JakenVeina

FICSMAS Factory is complete! ETA on 500 Stars for the final research is just under 12 hours.

Really happy with the exterior cosmetics.

First thing I had to do today to finish the build is realize that this setup I built yesterday completely neglected to account for sinking of excess products. So, I had to tear down a few parts of this, and adjust my plans.

I started by just going ahead and laying out all the machines, roughly where I thought they'd end up. I figured that would help me figure out where I would put the sink and all the Dimensional Depot Uploaders.

I'm actually really surprised I was able to fit all the machines in here, with so much room to spare. I thought for sure I'd have to make a separate wing, at least for all the uploading and sinking.

I ended up having plenty of space at the back of the facility to upload all 16 unique FICSMAS items, and sink all the excess, with a simple sushi belt setup.

Also went ahead and moved the stairs down to the logistics floor.

Glamor shots of the factory floor. Overall, I am EXTREMELY happy with this whole factory. There's some really crazy beltwork going on here, but it all runs to perfection. 61 machines in total, and all running at a 100% efficiency.

Also, the logistics floor.

And for the nerds like me, the production plan and logistics map. Satisfactory Modeler really doesn't like the complexity of this one, it refuses to actually calculate out all the flow rates.

More road work today!

Also built out most of a trucking lot for the RIP/MF factory. As in, my wife built it out, and I did some of the compact belting, at the end.

Next session, I'll have to manually fill in all the oblong space and line with barriers to connect it up to the road.

Meanwhile, in singleplayer, I'm back on the FICSMAS factory. I noticed the roof was pretty dark at night, so I blueprinted out and added accent lighting around all the trees.

Then I did an initial rough-draft for all the gift beltwork and lighting, along the ceiling. I figure, I don't really have enough room to do all the gift belting in the logistics floor underneath this one, as it's only 5m tall, so I'll be taking this rough-draft, and reorganizing it as needed to pull off gift lines in the various spots that I need them, as I build the machinery. I rather like the organized chaos vibe going on here.

I started with the Iron and Copper machinery, as that's pretty much the only set that has to be (or should be) in a particular spot (near the front door, where the ores enter the building). From there, I built out all the ornament factories that use them, in the way that felt the most natural.

I figured this was enough machinery to go ahead and power up, and get a head start on priming the facility. Also, I don't actually HAVE all of the FICSMAS research done, so I need to get ornaments going, in particular.

Finally have almost all the blueprints for the road worked out. Made a bunch more progress on the road, with them. Although, I encountered a few mistakes that I had to quickly run back and correct.

But I was able to build out the road in quite a few directions, an in particular, the whole way to Copperworks.

Of course, I then encountered the prospect of building out this whole shipping/trucking lot by hand (the edging in particular), so I ended up creating a handful more blueprints for that concept.

But with the lot built, all the truck stations in place, and a successful efficiency audit, Copperworks is fully complete.

I ended up doing all the beltwork here, after my wife wasn't happy with her first draft, that took up quite a bit more space.

While I was doing that, though, she ran off and built a new factory for Reinforced Iron Plate and Modular Frame.

We debated on the technical design for quite a while. It was actually an entirely new exercise, for me, since I'm used to building factories based solely on full utilization of raw resource nodes. But, with this factory, there AREN'T any raw resources. We're free to ship in whatever we want with trucks.

Ultimately, I think we've proven that the Ironworks and Copperworks factories we've built, to be able to truck resources out to all future factories, are really not gonna work that way. They just don't have enough output volume to produce later products. We dedicated almost the entirety of our Screw production (yeah, I know, we regret that as well) just to this factory, with plans to just make Screws on-site anywhere else that needs them, and we're STILL only managing to get about 20/min RIP and 5/min MF here.

I'm trying not to let sub-optimal factories bug me, though, learning about why some ideas don't work is still success.

Back from out-of-town today, and back to working on the FICSMAS factory.

I need a total of 61 FICSMAS Gift Trees, and I wanted them to be part of the cosmetics of the place, so I got all of those laid out.

I also built out the general facade of the factory. I do have a few more ideas for detailing on the outside that I'll get to eventually.

