FICSIT coupons - Why reward inefficiency?

[Adam_Spokane]

It seems odd that a factory games primary source of rewards is to make a bad factory.

[Empath demon]

Originally posted by orthostatic:

Eh, I think some folks are too obsessed with the maze to enjoy the cheese. If they can't find the cheese, they'll eventually figure out that it ain't on the Steam forums.

I actually enjoy watching my belts go brrr. Simple-minded? Yes absolutely, but that's the great thing about discretionary time ain't it? Gives me time to process the books I've been reading and properly digest them.

After my planning brain is tired but I'm not quite ready to quit the game, it's very satisfying just to watch the wheels turning for a while. I hop up and down my chains and just watch the numbers go up. It's an indispensable part of my gameplay for sure.

[Oddball]

Originally posted by YetiChow:

because the devs have so over-invested their design philosophy in "number go up is a Good Thing" that they've shut themselves off from rewarding, or at this point even conceptualising, any other kinds of success in design .....

FICSIT coupons reward wasteful design because anything else would be an admission that Satisfactory has absolutely nothing else to offer beyond watching the number go up. Which is pretty sad given how much was promised of Satisfactory's "innovative experience", and how many options are within reach if the devs wanted to branch out and actually put some interesting mechanics into the game. ... but instead, we have Cookie Clicker: Dystopian Colonial Nightmare Edition. Click the button to build more machines that each do precisely one thing, and ignore the fact that even though wireless communication clearly exists in this setting it's apparently more cost-effective to have you walk out and push a button manually ....

Thank you for posting this. I have not played this game in a long time, precisely for much of the reasons you stated in your post. I found the game is wholly disconnected from reality as building game with a Sci-Fi back-drop, ruining the experience to a point of frustration to me. (No solar? Can't send resources through tubes despite the player being able to? No high-tech teleporter to "beam" resources across the map? Player can't fly around, but resources can? No water craft despite the large water bodies on some of the maps? on and on....). The game's supposed drive to make the most "efficient" factory (of the future mind to boot!) possible seemed a farse to me in the end...

[Wolfgang]

Originally posted by Oddball:

Originally posted by YetiChow:

because the devs have so over-invested their design philosophy in "number go up is a Good Thing" that they've shut themselves off from rewarding, or at this point even conceptualising, any other kinds of success in design .....

FICSIT coupons reward wasteful design because anything else would be an admission that Satisfactory has absolutely nothing else to offer beyond watching the number go up. Which is pretty sad given how much was promised of Satisfactory's "innovative experience", and how many options are within reach if the devs wanted to branch out and actually put some interesting mechanics into the game. ... but instead, we have Cookie Clicker: Dystopian Colonial Nightmare Edition. Click the button to build more machines that each do precisely one thing, and ignore the fact that even though wireless communication clearly exists in this setting it's apparently more cost-effective to have you walk out and push a button manually ....

Thank you for posting this. I have not played this game in a long time, precisely for much of the reasons you stated in your post. I found the game is wholly disconnected from reality

Maybe because the game is not realistic in the first place?

[Oddball]

Originally posted by Wolfgang:

Originally posted by Oddball:

Thank you for posting this. I have not played this game in a long time, precisely for much of the reasons you stated in your post. I found the game is wholly disconnected from reality

Maybe because the game is not realistic in the first place?

Obviously yes, it'll never be 100% realistic, but to ignore some basic high-tech things that we take for granted today as not worth implementing into the game because it doesn't fit the game's mold despite the high-tech nature of the game's backdrop seems a bit silly to me, like hand-waving around the elephant in the room.

(They wanted energy for example to be a constrained resource, so therefore could not justify having solar panels in the game because it would be "free"... so instead we have coal/oil lol, which is very much going backwards on the energy-tech spectrum. Many mechanics of the game would be more fitting if just placed in the 1900's. Hard pill to swallow when trying to immerse oneself in the game world. Fundamentally it's just another building game yes, but the entertainment value is often scaled with the realism to a degree.

[Wolfgang]

Originally posted by Oddball:

Originally posted by Wolfgang:

Maybe because the game is not realistic in the first place?

