Satisfactory 1.0 launched in September 2024, 2 years ago. 1.1 came out which focused mostly on QoL items, including improvements on fluids and transport. I’ve done a couple playthroughs now, and do consider the game to be relatively feature complete at this point. Surprisingly, there’s a DLC announced – Core Values.

In some of the news circles, the devs have tried to explain the thinking here. If you compare to Factorio, it’s pretty obvious that the two options are a) find another physical location (Space Age) or b) rebuild the entire production chain (Krastorio). Quite a few logistic games have tried the cave construct, which comes with caveats.

• Size. The factory must grow, and games that are architected around tight builds can generally work in confined areas. Games that are built on the concept of size/scale, the size of a location is a major factor. Factorio put temporary limits on land mass size, which you eventually could compensate. Foundry has elevators and caves, which are a right PITA to manage, but generally have ample space to collect items, just not process them. Satisfactory has no real size limits currently, with a very large focus on 3D builds. Very curious as to how this will work.
• Logistics. How factories work has been optimized, any new location needs some new logistic tweaks. Satisfactory has horrendous liquid mechanics, so I do hope they don’t mess up there. Driving vehicles are better than before, but still very rough due to clipping. Trains work very well, but need insane space to work. Drones are ideal options in many cases, but obviously won’t work the same way in caves. Belts are apparently going to be tweaked. I’d gather there’s some limiting factor here with a new transport mechanic required.
• Production Chains. The current game has you producing teleportation and quantum power. I’m not quite sure what could come on top of that, but there certainly is an option for some mid-game changes, which begs the question ‘At what point does the expansion take place?’. I’m sure there’s some integration with max-level factories, but is this something that goes into Tier 2 production? Will it impact that construct?
• Space Elevator. The game is wrapped around the concept of shipping things to space, not sure a space elevator works underground. So does production require shipping between surface/caves, or is it a separate system? I’d certainly assume the former.

I do think this is an odd choice of DLC, likely limited by the game engine. I mean, the whole point is to build a space ship after all, and you do that. It would seem a potential option to unlock other planets or locations, rather than a space-limited construct. And space-limited with a game engine that does NOT support a destructible world.

This does pique my interest, as Coffee Stain has a good track record on building cool things and integrating player feedback. And really, Satisfactory is a top-tier option in the logistics space. More of that is certainly a good thing!

Factory automation and a skinner box? Let’s give it a go. Free demo, why not?

The main concept here is that you want to empty the pile of hay, 1 strand at a time. In that pile are 6 needles that provide absolutely atrocious buffs, but acts as a sort of meta-badge I guess.

You start as all automation games do… manually. It takes about 60 minutes before you can truly start automating anything. It takes even longer before you complete the 10 delivery quests that unlock all the available tech.

Progress is gated through money, there are no building materials or anything complex here. You need cash to build machines. You need cash to build belts. You need cash to build power stations. You need cash to upgrade machines. You need cash. And the best source of cash quickly becomes obvious as paper mills.

Eventually you do realize that you no longer need cash, you need throughput. At max level, each arm can extract about 3,500 strands of hay per minute (if there’s hay in range). That’s about 48 hours to eliminate 10,000,000 hay. You need a lotta arms! Which then fill your belts with hay, which also get saturated. The belt merging causes a slight hiccup in throughput, actually slowing things down. Oh, and to find the needles, you need to scan the hay, with 1 scanner per 2 arms.

The end result is a massive spaghetti run of belts, mergers, producers and power poles. Did I mention that there’s collision detection? That then means you need some 3D magic to make it all work together.

The two images below have maximized the number of arms possible (again, due to collision) at about 20. There’s 8.5m hay to go. That’s 2 hours, at best, to get to the bottom. The reality is that the arms will need to be moved closer together as the pile shrinks. I generally dislike AFK automation games, and there’s really nothing left to build now, just waiting. So I guess for all intents and purposes, I’ve completed the demo. It’s a neat idea, with a ton of rough edges. Free demo though…

Logistics games work on a rather simple concept. Insert material into a machine, extract the results. The complexity lies in the amounts of those 3 items, and their relationships. End-game factories have dozens of production lines to keep track of. The unique aspect of each of these games tends to lie with mass-distribution mechanics – moving things. Some use robots for low volume/high frequency, some use belts for a medium view, some trains for mass transport, and some ships for large distance transport where trains cannot work, normally providing less material than a train would.

DSP has robots, belts, and ships. It does not have trains.

• Robots are used extremely sparingly, primarily for keeping your personal inventory filled with buildings, but also in support of uncommon building requirements on a bus.
• Belts maximize at 60 items per second, which is only truly impactful in base ore processing. 20 smelters will saturate a belt. Stacking / piling is different (more on that in a bit.)
• Ships have 2 types, local and between planets.
  • Local has some small limits that can be improved through research, and are generally effective at large scale transport on a given planet.
  • Planet shipping is slightly more complex, as the time it takes to ship can be long, especially when travelling between systems. Large factories require dedicated off-world shipping, which then distribute locally.

