Satisfactory

New update rolled out today to celebrate the first anniversary of Satisfactory 1.0! 🎉

I've found over the last few games that I find crafting more and more frustrating in games. It took me a while but I honestly think it's because Satisfactory did such an amazing job with automation that I find other systems cumbersome and clunky.

For my example today, I've always wanted to like No Man's Sky. Building bases wherever you want to, flying around the galaxy, it seems amazing! But the crafting, dear god the crafting. I have to go over here, get an ore, bring it back, put it in a machine, take the output, put it back in another machine to finally get something out. The entire time (and now I'm at 15 hours so this was not a 20 minutes and I give up scenario) I was thinking "Why can't I just connect the miner to the machine here?

I went on the forums, maybe there's something I need to unlock? Nope, in fact the forums I found literally said "This isn't Satisfactory, stop trying to change our game, the fun is in the crafting."

So, maybe my fun isn't the same anymore. Anyone else feel that way?

Interiors all finished up.

One final exterior shot.

Nerd docs.

So, I'm a little bored of just building this factory. I'm gonna take a break and do some side stuff today, and finish the cosmetics tomorrow.

First thing is I noticed I somehow missed a couple things on radar in the Grassy Fields. I.... really don't know how that's possible, I feel like there must be some kinda bug that re-spawned these, or caused them to be missing earlier. But hey, I can go ahead and collect them.

Sneaky little Mercer cave.

Distinctly less-sneaky slug.

That takes care of that.

I've also been getting really annoyed by getting irradiated while building in and around the Titan Forest, for this new factory, so I also figured I could craft up some radiation gear, and clear out all the random Uranium rocks I've previously marked on the map.

Of course, that means I need a temporary storage facility.

Finishing up the exterior cosmetics, tonight, starting with this steel frame entrance.

Next, a proof-of-concept for the exterior of each maintenance floor. This is roughly what I had in mind from the beginning: the walls of each maintenance floor being recessed inwards by 4m, to make walkable balconies. I made sure when laying out all the machines to leave that space empty.

With walls up, I can't really put off interior lighting any longer, at least on the maintenance floors, where there's no windows.

A little bit of tidying and lighting on the roof.

That should do it for the exterior. A little bit more interior work, and we can call this done.

Time for cosmetics.

Got some decently-large segments of beltways to enclose, so I drew up some blueprints.

Came out very nice, I think.

Continuing on, the last resource we need to setup for this factory is water.

Logistics all built out. I went back to having a dedicated logistics floor for each machine floor, with this building. Just cause it's been like 3 builds since I've done that, and transitioning between floors is SO much easier than it used to be, now that we have elevators.

Except for the top floor. Not really worth a whole extra floor for logistics.

Adding in power for resource outposts, and framing to get a power line from the main grid, and we can power up a minimum-viable factory!

First Bauxite coming in!

Only took a couple minutes to start producing almost full-speed outputs. The factory might be big, for volume, but it also ended up quite simple. Very little priming time required.

K. Let's get started.

Alright, so I kinda skipped a bit.

Now that I know what the footprint of the building is, I still need to pull a bunch of resources, so I can go ahead and branch off of the building itself.

That's water and 3 nodes of Bauxite, if you can't quite see it.

I went ahead and built a proof-of-concept for what I want this trunk line to look like, so I know the pathing will work before I build all the belting.

Should be good.

Also, there's a node of Copper off that way.

Realized I forgot something after running out the line for the 3 Coal Miners, yesterday.

While I was here, I went ahead and routed the path on the left here, that we can eventually use to descend into the Swamp.

All built out and powered up. Doing a full excavation of the Swamp, from this Radar Tower, will be my next side project.

With the framing built, I was able to see that this little low-overhanging rock is MUCH less encroaching into the main frameway than I though. I figured I'd end up doing some kind of custom build here, to squeeze under the rock, but honestly, I think I'm fine with this, as-is. Maybe I'm just lazy.

And that's the rest of the frameway built out, plus all the mining outposts.

Satisfactory is coming to console November 4! Wishlist now on Playstation and Xbox. Or don't. That felt a bit demanding.

Item 1 on today's agenda is some exploration and murder. We've got a lot of new recipes to unlock now.

