Satisfactory

As I go around the world, there are many rock formations that look suspiciously like stinger bodies. This is something I noticed from the first time I played but now with the story added it has made me think more about it.

What if the alien entity that ADA is talking to is a massive stinger? Like as big as the rock formations?

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.

As the title says. This is my first time having it. HOLY SHIT!

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.

How are we not talking about it? Yes, you know, the FICMAS-bord Leftovers tape.

What are your opinions?

It's FICSMAStime

I can't be the only one who is reminded of this song with this event.

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.

So, I was just settling in to starting the FICSMAS Factory, after dismantling the old one, and I noticed this, while setting up some temporary storage for all the FICSMAS materials I brought over: I'm inexplicably out of Wire.

This crate here feeds into the Dimensional Depot, and should be full.

Looking a little more closely, I notice here that my Copper Ingot smelters are not running at 100% efficiency, confirming that I just somehow screwed up the numbers. Apparently for the past month or so since I built this factory, I've just been running on nothing but my existing backlog of Wire in the aforementioned crate.

This here is the culprit: This is 1 of 8 Wire Constructors that should be clocked at 42.8571%. Instead, they're all at 16.7946%. They're off by a factor of 2.55, which is especially bizarre. I could understand if it was a factor of like 2 or 4.

Easily corrected, but it'll take a while for the system to re-prime to the new numbers, and start producing Wire.

In the meantime, the other thing I noticed is that I'm not going to have enough Mercer Spheres to build all the FICSMAS stuff into the Dimensional Depot.

So, while the Wire factory corrects itself, I'm gonna go Mercer hunting.

Pretty solid haul, for a 3-hour-or-so trip.

Also, Wire is back in business.

Yeah, I just ended up going with the map editor to insert a gap here. This should get the job done, it gave me enough room to send off foundations for that new branch of the tubeway.

Ohhhhhh, that's right, y'all...

WE GOIN' TO PARADISE ISLAND!

With the foundations down as a base, I can run out the belts, and then build up the whole tubeway on top of that.

That'll work for today. Plan is to do all the cool cosmetic FICSMAS stuff on the top, with machinery all on an interior floor, underneathand a logistics floor on the bottom. Tomorrow, I think I'll figure out how to lay out all the gift trees, cause I want all of them to be on the top. Then I can hopefully followup with a start on the machinery.

Continuing running the belt lines for FICSMAS, from yesterday...

You can see them here, a little bit, running on either side of the Coal line.

Now at this point (just behind the tree) there's a junction where two additional iron belts get added to the beltway. And now, I'm trying to add two more lines, for a total of 5. That's too many to fit in the existing space underneath the walkway, here, so I'm going to have to perform some surgery.

The perspective shifted more than I wanted in this pic, but this is the same segment of the tubeway. I tore down the section that was only about 8m off the ground, and replaced it all at about 12m. This was only about 100m worth of length, so it wasn't too much work, and it was actually a neat little challenge to get it all done with no interruptions in power or belt lines. You can juuuuuuust see the two FICSMAS belts, near the center of the pic, rising up to run above the existing 3 belts on that layer.

And here we are, with the belts run all the way to my next decision point. I'm going to have to decide, tomorrow, whether there's some interesting pathing I can do for the tubeway, or whether I should just go into the save editor and shift the Versatile Frameworks factory farther out into the ocean by about 24m. I didn't actually leave ANY room here to add a tubeway branch going off to the forward-right direction, in this pic. But that's 100% the direction I want to go.

So, as much as I'm itching to make REAL progress in this play, I can't, in good conscience, put off FICSMAS any longer, so I've planned out what I want for a permanent factory, and that's gonna start with some Iron and Copper.

I agonized for a fair bit, actually, about where I wanted to pull from, and there really weren't any Impure nodes I could access without expanding out like another 3 biomes, so I went with this Pure/Normal pair near Coal Canyon Lake.

I have a chunk of tubeway right nearby here. Just a quick hop up the waterfall, and I can join right up to where the Coal heads off towards the coastline for Versatile Frameworks. One small dip to go around the existing coal belt, and we're in business.

Nice.

please don't watch all the way to the end

Easy Smooth Railways video where this technique is most relevant: https://kinowolnosc.pl/w/gu1ftrtBrzySEYtbNPhxuU

Youtube satisfactory tutorial playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd0z_0Gxs3VAi6T8Gr5Ip0g_oMX5LPNst

Alright, final product. Everything is done, except for final efficiency audit. Like last time, this thing is downclocked so far, it's gonna take dozens of hours of in-game time to prime up to 100% efficiency. The last factory STILL has 2 machines left running under 100%.

The last items on the to-do list for this guy were the entrance, which you can see here, footings, which I guess you can't, but I didn't take pics of them, and hanging supports for all the catwalks, as seen below.

Lots of progress on this building, today. Should be able to finish it next session.

Obviously, very much the same style as the last factory, but with a small handful of differences. Concrete pillars for all the accents, for example.

I established the control room yesterday, actually.

Also built out all the catwalks.

Lighting, pretty much identical to the last factory.

Final product routing up to the control room, to be depot'd and sink'd.

Roof on the control room, allowing for the sink to stick out.

Same style of facade, with a nice big illuminated front wall.

Back wall established. With an additional wall of lighting, as it was rather dark in that area.

Backside of the factory, with a maintenance entrance/exit.

Since I didn't get to play today, and since @[email protected] asked for it, I'm gonna elaborate on the walkway/tubeway I'm always talking about, but have never really shown off in detail.

