Satisfactory has added blueprints. They’ve been part of the game for a while. You can design, build and disassemble blueprints wholesale. They’re not super large, which is part of the challenge. For something like a rail line, the placement of blueprints won’t connect the rail line together even if you put a rail from end to end; so those blueprints usually are all the infrastructure surrounding a rail line, and the rail line is run down the infra after the blueprint is built.
There’s plenty of quirks with it, as I’m sure there are in factorio, and there’s no “perfect way” to do anything. A core mechanic in satisfactory is alternate recipes. I’ll give you an example. Screws are an early item that’s usually a pain point for new players early game. To get them, you have to mine iron, smelt it into iron ingots, then construct rods from those ingots, and finally, convert the rods into screws. It’s a pretty involved recipe for the early game. Most other recipes are more simple, concrete is raw limestone, constructed to concrete directly, it’s a two machine setup to get it rolling. Rods are another, and plates are similar to rods (both three machine setups, miner, smelter, constructor). Screws require at least four.
There’s a popular alternative recipe called cast screws, which creates screws from iron ingots directly. Not only that, but you get more screws per ingot than the vanilla recipe.
To take that example further, there’s an alternate for ingots, which is a “pure” ingot, which uses a mid-game machine, the refinery, to combine raw iron and water, and produce iron ingots, which has a higher yield than simply smelting the raw material.
So you can do the og recipes, and build a field of miners, smelters, and constructors (to make rods, then screws), so that you get enough screws in sufficient quantities, or, with a little legwork and some alternative recipes, you can use the pure iron ingot alternate, and cast screw alternate, and get a lot more with a lot fewer machines, and fewer iron nodes (less raw iron).
There’s Infinity variant building methodologies, from building right on the ground, to large towers filled with many floors of machines to do the work. The layout can be chaotic and spaghetti, inefficient and a mess, to varying levels of perfect input to perfect output, building a variety of things continually.
You can focus on design, or efficiency, or simply the speed at which you can throw things together. The options are endless.
You can rush towards coal, fuel, or nuclear power, or flatten all of the biodiversity of the map into biofuel and run everything on plant and animal matter.
Personally, I focus on alternative recipes early on, as well as logistics (faster conveyor belts, etc), and power (mainly coal/fuel)… Collecting biomass generally sucks IMO, plus the nature in the game is quite lovely and I don’t like to destroy more than I have to.
With the verticality, you can have production floors of machines where the inputs and outputs go into the floor, out of sight, into logistics floors below, to be carted around between machines, and to storage crates, or whatever you need.
If you run out of space, you can expand, or build more floors above your current build and expand that way.
Trying to solve logistical issues in three dimensions can be a challenge.
There’s caves to explore, a variety of wild animals of varying strengths and abilities in the game, even some that are radioactive, or spew toxic gas. There’s even flower looking plants that kind of stand up when you come nearby, and if you hang out near them, they emit toxic gases too… Or you can play on passive mode where the fauna generally ignore that you exist unless you attack them.
I could keep going, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in the game, including a lot of things we don’t have the story about (they’ve had placeholders in the game that won’t be explained until 1.0 gets released, hopefully later this year). I have over 970 hours in the game and I will be starting a brand new save once 1.0 is available. I’m certain I will be playing that for many more hours to come.
If you want to know anything specific, please ask. I can point you at beginner friendly YouTubers, or streamers that push the game to its absolute (and ridiculous) limits with mods, or anything in-between. I can also just discuss the mechanics or what we know of the story so far.
For me, satisfactory is an extension of the same concepts I enjoy and employ for my profession. I’m in IT, and getting everything working just right, then seeing everything working perfectly is the take away I like to get from doing a thing. Troubleshooting it when it’s not operating correctly, and ensuring everything stays running 24/7, is huge.
Satisfactory has added blueprints. They’ve been part of the game for a while. You can design, build and disassemble blueprints wholesale. They’re not super large, which is part of the challenge. For something like a rail line, the placement of blueprints won’t connect the rail line together even if you put a rail from end to end; so those blueprints usually are all the infrastructure surrounding a rail line, and the rail line is run down the infra after the blueprint is built.
yeah i know it has blueprints, i’m just saying it feels more like it’s been shoehorned in than it has designed to be integrated fully, as it has in factorio.