Initially, I was still not quite decided on where to place the next factory, even though I've got a plan for it worked out. Just from looking at the offline map, I'm having trouble picking out a nice "organic" spot to run a path up into the Red Jungle, to get Bauxite. I kinda would rather not just make a giant vertical shaft to climb up a cliff, I'd like my pathing to largely follow the natural roads and paths of the world. So, I figured I'd just go exploring around the areas and see with actual eyes what the terrain looks like, and what the natural paths are.

Decent haul from the exploration, and once I got feet on the ground, the choice of where to place the factory became kinda obvious.

This is the southern edge of the Eastern Dune Forest, just north of the Blue Crater, and this area has kicked the absolute SHIT out of me, in the past. The difficulty curve just from climbing this one dirt slope is NUTS. This was the first place I encountered a Radioactive Hog, as long time ago, back in like Phase 2, and after he murdered me about 6 times, I decided to just sneak past him, to explore some more, only to find out this whole place is LITTERED with top-tier hostiles. More Radioactive Hogs, big groups of Mountain Hogs, big groups of Alpha Spitters...

I am VERY much going to enjoy making this area my bitch. There's plenty of Bauxite in here, plus all the other resources I'll need, and as you can seen in the screenshot, it's right on the doorstep of my existing infrastructure.

Roaming around the area, I realized I never actually put the cosmetic finish on these two Coal Miners, that feed Weaponworks.

So, I took care of that real quick.

After that, we're headed into this foresty area to setup some more Coal Miners.

I managed to get them laid in, and all the belting run back to the start of the new segment.

So, today's audit reveals we're under-producting Steel, on account of under-producing Iron Ore.

Easy fix, I just never clocked the Miners at all.

Also, we seem to be under-producing Automated Wiring, at the other factory.

Traced that, ultimately, to a Steel Pipe Constructor that I either never re-clocked, when I did the Mk.4 upgrade, or that I typo'd.

Finally, I found that the Circuit Board Assemblers were getting starved for Quickwire, on account of this mis-configured Priority Merger here. It's a little hard to see in the screenshot, but the Assembler on the right is actually feeding a Merger underneath this one. This one is supposed to just be pulling Quickwire into the sushi loop, and the priority was set to the wrong side, so just not enough Quickwire was getting pulled in.

Built out a nice little nook here for the Water Extractors, that I REALLY like. Plus the rest of the wall.

Aaand the opposite wall.

Aaaand hanging catwalks all throughout the interior.

Aaaand we're done! This factory is finished!

Nerd docs.

A quick trip to the Space Elevator, and I have officially progressed the farthest I've ever been in this game. Phase 4 is ALL NEW CONTENT!

Lighting up.

Then I decided I wanted to change the coloring of the pillar grid, since having it colored instead of just metal is what I did for the Automated Wiring factory.

Tried to avoid being TOO boring with the roof. Not a huge success, but...

... I think it ended up pretty good with the ribs in place.

More auditing! The factory's been online long enough, I should have produced SOME Adaptive Control Units by now, but I haven't. Apparently, we're not actually making any Modular Frames.

Looks like Limestone isn't working? Both Steel Pipe and Concrete are dependent on Limestone. Although, so is Encased Industrial Beam...

Okay, so just half of Limestone wasn't running.

Also, found a spot where I forgot to connect a Conveyor Lift, to pass the overflow from the Encased Heavy Frame sushi belt, into the main AWESOME Sink line.

While that primes up, we can look at the Caterium Computers loop, which is definitely not working properly. Can't really tell from the screenshot, but this is where the leftovers on the sushi belt loop back and get re-injected to the front of the belt (if there's room). But somehow, we're not getting enough Quickwire.

Even though we're producing plenty.

I eventually realized I have a critical design flaw both here, in the Circuit Boards logistics, and in the Quickwire logisitcs.

Some background: there are basically 2 ways to handle load balancing and efficiency in Satisfactory (at least, in my mind): upstream throttling, or downstream backpressure.

Technically, there's a third: belt dividing with splitters and mergers, into specific ratios, but I almost never use that, cause once you get beyond Iron Plates, Iron Rods, and Wire, the ratios are infeasible to make perfect.

Upstream throttling is just down-clocking your production machines to exactly-match how much input your consumer machines require. Actually, for me, it most often means running the upstream machines at the highest speed I can, and clocking the downstream machines to match, but ultimately, the idea is that the upstream can't produce more than the downstream can consume, so everything runs at 100% efficiency.