There's very little to it, really. A few window walls, frame walls, frame foundation, and a glass roof, with a connection point for power lines and hypertubes running through. Plus some lighting, cause why not (fun fact, the light colors are actually the default machine colors).

This is actually about the third iteration I've done on a walkway/tubeway like this. Prior versions from prior playthroughs had the conveyor tubes just running down the middle of the walkway, with only railings instead of the whole upper enclosure, and power running underneath. It made walking along the walkway without getting sucked into tubes at junction points impossible, so I decided to elevate the tubes up above the walkway, and leave it clear for walking this time, which was a big success. That also meant I could just run power up above as well, which is much less of a pain in the ass than running it underneath.

Since the frame foundation set only comes in 4m ramps, that's the only type of incline I can support directly, which does kinda suck.

Entrance/Exit also gets its own blueprint. I had to try a few different things to get this to a height where you can walk underneath it without getting sucked in, but can still jump to get in, and still have it shoot me from one segment to the next, without stopping. This version's been working perfectly.

I've got just a few variations on the basic 8m-length straight and incline versions, and all the other edge cases have been easier to just build by hand, as needed.

A small junction heading off to miners, from the most-recent build.

I've also taken to putting in ladders, as such, pretty much anywhere there's tube entrances, since another problem I had in prior playthroughs was having to walk reeeeeeeally long distances to get back up on the walkway, after falling off or jumping off.

Now, here we have the main part of the "design" that I carried over: how I can use this walkway to also lay out belt and pipework. Basic idea, as you can hopefully see here, is that I use one of the 40cm thin flat frame pieces, positioned 40cm above the height where the belt support sits, and it lines up to look like the belt is simply sitting attached to the frame. No suspension of disbelief for floating belts!

I also am running some power underneath the walkway, like I used to do, but it's still so much simpler than before. This space is reserved for "non-main" power lines, I.E. power grids that sit behind a switch. I.E. When I have factories that have miners far away, I can still have them be powered off, when the main power switch for the whole factory is shut off.

A slightly closer look at a densely-packed section of beltway. There's 7 belts meeting up here, so that means extending the lower portion of the whole tubeway down by an extra 4m.

The design also supports having belts change elevation, and even criss-cross around each other, if needed, as long as they either use the 4 gap areas in the thin supporting frame pieces, or I just leave one of those pieces out for a foundation. You can juuuuuuuuuuuust barely see in this screenshot that the upper belt that's rising up by 2m is supported by another thin frame at the top of its rise, which is shifted over by 4m. Again, giving a nice illusion of everything being supported.

FINALLY got to play coop again today, so we spent the evening catching up on Ficsmas.

I started by building out a new chunk of the road, while my wife actually worked on the good stuff. She's never actually gotten to play Ficsmas before.

All caught up to Gold and Silver Ornaments.

Actually got a fully-functional Versatile Framework factory done today, starting from scratch.

After establishing an estimated footprint and location, I realized I still needed to go back and complete all the belt lines, and run power to all the miners.

Two Normal Coal nodes makes one pure's worth of belt.

Finished the new branch of the tubeway that carries the coal belt over to the coastline.

Iron and Copper, of which I only needed Iron, but which share a branch off of the main line, as they're so close together. The Copper will be for the next factory.

Back at the factory, I got all the resource belts and power lines run in.

This makes up production for Iron Ingot, Basic Iron Ingot, Solid Steel Ingot, Concrete, Molded Beam, Iron Wire, and Steel Cast Plate.

Added in Stitched Iron Plate, and ran power to get the initial stuff running and priming.

Remaining products include Steel Rod, Modular Frame, Steel Beam, and finally, the Versatile Frameworks themselves.

This brings everything online, and running, just inefficiently. We'll see what bugs there are to work out, tomorrow.

Reference for the curious. The factory is currently set to run at 12.5% clock speed, compared to this diagram, and is built to be able to clock up to 250%, with only belt upgrades needed.

i honestly wish i could find a way to describe this is that doesn't sound like clickbait, we're not even using mods

Approximate a circle with cubic Bézier curves: https://spencermortensen.com/articles/bezier-circle/

seththepotate's video on a beam-based hypertube railcannon: https://youtu.be/iTAwpAM3YMk

I learned how to use bezier curves from You Suck At Photoshop: https://youtu.be/YNfBF2xvhaE

That's also where I learned to call people babies as a joke in a tutorial, but I've discovered that's not my style.

Satisfactory tutorial playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd0z_0Gxs3VAi6T8Gr5Ip0g_oMX5LPNst

This Wizard Found a GUN...: https://youtu.be/-rOaE0ExZSA

Youtube video link (if that's your thing ig idk): https://youtu.be/dEaB0cbiotY

No blueprints this time, but this description is lowkey unhinged so that's fun.

Also I know I misspoke when I called them "fourth order bezier curves", but technically it could be right for all we know. Any bezier spline can be perfectly replicated by a higher order spline. I mean I know that's not what the game is using but we can't actually prove it.

Also hey folks check it out it's my first peertube link!

Officially done! Except for efficiency, I guess. The last 8 of the 20 Smart Plating Assemblers still haven't caught up to 100% efficiency, cause I've got the clock speed of the factory running so damn low. I'm gonna move on.

That pretty much finishes the whole main building. Tomorrow, I think I can spruce up the little upper entry floor, and that'll be it for this guy.