Small Scale

Until you unlock the ability to use ships, nearly everything is managed through belts. Throughput is low, a main bus can ship things effectively between buildings, and it generally keeps power usage low. The downside is that a significant amount of material is located on the belts at any time. Noting that this period also includes you travelling to another planet for silicon + titanium, smelting it there, and manually hauling it back to your main base.

Planetary Scale

When you do unlock ships, you’ll want to immediately move to the non-lava planet in your system. Some basic power options will be laid out, and you’ll focus on the basic smelting lines, effectively replicating all items on your starter planet here instead. That means all material up to yellow science.

Power is a massive issue here, as all logistic towers require an insane amount to charge, and you’ll be starved quickly. You’ll also have few ships available for distribution between towers, maybe 5 local and 1 planet per. That’s a start though, and enough to rebuild a main bus on this planet. Keep the starter planet running until you unlock purple science!

The power issue is going to be addressed by 2 methods. First, put as many wind turbines as you can on each pole, it will take a few hundred for sure. Next, on the lava planet, you’ll need to build a charging station, which requires a combination of wind/solar power and a battery construction plant. Use the extra power to charge batteries and ship them to your factory planet for discharge. Ship the empty batteries back. It’ll take a bit to build up, and charge rates are entirely related to the amount of excess planetary power… so keep improving it here. Eventually, you can supplement it with Deuterium Rods. Unfortunately, these batteries will be the only viable option until you get a Dyson Sphere running.

Proliferation

This is analogous to beacons in Factorio or Sommersloop in Satisfactory – they boost your output costing significantly more power. Mk1 sprays only cost Coal, and you should proliferate every single item (except raw ore, fuel, and dyson sphere components), including the spray itself. Make Mk3 spray once you unlock additional planets, as the nanotubes required need rare resources. Same rules. The 25% bonus to output is massive on multistep chains, which means you need less buildings, and therefore less power.

Interplanetary Scale

This happens when you start collecting rare resources outside your main system (kimberlite ore, sulfuric acid, and unipolar magnets all require level 4 exploration). These rare resources require warpers (green science) to move between systems, and dramatically simplify production chains. You can’t scale without these, and likely will need 1 dedicated logistics tower per.

You’ll likely build a dedicated manufacturing channel per item as well. Why? Because this is the only effective way to build a modular design that can scale to meet Dyson Sphere requirements. If you build a self-contained red engine plant, eventually you’ll need 8x more of it. It is much easier to lay down more belts and assemblers than to lay out an entire new blueprint. Further, each logistics tower can only accommodate 5 items in storage, or seen differently, the end product cannot require more than 4 ingredients per tower. Excepting white science, this isn’t an issue if you dedicate 1 tower per product. Complex builds will require multiple towers, which a) costs a LOT more power, and b) you have to build them a certain distance apart from each other. Modular builds ftw!

There are 3 main exceptions to this however. First, your main bus will have 5 towers to feed all the base material. Anything that is used in 4 or more buildings should be in the bus, the rest you can robot in. Second, your main construction material (inserters, belts, assemblers) should be in a concentrated build. It’s 3 towers of material to build level 1 through level 3 items. Extremely worth it. Third, proliferators. You will build Mk1, Mk2, and Mk3 items from the same tower, as it only requires 3 main ingredients and you will blow through them too quick to use ships. It’s only 1 tower mind you, but a very compact build.

Smelting Math

A Mk3 belt can support 30 items a second (1,800 per minute). That seems a lot, and for a decent part it is. A basic smelter takes 1 ore and gives 1 ingot per second. 30 smelters = a full belt. Cool.

Plane Smelters works 2x as fast, Negentropy Smelters (only with Dark Fog) are 3x. Your belt can neither feed in nor out that volume. Enter stacking, and two options, one of which is false.

Pilers take items on a belt and stack them. To get to 4 stacks, you need 4 pilers. You should never use pilers, ever. Pile Sorters are the right answer, through a relatively simple upgrade that automatically inserts and extracts up to 4 products. They take a lot of power, but they are better in almost every other way.

Noting that advanced logistics research (12k+ white science, multiple times) is required for logistics stations to automatically stack outputs. You want this.

Mega Basing It

So here’s the kicker that you eventually realize, there are only 2 main outputs of any given base, components for the Dyson Sphere (rockets + sails) and research, and you need 3 or more orders of magnitude less rockets than sails. If you want more than 1 sphere, then you’ll need to ship the material to another system, and build the relative ray receivers. I do not recommend this.

What you’re left with is the chase for more SPM, which is rate limited based on critical photon generation from ray receivers. It is unlikely you will hit that particular limit mind you, as you there are other key pieces along the path that you need to scale at late game. This assumes you have all stacking options unlocked (you want this for the recipes needing 12 Hydrogen per craft)

• Deuterium. Used for Strange Matter, you need a ton of this. A gas giant helps a lot here, more than one is better. Otherwise you need to make it from Hydrogen. You need a LOT.
• Plane Filters. The materials are easy enough to find, but it takes a lot of assemblers to make enough. This is likely where you will first use Mk3 assemblers.
• Carbon Nanotubes. You need these for so many things and will absolutely tear through production area doing so. Mk2 Chemical Plants are needed here first. The compression rate (6:1) should incentivize you to craft this on the planet where you harvest Spiniform instead.

