Satisfactory

I have yet to actually beat the game, but this playthrough I decided on going with a central logistics hub and modular factories. All goods flow into and out of the hub. Blueprints for rail bridges have been essential, but modularizing the factories has really helped cut down on the complexity. Most primary manufacturing is done on site at the point of resources, and further manufacturing is being done near the hub. If I can take advantage of a resource while making higher tier goods, I will. I also have made sure to integrate a hypertube network into the rail bridges, which has really helped with getting around. I'll sometimes add "booster" sections in the runs to speed things up.

I've adored what I've played of Satisfactory, but I've held off on delving too deeply into Coffee Stain's extraordinary automation extravaganza. See, I know that it's going to obliterate my social life for at least a month, because that's what factory sims do. Hence, it only seems fair that I bring my partner on that glorious adventure of social self-destruction. Yet our only other PC in the house is a Steam Deck, and up until now handheld Satisfactory has been a suboptimal experience due to its mouse-heavy control scheme.

As of Satisfactory's recent 1.1 update, however, this has now changed. The update adds an array of new features to the game's sprawling tangle of conveyor belts, including an overhauled photo mode and a buildable personnel elevator. But the most exciting addition for me is proper controller support, which also applies to Valve's handheld PC.

I took the update for a brief spin on my Steam Deck, and the difference is immediately apparent. Menus are now easily navigable with the analogue stick, no longer requiring you to faff around with the trackpad. Moreover, placing construction units like assemblers and drawing out conveyor belts seems far more intuitive than it was.

I should note that Satisfactory still doesn't feel like a game designed with Steam Deck in mind. Mainly, you still need to squint a bit to read the menu and HUD text, likely why Satisfactory isn't Deck verified yet. But "playable" is a much more accurate description now, and I can see myself having a good time building my dream industrial complex while slouched on my sofa or curled up in bed.

(Image credit: Coffee Stain)

This is far from the only change the update makes, though. As mentioned, Coffee Stain has wiped the lens of its photo mode, adding numerous extra filters, effects, poses and so forth, as well as a "dolly mode" that lets players create "small transitions and videos or anything your creativity allows" as Coffee Stain explains in a recent Steam post.

Elsewhere, debris from crash sites can be dismantled for extra resources, while trains now need a buffer placed at the end of the line to stop them from flying off the tracks. There's a litany of new features for resource transportation, such as "priority mergers" which let you prioritise which active inputs should feed out onto the belt first, as well as a throughput monitor that tracks the number of resources rolling along a belt per-minute. Oh, and pipelines now have specific "straight" and "curved" build modes, helping you organise your pipework.

Finally, there's that personnel elevator you can construct for speedy vertical transportation. This apparently enables players to create as many floor stops as they desire, customising the name of each floor as they go. I look forward to the community testing this to its limits, and attempting to build a personnel elevator to rival Satisfactory's space elevator.

Alongside these key additions, the update brings several visual updates, quality-of-life improvements, and bugfixes. "It’s no exaggeration to say this update includes more than a year's worth of work," Coffee Stain writes. Some of this work is in preparation for the game's console launch, which is due later this year. But you can enjoy the 1.1 update on PC (and Steam Deck) right now.

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Im cirrently on Tier 2, I have not built the Space elevator yet, but I have really big problems with the assemblers

So, I currently have 2 iron Plants: 1 with a 120/min drill, going into 3 smelters, 2 of them producing iron Plates and 1 being split into iron rods and the iron cast screws

And now I built a second plant from right besides it with 180/min, going into 6 30/min smelters, however even the mk2 conveyor bottlenecks the smelters

However even this way I still only produce enough screws for the rotors, so I still need another 60/min for the reinforced plates

So since I dont have a third iron node by the next 300m my only options are basically to either turn the whole plant into a plate and rod plant each and get a third one from somewhere to get the screws, or I can just redirect the screws from the other plant and let the rotors lag behind

If anyone had other ideas, I would appreciate it

Also, as a bonus: How in Ficsits godforgiven name can I scale these assemblers? Like, If I need 2 Iron entire Pure grade iron plants to build even 1 assembler for each, and the mk2 smelters and stuff only unlock once I got to Tier 3 or 4 already, how can I realistically even finish the Space Elevator project?

