For years, Satisfactory ended at Tier 4, which was more or less the Nuclear phase. In practical terms it was actually the Aluminum phase as Nuclear components were not needed, but there were power scaling issues that made it more complex to attain. Tier 4 was a balancing act, given the power / storage limitations at the time, not to mention the ‘issues’ with managing nuclear waste.

1.0 brought in Tier 5. It also brought Rocket Fuel, dimensional storage, and sommersloops which double productivity. Tier 5 itself brings more space parts but also the practical ability to create Mk6 belts (1200/m which finally supports Mk3 miners that are maxed), portals which allow instant travel across the map (later than I think it should be), and importantly the ability to create Power Shards to boost productivity.

The first time I went through this path I took a more traditional progression path. This second pass through, I opted to make improvements earlier along the progression.

First, I prioritized anything that generated power, specifically coal, fuel and then rocket fuel. Rocket fuel in particular is overly effective at generating power, to the point where Nuclear should be avoided. I did Nuclear in my first 1.0 path, skipping that here saved hours of set up.

Second, I prioritized blueprints. The 4×4 option is surprisingly effective if you apply design principles. The 5×5 option is the only option to get up to Tier 5, buildings are simply too large to fit in the standard layout. The 6×6 option… that’s too small. Or rather the buildings are too big. The Quantum Encoder only fits if it’s diagonal (use a beam laid sideways to make it click). The 5×5 blueprint is life. The auto-connect brought in with 1.1 makes it exceptionally time efficient.

Third, jetpacks + hoverpack. Get these ASAP. Massive quality of life boost.

Fourth, and counter-intuitive, I avoided trains where possible. I did need them for plastic, rubber, aluminum and quartz due to my starting location. When I unlocked drones and packaged rocket fuel, trains were completely deprecated. The reason is quite simple, laying tracks is a friggin’ nightmare. I love trains in Factorio, but this 3D layout here is horrendous. Drones used to only work with batteries, which were a huge pain in the butt to craft and it was a toss up to create those or lay out tracks. Batteries are still a huge pain to craft and you should avoid them at all costs. It’s super simple to package Rocket Fuel, distributing it even more so, and you can have multiple drones head to one location to speed up transfer rates. Trains look cool but are ever more impractical.

Finally, was thinking ahead for processing base material (ingots, concrete, rubber/plastic). I knew that I would unlock alternate recipes that are insanely more efficient, and planned accordingly. I had a ‘base material’ base which gave me construction material up until Steel Pipes. I put it in an out of the way location, with dimensional storage. My main feeds into the production bus were 100% dedicated to the bus, were built on the ground floor (the bus is very high in the air) so that I could eventually move to refineries. The basic recipes are 1:1 ore:ingot. The ‘pure’ recipes are nearly twice as efficient. Planning for this meant not having to tear up large chunks of the factory.

End result is cutting the playthrough time by a good 3/4. No major trains. No turbofuel. No batteries. No nuclear. Blueprints for 99% of the construction. Auto-connect allowing them to easily scale. Nearly all of my playtime instead is spent either building a blueprint or collecting hard drives / mercer spheres / sommersloops. Wildly efficient.

So now what? There’s not really much optimization to do, all my bus lanes are in surplus, with a 5x boost to tier 5 space parts. Anything I do past this is for aesthetics or achievements. I’ve ‘mathed’ it out, now its more about making it look pretty. I could quite honestly spend 1,000 hours making stuff look pretty, it just wouldn’t have any purpose.

Hmm, maybe I’ll just put this aside for a bit.

We’re a few weeks away from the Steam Summer Sale, which after so many years I’ve come to think of ‘let’s build a backlog’ sale. Not everything is crazy good, but there’s so much that is, that I’ve developed an interesting habit.

The Steam wishlist sends me emails when something goes on sale. I’m so accustomed to this now that I rarely buy anything at 50% off, because there’s bound to be a better sale in the future. Star Wars Outlaws goes on 50% sale every month. Is it really a sale or are you just paying a higher price because you can’t control your impulse?

The Summer + Winter sales tend to be even larger, so within a month or so I tend to simply wait. It’s like not buying yourself anything a couple weeks before your birthday or Christmas, you may end up with it as a gift. Most times, I can pick up games for less than $10 that would ‘normally’ be $70+. At that price point, I can take a few more gambles on games where I’m just not sure if I’ll like it. It’s cheaper than a pint at the rink!

What then happens, twice a year, is that I build a backlog of games that I will select over the coming months. I’ve often used the front page of Steam to find games during the sales, but over the years have instead paid attention to various curators and just plop things down on my wishlist instead. That list is about 50 long now, and nearly everything on it won’t be purchased until the sale comes across. (There are some items that are announced and not released, wishlisted to keep track.)

All of this benefits me. I am conscious that for smaller developers this is less than ideal, and depending on the team, I may just end up buying it early. Some will never go on sale (Factorio notably), so there is some wiggle room here. The largest impacts are on the big companies though, where price points are $60+. Square Enix in particular has horrendous pricing, and I picked up the entire Kingdom Hearts series for $20 in the Winter Sale. Normal price point is over $200.

