AI in the current state of technology will not and cannot replace understanding the system and writing logical and working code.

GenAI should be used to get a start on whatever you’re doing, but shouldn’t be taken beyond that.

Treat it like a psychopathic boiler plate.

True, there’s a lot of things that dist… Is that a bluejay?

Yep. This one is task paralysis.

It’s very common and really freaking annoying.

Fun fact, a lot of ADHD meds also help with things like depression. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Oh yeah, I’ve seen that. People hit the most minor roadblock and just stop working until someone else fixes their shit.

It’s an attitude of “we’ve tried nothing and we’re out of ideas!”

I don’t like those people either.

They share one brain cell.

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.

Only if we like you.

I’m pretty sure I’ve done most of these at some point or another.

It really depends whether I like you or not.

Liking my users is entirely dependent on how much work you make me do, and how difficult that work becomes because of your personality.

I’ve gotten tickets that were literally “$thing is broken”, or “help! Call me!” With no information given, not even a callback number. I’ve also gotten a rambling voicemail, in which a user describes an issue with a piece of software and doesn’t identify themselves, not provide any callback information. The CID on the voicemail wasn’t available either, and since I work with several companies doing support, I couldn’t even identify the client, nevermind the specific user.

There’s also the needy users that create tickets for every prompt, dialog, message, delay… Pretty much anything that could happen at all ever, whether it affects their ability to do their work or not.

There’s also the unavailable users, they are not available ever, at any time, for any reason. I have literally gotten critical tickets which require me to access the users workstation to fix, while it is logged in as the user, and I could call less than 5 minutes after they create the ticket, and they’re busy. Email them and they have an out of the office message, or reply with something about them being in a meeting (with no information about when they will be free), or simply don’t reply at all. After a few weeks of trying to contact them to connect and resolve their very simple (but “critical”) issue and getting nowhere, close the ticket, only to be met with a flurry of emails from them about how the problem isn’t solved. Immediately call or reply and you get voicemail and silence.

Most of my users do fine, and it’s usually a minority that are troublemakers, and I want to make that clear… But the troublemakers are the driving force for me to find ways to fix pretty much every problem without ever opening their system though remote control. I can do all kinds of things from registry edits and hacks, to writing and scheduling PowerShell scripts to fix their shit every time they log in, and deploy that by a remote PowerShell command prompt, and nothing more.

Yeah William, you might be the c-whatever bullshit, but if the issue is sooo fucking critical, make five goddamned minutes for me to fix your shit or it’s not getting fixed. I don’t care if you own the goddamned planet, I can’t fix your shit without access.

Can we call this out on terminal text editors too? Some just color lines based on their content, and frequently comments end up being blue on black and it’s impossible to read.

This comment describes the options for the next parameter in this config file, but I have no idea what it says, so I guess I’m fucked?

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.

That’s a fair assessment IMO. They’re all related games.

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

A few friends of mine are getting into Palworld and getting away from satisfactory. IDK, it seems a bit too different to me.

Foundry is on my radar. I might wait for satisfactory to hit 1.0, play that for a few months, then switch over to foundry.

It looks good though. IIRC it’s early access and what I’ve seen of it, I kinda want to give it a bit to get closer to complete before I jump in.

I’m a big fps/3d spaces person. I gravitated to satisfactory. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the same thing but 3D.

As a networker, ipv6 is the future. I’m a fan of it, but I don’t really talk about it anymore because there’s no point.

I threw in the towel after an ISP messed up so badly that I just couldn’t bother anymore.

At a previous job a client I was doing some work for got a new internet connection at a new site, the ISP ran brand new fiber for it. This wasn’t a new building or anything, but the fiber was new. They allocated them a static IPv4 thing as usual, and I asked the tech about V6, and they said we would have to take it up with the planning team, so I did. I was involved in the email chain at the end of the sales process to coordinate the hookup. So I asked. After many emails back and forth, I was informed the connection was allocated.

They allocated one single IPv6 subnet directly off of their device. I couldn’t even.

For those that don’t understand, the firewall we had connected to the device is an ipv6 router. What normally happens, especially in DHCP customer connections, is that the router will use DHCP-PD to allocate a subnet for the router to use on the LAN, and automatically set up a route to say “reach this subnet we allocated for this router, via this router” kind of thing. I’m dramatically simplifying, but that’s the gist. In DHCP-PD, the router will also have an IPv6 address on the ISP-facing link to facilitate the connection. In the case of the earlier story, they gave us an entire subnet to communicate between the ISP and the router, and didn’t give us a subnet for the client systems inside the network.

I did ask about this and I can only describe their reply as “visible confusion”.

I know many who will still be confused by this point are people who have not used IPv6; to explain further: the IP on your local (LAN) systems needs to be a public IP address, because the router no longer does network address translation when sending your data to the internet. So the IP on the router has no bearing on your computer having a connection to the internet over v6. If your local computer does not have a globally unique ipv6 address, you cannot use IPv6. There are ways around this, NAT66 exists but it’s incredibly bad practice in most cases. The firewall I was working with didn’t really support NAT66 (at least, at the time) and I wasn’t really going to set that up.

ISPs are the reason I gave up on IPv6.

I’ll add this other story to reinforce it. I’ll keep it brief. A different ISP for a different company at a different site entirely. The client purchased a static IPv4 address, and I asked about IPv6, as you do. To preface, I know this company and used them for my own connection at the time. They have IPv6 for residential clients via DHCP-PD. I was told, no joke, that because of the static IPv4 assignment, and how they execute that for businesses, that they couldn’t add IPv6 to the connection, at all.

The last thing I want to mention is a video I saw, which is aptly named “CGN, a driver for IPv6 adoption” or something similar. It’s a short lecture about the evils of carrier grade NAT, and how IPv6 actually fixes pretty much all the bs that goes with CGN, with fewer requirements and less overhead.

IPv6 is coming. You will prefer IPv4 until you understand how horrific CGN is.

I didn’t even realize it was cake day already.

Thanks!

Yay! Self depreciating humor!

In all seriousness. I’m kind of a jack of all trades, but I’m an excellent system and network administrator. I’ve been doing IT work professionally for more than a decade, and my childhood was filled with computers. I knew a lot going into college, got a diploma in network technology, achieved (at some point or another), Cisco certification, A+, various other vendor certifications. I’ve worked with everything from MS DOS, through Windows 9x, 2000/XP, and everything newer, Linux, mac OS, Cisco, Aruba, watchguard, sonicwall, mikrotik, juniper, ubiquiti, and way more. I’m currently doing mostly cloud support for virtual desktops, and server-less deployments, MS 365, and Azure. In my jack of all trades skillset, I’ve done woodworking, small appliances repair, HVAC stuff, automotive repair, electrical work, and I’ve dived head first into home automation. The list goes on.

I was just being funny, friend.

Stating the obvious is my specialty.

I am good at nothing else.

I don’t think the braille is necessary. By the time someone starts to “read” it, they already know what it says.