I’ve tweaked a few more bits in Satisfactory of late and used the Smart! mod to try and help in some parts. I’ve further moved forward and unlocked every milestone in tiers 7 & 8, which effectively means all the core bits are unlocked. I’ll get to that point in a bit.

At last point, I had automated everything but sulfur and uranium, that case remains. I did add Nitrogen gas to the mix, and ran a very long pipe to my main hub as a result. This was required to get some extra milestone bits done through Blenders (hard material + liquid/gas). I’ve reached a point where time and scale are the main issues. A Manufacturer may only create 1 item per minute and that takes a damn long time to build enough to do much of anything. I’ve resorted to just letting the game run for a couple hours while I do something meaningful IRL. That builds stock levels, which allows for more construction.

Which itself is a problem because every end state item requires hundreds of items prior and dozens of sub-steps. Even the “simple stuff” is hard. More rubber? Need an oil extractor, a half dozen refineries, water, and transport. A late game item is crazy, just look at Cooling Sytems.

The recipes above are base items. Across the world are Hard Drives, which are used on a 10minute timer to unlock alternate recipes, that use different materials to create an item. For example, you can smelt 1 iron ore to make 1 iron ingot. Or, you can use 7 iron ore, 4 water to make 13 ingots – which is 2x as efficient for ore, but 9x more expensive in terms of power. Almost every recipe has 1 or more alternate options, and your choices on usage will depend on the materials you have at hand. “Best” alternates are therefore relative, though I would say that anything that simplifies Aluminum production, removes screws, or copper is going to be a good idea, if only due to the simplicity offered.

These Hard Drives are placed in containers which are 90% of the time in some sort of deadly place – poison, toxic, or on a sheer cliff. Plus they require some material and/or power to open. There are a dozen or so “simple” ones, while the rest require late-game materials and major power requirements. The next effect is that these recipes are unlocked very late AND you are placing power poles everywhere, in case you need 300MW of power to open a container. I get the idea here, rewarding exploration. The randomness of the alternate recipe just plain sucks. There are 85 alternate recipes, and many of them you won’t care about. For the math folks out there, that’s ~15hrs of RNG research timegating. Or, savescum at the start of the 10 minute counter and reset if you don’t get what you want. YMMV.

In the fun space of this, is that I needed to build a new mini-factory to output 20 Reinforced Iron Plates. I had an optimization issue in the middle of my production line and needed to supplement. To get there, I needed 240 iron ore and 15 machines. It was a good test of the Smart! mod, which aided with the foundation + the layout of the machines with a couple keystrokes. Took me about 10 minutes to figure out all the ins/outs of the mod, but the larger construction effort was cut in half. “Simple” belt management was a breeze. Stacked belts (dual+ inputs) don’t work, think I’ll need blueprints for that.

Plan A

The next milestone is building nuclear plants to generate sufficient power. I am currently consuming about 60% of my power, so if I want to build a new factory that scales, I need much more power. That breaks into steps:

1. Collect and transport the uranium. It is incredibly toxic, and I need to ship a fair amount (~200/min) to a brand new plant.
2. I need to build said plant. That’s over 60 buildings, which is substantial.
3. Collect and transport the base material needed. Limestone, Iron Ore, Coal, Copper Ore, Sulfur, Water, Caterium Ore. At least there’s no aluminum required!
4. Process the waste into Plutonium Fuel Rods so I don’t have a nuclear wasteland. That’s a dozen more buildings.

That will build 5 nuclear plants at a sustainable level of production. Yet, also build it in a way that allows for future growth. 5 plants = 12,500MW of power. The final space elevator requires 4000 Nuclear Pasta. Generating ~10 of that per minute (so ~7hrs to fill) is about 80,000MW of power needed. So yeah. Scaling.

Plan B

To start Plan A, I need material. TONS of material. Fine enough, that will take time to generate. While that is happening, I want to do 3 more things:

1. Collect as many hard drives as possible
2. Collect Slugs / Power Shards for overclocking
3. Lay out power cables across the map.

Thankfully, all 3 of those are done in the same pass. There are 97 crash sites to explore, and I really only need 85. More than half have power requirements, so the power lines will be needed (and for the hover pack). Slugs are often near the crash sites, so that’s point 2 in the loop as well.

I’ve actually completed this step, which also means that for practical purposes the map is FULL of power lines. Hover Pack + Power Lines = easy vertical. All-told, this was about 4 hours of work to get through, with an external map to guide, and 3 runs for extra materials. Radar Towers tell you how many crash sites, but don’t tell you where. Now to continually research all these hard drives…

Plan C

Blueprints. I need many of them. They are small, but I can work with that. I cannot delete them, which is less fun (will work in Update 8 I hear). But to save the layout headaches I need:

• Refinery options (there are 4)
• Assembler
• Foundry
• Blender (3 input variants, 3 output variants – 9 total)
• Smelter
• Constructor
• Factory floor (to run belts below)
• Raised belt poles w/ power

These will be mostly lego blocks, and I’ll have to find a way to connect them together long term. I’ve got most created, but I need to actually test them to validate I can connect them.

The outlier is the Machinery, which has 4 belt inputs and I can only fit 1 per blueprint. I may just avoid blueprints here, but then again, I may create a below-ground belt fed one, and and an above ground version. Hmm.