Satisfactory

Even though I played for many hours after the 1.0 release last year... huh?

My iron smelter array. Total capacity is 9600 iron ingots/minute, using the basic recipe. I actually only have Mk.4 belts, so I can only use the bottom four (of ten) floors... But I like building oversized. The idea was to centralize the production of basic resources (ingots and concrete). Then, the actual factories making stuff could be located more or less anywhere, regardless of local resources. Centralizing the smelting would reduce the many-to-many distribution problem of resources to a many-to-one (resources to smelter) and a one-to-many (smelter-to-factory). But actually integrating the train station was a pain in the ass and not really fun compared to the factory. I have lots of ideas for how I want factories to look and nowhere can I fit three or more train stations. Maybe this is more a Factorio style and Satisfactory is really more about building the factory close to the resources. So I may not actually end up using this lol. That said, everything is blueprinted now, so I may end up using a smaller version of this design in a different factory. The back, with observation tower for scale.

Shoutouts to the 1.1 vertical nudging feature, which should have been in the game from the start and the new curve mode for conveyors, which look great with the gentle curvature of the main structure.

Dubious shoutout to the feature/bug that vertical splitters now allow you to build X.5m long vertical conveyors, which is a power that I should have used more sparingly.

The music is so good! Wish I had splashed out on it sooner!

I don't always like the idea of single big buildings, several buildings feels more industrial to me. I tried to make it fairly walkable.

I also realised that after finishing it, that I also need to send the output to a train to take to a future plant for Modular Engines, but I didn't leave any space for the train.

Everything just looks so good in this game!

I'm planning to start a new Satisfactory world with a number of friends and acquaintances of mine, some from different friend groups.

In a game like Minecraft, the world is limitless and people can set their base up anywhere, obtain resources wherever they please and just trying not to impede on others too much. In Satisfactory I worry a bit about competing over the resources or ideal space, or someone decides to take down another person's hourslong work to make a more efficient factory, etc.

What would be ways that I could fairly share the world with many people? I'd think most of the people would get along and the objective is shared, but I'd want to reduce areas of frustration where possible and would appreciate any advice to that end.

Created blueprints in satisfactory for a modular ore processing tower. The base is a wrapper around a miner, and the floors process 240 ore each. Scales up to 5 floors tall, allowing for 1200 ore/ingots from overclocked pure nodes.

Concept and inspiration came from Yakez42: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmnoLVtGfvg

In the basic setup, each floor connects to the base directly. With 1-3 floors, each floor is balanced input wise.

Each floor has 3 ore inputs, and 1 ore "forward" port. One of the problems with Yakes42's design is that it was before mk6 belts, and thus didn't need more than 3 floors. To support additional floors, I added an ore output to chain additional floors. The forward port ore is also split out before the machine groups lines are split, so half of the incoming ore is forwarded.

Each floor has 3 ingot outputs, and 1 ingot forwarding input. Again, to chain an additional floor.

There is a slight gap in the roof where i have the steel frame floor that allows you to check on the status of a machine if you really need to.

Internally, it's two machine groups of 4. Splitting is done on the logistics floor.

Screen of the miner with it's cover. There is some internal work to connect the miner output to the cover.

To support 1200 and 5 floors, you need to chain 2 floors off of other floors. The bottom floor needs to connect via the middle lift. Floor 2 needs to chain into floor 3, and floor 4 needs to chain into floor 5. Otherwise, you will exceed the lift height (without using other tricks)

It's using what I call "budget" 1:5 balancer that isn't actually that bad for balance. It's a spliter connect 1:3, and then two of the three legs get split 1:2 again. Once branch (the middle) gets 1/3th, and the other 4 get 1/6th of the resources. As soon as the "middle" leg backs up, it is balanced. I kind of hate the design of real 1:5 balancers, and would only use them if I really needed them for something critical. For smelters with 1200/min input, it really doesn't matter except on the initial fill time.

While I really like the look of radar tower on the top, the Lookout tower looks really out of place. I'll probably come up with a cosmetic design. I've been trying to brainstorm on something actually useful to put on top. The only thing I can think of is for a few to have hypertube cannons.

I like how far away I can see the full tower with a radar tower on top.

Next I plan to do floors with Forges. 4 per floors would let each floor handle 300 for iron alloy, and 400 for copper alloy.

I just liked the framing.

I was trying to come up with a compact design mini factories that I could blue print and wanted to see how many manufacturers I could squeeze into a mk3. Along the way, the solutuon I came up with ended up being load balanced. Now that I post-end game, and some of the final products can be really slow, I certainly appreciate being able to not have wait for a manifold to fill.

I started the design with what I am calling a "center feed" pair of manufacturers. Instead of resources coming from the left or right in a manifold, they are fed in between the 2.

I had a similar design before for a 3 input version, but didn't have to solve what to do when splitters on the head of the lifts are too close together. This time around, I just pulled further back and removed the splitters on the lifts.

Next was simply mirroring 2 more manufacturers and feeding the inputs in again from the middle (above the outputs). Now I had a balanced design for 4x. It could also trivially be extended to 6x, although it wouldn't fit in a blueprint.

The final step was to link 3 floors together. The inputs are routed via lifts up the middle floor, and there are split 3 ways. One output goes directly out the back the feed the machines on that floor. The right output goes to the top floor via lifts (easiest to see here), and the left goes the bottom floor also via lifts. The key to getting this to work is to stagger the lifts, and to not care that I we re-ordering which input was "on top" etc. Staggering the lifts usually needed me to build a splitter, nudge it in location, build the lift, delete the splitter, and then connect the lift via belt.