Obviously yes, it'll never be 100% realistic, but to ignore some basic high-tech things that we take for granted today as not worth implementing into the game because it doesn't fit the game's mold despite the high-tech nature of the game's backdrop seems a bit silly to me, like hand-waving around the elephant in the room.

(They wanted energy for example to be a constrained resource, so therefore could not justify having solar panels in the game because it would be "free"... so instead we have coal/oil lol, which is very much going backwards on the energy-tech spectrum. Many mechanics of the game would be more fitting if just placed in the 1900's. Hard pill to swallow when trying to immerse oneself in the game world. Fundamentally it's just another building game yes, but the entertainment value is often scaled with the realism to a degree.

Green energy has already been discussed on why this won't be added by the devs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4LlorYbVV0&t=656s

And if you need realistic games in order for them to be enjoyable then this might not be the game for you. Like many other games out there that aren't realistic.
I personally don't need realism for a game to be entertaining as I can just place the game in an alternate universe where all that stuff makes sense.

[tdb]

Originally posted by Oddball:

Thank you for posting this. I have not played this game in a long time, precisely for much of the reasons you stated in your post. I found the game is wholly disconnected from reality as building game with a Sci-Fi back-drop, ruining the experience to a point of frustration to me. (No solar? Can't send resources through tubes despite the player being able to? No high-tech teleporter to "beam" resources across the map? Player can't fly around, but resources can? No water craft despite the large water bodies on some of the maps? on and on....). The game's supposed drive to make the most "efficient" factory (of the future mind to boot!) possible seemed a farse to me in the end...

Enticing as the idea of a perfectly realistic factory game might seem, it would quickly become overwhelmingly complex. Like, look at an assembler for example. It's constructed with reinforced iron plates and cable. Where are all the shafts, gears and cams that make up the mechanism? Where are the screws, nuts and rivets that hold it together? In several different sizes too. It runs on electricity so clearly it should have a motor of some kind, probably multiple. Those would require their own chains of parts to produce. And what of all the tools required to shape the metal in the many different ways to build a working machine? How is the same machine able to create items as different as concrete, copper sheet and screws without any additional customization?

On the other hand, if we look at it from the scifi angle and assume the wondrous build gun can perform all the cutting, bending, welding and other things required to put the machine together, why does it need to work from these specific parts? Why does it need reinforced iron plates instead of regular ones? Maybe it could even work from ingots. Why don't we just integrate build gun technology into the factory and produce everything in a single step?

How come the vehicles in the game can use coal, diesel, batteries and nuclear fuel? In reality all of these would require very different engines. They're able to autonomously follow a recorded route long before we have computers, how does that work? There's some self-corrective capability in case the vehicle gets perturbed, so it can't be a simple cam-driven mechanical program.

And what about the entire premise of the game? FICSIT Inc goes through all the effort to put a space station in the orbit of another planet, but to obtain resources from said planet they send down a single pioneer equipped with a build gun (powerful as it is)? Then they restrict the availability of technologies to said pioneer until she can send certain specific resources up into orbit. How is that even remotely efficient? Wouldn't the job get done faster if more advanced technologies were available from the start?

It's a game, it's not meant to be perfectly realistic. It borrows things from the real world to make them feel more familiar and easier to remember. A lot of players seem to be enjoying it despite all the illogicalities. I've heard Captain of Industry has more realism, so maybe try that instead?

[Oddball]

Originally posted by tdb:

It's a game, it's not meant to be perfectly realistic. It borrows things from the real world to make them feel more familiar and easier to remember. A lot of players seem to be enjoying it despite all the illogicalities.

Yes, everything you said is all very true.

I never said I wanted or expected it to be "perfectly realistic", and only said that its obviously not 100% realistic in reply to the other post about it being not realistic. The level of detail you mentioned as examples of realism, through all true, are extreme for any such building game (unless the game is actually about designing/building an engine lol). What I was trying to get at is the dev's avoidance of implementing tech in the game from what we'd all agree would be commonplace (solar for example) or hi-tech in our real world today (thereby is already "real" to us), along with the lack of imagination for what we'd think a high-tech sci game set in the future would be (teleporting resources across the map for example, or a hover vehicle etc...), to instead implement features what we'd probably think of as antiquated technology when set against a future scifi backdrop. That to me, those choices result in a game that isn't realistic, is what I mean by the use of the word. It is still entertaining and fun to play I agree, but it's just not what I'd expect in such a scifi tech-driven building game, and after a while of playing, ended up a disappointment. To each their own though, have fun!