There’s plenty of quirks with it, as I’m sure there are in factorio, and there’s no “perfect way” to do anything.
there are definitely some quirks, but for all intents and purposes, anything you want to do with blueprints, can be done with blueprints. You can align them globally to the world chunk size, to make your blueprinting incredibly idiot proof, you can align it relative to the blueprints dimensions itself and change how that alignment is configured and setup, such that it will perfectly paste continuations in perpetuity, until you let go of the shift button. One thing about factorio that doesn’t exist outside of it is that the devs don’t settle for “good enough” they either do it right, or implement it so minimally that it can’t be wrong. A good example of this would be robots, they have an incredibly minimal implementation, though annoying, it’s forgivable because of how simple they are. Where as something like blueprints, basically anything you could ask for, is already inside of a blueprint. The one thing i want, is better blueprint navigation, because it doesn’t support forward and backward navigation quite perfectly, and that’s it.
There’s Infinity variant building methodologies
this is actually one of the things i appreciate about factorio, to my knowledge in the vanilla game, there are no alternative solutions or recipes. You make gears with two iron plates. There are different tiers of assemblers and modules, but those are the only things that change that. Everything is balanced to be self contained perfectly. It’s annoying sometimes, for example boilers burn solid fuel, but not liquid fuel, it’s not a huge deal because you can just make solid fuel, but it’s somewhat annoying because of pollution. Ideally burning solid fuel would be less polluting, though it isn’t in vanilla, i’m sure it could be modded in. But generally, the balance is really good, very well thought out, and explicitly designed around building and manufacturing things. Which makes for a really nice gameplay experience. I’m sure satisfactory is similar in that regard though. (a lot of factorio mods will introduce alternate recipes btw)
You can focus on design, or efficiency, or simply the speed at which you can throw things together.
same thing in factorio, like i mentioned with modules, you can just put three prod 3 modules into the rocket silo and make it 25% cheaper, or you can stack prod everywhere in your manufacturing line up, reducing your usage of raw material by at least 50% total.
You can rush towards coal, fuel, or nuclear power, or flatten all of the biodiversity of the map into biofuel and run everything on plant and animal matter.
this is actually one of the interesting things for me with factorio, there is a very explicit gameplay advancement. You could get to end game on coal power, sure. But the game really incentivizes you to at the very least, build solar power, if not nuclear power. Once you get to solar research, your power costs immediately start to increase significantly, building yellow and purple science basically double your raw material costs, while doubling the production of your factory. You need lots more power if you want that to go over well. You often go from about 50MW on blue science, to 500MW on a full 60spm base. It can be a little strict but the game is designed around it so well it’s not a huge concern of mine.
With the verticality, you can have production floors of machines where the inputs and outputs go into the floor, out of sight, into logistics floors below, to be carted around between machines, and to storage crates, or whatever you need. If you run out of space, you can expand, or build more floors above your current build and expand that way.
this is probably the most interesting thing to me about satisfactory, the fact that you can just immediately stuff things into an additional dimension is huge. Factorio kind of has this with a few mods, like warehousing, though it’s different. Though in factorio everything is just 2D, which makes for a rather aesthetic building style, as well as pretty clearly demonstrating where everything is, as well as where bottlenecks and problems are, which i find rather nice.
If you want to know anything specific, please ask. I can point you at beginner friendly YouTubers, or streamers that push the game to its absolute (and ridiculous) limits with mods, or anything in-between. I can also just discuss the mechanics or what we know of the story so far.
personally i’m not a huge lore fan, i like to follow along with it as i play, if i ever do though. As for questions, one thing i’m kind of curious about, though i’ve never looked into is building logistics. Do materials just magically materialize out of thin air from your base/root storage? Or do you have to do a bunch of handling logistics to cart materials and buildings from one place to another as you build stuff like you do in factorio. That’s probably my biggest gripe with factorio, though it does have robots, i find them lacking in aspects.
