Satisfactory: 3D Factorio by the makers of Sanctum

But… you can just turn combat off, with no other impact to the game. Don’t miss out on Factorio for this reason!

Pretty sure the same applies for Anno too.

Funny enough the thing that most interests me is the dedicated server. I have a couple friends who would love to get into this, but we can’t always meet at the same time all at once, so the dedicated server has been what is holding us back from playing.

It’s out!

I’ve been enjoying the hell out of this the past couple of weeks. I’m sure once I unlock everything I’ll find myself done pretty quick, but it takes awhile to get there and the interesting map helps keep me distracted.

I am a bit bored, and it has been a few years since I have played this. The last updated I played was the one where they introduced pipes and pumps.

Anyway, I decided to start a new game with the experimental update 6 branch in the northern forest area for a change of scenery from the grass lands I always start in.

The real problem, in general, is that my factories quickly turn into a giant mess and you end up having to path and jump over conveyors all over the place. Going vertical just extends the mess to multiple levels.

Then I occasionally see a video of people’s factories which are super well organized and very pretty. You know, something that looks professionally designed.

I would like to know if any of you who have played this have tips for designing a well thought out factory and what tricks you use to do that with. Perhaps some there are some videos on factory design out there? I do not expect to make something super nice, but I would at least like to get several steps better than the typical insanity I usually have for a factory.

I like Nilaus’s walkthroughs for Satisfactory, the main thing I adopted from him is the concept of building the factory in the air and keeping the ground clear.

My suggestion is to create actual buildings for individual parts. Never put buildings directly on the ground, always use a floor foundation. When you begin making the floor, build it to how much you think you’ll need, then double the area. This gives you plenty of expansion space. Don’t be afraid of going up as part of a 2nd tier thing. I do this thing where all my outputs from one row of machines gets fed into mergers which go to the end of the row, then do a 180 turn and get fed from splitters into the machines that need the outputs. You can see an example kinda of what i mean here

Don’t be afraid to belt materials far away. As long as you have the thruput it works fine.

My main thing is making one building for one advanced material though. it helps keep it all organized

Are they do to have a big update soon? It feels like it’s been a long long time since something new came out.

The pace of updates is glacial. I do not know if they have a super tiny team or if they just have no idea what to do with the game.

I am still annoyed by these artifacts that the game insists that you collect, yet do nothing. They have been in the game since day 1. In all this time they could have given them SOME use.

The way I would describe Satisfactory is that it takes place in a beautiful world, and it has a fantastic factory system that is in search of a game to utilize it. There is no grand project or goal you are trying to get to. You just unlock stuff and build things for the sake of building things.

They really need to provide interesting challenges for the players to solve.

I have an idea in which I think would add a lot to the game. Lets say the grand project is to build an orbital ring around the world.

Your first major project might be to ship 5 million iron rods and 10 million iron plates to the space elevator. This would just be the scaffolding to build said ring. This would provide a much more interesting challenge than building 50 foozles.

The next tier might be 5 million cable. After you do this, then if you make multiple space anchors, they would become ‘linked’ to your power grid and instead of running cables across the world, you would just make space elevators here and there to tie into your power grid.

The idea would be as more and more of the project gets done, you get more and more benefits.

Some other ideas would be that you could start to ship solar panels to the ring which would provide you free power, eventually giving you all the power you would want. You could also hitch a ride at some point and ‘teleport’ between space anchors.

I love that idea!

I think they are getting close to the new update since you can play the experimental version of it already.

From some of the dev videos I’ve watched it does kind of seem like they aren’t entirely sure where to go with it. I’m sure they have tons of ideas just not a clear vision of where they are going with it.

The newest update is out on Experimental(and there was an update at the end of 22 that added blueprinting) and is mostly the upgrade to UE5. Only real content additions are improvements to blueprints, power towers(meant for long distance power lines), and the ability to create power zones with automatic shutdown priority that you can control from anywhere. Beyond that it seems they are mostly doing a bunch of refinements in the presumed runup to 1.0 release.

Anyway, I posted this because I was curious to see how the UE5 features would run on my now ancient 980ti. And with the default TSR upscaling percent(along with mostly high to ultra graphics settings) I can activate the lowest level of Lumen GI and have it run pretty well! Definitely some artifacting going on with that but some of the lighting enhancements are pretty noticeably great especially as the time of day changes. Probably worth checking out for anyone with a beefy card that can crank things up past what I can.

I’ve read speculation that games in UE5 would actually perform better than they would have in UE4 (at the same graphic settings) just because the engine was that much more efficient. Before you cranked the settings, did you find this to be true at all?

Ha, since I upgraded my computer since I bought the game, I figured why not, I re-installed it, got on the experimental branch, and started a new game.

It crashed as soon as the ship landed. Well, it is the experimental branch!

I don’t know. Never had performance issues in Satisfactory that I could really compare against.

That’s too bad! I haven’t had it crash at all but it seems to not be managing the vram well and changing the graphics settings or respawning seems to just tank the performance to the point of making the game unplayable.

Going to pick this up while it’s on the Steam sale at 45% off. Enjoyed Factorio and Dyson Sphere Program so hopefully I should like this too.

I’ve personally gotten more time out of Satisfactory than the other two combined. Granted, I’ve not been able to get into DSP after two tries. Same basic premise, of course, but the terrain has personality and will very much affect your builds. And of course the verticality options are different too.

Having fun so far, but I’d be lost without playing along with a Youtube guide to get started.

I recommend Nilaus

OK, thanks. Will look for him.