(Please keep in mind this is just my own opinion about what I'd like to see in such games. I made a very similar review about a medieval world building game that failed in incorporate a host of aspects common for that time period outside of swinging a hammer to build something. It wasn't "realistic" and ended up a disappointment after about 100 hrs of play)

[tdb]

Originally posted by Oddball:

What I was trying to get at is the dev's avoidance of implementing tech in the game from what we'd all agree would be commonplace (solar for example) or hi-tech in our real world today (thereby is already "real" to us), along with the lack of imagination for what we'd think a high-tech sci game set in the future would be (teleporting resources across the map for example, or a hover vehicle etc...), to instead implement features what we'd probably think of as antiquated technology when set against a future scifi backdrop. That to me, those choices result in a game that isn't realistic, is what I mean by the use of the word. It is still entertaining and fun to play I agree, but it's just not what I'd expect in such a scifi tech-driven building game, and after a while of playing, ended up a disappointment. To each their own though, have fun!

While I can understand your desire to have such technologies and disappointment in their absence, some of them at least have justification from a game design perspective.

Solar power in particular would trivialize power management. Low on power? Build more solar. Anywhere. No space? Build more platforms. Everything in the game is based on managing the rate of resource flows, and solar would break that. The lack of power at night is not an issue since it means you just need to build some more solar plus power storages.

Teleporting resources across the map would similarly trivialize a major part of the game, that being transport. Why bother with trains or truck routes if you can use a teleporter? Trains are already powerful enough that many players skip trucks entirely.

Sending resources through tubes? Sure, that wouldn't break anything, but it would just be an alternative skin for conveyor belts. It could work as a cosmetic for the AWESOME shop. Or a Mk6 conveyor in late game.

Watercraft would not be very interesting since most of the deep water is at the edges of the map. Rivers are mostly very shallow and broken by many waterfalls. While adding boats would not break anything, I'm not convinced they'd be worth the development effort.

Hovercraft would actually be nice since it would cut some tedium out of traveling. All water bodies can either be navigated around or bridged over anyway, so hovercraft don't allow anything you can't do without.

For player flight we actually have limited options. Update 8 makes the parachute a persistent item and I've found it quite useful for flying over difficult terrain. It does take a bit of setup to get up high first. I should make a blueprint of some stairs. Then there's the jetpack, which likewise is made more useful by new fuels in update 8, allowing it to get higher. And later on there's the hover pack, although it's limited to operating near your power network.

I wouldn't mind some faster player transport options across the map, although I understand that the limitations are intended to encourage planning and automation so you don't have to move around fixing things all the time.

Some of these things are also available as mods. While mod support is currently unofficial, I seem to recall that the devs intend to make it official after 1.0 is released. I don't have a source at hand though.

[DarkCarnage]

Fixit does not waste !~ instead of having belt backed up and wasting items and power might as well put them to work :P

[XsilverwaterX]

If your using AWSOME shop early put it near you copper mine and configure it to eat some of your cables and wiring as your going to need a lot of biomass to keep your iron-based machines working until you hit coal power and better m3 conveyors. I usually keep the shop away until mid tier 5 where I have a fifth of the maps mines and solid 130 Tw fuel-age. Then I figure what excess I want my tractor to poop out.

[jamiechi]

I used to reset the Awesome sink back when the Offline save editor used to work. Later I started using the mod that prevents the exponential increase in the required items to get more Tickets. I never send all my overflow to the Sink. I still don't understand why some people think you have to keep the factories running continuously.

Originally posted by oliverse:

Easiest way to get coupons is to go out and harvest alien matter and turn them into dna capsules. Earns you a lot more points vs things like screws and rods, etc until you have enough efficiency to start feeding it higher end items :)

I do this as well. Helps a lot in U8 when you don't have mods yet.

