Me, I've thought about doing an "unlock everything from the beginning" playthrough, but I don't think it would appeal to me. In the face of having to invent my own purely-creative goals for building stuff, instead of having in-game goals to work towards, I find I'd rather go play something else on my backlog.
Instead, I leave the game at default settings, and come up with personal challenges to keep things fresh. The challenge for my current playthrough is "farm-to-table", meaning every factory has to make all of its intermediate products from raw resources (except for project parts) and "optimal resource usage" which means each factory has to make FULL use of the raw resource nodes its connected to, and ALL machines in the factory need to be clocked to run at 100% efficiency.
If I do another playthrough, I might do "excessive usage of trucks and trains" or "machinery as compact as possible".
Long story short, think about what would really keep you engaged, and I'd say go for it.
There's the guy who urges the captain to increase the ship's speed, so they can arrive a day early and impress everyone that the "unsinkable" ship is also super fast. And then sneaks his way onto a lifeboat at the end, when they're only supposed to be taking women and children. Arguably a parallel to Musk in that he's partly responsible for the sinking of the ship.
Much more prominent is Rose's (Kate Winslet) rich scumbag fiance who refers to Jack (Leo DiCaprio) as a "gutter rat", responds to "half the people on this ship are going to die" with "not the better half", tries to bribe with cash one of the men loading boats in order to secure himself a slot, and ultimately manages to get on a boat by picking up a random crying child and claiming it as his own. Much more like Musk himself, but not really a parallel in having resposibility for the ship sinking.
So, a morbid thought occurs... a rabbit hanging around an airport... that could have been someone's pet that got loose from its carrier, huh?
My wife runs a large online D&D guild, with games 4-5 nights a week (not that you play in all of them, they just have that many people). They're no strangers to kicking people that cause drama, and they have several trans and non-binary members already.
I will say that they might not be able to bring their character in, as-is, if it's heavily based on "official" D&D lore and sourcebooks. The group has spent 8 years building all their own lore and tuning some homebrew rules and classes. It's mostly built on the 5e foundation, though.
I believe this is where they'd go to apply.
Agreed, mostly. Like Malenia, once I learned, I really liked as a fight... except for, y'know... Waterfowl... the one thing that's not learnable and ruins the entire rest of the fight. Consort was similar, I ended up learning Phase 1 hitless, just from the sheer number of repeated tries, and kinda sorta appreciate it now. But Phase 2 is actual dogshit.
I will make this agreement with anyone, today, so long as it is made in good faith. Which means, they have to start by fully acknowleding their role in getting us to where we are, apologize, and promise to do better.
This is not what we're getting from Rogan.
"I'm sorry. You all tried to tell me, and I didn't listen. I was wrong"
We can talk about forgiveness and acceptance when he gets to this point.
Federal judge hasn't been paying attention.
The thing that gets me excited about Duskbloods and Nightreign is that with BOTH of them, so close to each other, FromSoft seems to be making an ACTIVE effort to work in the mutiplayer online space. Like "Hey, you know how our online multiplayer capabilities have been highly criticized in our past games? Someone go make some smaller-scale online-multiplayer-only games and work on that." This has the potential to be GREAT for their next mainline game.
Also, remember, FromSoft experimenting with new ideas instead of wallowing in what has already been successful is how we got Dark Souls 2.
A US right-wing indie pundit. You're better off not knowing.
I wonder how much Harry Potter had to do with the trend, cause superficially, that's Harry's story. It's a good implementation of the trope, though, because it's subverted rather quickly, and by the end of the seeies it's a core theme: Everyone WANTS to treat him like he's inherently special, and he's really not. It's his CHARACTER that makes him special.
Sleep is catching up to me again, so here's some FICSMAS.
I definitely want to make another cosmetic pass on this building, but this will be the general shape.
I think the interior is now fully "done" except for painting. It's got all the lighting it needs, all the catwalks I intend to add, and supports for everything.
I also gutted the re-balancer I used to have here, for the 3 belts of screws, after I discovered that (A) I built it wrong, and it was limiting throughput, instead of balancing it out, and (B) I didn't actually need it in the first place. I've got exactly 20 Constructors feeding Screws to exactly 10 Assemblers making Rotors, so as long as each of the 3 belts has a 2-to-1 ratio of producers to consumers, the belts will just be fully balanced on their own. I re-routed a couple of the Constructors to achieve this, and Rotor production quickly caught up to Screw production.
Boop.
Back in co-op, with Steelworks done, the next item I had in my head was a Nobelisk factory, since my plan was to siphon off a small portion of the Coal from Steelworks, and use that with the nearby Sulfur. I picked out a location for the factory, spliced into the Coal line I want to pull from, and went ahead and built out all the long-run beltwork.
Aaaaaaaand, then I ran out of Reinforced Iron Plate. And that's a factory we tore down, in order to make room for the new Copperworks factory, after the factories feeding it Iron Plates and Screws were torn down for a re-build. Those are now back online, but we haven't rebuilt a factory for Reinforced Iron Plate yet, and we've fully depleted our backlog. Gonna have to change gears and build at least a temporary solution for that.