Are you going to stop and wait or keep on going anyway?

It's not that I don't like power poles. I just don't like them inside. Wall attachments are also fine, but then everything would need to be near a wall.

Not sure if I'm happy or worried about this

Even though I played for many hours after the 1.0 release last year... huh?

My iron smelter array. Total capacity is 9600 iron ingots/minute, using the basic recipe. I actually only have Mk.4 belts, so I can only use the bottom four (of ten) floors... But I like building oversized. The idea was to centralize the production of basic resources (ingots and concrete). Then, the actual factories making stuff could be located more or less anywhere, regardless of local resources. Centralizing the smelting would reduce the many-to-many distribution problem of resources to a many-to-one (resources to smelter) and a one-to-many (smelter-to-factory). But actually integrating the train station was a pain in the ass and not really fun compared to the factory. I have lots of ideas for how I want factories to look and nowhere can I fit three or more train stations. Maybe this is more a Factorio style and Satisfactory is really more about building the factory close to the resources. So I may not actually end up using this lol. That said, everything is blueprinted now, so I may end up using a smaller version of this design in a different factory. The back, with observation tower for scale.

Shoutouts to the 1.1 vertical nudging feature, which should have been in the game from the start and the new curve mode for conveyors, which look great with the gentle curvature of the main structure.

Dubious shoutout to the feature/bug that vertical splitters now allow you to build X.5m long vertical conveyors, which is a power that I should have used more sparingly.

The music is so good! Wish I had splashed out on it sooner!

I don't always like the idea of single big buildings, several buildings feels more industrial to me. I tried to make it fairly walkable.

I also realised that after finishing it, that I also need to send the output to a train to take to a future plant for Modular Engines, but I didn't leave any space for the train.

Everything just looks so good in this game!

I'm planning to start a new Satisfactory world with a number of friends and acquaintances of mine, some from different friend groups.

In a game like Minecraft, the world is limitless and people can set their base up anywhere, obtain resources wherever they please and just trying not to impede on others too much. In Satisfactory I worry a bit about competing over the resources or ideal space, or someone decides to take down another person's hourslong work to make a more efficient factory, etc.

What would be ways that I could fairly share the world with many people? I'd think most of the people would get along and the objective is shared, but I'd want to reduce areas of frustration where possible and would appreciate any advice to that end.

Created blueprints in satisfactory for a modular ore processing tower. The base is a wrapper around a miner, and the floors process 240 ore each. Scales up to 5 floors tall, allowing for 1200 ore/ingots from overclocked pure nodes.

Concept and inspiration came from Yakez42: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmnoLVtGfvg

In the basic setup, each floor connects to the base directly. With 1-3 floors, each floor is balanced input wise.

Each floor has 3 ore inputs, and 1 ore "forward" port. One of the problems with Yakes42's design is that it was before mk6 belts, and thus didn't need more than 3 floors. To support additional floors, I added an ore output to chain additional floors. The forward port ore is also split out before the machine groups lines are split, so half of the incoming ore is forwarded.

Each floor has 3 ingot outputs, and 1 ingot forwarding input. Again, to chain an additional floor.

There is a slight gap in the roof where i have the steel frame floor that allows you to check on the status of a machine if you really need to.

Internally, it's two machine groups of 4. Splitting is done on the logistics floor.

Screen of the miner with it's cover. There is some internal work to connect the miner output to the cover.

To support 1200 and 5 floors, you need to chain 2 floors off of other floors. The bottom floor needs to connect via the middle lift. Floor 2 needs to chain into floor 3, and floor 4 needs to chain into floor 5. Otherwise, you will exceed the lift height (without using other tricks)

It's using what I call "budget" 1:5 balancer that isn't actually that bad for balance. It's a spliter connect 1:3, and then two of the three legs get split 1:2 again. Once branch (the middle) gets 1/3th, and the other 4 get 1/6th of the resources. As soon as the "middle" leg backs up, it is balanced. I kind of hate the design of real 1:5 balancers, and would only use them if I really needed them for something critical. For smelters with 1200/min input, it really doesn't matter except on the initial fill time.