For the next 2 weeks, I’ll be adding to my wishlist. There’s a lot of amazing games out there, would be nice to increase the backlog with some quality items found at a good price!

Opportunity cost and bulk measures fit here, so math talk a bit.

JIT (Just In Time) is a delivery method that focuses on anticipating needs in highly complex production chains. The automotive industry is a perfect example of this. A manifold has a dozen steps to create, and the first one takes place months before it’s actually going to be used. Assuming a stable logistics chain, JIT ensures you have only what you need, when you need it. Saves overhead and unnecessary storage costs..

Saturation is a delivery method that quite simply fills up the storage containers as the production chain is simple and volatile. An ice cream shop is an example, where the product can stay frozen for an extremely long period of time. One rainy day you sell nothing, the next sunny day you have a run on double chocolate. This allows for stock protections, but does have a cost for storage. For smaller items, this is less of an issue. Larger volumes – issue.

For what it’s worth, Amazon uses the saturation model. Next day delivery of a pair of shorts only works if they have them in the giant warehouse after all.

Factorio

For the wide majority of the game, Factorio uses saturation methods. ‘Fill a belt’ as it were, and when the belt looks empty, fill it some more. There’s very little math involved in the raw material processing, aside from knowing how many machines it takes to fill a belt. Vanilla Factorio had mini-factories, but that’s long gone now. You build big, and you fill that box at the end. Stack inserters broke the older model.

DSP

Also a game that focuses on saturation as mini-factories have very little benefit. Even with the best belts, you’re going to need to stack items. It’s maybe 10 seconds to build a line of 30 smelters that will produce a hundred or more plates. It’s meant for scale.

Satisfactory

While I prefer saturation, or perhaps simply more accustomed to it, Satisfactory is designed for JIT. A full belt feeding a dedicated crafting station will put out a pittance of material. This gets worse and worse as you build more complex items. There’s a reason there are offline tools to help you figure out the math on production chains. Heck, powering a basic Nuclear plant takes nearly a thousand raw items per minute.

Saturation works if your goal is simply progression. The challenge is that you need bulk material in order to unlock specific research / space elevator tiers. While a production chain will only ever use 1 Nuclear Pasta, you will need a collection of 100 to meet a given milestone. If you only apply JIT, you’ll never have that extra 100. Now, if you use the basic tools, such as a 48 stack container, you’re wasting storage. The balance here isn’t super clear, so your mileage may vary (I put in a mod to reduce storage, I set it to 5 stacks per container). The end result for progress is that you visually see a belt is full, and have minimal storage for when you need to unlock something new. You’d be surprised at how few machines you actually need.

If your goal is aesthetics and end-game scaling, then JIT is the only way to play. A nuclear plant takes 240water per minute, which is 2 extractors. If you want 40 nuclear plants.. well 80 extractors. It’s a pain enough that you don’t want to build 200. (It’s also 10 supercomputers per Nuclear Plant, and the base creation rate is 2 per minute. So 40 nuclear plants = 400 supercomputers = 3.5 hours of base crafting.)

Note: Don’t build nuclear plants for power, build them for looks. Rocket Fuel plants are a good 90% more efficient.

Basic Materials

The exception to JIT is for basic materials: Iron Ingots, Copper Ingots, Concrete, Caterium Ingots, Plastic, Rubber, and Aluminum. Trigons and Diamonds too, but that won’t matter much by the time you unlock them. Saturate the crud out of that stuff, it’s simple enough to do and in the case of Copper Ingots, you are going to need way more than you ever thought.

Sommersloops & Power Shards

This part messes up the math. Sommersloops double the output of a machine – it costs no extra resources but does require substantially more power. Power Shards increase the output of a machine, up to 2.5x the amount, for a commensurate amount of intake materials + power. Combine both, and you get 5x the output for 2.5x the input. What’s neat in Satisfactory is that you can set the output to a math formula, and it automatically resolves – like 3.5/2 will set itself up to 1.75 just fine. When you’re building a unique factory for say, a Thermal Propulsion Rocket, you’re going to see a lot of weird math. Having flexibility in and out is a must.

Note: I consider power ‘free’ past a given point. A simple rocket fuel plant can give you 50GW+. Power Shards are also free, but only once you reach tier 9. Until then, you need to harvest slugs in the world… still, it’s quite easy to have 300+ by the time you unlock nuclear. You’ll need 240 of them for a Rocket Fuel plant.

Starting this on a different footing. I really like the tools in Factorio. Space Age added a bunch of different puzzles, and through a serious amount of applied logic, you can do almost anything. The tools present mean that you spend very little time with finicky placement and instead solve math problems. The friction points have all but been removed. Dyson Sphere Program is 2.5D and has a very similar set of tools.

Satisfactory does have blueprints, which aid in growing scale, but they operate independently. You need to manually connect them together. At scale, this is super annoying.

