Earlygame is so godawfully terrible

[Hexerin]

"Earlygame" in this context being defined as "everything until you gain access to automation, aka coal power". There's nothing fun about standing at the workbench for hours holding your mouse button down to slowly craft parts. Attempting to semi-automate via biofuel is even worse. Could name it "Leaf Collection Simulator", because that's what you spend 90% of your time doing with this.

Meanwhile, once you gain access to coal power, suddenly the fun factor of this game spikes so fucking high that the people up in the Andromeda galaxy are being impaled. The game stops being slow and tedious, and becomes what literally everyone who plays these types of games expect from them: The puzzle of optimizing your factory.

CSS really needs to prioritize fixing this issue. I can confidently state that I 100% guarantee you that they've lost many sales (via refunds) over it. The earlygame lasts so incredibly long, that no new player is going to get through it by the time the 2 hour limit comes up, and at that point that refund option is going to look real enticing.

I myself have only gotten through the earlygame once, despite dozens of attempts. It's just that bad, I end up uninstalling the game out of frustration and boredom. I remember with painful clarity how much fun I had with the game that one time I got through it, sadly that was back on the first build of the game when they were still Epic exclusive so there wasn't that much to really do at the time.

Suggestion to fix the issue: Make everything related to coal power a Tier 1 / Tier 2 milestone, so they can unlock it immediately after completing the tutorial. Also, don't put some insane resource requirement on the unlock. Again, the game doesn't become fun to it's target audience until it's unlocked, so you need to make it as accessible as possible.

[Suzaku]

The only difference between early game and mid-game is that power is automated and everything is scaled a bit larger. With the use of a chainsaw, acquired quite early, you can literally spend 5 minutes gathering enough wood and leaves to power 10 burners for hours. Set up a simple solid biofuel assembly line, and your power needs are met with minimal further input on your part.

And if you're "standing at the workbench for hours holding your mouse button down to slowly craft parts", then you've forgotten that everything can be automated before you even hit tier 1. Considering that automation is what you're supposed to do, and what you find fun, the issue here is that you've intentionally forced yourself to not enjoy the early game by focusing on handcrafting.

Also, you can now just hit spacebar once to automate handcrafting, if needed.

[Vegas Doc]

Originally posted by Hexerin:

"Earlygame" in this context being defined as "everything until you gain access to automation, aka coal power". There's nothing fun about standing at the workbench for hours holding your mouse button down to slowly craft parts.

EARLY GAME (not terrible)
When I play, I might chisel off 200 iron ore, 100 copper ore, 300 limestone, to start off, put a miner/smelter on iron and copper resource nodes, and a miner and a constructor on the limestone, which takes about 15 to 20 minutes. Making sure to grab some heals/food which is all over the place, and of course a ton of leaves/wood, all that can fit into my inventory, it's not terrible at all, it's just stuff that you have to do, to accomplish whatever you feel is "fun."

TIER TWO (still early game)
The next phase would be make assembly lines for the "Big Five" (iron plates, iron rods, screws, wire, and cable) it might take 2 hours to completely fill a container of each, utilizing the resources to make other outposts, the more outposts that you have the sooner you'll get to the "fun" part, especially with Miners and conveyor belts Mk 1. (24 slots of stacks in a container, most about 200/stack is about 5K items, While they are filling up, I'm gathering the research materials (beryl nuts, pale berry, bacon mushrooms, slugs, quartz, sulpher, and caterium) for the MAM, chopping down trees for my Biomass burners (10-15.) Hand filling them about every 20 mins (3 times with 10 biomass burners) That keeps me busy, away from the work bench, not handcrafting very much at all, mostly just waiting for containers to fill up, so I'm multitasking, completing the 8 or so milestones in Tiers 1 and 2 , then when I've designed my last three items (reinforced iron plates, rotors, and modular frames, all the MAM research I can do, fighting a few mobs, setting up outposts, which takes about an hour, as said before with very little handcrafting at the work bench, having fun, enjoying the scenery, setting up and prepping for the next milestone (I know what I'm going to need), just following the ADA guidelines.