Downstream backpressure is how I most-often balance a set of production machines that are feeding more than one set of consumer machines (E.G. Iron Ingot feeding both Iron Plate and Iron Rod). And really, it just involves the same thing as throttling: setting all the machine clocks so that the producers are making exactly as much as the consumers, and then just splitting the line. Splitters always divide resources in a 1:2 or 1:3 ratio, and since that's basically NEVER the desired split, you'll always end up supply too much resource to one of the downstream consumers, and not enough to the others. However, as long as you're only using basic splitters, it doesn't really matter. Because the clocks all match, eventually the belts for the consumers that are receiving too much will back up, and the excess will naturally flow over to the other consumers, until it all balances out. I.E. the consumers that are receiving too much of a resource will apply "backpressure" to force the exact split of resources you want.

So, the problem with the Circuit Board and Quickwire logistics I found is that I am splitting each of them to feed 2 separate production lines. However, each of those production lines is a sushi belt loop, which by my design DOES NOT PROPAGATE BACKPRESSURE. I specifically include a Smart Splitter with Overflow to an AWESOME Sink in each sushi loop, to make sure they don't jam, but that, by definition, is absorbing any backpressure. It's impossible for me to split the lines of Circuit Boards and Quickwire in the precise ratios I need. If there was only ONE consumer that did not provide backpressure, I could mitigate that by splitting with a Smart Splitter that prioritizes the one that does, but in this case, BOTH consumers are sushi loops, for both of these resources.

So, since I can't use backpressure to precisely divide up the Circuit Boards and Quickwire, I have to use throttling, I.E. instead of having one production line of Quickwire feeding 2 production lines that consume it, each consumer needs its own, independent production line that is throttled to its needs. Same for Circuit Boards.

You can see here some of the re-belting I had to do to run separate lines of Quickwire and Circuit Boards, where they were unified before.

Ultimately, we are rewarded with production!

With the Adaptive Control Unit factory online, it's time for another upgrade, for the Automated Wiring factory that feeds it.

Fairly straightforward layout going on, there's just a lot of parallelism, due to the MASSIVE high volume of Wire flowing around.

Just one pure node each of Iron and Copper Ore, coming in.

Also swapping in the new wall holes again, as long as I'm here.

Before and after shots of the main output line

Buffer storage and uploader removed and replaced with a new output line.

Routed over to the new factory, and a temporary injector installed, to work through the backlog.

Alright, power line time. Again, using the strategy of running a grid of metal pillars along the underside of the ceiling.

Wires all connected.

A main power switch slapped down where the main entrance will be, and we're ready to power on and do some auditing!

Bunch of machines I just missed power lines for.

Also completely forgot to run lines for the emergency overflows on the 4 different sushi loops. Plus the actual AWESOME Sink and Dimensional Uploader.

So first big obvious problem is that one of the Limestone input lines is empty, while all the other inputs are arriving, no problem.

Not a power or missing-connection issue.

It IS however another instance of the Conveyor Lift phantom connection bug.

Fixed.

Next, I realized I have a pretty monumental design flaw here, on this little mini-sushi belt. See, I was trying to avoid making a weird crossover for the Rubber and Plastic loopbacks here, and they're so low-volume, I figured it'd be simpler to just merge and then split them.

Unfortunately, I neglected to consider that the OTHER side of these two lines (the ones not on this loopback) both feed into separate sushi loops for the Computers and Circuit Boards, That means that the lines feeding those 2 sushi loops will experience no backpressure, which in turn means that I either need to build a precision-ratio splitter to split the Rubber and Plastic lines BEFORE merging them onto this short sushi, or provide backpressure from the other side of each of these splits. But since those two sides merge together, their backpressure will merge, and ruin the whole thing. I.E. I can't balance the rubber and plastic splits here by just letting it back up, because it might back up such that the whole belt deadlocks.

I ultimately had to do the split, after all.

Also found a missing belt.

Hello everyone,

Here’s a video of a world created in Satisfactory. It is the culmination of more than 2000 hours of work in partnership with @Undefined_ID@lemmy.world I hope you enjoy the music and the footage.