For high SPM builds, you will want to dedicate other planets to specific research outputs. This will mean shipping Artificial Stars to get power running, fuel, and Mk3 proliferators on a regular basis to keep it running.

• Blue requires copper + iron. Very easy. All planets can do this.
• Red requires coal + hydrogen. Coal is generally limited to specific planets. Hydrogen you want from a gas giant. The starter planet + system is a good option, though there are plenty of others.
• Yellow requires titanium and organic crystals. No single planet will have both, so select a system with the latter and use 2 planets.
• Purple is a pain. You need rare resources. Fractal Silicon, Oil, Water, Fire Ice, and Spiniform Stalagmite Crystal. There are a dozen or so systems that meet this need. You’ll need to harvest from multiple planets, and be located on the one with Oil/Water.
• Green requires a lot of Deuterium, Grating Crystals, Fire Ice, Water, and Kimberlite Ore. There are not many systems that fit this bill – not sure if I’ve ever actually seen one that has Crystals and Ore together. Given you need Graviton Lenses for your Dyson Sphere collection, I would build this on the starter planet and just ship in the base mats.
• White requires antimatter, which can only be refined within a Dyson Sphere system, so no real options here.

It is entirely possible to hit 5k SPM on a single factory planet. It isn’t ideal, but is certainly feasible.

Story beats aside, The Coil are the frankly ‘unique’ mechanic within Zero Company. All the other pieces are generally refinements on previous bits you’ve seen, even the frankly awesome backup mechanic (free assist on attacks). The Coil are both the primary antagonists, key difficulty choices, as well as a core piece of combat planning. I’ll ignore the lore bits.

At their base, The Coil are relatively simple humanoid NPCs – melee, ranged, captain and so on. With no buffs (more on that later), when you kill a member, they transmit ‘resonance’ to the nearest live Coil target. At 2 stacks, some will heal. At 3 stacks, they will heal and gain a semi-permanent buff – like they explode on death, or charge melee when hit. Once at 3, they won’t gain any more stacks. You really want to plan this out, as having multiple 3-stack Coil in a combat field is not a good thing. Noting, that if you knock them to their death, resonance does NOT transmit. Super useful info. There’s also a main story bit that adds a tweak to this system, no spoilers there, but it does dramatically reduce the enemy’s offence as a result.

The complicating matter in all this is that you will, at planned time intervals, be presented with a dilemma that will buff the Coil. The choice you make BLOCKS an upgrade, meaning the other will go through. Some of these are annoyances, some require thought, and some feel like a snowball-to-game-over.

For example, adding retaliation to weak droids is a nothing-burger, they die in 1 hit anyways. Adding resonance stacks when they take damage, that is a very bad thing. Increasing defence is a bad thing. Increasing their chance to hit is manageable, but stacking damage buff… you’ll end up with Coil Snipers taking out your entire squad from range.

The main issue with this system is that you are effectively blind to the impacts of a decision for the first 3-4 choices. You likely haven’t even seen that enemy type yet, or don’t quite understand how it all synergizes. I’ve played a ton of these games, and I needed to reload after my first choice because it was clear it was a very bad one. Functionally, this system acts as an incremental difficulty to the game as your own party gets stronger. I get that, and it saves having to add a bunch of new classes. I actually think it works! When you see 6 Coil reinforcements show up on a map in the later parts of the game, you will freak out. That’s cool!

What I really like about this system is that enemy progression is tied to player choice, rather than an arbitrary scale. XCOM2 has an enemy power scale that determines who you see based on the number of missions you’ve completed, so that bad luck runs can snowball easily into dead ends. Phoenix Point gives enemies evolution points per mission you complete, which impacts their enemy response. Zero Company instead presents a clear decision point, and assuming you understand the mechanics, you get to choose specifically how the difficulty increases. Maybe it’s more ranged damage, maybe you focus on supped up melee enemies. With that information, you are better equipped in the next mission. You can’t defer the choice either, so it’s extremely obvious that you’re entering a new challenge point.

Now, whether this added difficulty is actually difficult, is a separate matter. This relates more to overall balance, or I guess the pure imbalance that Cly and Jae bring to the table. Those two combined can take out 4-6 enemies a turn, if you build them moderately well.

Scaling in any logistics game is based on three factors. Space, Resources, and Power. You need the real estate to lay down tracks and a factory (time to deliver is a big deal). You need resources to process. And you need Power to run all the machines. In DSP, these concepts are present, though the implementation is a bit different.

Space

As with nearly all games like this, you’re on a grid to place items. DSP uses planets (spheres), which provide an upper boundary on size. There are a few hundred planets, but getting beyond the first 3 requires ships to warp between them. Honestly, by that point this post is somewhat irrelevant. The individual planets though, they are organized in bands, meaning you can place more items in the equator band than the polar bands. Very large factories tend to avoid anything outside the equator bands as a result, using Ray Receivers or research there instead. If you truly want to mega-base, it will be across multiple planets and multiple systems… impressive logistics in that actually.

