Meadow Whisper (Natasha L.)This was such a weird year for me, partly because I spent a solid six months of it doing almost nothing other than playing Satisfactory (January to May/June), while struggling with some deep depression - a few months focusing on a single-player build, and then a few months focusing on a dedicated server with @Kjatar. With the new update now released, I find myself reflecting on the beginning of the year, and while I don't regret the time and effort I spent on it (especially given what else I probably would've been doing otherwise >.>), I do regret not sharing what Kjatar and I built, or even documenting it properly.
I'm so used to being able to revisit my projects in games like this pretty much forever - I've been working on the same Kerbal Space Program save file for well over a decade, I've got Civ saved games from nearly a decade ago that I could still open and review if I wanted, and I even have still-functional Second Life projects older than some *people* who use SL. But Satisfactory...doesn't work like that. New major versions are pretty much guaranteed to break old saves, and while that's not unheard of, being distributed via Steam means that I can't really keep parallel installations of different versions like I can with, say, Kerbal Space Program. On top of that, as I discovered tonight, I can't even meaningfully stop a forced update from happening - I was able to stave it off temporarily by putting Steam in offline mode, disabling automatic updates, and then running Satisfactory directly instead of launching it from within Steam (where literally the only option is "Update", there is no play/launch button when an update is pending). But that can't last long-term, especially since I can't actually play as myself that way; joining my own local save file on my own computer while Steam is in offline mode creates a new "guest session" EVERY TIME.
I don't know for sure what the impact to my existing saves will be with the new update, and I won't know until I actually install it, at which point it will be too late to go back. One possible solution to this is philosophical: Embrace the ephemeral nature of game and accept that everything I built - 1800+ hours of gameplay - is probably gone, and find a way to be ok with that. But I can't just...*do* that. It's not how I'm wired; I'm very much a natural archivist - sometimes to a fault - and I don't have it in me to just say "welp, that was fun, time to start over". I could (and probably should) write an entire essay just exploring why that is, but suffice to say, I can't just let all that go and hope that maybe some of it will maybe still be usable maybe.
The problem is that I don't quite know what *else* to do about this, especially with limited time; I just spent pretty much my entire evening *just* revisiting and taking a quick look at everything I built in my solo game to reload it all back into brain-RAM, and Kjatar and I built three times as much stuff in our server. Most of it was never finished, and even in my solo game I have a ton of unfinished projects, but I can at least accept that part.
What I'd *like* to do is record a full video tour, in detail, going over the whole build in both saves. But there's no way I can do it in a single session even for my solo game, so I don't know if I can (or want to) commit the time needed just to capture the video for that. Plus I don't know anything about video editing and I struggle to even have a coherent phone call, let alone narrating a dozen or more hours of a video tour in meticulous technical detail. Screenshots presented in blog posts would be MUCH more my speed, but Satisfactory builds feel extremely difficult to adequately capture in still images, because the visuals lose a LOT without a sense of perspective/scale and motion.
There's a soft deadline of "within this week" - I don't think I can put off Update 8 longer than that, and the aforementioned "guest session" weirdness is something I know I'm not going to want to put up with more than absolutely necessary - so to cut through the mental noise on this and get *something* done, my plan is to start with screenshots, while also writing down what the buildings and notable infrastructure *are*, and then use that as the basis to try a video session that I can either narrate later, or just hold onto for my archives.
This turned out a LOT longer than I expected; suffice to say, I'm kinda Working Through Stuff as it relates to Satisfactory, and also how I relate to both the games I play and the creations I build. The core of all this, though, is that I feel like I basically missed the ideal opportunity to share any of the many things I built in Satisfactory this year with others, things I'm quite proud of and that I feel would be worth sharing with the right audience and like-minded friends, and I'm struggling with feeling like a chunk of my creative output is being ripped from my hands and destroyed without my consent or even preparing for it to happen, but I've got one last chance to at least capture *something* to resolve both of those. So I'll see what I can do. Stay tuned, I guess. In the meantime, thanks for reading this, if you made it this far. Here's a sampler of some screenshots that I *did* capture at the time <3
Juxta