After spending nearly 20 hours finangling with a nuclear power plant setup and then missing a critical step that would require hours of re-work, I’ve put Satisfactory on the backburner. It boils down to three simple facts:

1. The inability to-prefabricate buildings combined with stupidly small stack sizes means continuous back and forth for material when trying to build anything larger than a shoebox.
2. The transport logistics for belts are the only thing that makes a lick of sense, given the above mentioned stack size issues.
3. The z axis is core to the experience, and built to be a hurdle to surmount.

Dyson Sphere Program (DPS) addresses both of these points, and more

1. You can pre-fabricate everything. Belts, smelters, drones, space stations, rockets, everything. And those items stack, so I can have 50 smelters, 200 inserters, and 600 belts to connect it all take up 4 (!) inventory slots.
2. Transport logistics have multiple options. Belts are drag-and-drop and go for as long as you have inventory. Small-range drones show up early and cover what you can see. Planetary drones are mid-game. Interplanetary drones are end-game. All drones require infrastructure at start and end points, nothing in between.
3. The z axis (vertical) is an option, and not a requirement. You use the z axis to get around roadblocks on the x/y plane, and then return to said plane.

I would chalk this up to quality of life bits, but this is actually the foundational part of any logistical puzzle. The speed of building something has little to do with your factory machines, but more to do with the ability to get material in and out of said factory. I am super cool with the concept of ‘mathing the crap out of something’, and that requires experimentation and the ability to modify things as you learn.

The z axis point in particular is important. Super Mario was 2D, most people played that. Super Mario 64 added a z axis, and exponentially added complexity to the game. Subnautica has a Z axis, but the entire game is predicated on simple movement. No Man’s Sky also has a Z axis, but there are no significant logistical hurdles… it’s primarily base building/architecture which is ‘snap based’, which makes it mostly decorative. Voxel games (think Minecraft) do a lot of work on the Z axis, but the pieces are snap & not finicky. The simplicity of the logistics (only minecarts) is amazing. Factorio, the grandfather and gold-standard, has a virtual z axis by applying tunnel and bridges.

I’ll share a picture from DSP.

While there is belt ‘magic’, I didn’t really do anything special here aside from click the start location and the end location. The larger concept here is that there is a “bus” of production, which itself is a really interesting concept I’ll get to in another post. The long and short of it is that DSP has a broad material chain (more options), rather than a deep material chain (more crafting steps). The net effect is a different type of toolbelt.

I’ll only briefly touch on the research tree, where you have a tree of growth, clearly defined from your first 30 seconds in the game. Alternate recipes are automatically unlocked, and should be exploited when you can find the extra material – they are always more efficient. You unlock crafting options, and you unlock character perks that improve performance (e.g. mine more efficiently, move faster, stack more things). The latter upgrades often have “infinite” upgrade options for those that want to expand their production chains across multiple star systems.