TIER THREE (almost to coal)
So.....you have automation right from the start, it might not do much, doesn't require very much power, a well planned out guide, steady but slow paced without much pressure, stopping to "smell the roses" if you will. I think that it's a stress releasing game, not a stress inducer, nice relaxing sound tracks... I'm pretty sure that it's a perspective thing, how you look at things. No, real spikes in the fun factor, it's all fun. Make fifty smart plates in your more advance assembler, and send it up to the FICSIT bosses. They reward you by giving you twice as much work for half as much pay and double responsibility, just like we do in real life.

Another factor might be don't restart from the very beginning over and over again, keep using the first game save that you found so tedious, just modify the assembly lines better and more efficient, instead of "starting all over from scratch, that could be why you feel the way that you do, you never get to the" fun part, when you finally do, then you are there. Why delete all of the hard work and starting all over from scratch, just disassemble what you don't like, reuse those resources that you tediously gathered, try out a different design, see it works better.

I love this game, I trust the developers, Coffee Stain has really got a great game, still in Early Access for only $30?, they listen to their customers, help out the modding community, they're good people with a great PR. So, I'm not sure what the problem is? Maybe relax a little, play with the toys, I mean tools that they give you have some fun. Happy Pioneering!

[Vegas Doc]

@ Sansee, yeah I didn't notice that, thanks. I wonder what has stirred up the natives with this coal level at tier 1 and 2? Seems like there are like four or five discussions topics about how bad biomass burners are, about them not being automated except with a mod, weird. Maybe they made a mod or something and just trying to change the public opinion to their way of thinking? Gotta take baby steps, one phase at a time, can't just give the Nuclear Fusion on the first day! Happy Pioneering!

[Suzaku]

Originally posted by sansee:

Steam level 0? Yeah, most likely a troll on a ghost account...

The level shows as level 0 because the account is set to private.

Though I do typically assume private accounts are home to trolls like 95% of the time...

[Halliwax]

You only need to hand-craft about 200 items to get through the first 3 HUB upgrades. After that you don't have to do it anymore if you don't like it. But when you do it, you can just press the space bar and it'll keep going until you stop it.

Biomass generators are not that bad at all. Just follow a few simple rules:
1. Don't scale up your factory too big while still on biomass and don't overclock.
2. Build as many biomass generators as you can keep fed, up to about 15. The more you have, the slower they will drain.
3. Use a constructor to make biofuel. Biomass is ok to make by hand.

[Maehlice]

I'm against conveyor-feeding Biomass Burners, but there's a sound argument that it no longer fits in the progression lineup as well as it did prior to Update 3 (fluids).

Throughout the Tier 0 onboarding process, there is a step-by-step progression out of doing everything by hand into full automation:

T0.0 - Hand-picking, gathering, crafting & feeding.

T0.1 - adds tool-picking

T0.2,3 - adds machine-crafting

T0.4 - adds partial-belt-feeding

T0.5 - completes full automation

T0.6 - Adds non-automatable standalone Biomass Burner

So, there's a certain "going backwards" feeling from unlocking full factory automation directly into a power generator that operates exactly like the T0.2 experience.

This actually worked okay in U3, because Coal only added one thing: belts.

Plus, prior to U3, the cost of advancing to Coal was a lot lower, so the player spent significantly less time in the Biomass phase anyway.

But now, as of U4, Coal Power costs significantly more and is now a two-step progression: belts & pipes.

To keep in line with the typical step-by-step progression, belt-fed power should be introduced separately prior to Coal.

I don't believe that's a difficult logistical progression, since the player should fully understand belts by T3. But, the amount of time (and thus power) needed to make that jump means the player is forced to experience Biomass for longer post U4.

Maybe CSS has already considered that specific element of early game balance and wants the player to experience Biomass for that long. IDK. I never had any problem with it and still don't, but I understand where the proponents are coming from.

[alan0n]

This is definitely done on purpose to drill into your brain that automation is key. Standing on a storage container watching the game play itself is the way. Manual crafting is for filthy heathens wallowing in squalor.

[Maehlice]

Originally posted by alan0n:

This is definitely done on purpose to drill into your brain that automation is key. Standing on a storage container watching the game play itself is the way. Manual crafting is for filthy heathens wallowing in squalor.

If automation is the key, shouldn't CSS get the player there as quickly as possible then? (By belt-feeding Biomass Burners and decreasing the costs of advancing to Coal.). Onboarding alone is enough to drive home the point.

