effort I went through to get it set up.

[druid91]

My two routes were in the grassy area. One down the ravine to the big pit, to bring oil from my oil-checkpoint (I used Conveyor belts to get the oil to the big tower I'd made to get into the mountains to get to it in the first place.) To my base near the stone arch. Then I had a second route to bring in the coal from that tiny plateau in the opposite direction.

And yeah. My solution to that was to practice the routes a couple of times. My only issue I found was when I put multiple tractors in the same general area. (I tried to set up a caterium run that went through the ravine.) there was a fairly decent risk of the two tractors colliding and knocking one another over.

[Jimorian]

I tried to scan through the thread to see if anybody mentioned it, but I missed it if so. But they announced that Satisfactory is coming to Steam on June 8th.

[IthilanorStPete]

Played it a little bit today, got to the point where I'm starting to set up constructors and conveyors. It seems really difficult to design and build stuff while working in the first-person perspective, though, especially with how big the buildings are; does that ever get better?

EDIT: Well, regardless, I'm having fun...officially sucked in at this point. :smalltongue: I also just finished the Base Building milestone, so that might help with my previous issues. Current factory:


https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/669042373623414784/719247410173313105/full_factory_1.png