Resources

With a singular exception, there are near infinite resource to collect. You can improve your mining ability to both speed up collection (+10%) and reduce resource drain (-6% compounding), making some veins near infinite. It’s generally best to concentrate mining on a given set of nodes rather than spreading out. Unipolar Magnets are the exception to all this, there’s usually only 1 million that spawn on any given game, and you need a crap ton of research to make that pile effectively infinite.

I will say that while resources are near infinite, the ability to process them is not infinite, with an upper limit based on the buildings you are using and distribution speed. Here I am thinking about something like Factorio with legendary buildings and speed modules pumping out hundreds of items per second. That’s a whole other topic…

Power

Put plainly, I dislike power management in this game. There are too many potential sources, nearly all of them suck (or create major problems), as compared to the final Sphere/Artificial Star option. Let’s cover them.

• Wind Towers. The best starter option, they provide a decent amount of power for small builds. Takes about a half dozen per mining field, which need to be spread out. Some planets have little wind, so less good there. They do not scale, consider them purely temporary. They can be placed on water (this was a major QoL change).
• Solar Panels. They take a lot of resources to build, only work when the sun’s out, and on a per-grid deployment are only marginally better than Wind Towers. The ‘best’ option is to have a 5 wide band run across the equator, that is if you don’t have a tidally locked planet.
• Fuel Burner. Coal, Graphite and other items can burn here. These provide very little power for the time invested, and should be treated as hydrogen sinks only.
• Fusion Plants. These burn advanced fuels, of which only Deuterium Rods are a viable option. You need a planet-full of those rods to build a sphere.
• Thermal Plants. Only works on lava, which means the 2nd planet in your starter system. They pump out less power than an equivalent footprint of Wind Towers. Their only real use is when Dark Fog digs holes – put these to block them.
• Ray Receivers. Assuming you have any part of a sphere running, receivers can capture rays and transform it to power. Or, you can use them to create photons, required for end-game research and artificial stars. You’ll end up with both, at least one deployment per pole. It takes a while to charge up mind you, and provides power relative to the construction state of your sphere.
• Batteries. Let’s say you have too much power on one planet and want to move it to another. Charge some batteries and discharge them on the other side. 90% chance this is actually the only viable option in a starter system. It works, it’s not terribly hard to scale, and has a decent transfer rate. But it’s not power itself, it’s a mechanism to move it between planets. A quarter planet of solar panels + batteries = ‘free’ power anywhere. There should be an infinite research that increases the maximum charge of a battery.
• Artificial Star. Assuming a sphere is running and assuming you have ray receivers making electrons, you can make this. In nearly all cases, it doesn’t make sense to use these in any system with a Dyson Sphere, as Ray Receivers are better options. But they are absolutely essential for mega-base foundries in other systems, as the material is much simpler to ship around. Each is 72MW, which seems like a lot, but a fully running factory planet will be 1-2GW of drain.

From this, there are really 4 phases of power management

1. Early game, up until you unlock yellow science. 100% wind powered.
2. Mid game, up until you start a Dyson Sphere. A power planet, using solar panels, charging + shipping hundreds of batteries a minute. A destination planet consuming said batteries.
3. Late game, Dyson Sphere under construction. Ray Receivers, lots of them.
4. End game, aiming for 120+spm for white science. Ray Receivers in the Dyson Sphere system, Artificial Stars in others.

The good news is that consumable power is rated based on draw, so you never burn more than you need. Also in the good news, as long as you’re above 40%, stuff will work, just slowly. Building your fist planet-sized factory, you will have this happen all the time. In the great news, the major power draws will come from logistics centers, and you can set how much they draw at any given time. You also only need to power only 1 end of a logistics chain, not the whole thing, very helpful when mining on a different planet as you only need to power mining, not shipping.

The bad news is that it’s very hard to build dedicated power channels, and very difficult to manage them. If a planet you’re not on loses power, tough cookies. If you want to change the settings on a group, I’m not aware how. Finding the source of a problem is also difficult. For example, improving storage on logistics towers causes them all to try to fill up the new space… effectively adding a 1GW surcharge until they fill up – ain’t no way you’re going to avoid that.

I think my main gripe here is that only the renewable power is self-contained, and even then needs an absolutely massive area to work effectively. Any consumable power is going to encounter throughput issues… either your nodes dry up, the material is needed elsewhere, or it will fail and getting it running again is a miracle and a half. More to the point, I think I’m somewhat spoiled on the ease of power generation in Factorio, or even a Rocket Fuel factory in Satisfactory. Understanding that ‘ease’ here is certainly relative.

It boils down to one key conceptual issue. The entire reason a Dyson Sphere exists is to capture all the output of a sun. The game currently doesn’t reflect that, and power issues are going to be your limiting factor throughout your playthrough. Which, I guess in hindsight, is more accurate to real life than not. Hah!