Next session will be starting on wiring these together, and figuring out how to split them up across all the machines.

Also went back to check on Frameworks to discover that there's ANOTHER issue with the Iron Ore balancing. I believe I now understand why people are asking for Smart Mergers (I.E. with the ability to give some inputs priority, similar to what you can do with Smart Splitters), because I'm pretty sure that is the source of the issue this time. Previously, I would have said that Priority Mergers aren't necessary, when you can just go upstream and place a Priority Splitter, but I don't think that's feasible here.

Instead, I opted for a cheesy solution: using crates as mergers. These crates SHOULD fully allow backpressure to propagate across the two input belts, instead of pushing little bits of it back onto the input belts, and making them back up, since there are now 0 mergers ANYWHERE on the Iron Ore lines.

More progress on the Copperworks factory, today. My wife finalized the exteriors on all three buildings, and got all the lighting finished on the right-hand building.

We also spent a few hours hunting for Mercer Spheres together, as we actually don't have enough to finish this facility.

Me, I made more progress on the road blueprints today.

A sample of a couple of the issues I managed to resolve.

With nearly all the blueprint variations complete that I'm going to need, here's the progress I was able to make.

Also figured out how we want to deal with intersections.

Next session, I should finally be able to just sit down an USE all these blueprints, without getting interrupted by edge-cases I haven't worked out yet. I believe there's only one more scenario where I'll have to make some more blueprint variations, and they're sections of the road that are quite a ways away from here, involving both curves and inclines mixed together.

So, today, I'm faced with a dilemma. I am somehow an entire building short in my planned layout here. In the middle-right, we have the first stop, the smeltery, making nothing but Iron Ingots. Middle-left is where all the Iron Ingots go, to be crafted into various products. The little guy on the left is Concrete, and on the right is the final product: Modular Frames. Also, the open spot in front here will be the final building, once Manufacturers are unlocked, making Heavy Modular Frames, uploading to the Dimensional Depot, and sinking all the excess.

In all of this, I have neglected an entire 2 intermediate recipes: Stitched Iron Plate and Encased Industrial Pipe, for which I need at least 11 Assemblers.

Luckily, this won't be TOO difficult to work around. My plan is to just move the 2 floors of Concrete onto the top of the Iron Products building, add 2 more floors to the top of the old Concrete building, and house the Assemblers there. I've still got all the blueprints.

New floors in place.

The reworked bottom floor of the now all-Constructors building.

The lower of the two Concrete floors. Top one has 6 Constructors, like most of the other floors, but I only needed 9 total, so this one has just 3, plus a little extra space to combine all the Concrete together onto one belt.

Bottom floor of the new intermediate-Assemblers building.

Re-routing all the Limestone to run counter-clockwise around the building, instead of clockwise.

Splitting off a small portion of it to feed Basic Iron Ingot.

And finally, sending it up into the factory proper.

With that all sorted out, I've got 7 lines of Iron Ingot that need to feed over to 3 lines in the Constructor building. Unfortunately, this is about when I noticed my next little dilemma.

I drew it all out in Satisfactory Modeler to confirm what I thought: my belting plan has a belt exceeding its capacity. The goal with all my planning calculations is that no belt should exceed 480 items/min (a Mk.4 belt). That way, when I'm ready to clock this factory up to 250%, no belt will need to exceed 1,200 items/min (a Mk. 6 belt). But since I didn't actually draw out the belting like this, during planning, I've ended up with a belt that would exceed 480.

This issue also wasn't too difficult to work around. In this case, the way I have the machines laid out on each floor, it just involved me re-routing a few of the Iron Ingot belts, and also adding a 4th one. Now, each of the high-volume floors (with Iron Pipe) is fed by its own Iron Ingot belt, and the other 3 floors for Rod and Plate all share a belt.

So, now we need 7 Iron Ingot belts to balance down to 4, instead of just 3. This is how that turned out.

The 5 products coming out of the Constructor building all just run straight across to the Assembler Building, except for Iron Rod, which turns and heads to the opposite corner, for Modular Frames.