In it you’ll see our map, which is fitted with 10 factories reachable through a cluster of 12 double‑teleportation satellites and linked by roughly 75 km of high‑speed hyper‑tubes.

Energy – Our boosted facilities produce about 400,000 MW h, while the average consumption is around 220,000 MW h. That power is distributed to roughly 1,700 machines via an electrical grid of about 125 km.

Logistics – The factories are connected by a 85 km railway network that circulates 14 trains and a total of 72 wagons, servicing 25 stations. Some factories also have an approximately 7 km road network that moves 24 vehicles and serves 42 stations. Finally, most of them are equipped with 15 drones.

Architecture – Well, we went all out, each time trying to find a theme that matches the type of components produced and the overall environment of the map.

Mods used:

Structural Solutions [D4rk, deantendo] Infinite Zoop [SirDigby] Linear Motion [D4rk, deantendo, BlogmasterAvery] Infinite Nudge [SirDigby] Decoration [Andre Aquila] SkyUI [D4rk, deantendo] Fiscit‑Cam [Panakotta00]

Enjoy watching, and feel free to crank up the volume! My teammate and I are happy to answer any questions or receive feedback.

So, I kinda need to know where the resource lines are coming in, in order to continue building, so time to get those routed in.

Scaffolding removed.

And with the belting all finished, I can go ahead and fully finish building the framing.

I can also finalize the entrance to the last factory.

So, I'm kinda working backwards from the Refinery products, to try and get to a highly-optimal packing of machines.

The farthest 2 Refineries in the line are making Rubber, so next to that, I've got 3 Manufacturers, making Computers.

The next 3 Refineries are making Plastic, so the next line is 8 Assemblers for Circuit Boards.

You might also notice, I'm using sushi belts again. I REALLY am happy with how well that worked in the last factory, so I'm gonna try going a little crazy with them this time. Same basic principle, each sushi line loops back on itself, with Priority Mergers making sure to prioritize pulling NEW resources into the loop, and Smart Splitters ejecting overflow from the loop, which will get sent to an AWESOME Sink. This ensures that the loop will never starve for a particular resource, and should eventually self-balance to the point that there's no overflow.

Since both Computers and Circuit Boards require Quickwire, I laid out those Constructors, over near the two lines that'll use them, and then Foundries for Tempered Caterium Ingot, over near the Petroleum Coke Refineries. Also, a couple Foundries for Coke Steel Ingot, which will use up the rest of the Petroleum Coke.

Last 2 Foundries will use up the remaining Iron Ore with a little bit of Limestone, to make Basic Iron Ingot.

I kiiiiinda got ahead of myself and didn't take progress pics for the rest. Suffice it to say there's a LOT of interesting belt routing going on here, so I'm really excited to see if I got it all right. It's gonna REALLY suck if I didn't.

New Factory Time!

Same basic premise as the last one, for how I'm gonna handle Refineries, I think, but this time there's FAR fewer of them that I need.

I think I'm also going to go back to the concept for the first 3 Project Part factories: just one flat floor, with the rib design covering everything, so I've laid out these refineries to avoid colliding with where the ribs will eventually be.

Also basically copying the design of the Water Extractors from the last one.

Crude Oil first.

Logistics work for Heavy Oil Residue and Water.

I also wanted to try something different for Diluted Packaged Fuel this time, just cause I've done the same setup like 5 separate times now. It's not even that different, I'm just putting both the packaging and unpackaging on the same side.

Remaining Rubber and Plastic crossover production.

Realized I forgot to finish laying in Water pipes.

Final shot first, for the thumbnail, cause I do believe this factory is complete.

So, finishing out the back wall, I ran into more clipping than I anticipated. The support pad at the top even ended up clipping through the wall, on the outside.

Fortunately, the clipping kinda works in my favor. Just deleting the vertical beam gives the illusion that it's mounted to the wall, instead, so that was an easy fix.

And that's the back wall complete. Basically the same as the front wall, but flatter.

I tried to be as un-boring as I could manage, for the roof, and I'm rather pleased with the outcome. Even though it's still uhh.... formulaic? I dunno, "heavily-organized" is just kinda my style, I guess.

Interior coloring.

Also a skirt and footings.

Nerd docs.

Final machine in the line, that's 100% efficiency reached!

More cosmetics.

So, the factory's had some more time to prime up to 100% efficiency, but uhh.... it's still not there. Time for another round of auditing.

