Tales of the Shire

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It has been a long time since a decent LotR game came out, way back in the early aughts. (Shadow of Mordor is a bad story, but the Nemesis system is amazing). I understand why this is a challenge, the wide majority of fantasy archetypes are founded in LotR – people have flushed out from this for decades. There are few corners left to explore.

Tales of the Shire is a niche take on a very specific setting. Thematically, a cozy game set in the coziest part of Middle Earth makes a lot of sense. When you think of hobbits, you think of slooooowing down and enjoying the scenery. This game has pieces of that all over the place. However, it also has piece that conflict with this measure.

Main Activities

The totality of the game revolves around cooking meals. You collect materials, grow gardens, collect fish, and then leverage an obtuse mini game to craft a meal. Sharing said meals with the villagers increases your friendship levels, unlocking more stuff. As with other cozy games, there are seasons, cross-benefits between skills, items to acquire, and areas to unlock.

The menus behind all of this are more complex than I would think reasonable, if only because the actual mechanics of everything is more complex than need be. I am nitpicking here, as the data is certainly present, just not obvious to access.

Money

Is the root of all evil, and a major hurdle to overcome. Everything costs money, and money is challenging to acquire in amounts that are deemed ‘cozy’. A set of seeds may cost $50, work once, and the product sells for marginally more than the seeds. You cannot sell a final meal, which is very weird. Expanding the ability to garden also requires money, about 1000 a shot.

You will start by scrounging the landscape for things on the ground and sell them for minor amounts and a lot of time invested. Fishing is the best option, but only becomes so after you’ve reached level 2+ as the fish start to sell for 100 each instead of 20.

While I can appreciate the pressures of money (Tom Nook scars remain), its a weird thing to put in front of a hobbit just trying to relax. Money issues also don’t scale as in other games. I’m literally a multi-millionaire in Stardew Valley, when I hit 10k here I thought I was Scrooge McDuck.

Cooking

This here is both very interesting and complex. Ingredients matter. They have quality levels and flavor profiles (salt only comes from seasoning). Better quality = more friendship points when served.

You gain additional recipes over time, and more cooking stations as you improve your cooking skill. These stations allow you to alter the composition of a meal, making it more crispy, tender, crunchy or smooth. Get the right balance for some added benefit. You can only crisp/tenderize specific items, so ingredient choice matters.

Villagers also have tastes – sweet, bitter, salty, and sour. Recipes change their flavour profile based on ingredients. Some ingredients can be seasoned to change their profile, which may or may not change the profile of the meal (I have yet to figure this part out fully). If you combine two specific flavor profiles, you get a quality boost as well.

Serving food is the main point of the game, and you want to serve 4 people per day their preferred dishes. Higher quality boosts the relationship meter faster. Each relationship level gives something, usually a new recipe, which helps meet more villager taste preferences.

The Cadence

Aside from the main story – which is arguably a long tutorial – you generally follow the same daily pattern.

  • Wake up
  • Tend to the garden
  • Read the mailbox
  • Create meals for guests
  • Serve guests
  • ???
  • Make money
  • Invite guests for tomorrow
  • Go to bed

I think that is a valid and simple daily routine that aligns with my idea of a hobbit. There are other things you can do, such as trade, collect more ingredients, complete daily tasks to improve a skill. Each of them has some merit. My only true gripe here is that progression provides nothing more than the ability to spend more money through an expanded garden and house. Fishing in a new location is a cool idea, but you need to lose a chunk of the day to run to the vendors, when you could just fish in town.

I’d argue that this game is a niche of a niche game. You really need to like cozy games and also need to like Hobbits to truly appreciate what’s here. In that space, your mileage may vary.

Thoughts on a Bus

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I took a trip out west recently, out to the mountains. Nice to just disconnect and enjoy nature. I live in a heavily urbanized setting, and there’s a particular highway that is notorious for 18 wheelers, where it feels like there’s more of them than personal vehicles. The why of it is fairly clear, logistics. Getting things to urban centers relies almost exclusively on trucks. Out west though, trains are the major logistical method – perfect for grains, oil, and other basic materials. There aren’t any trains of bluetooth headsets, but there are trains that are 200 wagons long of canola. As I’ve often been fascinating with logistics, it made me think more about optimizing deliveries.