For me, satisfactory is an extension of the same concepts I enjoy and employ for my profession. I’m in IT, and getting everything working just right, then seeing everything working perfectly is the take away I like to get from doing a thing. Troubleshooting it when it’s not operating correctly, and ensuring everything stays running 24/7, is huge.
it’s similar for me, although i find factorio is sterilized a bit more, as far as my general taste goes. It’s more interesting for me on a macro level, than on a specifics level, for me i really enjoy experimenting with different play style metas in factorio, i’ve gone from belt based mega base, to bot based belted megabase, to train logistic based megabase, to presumably in the future, a proper belted mega base, and a proper bot based megabase. As well as all of the various overhaul mods and play style changes you can make to make it more interesting to play.
Factorio is lot less about the individual build, although you can still hyper optimize those, and i do that from time to time, and more about figuring out how to fit them together effectively. Anybody can build an oil setup, it’s integrating it properly into all of your other stuff that makes it hard.
So, to address your question, raw materials only come from nodes, which require miners. Obviously miners require power, but produce raw materials (output via a belt) indefinitely. The rate of extraction depends on the quality/purity of the node (poor/normal/pure) and the level of the miner. Miners can be placed anywhere there is a node. So building smaller modular factories is definitely possible and one of many legitimate strategies.
I think that answers the question, let me know if I misunderstood. I’m not 100% familiar with all the factorio mechanics so I’m not totally sure if I fully understood the question.
Between locations, you can move materials by truck, train, or drone. You can run trucks across the ground or build roads.
When it comes to generation, coal plants can burn just about anything solid, from raw coal to more complex materials derived from by-products of oil production. Fuel generators take any liquid fuel, from regular fuel, turbo fuel, and even liquid biofuel. Additionally there’s a bunch of different ways to arrive at each type of fuel, for solids, you can use refineries to refine coal or petroleum waste into compacted coal or similar, and with liquid fuel, there’s blenders and refineries, recipes for turbo blend fuel, heavy fuel, even turbo heavy fuel, diluted fuel, and packaged fuel too (used for jetpacks and vehicles). It gets… Complicated.
With satisfactory, you can build small and just wait, or build big and use a lot of power, and things get finished much faster.
With progression, there’s two main sections, milestones and phases. Each phase unlocks more tiers of milestones, and each milestone unlocks more buildables which will allow you to complete future milestones and phases. You can complete them in whatever order you want, but some of the progression requires that certain milestones get completed before progress can be made. In that way, there’s some linearity with the progression.
The first person perspective of the game and the three dimensional design is what draws me towards satisfactory more than factorio. I’d happily give you a personal tour of one of the multiplayer servers I play on and host. No pressure, I just thought I’d offer in case you wanted to ask questions and get shown around the game by someone.
It just seems like you would enjoy the game. If you ultimately decide to play, that’s fine, if not, no worries.
So, to address your question, raw materials only come from nodes, which require miners. Obviously miners require power, but produce raw materials (output via a belt) indefinitely. The rate of extraction depends on the quality/purity of the node (poor/normal/pure) and the level of the miner. Miners can be placed anywhere there is a node. So building smaller modular factories is definitely possible and one of many legitimate strategies.
i have a rough understanding of this part, my question was more so “do i have to cart a billion thingamajigs from point A to B in order to build a thing” It’s already a thing in factorio, so it wouldn’t be a deal breaker, but i feel like satisfactory is the type of game to make this a non problem.
Between locations, you can move materials by truck, train, or drone. You can run trucks across the ground or build roads.
similar to factorio, though factorio is more restricted, which i like. There are four directions (8 if you include diagonal rails) and there are explicit tiles that machines and belts take up, which often means you can make super braindead blueprints.
For example, earlier today, i just shit out a blueprint book with a bunch of perfectly tiling walls, where everything aligns perfectly, all based on absolute positioning, so i can easily plonk them down anywhere, and know that i can make my walls line up as needed without having to think about it, along with that i made a roboport blueprint that coincides on the half grid of the wall prints. So that i can print it down inside of the wall without it being in the way, while still having it align perfectly and be super clean.
I imagine you can do similar things in satisfactory, but i suppose this is probably my minecraft roots coming out to play with this one. I’m sure the 3rd dimension and less restriction would be fun, is there any sort of grid alignment? Or is everything manual, i think that would be the one big thing i’d miss, is the ability to align things automatically.