DSP is, at a given point, a zen experience. Up until Dark Fog was introduced, there were very large stretches of simply waiting and enjoying the world around you. Especially when it came to the construction of the eponymous Dyson Sphere.

Dark Fog is an attempt at the PvE element found in Factorio. It adds a persistent threat that is relatively easy to defend on a planet’s surface and only supports brute force in space. There’s a passive research reward for participating, so you kind of want to set up a farm for it, which is surprisingly difficult to do. It also adds about 30% more ‘stuff’ with poor logistical intersections. I played it a few times, loved the early parts of it, and really didn’t enjoy the mid- to late- portions. There’s still no ETA on when the space portion will be complete, which would effectively make it 1.0 launch. Until then, Dark Fog is disabled in all my playthroughs.

Which is a weird thing, as it actually reverts the gameplay back a significant amount. From late blue science to early yellow, you’re just sitting and waiting as the research itself takes a while to complete. You can certainly add more research buildings, and fill your planet with wind turbines to offset the power requirements. There’s no real elegant option for power until after yellow. Thankfully this period isn’t complex.

I will note that there are some fascinating design decisions here that differ from Factorio, while trying to adhere to the spirit of it all.

• You pre-fab buildings. If you ignore the combat buildings, generally the types of buildings correspond to the work they do. Very similar to Factorio here. Wildly different than Satisfactory. I much perfer this model.
• Belts are everywhere. You need inserters. You can stack on belts (eventually). You can’t reliably add two items to a belt, but you can ‘pull/push’ from 3 belts away. Has some minor design implications later.
• The game is 3D and belts can go up and down. This works really well in theory and in practice. Gone are the Satisfactory clipping issues.
• A main bus is still the simplest way to build pretty much anything up until mid-game, and even then it’s worth keeping. The bus takes a decent chunk of space given the intermediary items you need to pass through. Some items are used once, but in high volumes. More on mega bases in a bit. This is the model I use for all logistics games, and it works relatively well here.
• The world itself is grid based, each on a sphere. You can only place items on the grid, and depending on which part of the sphere you’re on, things may or may not fit. This is a cool math problem, but it also means that blueprints are a pain as they only fit in specific locations. A Factorio or Satisfactory ‘grid’ blueprint doesn’t apply here. This is actually a great distinguishing feature for DSP.
• There are no pipes or fluid mechanics of note. No pressure. No head lift. Glorious!
• Research has an intermediary step, associated to colors and technology levels. The net benefit here is that you can easily see where research bottlenecks are present, can dedicate areas to their construction, and focus productivity benefits. I personally prefer Factorio’s modular builds for research, though this is certainly an option for late game SPM.

Automated Logistics

This deserves its own section, as there are some nuances here that are really not obvious. It’s a weird system.

There are 4 types of automated logistics

• Local: These operate as a sort of bot system from Factorio, where you apply a piece on a storage unit, then put in some bots, and connect it to a local network. The throughput is ‘ok’, and primarily meant to keep your inventory up to date, as well as move infrequently-used items around a planet in small volumes. These are exceptionally useful, though also quite simplistic. Also, you need to research 5 levels of distance to cover the entire planet.
• Planetary: This has shuttles that transport stuff across your planet. 50 drones, 4 types of things. Can connect to other Planetary stations. Has space limitations so that they don’t overlap. I cannot for the life of me find any use for this. This would only be useful if it could contain more types of things.
• Interstellar. This has shuttles that transport stuff across all planets. 10 shuttles, 100 drones, 5 types of things. Connects to all other stations. Has space limitations so that they don’t overlap. Can set groups, priorities, queues, volumes. These are the lifeblood of any mid/late factory.
• Gas. These harvest gas from, well, gas giants. Connects to Interplanetary stations, can put 20 per gas giant. You want these.

So the Local portion is primarily used on a main bus, so that you can get all the pre-fab buildings going. No real use outside of that as they can’t manage volume.

Interstellar… eventually you get rate limited, as the storage limits are too low. You are presented with 2 options here. Create sub factories on other planets and only ship end products (core of mega basing), or you create a hub/spoke model where you have 3 or 4 stations collecting across the galaxy that are pulled down for local distribution (the step before mega bases). Creating groups of stations allows for targeted distribution models, so you can (and should) have a dozen stations holding Titanium bars in order to support a massive factory.

Mega Basing

The definition here varies, but generally you’re looking at over 500 SPM to be considered in this space. Just getting here requires a decent throughput of Artifical Stars in order to power the whole thing. You reach a point where a single planet can no longer fully support the construction requirements to build research items. Instead, you’ll have factory planets that focus on a single type of research, with dedicated construction channels on a single output. That’s likely 5 planets, and a final one where you have your Dyson Sphere (as you need material generated from it).

Interestingly, nearly all the updates over the past 2 years have focused on mega base optimization. Multi-threading, CPU and GPU optimization, pilers, throughput monitoring, and a slew of other bits. Prior to these items, getting 1000 SPM meant frame rates under 10. Now, you can build multiple Dyson Spheres and ridiculously large factories across multiple solar systems.