Moving a few tons of items has interesting factors to evaluate. Is it the same stuff? Can the stuff mix? Does timing matter? Does it all go to one location? Do I have the infrastructure in place? If I need to move a bunch of different things that don’t stack, and need to do it quickly, then large volume logistics is unlikely to work. If it’s bulk raw material, then it’s likely best to ship it all in one big package.

From start to end product, the logistics of distribution change on scale. All of this is macro logistics, getting things to factories. Once they are in the building, we have micro logistics.

  1. Basic materials are extracted and put in buffer storage while waiting for transport. Miners, Pumps, Harvesters.
  2. Materials are transported in bulk (often a train) to a refining process that normally has a train station built in – think a large scale foundry. Ore to bricks, crude oil to refined.
  3. The refined items are also transported in bulk (again, trains) to major distribution hubs. It’s possible some locations actually have train stations built-in, but this is less and less common.
  4. From the hubs, the materials are shipped by trucks to production plants and set in storage.
  5. Inside those production plants are forklifts/loaders to move items between production floors.
  6. Products are put into final storage and distributed by truck for saleé
  7. Steps 4-6 can repeat numerous times for complex production chains. Car manufacturing is a great example, where dozens of production steps are required to reach final assembly.

Side note, even a basic toaster has complicated steps in production. This TED talk covers the high level parts.

When we ‘gamify’ logistics, the same concepts are applied to things that follow a progressive pattern of complexity. You’ll mine iron, make bars, make plates, make gears, make engines, make rockets, each step requiring more complex pieces and more raw items. Where an iron bar may take 2 ore, a rocket may need the equivalent of 1000 ore.

Where games truly differ is that they apply macro and micro logistics to the same interface and generally at the same scale. In that sense, I mean that a train generally takes a similar amount of space as a belt.

Micro Challenges

In the real world there are infrastructure challenges that impact the micro. You factory has a limited physical size, so you need to optimize the footprint to get the most amount of items produced safely. If you run out of space, you need to find another factory. If you want to build a train station close to the factory, you need to buy land, get permits, remove buildings, get permits, build buildings and connect to the existing rail system.

In a game, you can just build more. If you need to connect to a rail, select what’s in the way, press delete, build and connect. Rarely, very very rarely, are you ever space limited. You will however be rate limited, where the belts have a max amount they can transport. The answer? MOAR BELTS!

The Bus

I like the idea of a bus. It’s been part of software/hardware architecture for a long time and to key principles boil down to standards.

You have a bus at home, and you use it every day when you plug something in for power. You don’t care (or maybe don’t know) how the power gets to the outlet, you just care that is works with your standard plug. The power company cares. Construction companies care. Insurance cares. Maybe power is solar, or nuclear. Maybe it’s produced and converted on-site, or distributed across the country. Maybe the connection to your house is above ground or below. You likely don’t care at all, as long as the lights turn on.

If you live in North America, odds are you have used Amazon. That’s another great example of a complex bus that gets you that special pencil delivered to your door tomorrow. Sure, it’s slave labour to create it, and vastly underpaid ’employees’ all the way to your door, but does it matter when you don’t have to leave your couch?

Game buses work the same way. You collect material whatever way you want, and deposit it into the bus. You can then extract from the bus using a template (or blueprint!), do what you need, and either expand the bus or store the item for use. The game will dictate is you have a simple bus (say, a dozen or so raw items used for nearly everything) or a master bus (one that continually expands as you create more complex things). In some games, you don’t need material past a certain point and can stop that flow to be replaced by something else. In others, you need base material all the way to the end.

The main advantage of a game bus is that it’s nearly infinitely expandable. There are always going to be optimized distribution methods, and they often rely on the dual sided complexity/simplicity of the mechanics.