[OmegaFreak01]

Originally posted by YetiChow:

because the devs have so over-invested their design philosophy in "number go up is a Good Thing" that they've shut themselves off from rewarding, or at this point even conceptualising, any other kinds of success in design (e.g. hitting the production goal with a minimal use of resources, or a minimal footprint of space used.) They've had to twist waste (of both materials and energy) into "oh actually that's good", and even tie important QoL upgrades into that intentional-surplus-disposal loop in order to justify the number never going down (i.e. never turning your machines off) -- even though it's patently obvious that it's not possible to 'perfectly balance' production. The sink exists so that all those parts-per-minute increases don't simply collapse the whole system under the weight of all that surplus (i.e. wasted) production.

The game would be so much more interesting if it included tools to actually build efficient systems (e.g. programmable behaviour so that machines produce the right number of components and then hold, or better yet switch to another recipe so that you don't have downtime but you also aren't trying to store or dispose of surplus inventory.) In its current state, all it does is (badly) pretend to imitate Just-in-Time philosophy; but what it actually achieves is a nightmare mockery of JIT which would make any adherent of real JIT break down weeping. It's not hard to understand why the devs are chasing Number Go Up as their holy grail of user experience -- they've built the most graphically complicated successor to Cookie Clicker to date, and they want users chasing that same never-ending reward drip-feed for hitting new records... but they could have quite easily turned the game into something more than just Cookie Clicker with Extra Steps if they had simply factored in the idea that some people get more enjoyment from completing a task elegantly than from brute-forcing their way to a messy ending. And the thing is, had they taken that path they could still cater for the Number Always Go Up crowd, and had them be endlessly happy... but they wouldn't have alienated a whole swathe of other types of creative players along the way.

The factory building and automation options in vanilla Minecraft (i.e. redstone, hoppers, rail mechanics, and block intereactions) are already magnitudes ahead of the options available in Satisfactory -- and frankly have been for years. There are plenty of tiny indie games/teams that absolutely eat Satisfactory's lunch when it comes to factory design; off the top of my head there's Mob Factory, Dawn Apart, Shape Heroes, Mindustry... That's before we start talking about the larger and better-resourced projects (such as Techtonica) that are starting to pop up which can compete with Satisfactory on graphics and 'production value', and absolutely wipe the floor with it on factory-building mechanics (with things like logic systems, dynamic/terraformable terrain, dynamic recipes, fleshed out narratives, and vastly improved QoL that doesn't rely on making the player slog through chores just so they'll 'appreciate' the upgrades later on!) At this point, the only reason that Satisfactory is a 'big player' in the genre is because it was the first game with a AAA budget behind it to do the factory building genre in 3D.

FICSIT coupons reward wasteful design because anything else would be an admission that Satisfactory has absolutely nothing else to offer beyond watching the number go up. Which is pretty sad given how much was promised of Satisfactory's "innovative experience", and how many options are within reach if the devs wanted to branch out and actually put some interesting mechanics into the game. Even a simple re-ordering of the techs available in the early game (with a little bit of narrative justification) could dramatically improve the experience -- it could easily become a game about starting with powerful but limited options and having to branch out into compromises and tradeoffs with ever-more meaningful downsides; it could also easily become a game that actually encourages maximalism and gives us tools to exploit those opportunities without enforcing a horrible slog of chores for each 'improvement' step. We could have either of those games... but instead, we have Cookie Clicker: Dystopian Colonial Nightmare Edition. Click the button to build more machines that each do precisely one thing, and ignore the fact that even though wireless communication clearly exists in this setting it's apparently more cost-effective to have you walk out and push a button manually (spending real-world time on a virtual chore) than to just add a radio transceiver to each machine for remote operation from the HUB.

Goes without saying but Factorio is a game I take 200x more time to complete because I want to solve all the steps with my own uniquely designed blueprint with a theme (these ones are efficient on materials, there's ones have no belts challenge, this one is just super ellegant ect).

I couldn't quite figure out why I don't find satasfactory rewarding and you're right, it has this infinite supply numbers goes up design.

