KillingTimeItself

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.

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.

I mean I would accept magic, but anything less of an explanation of the biters behavior seems like a problematically reductive view of life.

magic is definitely an option, but we’re talking about an entire field of science here. How are we supposed to define something without reductive reasoning? The only other real possibility would be religious in nature.

All we know, or more specifically, all i know about the biters is that they’re a seemingly persistent, constant across any given world. They don’t seem to be feeding on anything. They don’t even consume the player when killed. They seem to be explicitly aggressive against the player, for who knows what reason. They seem to benefit explicitly, and massively from pollution, and they also seem to direct targeted attacks towards the source of that pollution, all of which in an evolutionary sense would take billions of years. So presumably, there must be more than one person on this planet, and this must be a very regular cycle. Or perhaps it’s a sort of multiverse deal where this simply loops forever?

Even the behavior of bacteria is complex and more nuanced than a cancerous process.

yeah, i mostly just meant it in comparison to like tigers, or something. We hate ants, wasps, and insects in general, we seem to have little problem killing them on the regular, however when it comes to things like tigers, we seem less receptive to it. It’s certainly an interesting choice to base the biters on an insectoid type species.

I get that it is a game, but I think these things do matter, especially for computer minded people who want to understand everything as a computer programs and recklessly ignore the reality of the environment around them. Media like this severs the salience of the surrounding landscape to people, and contextualizes it simply as a resource to exploit.

It’s definitely interesting, but i feel like exploitation of resources is probably the only good setting for this game. We can look at something like shapez for instance, similar to factorio, but it’s a sterile environment, where you produce shapes. Suddenly that seems even more dystopian by nature. Are you just a dude shipped to a massive sterile warehouse and told to create various different shapes as a method of commoditization? Who knows.

At least with resource exploitation, there’s a very clear driving path, there’s an entirely independent motivation (not being on that planet, because lore wise, you crashed there, and aren’t supposed to be there, and how else are you supposed to leave without exploiting resources? Sure you could wait for someone else, but they also exploited resources, and them arriving isn’t a guarantee, so you might as well keep busy and do it yourself.) Though to be clear, i haven’t played shapez, so maybe there is some kind of weird lore behind it, i’m assuming there isn’t.

Idk, I mean factorio is amazing, I totally get why people love it, and I know the focus of the game isn’t on this but still…

I always like to think of it from the perspective of something like a lion. Killing animals for sustenance. At the end of the day, we all must cause some level of destruction to progress. In this case we cause very little destruction once we do leave, because inevitably the base will cripple, run out of power, and the biters will overrun it, destroying everything in it’s place, claiming it as theirs again, and expanding back over it. Just at an extremely high level of evolution now instead.

There is an eventual yin to every yang.

I personally haven’t played factorio, but I know enough about it to prefer satisfactory.

any reason specifically you prefer satisfactory?

I think i’d have to look into satisfactory more, but factorio is more explicitly focused on the gameplay loop, and meta elements of the game itself. Having really good balance, great game design, and super functional gameplay styles.

Whereas satisfactory seems to focus more on the game itself, less than the gameplay styles. I.E. the game creates the gameplay style, the player will follow, as opposed to in factorio, it’s explicitly designed around having certain styles of gameplay, which make it very easy to adopt and utilize.

Not to say that you can’t with satisfactory, it just seems like it would be a lot more work. Like in factorio i have a set of rail blueprints that are perfect. Space optimally, designed optimally, and work optimally, they’re designed so that i can just plonk them down and do as little work as possible and have them functional. I’m not sure satisfactory has that level of gameplay.

absolutely, especially if you play with the various multiplayer scenarios.

it truly is weird, how you can sit down and simply, play the game for 8 hours straight.

That might have been the opioids i was on at the time more than anything (dental work) but regardless, i got a lot of work done.

absolutely. Personally i’ve just been enjoying varying my playstyles over time. It’s added enough variety for me so far. I will presumably also enjoy building and design different base metas over time as well, though i have only done a few things so far, so i have hundreds if not thousands of hours to go before i start to get interesting things.

yeah, it’s like that. Took me about a 100 hours to get fully acquainted. I’ve had several different play-styles through my various saves, all trying different things, and seeing how they go. I’m sure it’ll continue for quite some time.

Especially when the expansion with 2.0 drops.

i have shapez kicking around somewhere, seems interesting, havent played it though.

ironically, it seems almost as if the planet itself was designed to counter your existence. The biters literally feed on your pollution and evolve multiple magnitudes of strength, multiple times over.

I like factorio but the game never even asks the question of whether destroying an entire planets ecosystem just so you, one person, can get home is ethical or right.

yeah, but the game isn’t about social commentary, it’s about logistics, factory building, and to some degree, tower defense. You don’t like biters? You can just disable them, you don’t actually need to play with them. You can just roleplay as if you’re living on mars.

I feel like if anything factorio does a great job of explaining why the human urge to industrialize exists, and makes you experience all of the negatives of it. If we’re taking it like a social commentary sort of thing. Ultimately it’s nothing worse than human history has done at any given point of time. By a large margin.

By the way, you might want to check out nullius, it’s the inverse of the gameplay loop. The planet is barren, and you are analogous to god, you need to create everything in order for the “normal” gameplay loop to begin.

It’s also kind of interesting to consider the impacts of the biters themselves, they aren’t really a life form, they’re more akin to a bacteria, just on a macro, insect scale. They literally only do something productive for themselves once you get in their way. Their entire evolutionary lifeform is predicated on you being a negative influence on their environment. They consume your pollution, and use it to grow and become stronger. However, left to their own devices they seem to spread across the entire planet, almost like a cancer, just without the consumption of life that is typical, because biters seem to be magic?

that’s my two cents on it, i suppose.

i don’t own satisfactory, though it does seem interesting, i feel like factorio is the precursor to satisfactory in a way.

It’s more primal to the human urge to industrialize.

i have like 370 hours of factorio, and i’ve only really played it over the period of about. 4-5 months, though i’ve owned it for a year or two now.

Factorio is just one of those games. For anybody that likes open world sandbox games and technical stuff, you already own factorio, yell at me in the replies.

i’m mostly just sad that the funny side of malicious software is gone.

There’s no more funny malware. It’s all ransomware and stealers.

man i miss these days.

These days not only would it open your CD drive, it would open your tax documents, your crypto wallet, your account cookies, probably even your banking information.

The modern internet fucking sucks dude.

“once put into power, i will only be consuming the sheep deemed by democratic voting, to be the least productive, happy, and likeable members of the flock.”

wait is this just eugenics?

shitposting properly is the objective, regardless of my rhyming imperative. My post must be shit, in order to get the hits.

it’s y2k, but not 2k, it’s just y.

rose are red, violets are blue, money is the reason we can’t have nice things.

1-Because I’ve had some people online get real defensive when I’ve asked for sources

i mean i get it, but that should show someone elses character more than yours.

2-Cause I was a few shots deep by that point so I just kinda say things

fair enough honestly