Craig P

I JUUUUST learned a basic Satisfactory skill that everyone else probably already knows, because I played so much Factorio I went in with the wrong concept.

In Factorio, the concept of a main bus has such power because things fill up. Things stop. So while things near the front of the bus have resource priority, they only produce what they need, and when they're done, they stop.

Satisfactory isn't supposed to be like that, and now that I know that, things are going great.

Mar 10 at 4:09pmWeb
Show threadCraig PMar 10

Satisfactory's "AWESOME" shop (the part of the game I despise) is built specifically to push you to have "always on" factories.

Nothing is ever done producing. Nothing is ever full. If something is full, it should be dumping its produce into the void in order to unlock advanced space age concepts like "gold paint" or "a mug".

This is a completely different resource paradigm, because now you have static resource loads.

Show threadCraig PMar 10

This is something it seems most Satisfactory players just... inherently get. They don't even really talk about it.

If a factory needs 240 iron ore, you pipe in exactly that much and it's just... off the market entirely. Until you shut down the factory.

Now that I realize that, I've simply started leaving screens noting how many of a resource has been allocated for which factories, and it's really helped me build easier and more freely.

Show threadCraig PMar 10
This obviously can extend to secondary products. If I have a factory that produces 900 steel ingots per minute, I can simply note right there that 240 of it is specifically allocated to the SAM/Stator plant and will always be allocated that way, whether delivered by rail, truck, or conveyor.
Show threadThe Seven Voyages Of SteveMar 10
@Craigp oh yeaaah, never even thought to mention it. Yep absolutely every stockpile has to have programmable splitters at joins with an "overflow" path which dumps the excess into the bin for tickets. We had dedicated blueprint for it. It's just really important to balance your belt speeds - if you accidentally have one faster in belt than out it'll be dumping into the bin even when the containers aren't full because it's just trying to keep it all flowing
Show threadRobert KlaschkaMar 10

@Craigp I think I found the AWESOME Sink was the valuable thing, because it allows you to keep more complicated workflows from blocking up due to too much of something going in on combined belts, the tickets were I bi product I wasn't fussed about. Though maybe the combined belts thing is me being lazy, and perhaps I should deisgn better.

I have made some really (in my mind) elegant little packaged factories. But for the complicated stuff I'm a mess! Still I love this game.

Show threadCraig PMar 10

@robertklaschka Yeah, if I consider it as just a trash dump, its purpose makes sense.

For me as someone that wants to decorate factories, it was an unreasonably bad design decision to ask me to just burn random resources to unlock ladders.