  • Factorio used to be focused almost exclusively on belts through a main bus, with trains supplying raw materials. Space Age added terrain challenges, and significant improvements to bots and logistics containers, so that later planets really work a whole lot better without belts or trains. And that doesn’t include rocket logistics. There are tons of tools to optimize logistics.
  • Satisfactory has very poor tools to build trains, and their throughput is exceptionally low given the complexity. Tier 7 belts are dirt cheap and with few exceptions much more efficient in transport. Rocket Fuel is super easy to make, and drones are ridiculously easy to set up, making them far superior to trains as well.
  • Dyson Sphere Program is an exemplary use of both master bus and distributed logistics through vessels/shuttles. Well.. it was until the Dark Fog addition that added 30% more items to the bus and made things more complex without simple solutions. You can play without Dark Fog and ignore that part (highly recommended).
  • Foundry is a very weird game. The master bus is the only option until you reach end game, where you effectively stop producing anything on planet and simply ship it in. The market interface becomes the bus, which is like ordering from Amazon. Not sure if that was the idea.
  • Outworld Station doesn’t have a bus in the traditional sense, as you can only place factories. The station itself is the bus and each new building you add brings a new path for items to move.
  • The Crust is a master bus, plain and simple. To point, it’s also the only way to get rid of slag and at that, extremely inefficiently.

There are other games in the genre. Captain of Industry, Timberborn, Microtopia and so on. With only a couple exceptions, most apply the concepts quite well but start to strain under higher volumes and complexity. Games that offer the option to set general priorities (high/regular/low) rather than logic gates (more than 100 ore) are almost guaranteed to see this issue.

Personally, I think DSP has the best logistics system for the widest crowd. It’s easy to set up, easy to expand upon, and rate limits only apply at the ultra end game. Factorio has the most complex, and acts as a huge hurdle in the space portion if you can’t figure out the logic gates. But those are the ones that work for me. Think it may be time for another pass through..

And all of this, because I was looking at trains in the mountains.

The Crust

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You know how a buffet has something for everyone but none of it is really great? That’s pretty much The Crust (Early Access).

Billed as an ‘immersive economic management sim’, The Crust has some interesting ideas. You’re on the moon, with access to the surface and below ground. With automation, you can set up what is sort of like a factory, and spend time exploring the larger surface for ‘quests’. The pieces sound good, and in most cases it works out.

The exploration part is bare bones. Send a vehicle to a location, trigger a step, send another vehicle to do stuff on that step, repeat. You’ll start with 1 of each vehicle, eventually able to buy/build more. You’ll eventually be able to mine the surface and build supply routes as a result.

The surface construction is basically power generation + logistics support with very large buildings. Eventually you can the ability to put elevators between surface and below, so placing items will eventually have some bearing. More than ample room and straightforward.

The below portion is the meat of the game. Two main parts, mining regolith (moon rocks) which generate one of 1 outputs, with varying %. You process the results into various products, use those products for more and so on. The first 3 tiers are simple enough. Tiers 4 and 5 are clearly WIP, as they require 4 or 5 materials, things you often don’t want to pull across a base, and often replace previous recipes with marginally more efficient recipes. A main bus is all but required given the scaling item requirements. Belts only cost $, which is nice, but also prohibitively expensive early on. Storage is too limited to my tastes (256 or 512 per container, and some steps need 5,000+ items). You also need to build livable quarters, and hire staff to run buildings (such as research). Getting water/air to these places is simple, building them takes ages due as it takes about 60s per 1×1 square. I’d expect this to be changed at some point.

A view of the below surface portion. Looks like a factory builder to me.

Quests (which move the story along and are highlighted in yellow) have varying requirements to complete. One particular step gives you a countdown to provide a substantial amount of an item, one that you are very unlikely to have on hand. My recommendation is that you create 4 or 5 saves and use them incrementally per stage of the quest.

Oh, forgot to mention you are limited by CPU power, which is a sort of building limit. You can increase this through construction of a building in a living quarter that requires a tier 3 material. I really dislike this mechanic, as it’s a huge punishment for the early game (when you can’t actually build tier 3). I haven’t mentioned the challenges with setting building priorities (never user low priority, it causes everything else to break).