[alan0n]

Originally posted by Maehlice:

Originally posted by alan0n:

This is definitely done on purpose to drill into your brain that automation is key. Standing on a storage container watching the game play itself is the way. Manual crafting is for filthy heathens wallowing in squalor.

If automation is the key, shouldn't CSS get the player there as quickly as possible then? (By belt-feeding Biomass Burners and decreasing the costs of advancing to Coal.). Onboarding alone is enough to drive home the point.

Sorry, sarcastic humor doesn't translate well into text.

Belt driven biomass would still not be fully automatable (thus not really more useful) unless you could make a robo-logger or something.

[⇧⇨⇩⇩⇩]

Originally posted by alan0n:

This is definitely done on purpose to drill into your brain that automation is key. Standing on a storage container watching the game play itself is the way. Manual crafting is for filthy heathens wallowing in squalor.

Standing? You mean with your feet? Eww... why stand when you can hover in the air? Let me remind you that this game is about automation, thus the logical thing is to also automate movement. :D

[Maehlice]

Originally posted by alan0n:

Sorry, sarcastic humor doesn't translate well into text.

Belt driven biomass would still not be fully automatable (thus not really more useful) unless you could make a robo-logger or something.

Sarcasm is hard for me IRL, too. :/

It would be more useful just from the standpoint of not having to scale it up so big to increase running time.

Right now, to work on or leave the factory for an hour, you need three times more capacity than consumption. (A fact that isn't necessarily intuitive, since it's more akin to underclocking, a "non-core" MAM tech.)

Enabling belt-feeding would allow the player to build a "normal" quantity of burners more in line with how scaling the factory works. (As opposed to what is logically bass ackwards by comparison.)

---

Again, I'm not in favour of belt-feeding Biomass Burners, but playing devil's advocate, I can see sound reasoning for it.

[⇧⇨⇩⇩⇩]

Originally posted by Maehlice:

Again, I'm not in favour of belt-feeding Biomass Burners, but playing devil's advocate, I can see sound reasoning for it.

Nice to see you write a nuanced take on them. :)
Imo the best argument against beltfeeding them is that they are now the only powerplant that adjust their production to whats consumed.

The early game doesnt take too long to get past... for someone who has done it before and knows how to stack research and production in ordfer to get them out of the way as fast as possible. For someone playing their first game of satisfactory the pre coal gameplay does tend to drag on a bit.

[Cutelittlepoop]

"Can you please make the game easier because I can't figure it out?"

No.

Devs did a great job with balance and there are plenty of guides. Early game can be overcome in a couple of hours with efficiency. Also, bioreactors last quite a long time while is it super easy to produce fuel. Chainsaws can fill your inventory up quickly. Make biomass out of the leaves and wood, throw it all in a storage container leading to a constructor for the biofuel. Then just stack a few storage units next to your reactors and there you go, quickly accessible fuel.........

[Malidictus]

I'll be the odd one out here - I don't really see the point in progression systems in these kinds of games. To an extent, it cuts down on the learning curve as everything isn't thrown at the player all at once. However, locking tech behind a resource cost has only ever brought me grief, personally.

I tend to treat these sorts of games (this, Factorio, Dyson Sphere Programme) as puzzles to be solved. Missing pieces makes the puzzles less interesting. Having to design around missing pieces just means designing the same thing multiple times. Because I tend to take on larger projects, I end up having to do a lot of things with very limited tools as there's only so much time in the day to build.

I'd argue that Satisfactory makes this a little bit worse, as well, though. Oftentimes items are locked behind upgrades for seemingly little reason. "Vehicles" are locked behind a milestone, but "the other vehicle" - the one that's good for exploring and covering long distances - is locked behind I think Caterium. Pipes unlock with their own iron-level upgrade but pipe supports unlock with a steel level upgrade... despite not needing steel to build.

We have Milestones, we have MAM, we have the Awesome Store, we have pods - so many different progression paths with otherwise valuable things locked behind them. I guess that's the nature of this game's design - it genuinely feels closer to Subnautica than Factorio sometimes. At least mods exist to circumvent some of these things.

[Diakoptes]

yeah it is pretty terrible till you get coal, and also yes, its not much fun till you have coal