Moving Forward

There are still no dates for the next content update, which will include vehicles and space combat. Game optimization is pretty much at the max right now, at least in ways appreciated by the wide majority of players. It is without question a better game today than it was a year or two ago. Factorio remains the gold standard, but DSP is the next in line under the concept of ‘the factory must grow’. Fingers crossed we can get a date for the next big thing…

While I’m not done with it, I do think the rest of the summer has other bits that need to be handled. 2.1 will be in experimental for a bit, likely waiting til the fall to get out. There are still a few quirks to work out, in particular around quite a few QoL changes that obviously are much more complicated that you would think. Still, general thoughts are that 2.1 is really amazing and addresses a lot of my concerns in 2.0, with one exception – Quality. More on that.

• Research – that you can queue research based on available packs is extremely helpful in the midgame. Gleba packs expire, so you want to take full advantage of them. It works on infinite research too, which is awesome. I have a weird display bug, but the functional parts are fine. This isn’t all that useful at late game, where you’ve generally figured out logistics, but for about 80% of your time getting there, it’s awesome!
• Visuals – planets in space are cool. Assemblers and rocket silos have a glow up. It generally looks better, which avoids needing more mods.
• Fluids – Measuring pipe volumes avoids the need for storage on most planetary builds, better logistics too. Being able to pivot fluid connection points allows for much tighter designs too, so that’s nice.
• Space Rocket Logistics – Hell yeah! The game is smart enough to ship less things to you, or break them up into better packages drastically reducing the need for rockets. When you haven’t gotten logistics fully sorted out, this is a really big deal!
• Military Science – What? This isn’t in 2.1! You’re right, and I have a gripe with that. Of all the sciences you can craft, all of them have have been optimized in some fashion in Space Age – except Military Science. Grenades and Walls still have shitty ratios on shitty crafting paths. I was hoping for something better here… at least in QoL. Oh well.
• Shipping between platforms – I leave a space platform above Aquilo that makes too much ammo and rockets, which then feeds my transport ships, without the need for rockets. The less time any ship spends around Aquilo is a good thing! While there are bugs to work out here, it has saved me from losing ships.
• Space Casino death – I still don’t quite follow why this took place, as I was rather easily able to build equivalent chains on Vulcanus. Granted, you need more ground space and therefore more foundations + power, but it’s certainly doable. Blue Chip + LDS shuffle remain absolutely viable, so if anything, it adds a small hurdle in late mid-game. Your bottlenecks will remain legandary quality + productivity materials anyways.

Quality deserves a special mention here, as most people will see 2.1 as a sort of reversion on the concept, or at least making it more difficult to acquire. I don’t necessarily have an issue with legendary material, but I do on everything between it and normal. Aside from space platform material (normal collectors are kinda bad) there are no real reasons to use anything but normal or legendary due to the logistic impacts of sorting through all the junk. You may end up using some buildings as a temporary measure (like Biolabs), but your goal is 100% to get to legendary as the benefits are ridiculous. Noting you can absolutely beat the game without any legendary mats, just that your final ship is going to be bigger and slower as a result. And for a variety of reasons, it’s not really practical to mega-base without legendary. This is one reason I prefer mods that simply give legendary outputs based on the volume of inputs, like say 100x the inputs to get 1 output. You’re skipping the lottery part and frankly, the view of destroying 98% of all your outputs.

What I think I find the most interesting actually is that the genre as a whole has emulated/replicated every single aspect of Factorio by now. Maybe not all in one game, but the pieces are everywhere. And yet none, not a single one that I have seen across dozens of variants, has opted to implement a concept of quality. I think that alone is argument enough.

Factorio still rocks, and if this is where the swan song is, then holy crud have we been blessed.

In the previous 2.1 post, I ran some tests regarding Space Casino alternatives, notably those specific to maintaining a space platform. The sum of it is that the removal of Quality Mods from crushers effectively made anything space related obsolete, with some caveats.

• The rate of asteroid collection cannot be improved in any meaningful sense. Once you are moving between planets, the rate at which you encounter asteroids is relatively fixed.
• The rate of crushers vs. recyclers is substantial. Crushers return 80% of the material, Recyclers only 25%. Seen another way, it takes 1250 items crushed to get 1000 out. It takes 4000 items to get 1000 recycled.
• It takes about 4 steps to go from normal to legendary, each one a gamble. To get 1 legendary asteroid, it takes about 30,000 from recycling.
• In pure math, it takes about 7x more material to get the same results, and you cannot practically increase the amount you put in the machine. Well you can, you just need to build multiple platforms.

Right, so you’re stuck with less elegant options. The good news is that you only need coal, iron, and calcite. The even better news is that you need very little calcite as it’s used for stone, which is in turn only used for buildings, not actual products.

One important bit of context in this post. It assumes that you are only using normal quality science products. If you want to do legendary science, odds are you’re well outside the intended audience here.