Products from the Assemblers (as well as a portion of the Steel Pipe, to be used for Heavy Modular Frames) head across to the yet-to-be-built building for exports and Heavy Modular Frames, to either be sunk for now, or continue onward to Modular Frames.

The Modular Frames building pulls in the Rods from earlier, and Reinforced Iron Plates, and then sends the frames back to be sunk.

That actually finishes out all the production lines. We are now producing Modular Frames, and producing and sinking everything that we'll eventually need for Heavy Modular Frames.

Time for some auditing.

Remember that balancer I briefly talked about yesterday, for Iron Ore? Yeah, there's a problem with it. Some of the Iron Ore miners are not running at 100% efficiency, due to backpressure.

This Mk. 1 belt here is the sole feed for 2 of the Iron Ingot Smelter floors, which need 37.227 Iron Ore/min each. As mentioned earlier, I can't just upgrade this belt, because that'll mean this belt would need to handle more than 1,200 items/min when I up the clock of the whole facility to 250%. I'll have to rebuild this whole balancer.

This seems to be working. Instead of taking 4 belts and attempting to cross-balance them, I'm taking 1 of the 4 (the one feeding the Foundry floor, which has the lowest demand) pulling 3 overflow lines off of it, and merging those into each of the remaining 3 belts for the Smelter floors.

The Smelters will take a while yet to fully prime to 100%, but they seem to be trending up now.

Sink and Depot for all the products. I'll check back periodically for efficiency audits, but I think, for now, this factory is done.

Back in singleplayer, I was planning to setup the miners for Frameworks, last time. In order to setup belting for that, I'll need to know exactly the footprint I have to work with, within the logistics layer of the structure, so my actual next task was to finalize that, which means I needed to finalize the exterior as well.

This is what I came up with. I'm pretty happy with it.

Laid down all the miners, next.

I'm QUITE happy with how the interior came out.

Got belting, power, and final cosmetics done for all the miners.

Raw resources all run along the edges of the logistics floor.

With the raw resource all in place, next up is to start using them. Almost all of them will be going into here, to the Smelter/Foundry building.

I realized the Foundries for Basic Iron Ingot only need a small portion of the Limestone, so I can just split off a little bit of it from the first miner (which provides half of the total) before sending the rest onward to join up with the other sources, and head to the Concrete building.

The two Iron Ore lines needed some tricky splitting and re-balancing, to spread evenly across 4 belts to head into the Smelter/Foundry building, but I got it all worked out (I think). This brings the Smelter/Foundry building fully online and finished.

With the blueprints I engineered yesterday, plus a couple additional variations I finished today, I got to work re-doing the road with them.

Same idea as the tubeways, ultimately: layout the pathing in foundations, and then place blueprints on top of those.

First little section looks pretty satisfying.

Unfortunately, I've already encountered an issue, the first time I tried to make a 5-degree curve. What I'm gonna need to do is make a couple more blueprint variants, for curves, where these beams and pillars don't run all the way to the end. Probably one each for 5-degree, 10-degree, and 15-degree curves. I'll only need these variants for flat segments of road, fortunately, as we already established a long time ago that you can't place incline segments in a curve.

Meanwhile, my wife had an idea while doing lighting and costmetics on Copperworks, and I helped her blueprint it out.

(that's lighting panels embedded in catwalks, in the little ridge running through the middle that's basically the exact size of the half-meter strips.

I'm definitely gonna steal this, eventually, in my own save.

Co-op day again! My wife made quite a bit of progress on Copperworks. Enough to actually power it up and get it priming.

Still plenty of cosmetic work to be done. And there's no exports at all, yet.

She also got a bunch of FICSMAS work done. All items are being crafted and Depot'd now, except for Snowballs and Fireworks.

Don't worry, I'm already planning an elaborate prison break for the poor guy.

Meanwhile, I spent almost the entire session workshopping blueprints. After like 4 iterations of trying to get pillar and beam joins to line up cleanly, or all permutations of joint angles, we agreed to just give up and cover all the joints in the little nubs.