1.1 Changes

Sweet baby carrots is this a massive quality of life boost! To get the auto-connect to work, you need to be within 2 spaces between the in-world item and your blueprint… not really an issue for belts but much harder for rails. This is entirely due to the Z axis (vertical) and how items need to be touching something. Belts work best when on the ground as they need to connect a machine… which should also be on the ground. Rails… they are meant to not be on the ground as you want to move across complicated terrain.

The general rule of thumb is that if only 1 axis moves, it looks really good. If 2 axes move, then it looks ok. If all 3 axes move, it looks like a 2 year old drew with crayons.

The impact for normal production blueprints is small. There’s a minimum distance for belts to run, so it is possible that blueprints need to be adjusted to ensure connections are larger than the limit. In my testing so far, belts set up to the limit of the blueprint box work just fine.

There are now 2 new types of valid blueprints – one for a belt bus and another for rails.

Belt Bus Blueprint

The idea is simple but building it is a bit weird. My take on this is to use a 4×4 blueprint and put in double belt holder equally spaced. Belts need to be on something. I added temporary poles next to them, ran the minimum belt length and then deleted the temp poles.

Placing this blueprint brought a tear to my eye. In the time it took to lay 1 extension, I can lay 20+.

Rail Blueprint

Rails should not be on the ground, and rails also have a minimum length. That means a small pillar with foundations on top that have 2 parallel rails. A very simple blueprint. It won’t look good as you’ll have rails floating in the air, but it is extremely quick and practical.

Placing this blueprint is not fun. You need to ‘lock it’ (press H), then nudge it close enough to the existing rails so that it connects. Then you click. And then you make a choice.

If you want to manually place the rail extension because you have terrain nearby, press H again, rotate and place the extension. This works for about 50% of the time you’ll use rails.

If you do not have terrain nearby (say you are trying to elevate a rail), then you need to manually nudge the rail blueprint (up/down, left/right, pgUp/pgDwn). The downside to this is that you cannot rotate the blueprint to make turns, so you may want to build a 45/90 degree turn blueprint as well. The crayon downside here is that your rails will have ‘humps’ rather than a smooth incline.

The net result is rails that work, placed in a tiny fraction of the time. This will save hours and hours and hours. And a few more hours.

Summary

I’ve been playing Satisfactory for a long time, and I’ve hit numerous quit walls over the years. All of those were related to a perception of wasted time. I had goals and would find myself stuck in minutiae for 80%+ of the time rather than the fun stuff. Blueprints were a HUGE boost in 0.7, if limited. Dimensional Storage removed the need for central storage in 1.0, saving dozens of hours in the late game running around for materials. Connecting Blueprints, to me, is the final QoL change which will dramatically remove friction in building factories.

While there are other tweaks I could suggest here that would aid in QoL, they are generally low friction events. (This is aside from the HD/Sommersloop/Mercer Sphere 4-hour scavenger hunt.) Finicky tweaks, for sure, but big system changes are pretty much all there now. Satisfactory is essentially ‘complete’. A heck of a journey to get here.

When I was younger I enjoyed TT games, though less 40K given the length of the gameplay and well, smells. It’s certainly better now with more adults. I’ve generally shied away from the video games. The lore is interesting but the IP is the selling point here, not the actual gameplay. Feels more like a Disney approach to milk a franchise.

Space Marines 2 was on sale and my gaming news feeds generally had high praises. The campaign for one, the associated coop and PvP. I dislike PvP for a multitude of reasons – mouthbreathers, try hards and bots notably. But a decent campaign is worth a shot.

I completed the campaign in about 6 hours, which feels really weird. The first few missions were interesting and flowed well. The second half was full of loading screens and aside from 2 specific fights, a cakewalk. Run in, melee, AE melee, execute an enemy, move on. With few exceptions, the guns in the game serve little purpose.

I get the grimdark setting. I don’t mind the gruffness of the characters where everything is dour and serious. I don’t see them as heroes at all, what given that 40K is an outright criticism of religious fanaticals. Everyone is effectively a bad guy. The setting and lore are solid in that regard, so hats off in that regard.

(Side note: there’s some irony that this game is a Gears of War clone given that Gears of War borrowed heavily from the setting. Oh, and Starcraft/Zergs a plenty.)

Mechanically the game is simple but effective. There’s weapon variety which is mostly meaningless, except for the melee options. The invulnerability from executions needs to be exploited to survive, and there are some battles where you simply get chain stunned to death. The AI companions are actually quite good here, which is nice.

But the grand total of it all is quite meh. It does nothing well, except give you the experience of playing in the setting. You certainly feel like a Space Marine, which is neat. The ‘mini-bosses’ are more complex than the final boss who is about parry/dodge timing. Quite honestly, it felt more like a 6hr interactive video than an actual game.

The game peaked at 200k players and then has stabilized at about 10-15k since, which is a fairly health multiplayer base. I have no interest in this, but for those who do, it’s good to see it still going.

Overall, I wouldn’t recommend Space Marines 2 unless you find it on a decent sale, or are a die hard 40K fan, and you likely already have it. There are many more games that have done this better.