Raw Upcycling

This is the act of taking any material, applying quality to the first step, and where you don’t get legendary, you recycle it until you do. As pointed prior, this gets you on average 1 item per 30,000. It is stupidly inefficient, if only because the throughput is so high. On top of that, every time you process something in a production building, you increase the odds as you at least get 100% of the output back, and with productivity, potentially more.

For example, if you were to process something with a max 300% productivity boost, you would only need about 7,500 raw items to get 1 legendary. Research improvements are very helpful here. There’s different math when it comes to adding quality mods, and where.

Intermediate Upcycling

The idea here is pretty simple. You want an intermediate product that you plan to recycle in order to get legendary material. The practical application is quite hard, as you need a decent supply of those materials first, in order to make that product. The general idea is:

Input base products -> Create intermediary with quality mods -> recycle anything that isn’t legendary –> use recycled material to make more things.

The main issue here is that you will end up with items of varying quality throughout and need to make different quality products from them, with some interesting filtering on belts. It’s about 10 regular production stations to 2 uncommon, and 1 of each rare, epic and legendary. If you do it once, it’s pretty easy to understand the flow for any additional time. The more of that item you need, the more space you need to orchestrate it all.

Quality Mods

There are three paths, one of which doesn’t actually count.

• Path 1: Tier 3 normal quality. This takes Superconductor rods, and gives 2.5% bonus. Only make these to start Path 2.
• Path 2: Tier 2 legendary quality. This requires green, red, and blue circuits, an upcycle, and provides 5% bonus. Insert Tier 3 normal mods until you produce your first rare or better, then replace away.
• Path 3: Tier 3 legendary quality. This requires legendary Superconductors, which is it’s own thing, and gives a 6.2% bonus. They are a pain to make, and should only be used once you have fusion power everywhere.

Iron

Raw ore is not really an option as only Nauvis has any in decent quantities, and you’re likely using that for something else. Vulcanus can give you infinite iron plates relatively easily, for very little calcite cost. Foundries also have a native 50% productivity, with 4 mod slots, making it a small footprint to output a full belt of iron plates.

Recycling them is one option, but if you were to turn them into iron chests with a 4 mod slot assembler, you’d be even more efficient as those are super fast to create and give/take 8 iron plates.

Calcite

Right, this one is either super complicated or super easy. Calcite is used in only 3 things – fuel, artillery shells, or cliff explosives. Those last 2 have multiple sub-products and are difficult to produce at scale. In this case, it’s better to just do a raw upcycle as you have so much available on Vulcanus.

Now, since calcite is only used for stone, you’re likely better just making stone instead. This can actually be quite simple… copper foundry directly into a recycler. You’d need to get rid of the copper fluid mind you – which is achievable through an extremely simple decider configuration.

Coal

This one is a big ‘it depends’. Coal is primarily used in the construction of plastic, which can be a bottleneck as it’s used for a ton of things. Plastic Productivity helps a lot here, as Chemical Plants can only take 3 mods. You’re gonna need a lot of coal!

If you’re on Vulcanus, you’re likely sitting on Coal deposits that are in the millions. There are two options present – raw & grenades. Grenades will give a 20% boost and some iron plates as an output, but they take 8s to craft each using 10 coal. 10 coal can be recycled in less than 2 seconds. Given near infinite supply and throughput options, raw seems the best option.

Closing Thoughts

I think it rather obvious that getting legendary anything through infinite inputs is not hard. Space Casinos essentially put it out of mind and let you concentrate on the more complex builds, while giving new ideas to creating items in space. By making this be planet bound, it actually increases the scalability as it’s way easier to create a new production line there than build a new space platform.

My rough math says that for each Casino I had, I’ll need roughly four times the space to collect a similar amount through alternative means. The main issue is the sheer amount of Quality Modules needed to get this running well. Vulcanus can easily build an upcycler for Q2 modules at 5%. Legendary Q3 require fusion + trains + upcycling of capacitors on Fulgora… that’s a long term thing.

It also means that collecting materials from space to do anything non-space related (e.g. fuel or ammo) is pretty much gone. The domination of Vulcanus for nearly every late game production is even more cemented. The only hiccup I now see is that you’ll need multiple fusion power plants and a decent amount of foundations to expand sufficiently.

I’ve been away on a break for a few weeks, hence the quiet blog. Where generally folks use New Year’s to ponder their annual goals, I do that during the summer break as a mental reset. And this year was an interesting one. Within about a week two meaningful events occurred.

First, a great friend’s father passed, a man I knew for over 30 years and treated everyone as his best friend. It was relatively quick, and he went out with a giant grin. He was a man with infinite energy and boundless optimism. Truly a fascinating character and no matter how bad a day you may have had, he was enthused to make it a good one. He embodied the adage that ‘a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met’.

Second, Belghast passed away. A year to the day that he lost his wife, and nearly 6 months from when he shared he had cancer. ‘Pillar’ is a term that is thrown about, and in this case it’s certainly apt. Blogging is everywhere and in today’s age, one of the most archaic forms of sharing if you’re not using some sort of AI tool and recipe hunting. Bel found a way to bring more people under the tent (Blaugust) and somehow found time to share his passion for gaming on a near daily basis. His was one of the few blogs I checked on a near daily basis… and as a habit I still do, until it hits that we won’t see anything more. He’s frankly the reason I played FF14 and enjoyed the time spent in there with him and the guild.