I still need to do a third variant for the 1m inclines (24m length), 3 variants for 2m inclines, a blueprint for the street lights that'll be lining the road, and an extra utility blueprint for the little grouping of nubs, in case we need to place a few here and there.

Also....

My wife: "Hey, we're out of Iron Plate."

Me:

...

Final result of all the belting running through the first floor, in the Iron products building. There's 3 input lines of Iron Ingot, and 4 output lines, one each of Iron Plate, Iron Rod, Iron Wire, and Iron Pipe.

Last building I need for the moment is to house Assemblers for the Modular Frames themselves, and the footprint of this building is slightly different from the others, so it's back to the blueprinter.

And there we go.

Bottom floor only needs 1 Assembler to round out a total of 10.

Next up is to lay all the mines for Iron Ore and Limestone (11 in total), so I wanted to go ahead and lay in the main tubeway first, to clarify where I can and can't run beltwork for those. Plus, a few of them will need to belt ALONG the tubeway. Also, I'll need it for power.

Slight modification to this segment of tubeway, compared to the rest, in that there is no ceiling. It just attaches directly to the underside of this factory.

I'll probably also go ahead and tidy up this logistics floor, before getting the ores pulled in, so I can have some lighting while I work.

So the next thing to derail me from FICSMAS is that I'm out of Modular Frames. I tore down the starter factory I had like a month ago, to replace it with Motorworks, and I was hoping I could just get by on the crate full of backlog I had, until getting to Phase 3. My intention is to build a Frameworks factory that covers both regular and Heavy Modular Frames. And since I don't HAVE the ability to make HMFs yet, I put it off.

Luckily, I DID actually make a brief start on this factory, back when I was trying to kill time before tearing down and rebuilding Steelworks, so I have a head-start to work from.

First order of business was to (once again) dip into the map editor to re-align what I already had built to line up with the main tubeway. I had forgotten to snap this whole thing to world-grid-height, when I first started it.

Also added a new junction point on the tubeway. I'll finish this out later.

With all the blueprints I still had from last time, it didn't take long to make a new set for creating a couple Constructor buildings, which only need 12m-tall floors, instead of the 16m-tall floors I needed for the Smelter/Foundry building. Also, built a basic layout for Constructors and power.

Empty building shells didn't take long to get up, with the blueprints. Hardest part was having to run off to resource factories three separate times, to stock up on high-volume resources (Concrete, Reinforced Iron Plate, and Quartz Crystal). Just one of these blueprints is enough to deplete the Dimensional Depot of Quartz Crystals, for about a solid minute. Perils of sign lighting.

Machines are all placed down, and the smaller of the two buildings (making Concrete) should be fully belted out. The bigger one will be trickier, as I have to squeeze 4 different intermediate products into it, all crafting from Iron Ingot. I'm pretty sure I know how I'm going to make it work, though.

Back in co-op today, my wife made more progress on Copperworks.

The first half-facility is wired up and ready for power.

She also made a little progress on FICSMAS. But with everything so small-scale, it takes a while to produce enough items to progress.

Me, I remembered that I was going to start a Nobelisk factory last time, and ran out of Reinforced Iron Plate, while building it, so I had resolved to build a new one, which will require automated trucking, which will require automated vehicle fueling, and also finalization of all the roads.

Here we have the last vestiges of the old belt-supplied-central-storage system, that remains to be torn down. Also, the remnants of Solid Biofuel Power, which I'm going to repurpose into fueling trucks.

With a workable refueling station in place, we spent the next hour or two brainstorming how to formally build out the roads.

As we were discussing how to run power, it occurred to us that with the right design for power lines, we could also support zip-lining. So, we experimented with a bunch of different ideas for that, figuring out the ideal height we need, how to ensure uninterrupted zipping between joints, how to make it all look cosmetically nice, etc.

Ultimately, we've settled on this. In spite of my hatred of powered lights, this really did look the best. We'll just be setting it all up with enough controls that we can turn all the road lights off, if it becomes a power problem.

So, our intention is pretty much to be lining the roads, as such. I'll get to work on blueprinting this as much as possible, next session.