First thing I found was that these two Mk.2 belts carrying Rotors and Stators are being supported by Mk.1 lifts, on the under-side of these floor holes.

A little while of that running, but we were still under-producing Rotors.

Turns out that's because I got the sub-floor for Rotors and Stators backwards. You may recall that to fit on only Mk.4 belts, I needed 3 separate production lines of Wire. Two of those are supposed to feed two halves of Stator production, while the third, slightly-higher-volume one is balanced to feet Rotors. As you can see here, though, I've got two lines of Wire feeding Rotors.

This was a bit of a conundrum, because the third line of Wire is not here in the middle of the floor, with the other two, but waaaaay off on the right-hand edge. Not really feasible to re-route it. Ultimately, it ended up being simplest to just swap all the recipes and clock speeds in the machines, without actually rebuilding anything. The Rotors and Stators both run on Mk.2 belts, and go to the same machines making Motors, so I just had to spend a little time cleaning the belts out after making the swap.

Unfortunately, with those changes, we were STILL under-producing (Stators now, IIRC). That traced to an under-production of Iron Ore, seen here.

The Iron Ore for this factory is produced by 4 separate Impure nodes, one of which was only running at about 50% efficiency.

That there was why.

I THINK that's all the defects now, so time for some more cosmetics, while the system re-equalizes.

I was lamenting the fact that there are no build pieces in the game that can match the curve of a foundation, to serve as a railing, together with the fact that curved foundations are kiiiiinda the only option for accenting these Water Extractors, when I realized..... we actually DO have things that can curve now.

It's a little weird, functionally, to serve as a safety railing, but it doesn't look half bad.

Also built up a main entrance and power switch. First time actually getting to use a Priority Power Switch. I'll need to go back and retrofit all the existing factories, in the near future.

And a good start on the exterior facade.

First Modular Engines are coming in!

So, we're pretty much exclusively in cosmetic territory, now.

Lights and catwalks, first.

Down on the ground floor, I realized that standing catwalk supports made more sense than hanging ones, since the ceiling is VERY tall, I'm pretty sure it's not gonna be flat, and this floor doesn't have the metal pillar grid for power running across the ceiling.

At which point, I asked myself "Why the hell wasn't I using Beam Supports for the hanging beams this whole time?"

I also worked out in my head what I wanna do for the mini-floor here, so I went ahead and added a new elevator stop, and extended the floor out.

Okay. Power's run. Belting is run. Resources are all setup. Clock speeds are all set. Let's power this shit up, and find the defects!

Obvious ones first, I forgot pumps on the water.

Next up, Copper's coming in, but not Iron. I traced it down to a missed pair of wires here.

Also, I hadn't clocked in the Iron Miners yet.

Sweet, Iron Ore has made it to the factory. As you might notice, though, it's on the wrong belt.

Simple enough to just fix, here at the factory.

Now, we get into more fun territory. You might notice the Iron Ore here is fully saturated on the belt, but none of it is making it onto the lift. This is a lovely little bug that apparently got introduced in 1.1, which presents when snapping lifts to support poles (instead of belts or ports), in "Reverse" mode. The only workaround I've been able to find is to place belts down first, at both ends, THEN snap a lift between them. This is definitely not the last time I'll be seeing this.

The backlog of Smart Plating is cleared out, now, so I can tear that down.

Next, one of the two Diluted Packaged Fuel loops is idling, cause the Fuel's fully backed-up.

Thaaaaaaaat would be why. That there is supposed to be Rubber, feeding 3 Refineries to make Recycled Plastic, with the Fuel from that loop. This one's a little problematic, since the Rubber's being made on the complete opposite end of the building, and since I kinda blocked the route for this belt with the sushi belt connection that I thought was so clever.

Ultimately, not TOO difficult to work around.

Sushi belt in action, now that those Refineries are running.

Other sushi belt in action, up top. Definitly not as many Motors as there should be, though.

Deadend line of Wire that never got connected.

Fixed.

Another bugged Conveyor Lift that needs to be re-built.

Fixed.

A chunk of Steel Pipe production that just.... never got finished.

Fixed.

That was all the defects I could find, for now. Tomorrow, I'll work on some cosmetics while the factory has a chance to prime itself and reveal any more issues.