When it comes to generation, coal plants can burn just about anything solid, from raw coal to more complex materials derived from by-products of oil production. Fuel generators take any liquid fuel, from regular fuel, turbo fuel, and even liquid biofuel. Additionally there’s a bunch of different ways to arrive at each type of fuel, for solids, you can use refineries to refine coal or petroleum waste into compacted coal or similar, and with liquid fuel, there’s blenders and refineries, recipes for turbo blend fuel, heavy fuel, even turbo heavy fuel, diluted fuel, and packaged fuel too (used for jetpacks and vehicles). It gets… Complicated.
sounds about right. I’d definitely enjoy that if i got into it.
The first person perspective of the game and the three dimensional design is what draws me towards satisfactory more than factorio. I’d happily give you a personal tour of one of the multiplayer servers I play on and host. No pressure, I just thought I’d offer in case you wanted to ask questions and get shown around the game by someone.
it’s definitely interesting, but the thing about factorio that makes me really like it, is that the game seems to be explicitly designed around being a factory builder, where as something like satisfactory is more a 3d open world sandbox game that is also a factory builder, but then again i also havent played it so.
If i ever do buy the game i probably won’t take you up on the offer because i’ll be too busy figuring the game out already, lol.
Satisfactory has added blueprints. They’ve been part of the game for a while. You can design, build and disassemble blueprints wholesale. They’re not super large, which is part of the challenge. For something like a rail line, the placement of blueprints won’t connect the rail line together even if you put a rail from end to end; so those blueprints usually are all the infrastructure surrounding a rail line, and the rail line is run down the infra after the blueprint is built.
There’s plenty of quirks with it, as I’m sure there are in factorio, and there’s no “perfect way” to do anything. A core mechanic in satisfactory is alternate recipes. I’ll give you an example. Screws are an early item that’s usually a pain point for new players early game. To get them, you have to mine iron, smelt it into iron ingots, then construct rods from those ingots, and finally, convert the rods into screws. It’s a pretty involved recipe for the early game. Most other recipes are more simple, concrete is raw limestone, constructed to concrete directly, it’s a two machine setup to get it rolling. Rods are another, and plates are similar to rods (both three machine setups, miner, smelter, constructor). Screws require at least four.
There’s a popular alternative recipe called cast screws, which creates screws from iron ingots directly. Not only that, but you get more screws per ingot than the vanilla recipe.
To take that example further, there’s an alternate for ingots, which is a “pure” ingot, which uses a mid-game machine, the refinery, to combine raw iron and water, and produce iron ingots, which has a higher yield than simply smelting the raw material.
So you can do the og recipes, and build a field of miners, smelters, and constructors (to make rods, then screws), so that you get enough screws in sufficient quantities, or, with a little legwork and some alternative recipes, you can use the pure iron ingot alternate, and cast screw alternate, and get a lot more with a lot fewer machines, and fewer iron nodes (less raw iron).
There’s Infinity variant building methodologies, from building right on the ground, to large towers filled with many floors of machines to do the work. The layout can be chaotic and spaghetti, inefficient and a mess, to varying levels of perfect input to perfect output, building a variety of things continually.
You can focus on design, or efficiency, or simply the speed at which you can throw things together. The options are endless.
You can rush towards coal, fuel, or nuclear power, or flatten all of the biodiversity of the map into biofuel and run everything on plant and animal matter.
Personally, I focus on alternative recipes early on, as well as logistics (faster conveyor belts, etc), and power (mainly coal/fuel)… Collecting biomass generally sucks IMO, plus the nature in the game is quite lovely and I don’t like to destroy more than I have to.
With the verticality, you can have production floors of machines where the inputs and outputs go into the floor, out of sight, into logistics floors below, to be carted around between machines, and to storage crates, or whatever you need. If you run out of space, you can expand, or build more floors above your current build and expand that way.
Trying to solve logistical issues in three dimensions can be a challenge.
