My last run in Satisfactory was for 1.0, and it was with AGS. AGS is a set of options that remove friction points – things like a permanent jetpack, all research unlocked and so on. The jetpack is a huge quality of life item and cuts travel / exploration time by what feels like 90%. Alternative research being unlocked means not having to locate crash sites, have arbitrary material on hand to unlock said sites, and then waiting 10 minutes per (there are 100+) to unlock the research which is useless more often than not. So… yeah, saves a few dozen hours. The only downside is that you can’t get achievements with AGS enabled.

1.1 comes out on June 10. Saves have been cross-compatible for a while now, so I opted to get the rough stuff sorted out before the drop. For some reason, self-flagellation I suppose, I opted for a vanilla run without AGS. That means roughing it like a pleb. Let me tell you that the wrinkles really show when you play this way.

Important to understand is that Satisfactory is much different than other games in the genre when it comes to factory building. There is no grid alignment, everything is freeform placement. Buildings are also quite large, much bigger than you, so things take up space. A + B = a sprawling factory until you can optimize with blueprints after about dozen hours. You also can’t prebuild items and need the base material in your (limited) inventory to construct. That is a lot of back and forth between storage and the factory floor. A lot. Oh how I miss my jetpack. Finally, storage in Satisfactory has 24-48 slots. For nearly every material , this is a giant waste of space. You do not want 24 slots of Rotors, you will never need 24 slots of Rotors. Where Factorio, DSP, and Foundry all operate on the concept of full buffers/storage/belts, Satisfactory instead opts for ‘just in time’ delivery. You only build what you need to keep a factory running. Which is dumb, because of my point on not being able to prebuild material and your inventory needing to be full.

Thankfully 1.0 addressed nearly all of these quirks. Dimensional Storage has much lower stack limits (1 to start) and will automatically refill (30/m at first, which is molasses speed), which lets you leave your base and build more stuff with a virtual inventory. It allows a factory floor to be focused 100% on ‘just in time’, which can be complex math. The optimum way to play here is with a spreadsheet. If I need 15 rotors per minute I don’t want to store 1,200. I still like the idea of storage acting as a buffer in case something breaks down in the production chain, giving me time to sort it out. So I found a mod that lets me limit storage levels, and I am alllllll smiles.

I build large mega buses. It requires a fair chunk of material and the belts need to buffer, but in the end it’s the simplest and most efficient way I’ve found to build in factory games. Generally it goes material + production + product on the bus. It’s a tad more challenging to get this up and running early, as your belt throughputs are unlikely to be enough to sustain large scale efforts. Mk2 belts in particular are extremely expensive relative to all other things, so it’s best to run very long Mk1 belts and merge them for very short distances (e.g. coal for power plants). Mk3 belts are dirt cheap. Mk4 have limited use, Mk5 are by far the cheapest of them all. Mk6, well, by the time you get there only Mk3 miners and copper matters.

I am harping on belts here for a good reason. Building at scale requires blueprints. Blueprints don’t allow belts to link. They will in 1.1! Rails too!! The last time I built a rail around the map, with a jetpack mind you, it took over 4 hours. This will make a world of difference.

So, for now I’m building enough to unlock rails, but stopping before actually building any of it. It would take me longer to build than simply waiting for a patch, and blueprinting my way to glory. This one small thing, full hyperbole, will change the game from coal on out. For sure cut build time in half, if not more.

So for now, a starter base is up and running awaiting this massive QoL patch.