Still I will hold out because the game isn't finished, I'm sure the glue will come in 1.0 with the story and content. Gives you a reason to make the numbers go up.

[OmegaFreak01]

"Or how about making coal power also a tier 0/1 tech, but adding an overheat mechanic to the generators (they run for let's say 15 mins then shut down for 1 min to cool off; and they now have 2 water input pipes: 1 for generating/making steam with, and one for the cooling tower) -- and then when you get oil production a couple of tiers later, introduce coolant which can allow your coal gens to ignore overheat (the coolant is just that much more efficient than using extra water for the same purpose), and that also lets you redirect the extra water you were using for cooling to run more coal gens. Now the player has multiple meaningful options -- they can a) just build enough coal gens (and later, batteries) to handle the peaks and dips, staggering the downtime of their generators to ensure enough are working at once to meet demand; b) use oil tech to improve the efficiency of coal gens and allow for building even more using the previously maxed-out water sources; c) ignore the coolant recipe and move to fuel-based power ASAP; d) some combination of all of the above!"

Honestly people in this thread seem to hate you but I think your points are on point. The only thing I think you're missing is the game isn't released so they could very well be holding back something with the coperations or the space elevator, imagine slowly seeing your space elevator assembly a machine in orbit, your numbers go up design would be applicable, maybe the coupon system is just a placeholder for what ever 1.0 will do. Although while it felt like a short term band aid like you said there is nothing harder to remove than a short term bandaide.

I think factorio sets a bad example because we have blueprints from the second you click play, you can automate power and everything. You very quickly can get passed the hand crafting stage and have fully automy to go in what ever design direction you want. Satasfactory on the other hand, dam what a slog the early game. You're just forced to wait for all the tiers and power it with veg until you got power automated. Like that annoyence is to make you appreciate what you get later but factorio is a good example of how that doensn't need to go on for so long.

Then there's the items your producing, they are pointless other than feeding into some other black box which spits out another pointless item. It's so strange, like why should I actually care about that item? In factorio the items mostly have a purpose. I'm making a bullet factory so I can have bullets and so my turrets can kill the monsters so my factory will be defended. It's that final sense of action that actually makes the factory have any sort of value.

Satasfactory to me seems to have this really annoying early access community almost like dyson sphere program where because the game is unfnished and not completed the people who are attracted to that game, who then talk in the communities then play for 1000 of hours end up representing the community. You see it all the time in here "Go play x because this is y". Dyson sphere has a lot of people wishing the devs wouldn't add in anything to combat because the people playing it have infinite time with no pressure, so these people end up representing the game because that incomplete environent is perfect to them.

Satasfactory clearly is aware of other factory games and follows there design patterns while the incomplete game basically provides an environment for minecraft like building for creativitiy. Rather than engineering a base and all that it's just this empty sandbox where you can draw what you want but there's no problem to solve when you can just have a carpark floating base. What's there to solve? The game isn't pressureing you to do anything other than numbers go up or you wait until the heat death.

It's super skelton like but you see in the comments all the time the community just rejecting everyone that doesn't connect to that skeleton. Personally I'm hoping 1.0 with the story will give me a reason to play but It's weird because I love all the other factory games but this one, it feels empty. Even 0.8 I just find my self asking "why" should I care about making that number go up? Like you said you are only rewarded with more tasks to do but without a reason to actually do it. If it was stuff like you have you ♥♥♥♥♥♥ power system and progressing is making that coal power plant better, auto cool downs ect all that I could dig. It's still the same idea of annoying you to progress but currently I find all the machines just really anoying.

Visually everything looks great, plently of building blocks for people to have fun and "cosplay" a factory with all the moving bells and whistles. Other players not so much.