There’s caves to explore, a variety of wild animals of varying strengths and abilities in the game, even some that are radioactive, or spew toxic gas. There’s even flower looking plants that kind of stand up when you come nearby, and if you hang out near them, they emit toxic gases too… Or you can play on passive mode where the fauna generally ignore that you exist unless you attack them.
I could keep going, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in the game, including a lot of things we don’t have the story about (they’ve had placeholders in the game that won’t be explained until 1.0 gets released, hopefully later this year). I have over 970 hours in the game and I will be starting a brand new save once 1.0 is available. I’m certain I will be playing that for many more hours to come.
If you want to know anything specific, please ask. I can point you at beginner friendly YouTubers, or streamers that push the game to its absolute (and ridiculous) limits with mods, or anything in-between. I can also just discuss the mechanics or what we know of the story so far.
For me, satisfactory is an extension of the same concepts I enjoy and employ for my profession. I’m in IT, and getting everything working just right, then seeing everything working perfectly is the take away I like to get from doing a thing. Troubleshooting it when it’s not operating correctly, and ensuring everything stays running 24/7, is huge.
yeah i know it has blueprints, i’m just saying it feels more like it’s been shoehorned in than it has designed to be integrated fully, as it has in factorio.
there are definitely some quirks, but for all intents and purposes, anything you want to do with blueprints, can be done with blueprints. You can align them globally to the world chunk size, to make your blueprinting incredibly idiot proof, you can align it relative to the blueprints dimensions itself and change how that alignment is configured and setup, such that it will perfectly paste continuations in perpetuity, until you let go of the shift button. One thing about factorio that doesn’t exist outside of it is that the devs don’t settle for “good enough” they either do it right, or implement it so minimally that it can’t be wrong. A good example of this would be robots, they have an incredibly minimal implementation, though annoying, it’s forgivable because of how simple they are. Where as something like blueprints, basically anything you could ask for, is already inside of a blueprint. The one thing i want, is better blueprint navigation, because it doesn’t support forward and backward navigation quite perfectly, and that’s it.
this is actually one of the things i appreciate about factorio, to my knowledge in the vanilla game, there are no alternative solutions or recipes. You make gears with two iron plates. There are different tiers of assemblers and modules, but those are the only things that change that. Everything is balanced to be self contained perfectly. It’s annoying sometimes, for example boilers burn solid fuel, but not liquid fuel, it’s not a huge deal because you can just make solid fuel, but it’s somewhat annoying because of pollution. Ideally burning solid fuel would be less polluting, though it isn’t in vanilla, i’m sure it could be modded in. But generally, the balance is really good, very well thought out, and explicitly designed around building and manufacturing things. Which makes for a really nice gameplay experience. I’m sure satisfactory is similar in that regard though. (a lot of factorio mods will introduce alternate recipes btw)
same thing in factorio, like i mentioned with modules, you can just put three prod 3 modules into the rocket silo and make it 25% cheaper, or you can stack prod everywhere in your manufacturing line up, reducing your usage of raw material by at least 50% total.
this is actually one of the interesting things for me with factorio, there is a very explicit gameplay advancement. You could get to end game on coal power, sure. But the game really incentivizes you to at the very least, build solar power, if not nuclear power. Once you get to solar research, your power costs immediately start to increase significantly, building yellow and purple science basically double your raw material costs, while doubling the production of your factory. You need lots more power if you want that to go over well. You often go from about 50MW on blue science, to 500MW on a full 60spm base. It can be a little strict but the game is designed around it so well it’s not a huge concern of mine.
this is probably the most interesting thing to me about satisfactory, the fact that you can just immediately stuff things into an additional dimension is huge. Factorio kind of has this with a few mods, like warehousing, though it’s different. Though in factorio everything is just 2D, which makes for a rather aesthetic building style, as well as pretty clearly demonstrating where everything is, as well as where bottlenecks and problems are, which i find rather nice.
personally i’m not a huge lore fan, i like to follow along with it as i play, if i ever do though. As for questions, one thing i’m kind of curious about, though i’ve never looked into is building logistics. Do materials just magically materialize out of thin air from your base/root storage? Or do you have to do a bunch of handling logistics to cart materials and buildings from one place to another as you build stuff like you do in factorio. That’s probably my biggest gripe with factorio, though it does have robots, i find them lacking in aspects.
it’s similar for me, although i find factorio is sterilized a bit more, as far as my general taste goes. It’s more interesting for me on a macro level, than on a specifics level, for me i really enjoy experimenting with different play style metas in factorio, i’ve gone from belt based mega base, to bot based belted megabase, to train logistic based megabase, to presumably in the future, a proper belted mega base, and a proper bot based megabase. As well as all of the various overhaul mods and play style changes you can make to make it more interesting to play.