In the meantime, my wife has been cranking on Copperworks.
So far, I'm a fan.
Back in my singleplayer save, I built out the rest of the roof and started adding catwalks to the Smart Plating factory.
But then, I noticed this weird white speckly graphical artifacting...
OSHIT! Forget Smart Plating!
Big fan of the rework they went with for falling presents. Much less obnoxious on the screen, and actually a little more gamified, in what it takes to collect them.
Good start.
Little more progress today. I figured out how I wanted the factory entrance to be, and where the sink should go, so I set that all up. Which then allowed me to build out the tubeway some more, and run proper power.
Also built out lighting for the factory floor.
Power's run, belts are built, machines are configured... this factory should be fully functional. Just gotta wait for it to prime (it's gonna take a whiiiiiiiiiiiiile).
I decided to work on all the resource lines for the Smart Plating factory, today, so I blueprinted up a new version of a small beltway, and built them all out for the Iron and Limestone lines that this factory will use. Also, power lines for the miners, which doesn't pull power from the main tubeway, but instead pulls lines from the factory, so that they're subject to shutoff from the factory's main power switch.
To get all those resource and power lines tied together, I also needed to finish building out the primary tubeway, at least up to the spot where the factory entrance splits off.
I made this decision after laying out the last 10 Assemblers for the factory floor, where I think I should be able to make them work, and running some power lines over the whole area.
At that point, the next step would have been finishing the beltwork, and configuring all the machines, and I realized.... I'm not even 100% sure what machines are supposed to be making which products anymore, and how I intended to route all the belts together. There's quite a bit going on here. So, instead, I figured I'll do the beltwork and configuration AFTER I have resources coming into the facility, so I can verify each chunk of the facility immediately, before moving on to the next.
Got most of the machines laid out. Just need to fit in another 10 assemblers, at the far end, and finish all the belt connections.
Also got a decent chunk of the tubeway printed out.
Built out the two coal mines today, and got all the belt run for them.
Brought all the belts down to the water line, and then brainstormed for a while what the hell I'm going to do for these factories.
I think I've settled on a concept of "single flat factory floor for everything, and make it as compact as I can manage", so I took the grand total of the footprint area of all the machines I need, added an extra 50%, and used that to estimate the size of the floor I'll need.
Then I built out the Iron Ingot lines.
Alright, NOW it's done. For reals this time.
I did indeed use satisfactory-calculator.com to fix this. Specifically, I used it to manually lower the entire half of the beltway that was slightly higher than the other half, and absorbed the height discrepancy between the two buildings at the end of the upper beltway, here:
A few more glamor shots of the steel campus:
Next up, I got all the lighting done at the Nobelisk Factory:
So that concludes all of the temp factories that need to be rebuilt, except for Frames, Quartz, and SAM, all of which I'm putting off until next phase, because I don't have Manufacturers.
SO, that means it's time to start Project Parts!
This one's gonna be a decent distance away, since I've basically exhausted all the resources in the plains, so first step is to extend the tubeway to our new location.
Additionally, I need to go even farther out to get some Coal. As it happens, I already have some very close to the existing tubeway that leads to the power plant (I only used 2 of the 4 Coal nodes down by the lake) so I also built out a full loop of the tubeway, to connect up to a segment near those Coal nodes.
Next, I branched off to all the resource nodes, as well as down to the beach, where the factory will start. I'm thinking about doing some kind of organic megafactory for ALL the project parts, so I'm gonna need a loooooooooooooooot of space out on the water.
Finally, I decided I wanted a new design concept for miner outposts, so I came up with this, and built it out on all the resource nodes (except the Coals).
Back to co-op today! AND IT'S FINALLY DONE!
Oh. So... no... I guess it's not done. Yeah. I really don't know what I'm going to do about this. Well. Actually, it's probably going to be something similar to what I did for this...
I quite literally could not place this blueprint at the correct height, because the foundations it needs to be placed on would be inside the ground.
God bless satisfactory-calculator.com. There are SO many bugs or deficiencies in the game that I've been able to solve with the save editor.
But I am officially not dealing with that other tiny height offset today.
How's about a tour of the rest of the steel campus?
Pretty much all of the steel campus was built by my wife, with the exception of the belting. She is somehow GREAT with building facades, in a way that I just haven't been able to match.
I teased her today about how much she explicitly wanted to highlight this tree, and then never actually finished that idea.
Meanwhile, in singleplayer, the Nobelisk factory is down to JUST needing lighting.
No post yesterday, cause I just crashed and went to bed like 4 hours early. My week of 12 hour days is aaaaaaalmost over.
Anyway, more incremental progress, today.
Slightly more progress. Was limited to another very short session today. Wife is sick, so I'm having to pick up a fair bit of additional responsibilities in my day. I'm tired.
Good news is with this whole "building" finished out, I think I've got the general cosmetic style for this whole factory established.
Sick.