[❤ Sly Succubus ❤]

Originally posted by OmegaFreak01:

"Or how about making coal power also a tier 0/1 tech, but adding an overheat mechanic to the generators (they run for let's say 15 mins then shut down for 1 min to cool off; and they now have 2 water input pipes: 1 for generating/making steam with, and one for the cooling tower) -- and then when you get oil production a couple of tiers later, introduce coolant which can allow your coal gens to ignore overheat (the coolant is just that much more efficient than using extra water for the same purpose), and that also lets you redirect the extra water you were using for cooling to run more coal gens. Now the player has multiple meaningful options -- they can a) just build enough coal gens (and later, batteries) to handle the peaks and dips, staggering the downtime of their generators to ensure enough are working at once to meet demand; b) use oil tech to improve the efficiency of coal gens and allow for building even more using the previously maxed-out water sources; c) ignore the coolant recipe and move to fuel-based power ASAP; d) some combination of all of the above!"

Honestly people in this thread seem to hate you but I think your points are on point. The only thing I think you're missing is the game isn't released so they could very well be holding back something with the coperations or the space elevator, imagine slowly seeing your space elevator assembly a machine in orbit, your numbers go up design would be applicable, maybe the coupon system is just a placeholder for what ever 1.0 will do. Although while it felt like a short term band aid like you said there is nothing harder to remove than a short term bandaide.

I think factorio sets a bad example because we have blueprints from the second you click play, you can automate power and everything. You very quickly can get passed the hand crafting stage and have fully automy to go in what ever design direction you want. Satasfactory on the other hand, dam what a slog the early game. You're just forced to wait for all the tiers and power it with veg until you got power automated. Like that annoyence is to make you appreciate what you get later but factorio is a good example of how that doensn't need to go on for so long.

Then there's the items your producing, they are pointless other than feeding into some other black box which spits out another pointless item. It's so strange, like why should I actually care about that item? In factorio the items mostly have a purpose. I'm making a bullet factory so I can have bullets and so my turrets can kill the monsters so my factory will be defended. It's that final sense of action that actually makes the factory have any sort of value.

Satasfactory to me seems to have this really annoying early access community almost like dyson sphere program where because the game is unfnished and not completed the people who are attracted to that game, who then talk in the communities then play for 1000 of hours end up representing the community. You see it all the time in here "Go play x because this is y". Dyson sphere has a lot of people wishing the devs wouldn't add in anything to combat because the people playing it have infinite time with no pressure, so these people end up representing the game because that incomplete environent is perfect to them.

Satasfactory clearly is aware of other factory games and follows there design patterns while the incomplete game basically provides an environment for minecraft like building for creativitiy. Rather than engineering a base and all that it's just this empty sandbox where you can draw what you want but there's no problem to solve when you can just have a carpark floating base. What's there to solve? The game isn't pressureing you to do anything other than numbers go up or you wait until the heat death.

It's super skelton like but you see in the comments all the time the community just rejecting everyone that doesn't connect to that skeleton. Personally I'm hoping 1.0 with the story will give me a reason to play but It's weird because I love all the other factory games but this one, it feels empty. Even 0.8 I just find my self asking "why" should I care about making that number go up? Like you said you are only rewarded with more tasks to do but without a reason to actually do it. If it was stuff like you have you ♥♥♥♥♥♥ power system and progressing is making that coal power plant better, auto cool downs ect all that I could dig. It's still the same idea of annoying you to progress but currently I find all the machines just really anoying.

Visually everything looks great, plently of building blocks for people to have fun and "cosplay" a factory with all the moving bells and whistles. Other players not so much.

From the word of Valve directly to you, not the community.
"If you don't like the game, EA or not, then don't buy it, its that simple, if its in early access, then your buying something thats not done, you yourself are the only one at fault if your mad with an unfinished product."

We don't hate people who dislike Satisfactory, we hate their ignorance in when they think they know better then a video game developer just like your displaying yourself, its not your game, we can give suggestions to change things or fix bugs but your mad over something that is neither complete nor your own design.

In the wise words people from the main Steam forums would say.

"If you don't agree with the developers, thats on you alone, its not your product, its not your design, its not your development team, you get no say in the product, dont get up in arms when people disagree with you in a game's EA forum because 99% of time those mad in those EA game forums are people who forget they bought an unfinished product and are mad that its unfinished, its like getting mad at water for being wet."

[Joeyramone]

Originally posted by YetiChow:

Originally posted by Wolfgang:

Still haven't learned to make a TL;DR at the end of your essay, have you?