Factorio is lot less about the individual build, although you can still hyper optimize those, and i do that from time to time, and more about figuring out how to fit them together effectively. Anybody can build an oil setup, it’s integrating it properly into all of your other stuff that makes it hard.
So, to address your question, raw materials only come from nodes, which require miners. Obviously miners require power, but produce raw materials (output via a belt) indefinitely. The rate of extraction depends on the quality/purity of the node (poor/normal/pure) and the level of the miner. Miners can be placed anywhere there is a node. So building smaller modular factories is definitely possible and one of many legitimate strategies.
I think that answers the question, let me know if I misunderstood. I’m not 100% familiar with all the factorio mechanics so I’m not totally sure if I fully understood the question.
Between locations, you can move materials by truck, train, or drone. You can run trucks across the ground or build roads.
When it comes to generation, coal plants can burn just about anything solid, from raw coal to more complex materials derived from by-products of oil production. Fuel generators take any liquid fuel, from regular fuel, turbo fuel, and even liquid biofuel. Additionally there’s a bunch of different ways to arrive at each type of fuel, for solids, you can use refineries to refine coal or petroleum waste into compacted coal or similar, and with liquid fuel, there’s blenders and refineries, recipes for turbo blend fuel, heavy fuel, even turbo heavy fuel, diluted fuel, and packaged fuel too (used for jetpacks and vehicles). It gets… Complicated.
With satisfactory, you can build small and just wait, or build big and use a lot of power, and things get finished much faster.
With progression, there’s two main sections, milestones and phases. Each phase unlocks more tiers of milestones, and each milestone unlocks more buildables which will allow you to complete future milestones and phases. You can complete them in whatever order you want, but some of the progression requires that certain milestones get completed before progress can be made. In that way, there’s some linearity with the progression.
The first person perspective of the game and the three dimensional design is what draws me towards satisfactory more than factorio. I’d happily give you a personal tour of one of the multiplayer servers I play on and host. No pressure, I just thought I’d offer in case you wanted to ask questions and get shown around the game by someone.
It just seems like you would enjoy the game. If you ultimately decide to play, that’s fine, if not, no worries.
i have a rough understanding of this part, my question was more so “do i have to cart a billion thingamajigs from point A to B in order to build a thing” It’s already a thing in factorio, so it wouldn’t be a deal breaker, but i feel like satisfactory is the type of game to make this a non problem.
similar to factorio, though factorio is more restricted, which i like. There are four directions (8 if you include diagonal rails) and there are explicit tiles that machines and belts take up, which often means you can make super braindead blueprints.
For example, earlier today, i just shit out a blueprint book with a bunch of perfectly tiling walls, where everything aligns perfectly, all based on absolute positioning, so i can easily plonk them down anywhere, and know that i can make my walls line up as needed without having to think about it, along with that i made a roboport blueprint that coincides on the half grid of the wall prints. So that i can print it down inside of the wall without it being in the way, while still having it align perfectly and be super clean.
I imagine you can do similar things in satisfactory, but i suppose this is probably my minecraft roots coming out to play with this one. I’m sure the 3rd dimension and less restriction would be fun, is there any sort of grid alignment? Or is everything manual, i think that would be the one big thing i’d miss, is the ability to align things automatically.
sounds about right. I’d definitely enjoy that if i got into it.
it’s definitely interesting, but the thing about factorio that makes me really like it, is that the game seems to be explicitly designed around being a factory builder, where as something like satisfactory is more a 3d open world sandbox game that is also a factory builder, but then again i also havent played it so.
If i ever do buy the game i probably won’t take you up on the offer because i’ll be too busy figuring the game out already, lol.