While I really like the look of radar tower on the top, the Lookout tower looks really out of place. I'll probably come up with a cosmetic design. I've been trying to brainstorm on something actually useful to put on top. The only thing I can think of is for a few to have hypertube cannons.

I like how far away I can see the full tower with a radar tower on top.

Next I plan to do floors with Forges. 4 per floors would let each floor handle 300 for iron alloy, and 400 for copper alloy.

I just liked the framing.

I was trying to come up with a compact design mini factories that I could blue print and wanted to see how many manufacturers I could squeeze into a mk3. Along the way, the solutuon I came up with ended up being load balanced. Now that I post-end game, and some of the final products can be really slow, I certainly appreciate being able to not have wait for a manifold to fill.

I started the design with what I am calling a "center feed" pair of manufacturers. Instead of resources coming from the left or right in a manifold, they are fed in between the 2.

I had a similar design before for a 3 input version, but didn't have to solve what to do when splitters on the head of the lifts are too close together. This time around, I just pulled further back and removed the splitters on the lifts.

Next was simply mirroring 2 more manufacturers and feeding the inputs in again from the middle (above the outputs). Now I had a balanced design for 4x. It could also trivially be extended to 6x, although it wouldn't fit in a blueprint.

The final step was to link 3 floors together. The inputs are routed via lifts up the middle floor, and there are split 3 ways. One output goes directly out the back the feed the machines on that floor. The right output goes to the top floor via lifts (easiest to see here), and the left goes the bottom floor also via lifts. The key to getting this to work is to stagger the lifts, and to not care that I we re-ordering which input was "on top" etc. Staggering the lifts usually needed me to build a splitter, nudge it in location, build the lift, delete the splitter, and then connect the lift via belt.

All of the outputs for the top two floors are routed back away from the inputs lifts, and then down to be merged with the ground floor mergers. They were pretty easy to route since there was a lot of room beneath the input splitters.

First time I completed phase five. Killed about 630 hours across two saves. Now I need that golden nut!

This is my biggest build yet, it’s got so much room for activities. I hadn’t built a tier 9 factory yet, so this houses all that. Along with all my new portals and my HUB.

36 refineries to supply 36 fully over-clocked Fuel Gens. This is only the last step.

Should give me enough power for a while tho.

Next floor is done.... except that I JUST realized upon looking at this picture that I forgot to paint the floor.

With everything on this floor except for the last wall done, there's one little addition I want to make...

ELEVATOR!

They are absolutely as awesome as they look. Coffee Stain REALLY outdid themselves. I don't think there's ever been a feature they've added that I didn't have at least SOME small criticism about, but not this one.

Last wall filled in.

WE BACK!

Yeah, I haven't burned out on the game quite yet, I just haven't had a gaming PC for about 2 weeks. We dismantled the entire office in order to get the wood floor resurfaced.

Anyway, let's get this Caterium mine built up.

Lovely. I'm enjoying getting to play with the new beam variants. Disappointed that the "Shelf" beams can't have a sign nudged into them, without covering it up (at least, not with half-meter nudging).

Now, the bridge between the 2 buildings.

Moving on to the first floor of the main building.

More tomorrow! (heading out-of-town for the weekend after that, though).

It's nice to finally have a manufacturer so that I can automate the 3 items recipes, it was getting annoying having to do them at the bench.

A few months ago, I finished Satisfactory, including all the achievements. I really enjoyed the game, and though it felt really good to finally complete it and see everything I had built, I also was sad I would no longer be in the world.

I’m thinking of doing a new run, but I’m daunted by having to get all the collectibles again. In the first run, it was nice to explore the world and take a break from building things, but I’ve really seen the world now, so that’s less appealing.

Curious if there are others who feel similar. I’m wondering if I should just start a new game with all recipes unlocked and give myself all the spheres and sloops up front.

What have others done for a second run?