All those words and nothing about economic simulator! Well, you get access to contracts which have reputation requirements and allow you to ship items for money/reputation/research. The game is currently ‘broken’ where mandatory quests take up all contract space unless you research a key piece. You can also just plain ol’ sell items on the market, which is where 90% of the $ in this game are acquired. This is how you address the ‘too much slag’ problem that pops up mid-way. Use slag to make bricks (sell those on the market) or sell the slag through contracts. Ahh forgot to mention that you are limited in shipping size based on the weight of the item, and the size of the ship… and you need to pay for transport. This means that for all the early game it makes zero sense to sell on the market, and later on, only certain items are worth the effort.

I have played many games in genres that The Crust borrows from. Automation, RPGs, economic simulators all have their own complexities. Building just one of those is hard, building something across all 3 is really hard. At no point is any of it truly totally broken. There are systems that add un-needed complexity (CPU), time sinks everywhere (only play on fast forward), and some rather decent balancing pieces to sort out (research requirements, crafting ratios, shipping, quest requirements).

Back to the buffet comparison. The Crust has something for pretty much everyone, and it’s all interconnected. There may not be any particular item that is a show stopper, but all of it is decent enough. I will say that it’s nice to have a more ‘mainstream’ take on the genres with a much lower barrier of entry.

Summer Break

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Just coming back from a couple weeks away from the daily routine. I’m fortunate enough to own a cottage on some water, and moreso that I’m able to share it with friends. This was the first year without any major (day or more) project that needed to be done, so it was quite restful as a result.

I will add that the weather was both amazing and worrisome. It was a heat wave for a large part of it, and the temperature of the water hit a new record – 85.2 F. “Regular” temperatures are more like 78 F, and breaking 80 is maybe a couple days total. You would recognize the difference of a couple degrees… aquatic wildlife certainly feels this. Algae blooms are everywhere, and fish have massive worm infestations. It’s not debatable that it’s getting hotter in general, that part is measured. The why of it… somehow there’s debate. There’s a rant there but not for this place.

This was the first year where I didn’t buy anything during the Steam Summer Sale. I have a long wishlist, and nearly everything on it was reduced at some point. Some of them I do want to get. I just have this bad taste in my mouth right now and it traces squarely to the Microsoft layoffs. I quite acutely understand the realities of financial management and impacts on people, there are times when very hard calls need to be made. And ideally you make those calls before the house is on fire. Announcing record profits and then letting 9,000 people go (on top of the 6,000 in May) is hard to digest. This is quite similar to what EA a dozen years ago by buying companies and closing most of them, or Embracer’s approach to building an empire on a house of Saudi cards. The eternal quest for more money is self-defeating. There’s a rant here but not for this place.

This time of year tends to be my most reflective. Time away from work let’s the brain disconnect and think about other things. Similar to New Year resolutions, I tend to look at the past year and plan the next at this point. I have a growing appreciation for what I have and don’t have. I look at my kids and think we’ve done a damn good job. I look at my career and still am amazed at how much further I’ve exceeded my original plans. I look at my wife and I’m just amazed at how far we’ve come, mountains and valleys, to come out stronger. I look at the impact my family has had on the community, and the sheer number of positive relationships and think we’ve made a difference.

Stuff may be going to shit, but the things I have some level of control upon are doing pretty well. So let’s see what’s around the corner.

Satisfactory – Tier 5 Redux

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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.

This entire thing gives about 15million points per minute

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.

Steam Summer Sale – Bad Habits

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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!

Satisfactory – JIT vs Saturate

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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.

Satisfactory – 1.1

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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.

This creates 1 motor every 6 seconds. It looks amazing. It takes a good 20 minutes to layout, so you want a blueprint.

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+.

The squigglies mean its working.
The downside is that this eats materials way faster than you can make them. 116 Steel per blueprint!
The upside is this took no time at all to lay out.

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.

I present to you, crayon rails! It isn’t stupid if it works!

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.

Satisfactory – Basic Run

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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.

Warhammer 40K: Space Marines 2

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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.

Most of the game looks like this. Great background art, nothing much happening in front of you.

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.