All of the outputs for the top two floors are routed back away from the inputs lifts, and then down to be merged with the ground floor mergers. They were pretty easy to route since there was a lot of room beneath the input splitters.

First time I completed phase five. Killed about 630 hours across two saves. Now I need that golden nut!

This is my biggest build yet, it’s got so much room for activities. I hadn’t built a tier 9 factory yet, so this houses all that. Along with all my new portals and my HUB.

36 refineries to supply 36 fully over-clocked Fuel Gens. This is only the last step.

Should give me enough power for a while tho.

Next floor is done.... except that I JUST realized upon looking at this picture that I forgot to paint the floor.

With everything on this floor except for the last wall done, there's one little addition I want to make...

ELEVATOR!

They are absolutely as awesome as they look. Coffee Stain REALLY outdid themselves. I don't think there's ever been a feature they've added that I didn't have at least SOME small criticism about, but not this one.

Last wall filled in.

WE BACK!

Yeah, I haven't burned out on the game quite yet, I just haven't had a gaming PC for about 2 weeks. We dismantled the entire office in order to get the wood floor resurfaced.

Anyway, let's get this Caterium mine built up.

Lovely. I'm enjoying getting to play with the new beam variants. Disappointed that the "Shelf" beams can't have a sign nudged into them, without covering it up (at least, not with half-meter nudging).

Now, the bridge between the 2 buildings.

Moving on to the first floor of the main building.

More tomorrow! (heading out-of-town for the weekend after that, though).

It's nice to finally have a manufacturer so that I can automate the 3 items recipes, it was getting annoying having to do them at the bench.

A few months ago, I finished Satisfactory, including all the achievements. I really enjoyed the game, and though it felt really good to finally complete it and see everything I had built, I also was sad I would no longer be in the world.

I’m thinking of doing a new run, but I’m daunted by having to get all the collectibles again. In the first run, it was nice to explore the world and take a break from building things, but I’ve really seen the world now, so that’s less appealing.

Curious if there are others who feel similar. I’m wondering if I should just start a new game with all recipes unlocked and give myself all the spheres and sloops up front.

What have others done for a second run?

Just thought this was a nice shot!

I didn't start playing until 1.0, and am wrapping up my first play through. I've complete the main progression, and complete all of the achievements (hopefully that's spoiler free enough). I am probably 95% done with my personal end game goal.

Since I started on the Grassy Fields, I want to try a different starting location. I like the idea of the Northern Forest, as I like the scenery, but it seems like a terrible location to start. I don't want to steam roll the terrain to try to build with the new players tools, and would rather come back later when I can properly build more in harmony with the terrain. I do like the centrality of the location. I like the idea of the Dunes, but it's so far removed from everything else. It seems like a great place for an end game mega factory, or if you want a mega factory from the start. So that leaves mean leaning towards the Rocky Desert. I do like the biome, but I also just recently built a large factory there. I have not really explored or built on the Crater Lakes, Red Forest, or Forest Lake much and want to change that.

I want to give tractors/truck a chance for the early game, and I think that's another point in favor of the Rocky Desert or Dune Desert. I'll likely go back to a real hypertube network, instead of cannons everywhere.

I want to take the game slower, decorate more, load balance more, and use blueprints extensively. I will probably visit a certain cave, grab some hard drives for a certainly terrible early game item, rush some research to get my toys back, rush the mk1 blueprint designer, rush coal, and then dial it way back.

Anyone restarting for 1.1 or doing anything else to change it up?

Ignore the mess in the background, I'm working on it.

Heads up for those who run a dedicated server who haven't tried experimental first, posting this so it's on your radar.

Long story short, we had to open two additional ports on our server, 8888 and 27777. Following is a direct copy from the changelog:

Dedicated Server - Port Forwarding Updates

If you have Host a dedicated server, you should definitely give the next block a read as many new improvements have been added to allow for extra flexibility since the last update on Experimental

We have updated the Port Allocation Strategy in Reliable Messaging New features:

Explicit Port Configuration

• A new -ReliablePort= command-line parameter allows explicit port selection.
• The value must be an integer between 0 and 65535.
• If specified, the server will attempt to bind to this port and fail to initialize if the port is unavailable.

Default and Configurable Port Ranges The following settings in Engine.ini control port allocation:

[/Script/ReliableMessaging.ReliableMessagingTCPFactory]
PortRangeBegin=8888
PortRangeLength=512
ExternalPortRangeBegin=-1

• The server will attempt to bind within [PortRangeBegin, PortRangeBegin + PortRangeLength).
• By default, the server starts at port 8888 and tries up to 512 ports until it finds an available one.

Client Awareness & NAT Handling

• Clients must connect to the correct port, but port remapping (e.g., via NAT/firewall rules) can break this.
• To address this, the server now communicates the listening port to clients during the initial handshake.
• If external port remapping is used, the server must be aware of the external port via:
• The ExternalPortRangeBegin config setting (for remapped ranges).
• The -ExternalReliablePort= command-line parameter (for explicitly mapped ports).

Server Host Requirements (TL;DR)

• If hosting a single server, port 8888 TCP must be open by default.
• If hosting multiple servers, a range of ports starting from 8888 TCP (by default) must be open.
• The server will attempt up to 512 ports before failing (configurable).
• If port remapping (NAT/firewall) is used, the server must be configured accordingly; otherwise, clients won’t be able to connect.
• Logging is in place to help server maintainers verify the allocated ports.

No comments today. Just a finished building.

Yeeeeessssssssssss.........

YEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSS.........

YEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSS!!!!

So, will all that squealing worked out of my system, I got the tower mostly finished. Still need to color it and maybe do some lighting or other detailing.

Was also able to confirm that, yes, we are still playing Satisfactory.