It’s an interesting thing this concept of life, as ephemeral as it is. I’m at that age where there are way more funerals than weddings, way more divorces than baby showers. The absolute certitude of youth is replaced with a sort of melancholic acceptance of loss of control.

It reminds me of a sci-fi trope that immortality is a curse, where true appreciation is bound by the loss of something. The act of procrastination or deference to a future date is pushing out the ability to enjoy what you have today. There are so many things that can happen tomorrow that you can’t control, and if you can do something today, you generally should.

My friend’s dad lived every day like it was going to be his last. Nearly his entire life that way. Bel shared what he had with what tools he had on a near daily basis, spreading the good word of community and gaming as a way to bring people together. Neither made excuses, they just appreciated and moved forward.

If there’s a resolution or attempt I want to spend my energy on, it’s exactly that. Appreciate the day. Appreciate the gift of the people around me. Cause tomorrow is another day that may not bring that gift.

Scaling is an interesting thing, I’ve written a lot about the concepts in gaming. Most ARPGs tend to have a weird mix of them, where monsters appear linear but are actually exponential, and players appear linear but are actually logarithmic bumps. The math behind it generally results in you either feeling good or bad about your power level. You feel strong being a level 50 taking on level 1 mice, but feel week taking on a level 60 boss, right?

Ok, real hard tangent for a minute. Taxes are math. When you’re young, taxes are pretty simple. When you get older, taxes can get hard, man. There’s an actual profession for it! The goal of taxes remains simple enough, people pay their fair share for common services. Now, everyone has their own definition of fair, and that’s why the complex math exists. Your emotional reaction to fair has a major impact.

ARPGs use this model, where some content feels fair and others do not. Some encounters feel good, and others on the exact same map, feel punishing. Why? There are a couple reasons here, and they boil down to mechanics and math.

Mechanics

Enemies have their own methods of attacking you. Some burrow, some fly, some are melee, some are ranged. PoE has some rather insane enemy variety to parse, and they are generally visually distinct which helps. Mods though, mods will do you in. A monster with a hp/mana drain effect and can only be hit while being next to them is, for most players, an immortal enemy. Again, all the deadly ones have a very obvious visual clue.

Some events are more fun than others, mostly due to their mechanics. Having a ton of spawning enemies is generally manageable. Having multiple rares spawn at the same time – that is extra spicy. Breach, Expedition, and Rune events can cause this, with minimal warning. The net effect is that while you’re pushing maps there are certain events you will absolutely want to avoid, simply because the mechanics themselves are too volatile. Delirium certainly feels like hard mode if you get all the way to the boss and get a double spawn, as the difficulty in the map actually gets harder as you go!

Map bosses have their own amount of fun with generally a fair share of AE mechanic to avoid. With only a couple exceptions, there are few 1-hit-kill attacks so you are generally provided ample time to avoid a big hit. The effects of a given map will impact a battle, but this isn’t specific to the boss but all content in a map. Arguably, the harder a map, the easier the boss as you will have memorized the mechanics by that point. Except maybe the psycho gorilla. Screw that guy.

Major bosses are a different matter – these are either end-of-act repeats of bosses or new pinnacle bosses with absolutely punishing mechanics that will kill you. And then kill you again. But then you’ll get it! And then die again. (Noting that every death has you lose 10% xp, but not a level. Ideally only try these bosses when you just leveled up.)

Math

This is where PoE2 frankly does most people in. Your damage output and taken is under a complicated formula. Conceptually it is simple, but the practicality is much, much different. A minor thing, like +5 damage on a glove could have a few hundred damage impact in the end game. Uncapped resists are just, well, wild when you look at the actual impacts on numbers. And there are so many intertwining systems, it honestly feels like a math degree to work it all out.

In this space, hats off to frankly every other ARPG out there for having generally solved this issue. You can get to max difficulty in pretty much all of them without any help. PoE has a Solo-Self-Found (SSF) mode where you can’t trade. That should give you an idea of how much trading is core to the process of gearing. PoE2 has this mode as well, but has some controls to try and help here… back to a prior post on item drops.

The net effect is that by changing 1 piece of gear you will immediately feel the in-game effects. Making the correct choice as to which piece of gear to prioritize (99% of the time it’s your weapon) and what stats you want on it, well, that’s the true battle.

Finally a bit on the actual Waystone tiers. Maps start at 65 for tier 1 and go to 80 for tier 16. One level may not seem like much, but enemy stats scale with levels. There’s no damage penalty for a level difference, but the game expects you to be at a certain threshold – and item / mod drops are level based – so you will for sure feel a difference between tiers.

The net result is that difficulty in PoE2 is a combination of the Waystone tier, the mods on that Waystone/Tablet, the actual event within that map, and finally the RNG of enemy mods on any given enemy. That means the concept of fair at any given time fluctuates wildly. What an interesting model.