Btw, a look at the game description on the Steam Store undermines your whole argument. Just to bring in some snippets:



The game is litterally designed to be "produce more and then more until you've done it!". Also the sinks help for making a storage system that doesn't back up and can be easily sorted.

And the "number go up" thing is a basic human thing. We like to see numbers go up and to compare them. Because that is something we can easily grasp and understand. Being more conditional of "do this but avoid this while doing this other thing too and use as little as that thing" is not as easy for our monkey brains to comprehend.

I can do short. I choose not to, because unlike the louder part of this community, I'm not afraid of a complex discussion.

And your (mis)reading of those store page promises is another case in point. Those store descriptions explicitly claim that you can "play however you like", that you'll have multiple options to configure your factory. This is patently not true. You can put your machines over here, or over there; but you will always be building the same machines in roughly the same order and roughly the same ratios. The only "optimisation" available comes from building a spreadsheet to reverse-engineer the design logic of the game's map layout.

Nowhere in those quotes you've pulled does it say "this is a game where the number going up is the entire point and nothing else matters." In fact, the last quote implies the opposite -- it implies that you'll have options in how you make the number go up, at least. This is not the reality of the game as it stands. There are no meaningful choices beyond "what order do I hit these nodes?"; everything is a single (artificially) stretched-out 'to do' list; and the order that you tackle those items on it makes no difference to the overall shape of your factory. All you can choose to do is slow yourself down by trying to tackle the ones that you can't support yet, you can't choose to, say, build up an alternative production stream that will come to fruition later. You can't build lines that switch their output, or try to design any kind of "elegant" solution that produces exactly enough parts for a goal (e.g. a refinery that produces enough plastic to unlock fuel generators and then shuts down awaiting you to reconfigure the line for fuel production.)

The only thing you can possibly optimise for in Satisfactory is increasing PPM. That's not "factory design", it's a 1-dimensional reduction of all of the engineering principles that this game claims to weave into it (but fails to deliver upon.)

There's a tiny amount of sequence-breaking made possible by the crashed pods; but I've run the math on that and you don't actually get any benefit from doing it -- by the time you've run around grabbing those components that you need, you still come up short for the machines that you would need in order to get a meaningful leg-up at every single 'tier breakpoint'/major progression step. The only one that makes any difference is the option to grab all the parts for a set of blade runners (you can do this at any start location; they all have pods nearby with the required parts scattered around); and honestly I'm starting to suspect that the devs intentionally did a pass on what's available at those crashed pods to ensure that they can't be used to sequence break. The fact that roughly the same materials are available in crashed pods at roughly the same distances from each start location certainly makes me suspicious.

But more than that, your entire premise that sinks "are efficient because they stop your lines from backing up" is a load of utter ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. What the sink does is allow the line to keep running even when it's not producing anything useful! It's like having an entire factory that produces clothes and conveyors them straight into a giant bonfire so that the factory can get a tax write-off. That's not "efficient", that's waste on a grand scale in order to cover up a second source of waste somewhere else, and a poorly designed set of rules above it! It's bad design all the way down, and a refusal to even look at the design and go "hang on a minute, this no longer lives up to the stated aim." It's the kind of Growth At All Costs mindset which is ruining the modern internet, destroying our planet, and which completely ignores the fact that it's really not ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hard to do better with the same resources.

Take it from me -- I'm not a Business Genius, I'm just a diagnosed autistic 30-year-old who's done a lifetime of pointless ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ jobs and who is good at spotting patterns -- the whole "we're wired for Number go Up" thing is a total load of rubbish! I mean, I like designing systems. I want to design complex factories, and refine my designs, and see better returns from them. But that's not what Satisfactory is! Satisfactory is a one-dimensional cookie clicker game wrapped up in the language of a factory game, but it's all just set dressing. There's no actual factory design under there! Because the machines Always Have To Run, there's no room to design systems that work like an actual factory. Forget about "realism", Satisfactory misses the most fundamental concept of engineering: designing something to solve a problem. What Satisfactory actually gives you is a bunch of solutions that are looking for problems -- it hands you a set of increasingly large hammers, and expects you to turn the rest of the world into a series of increasingly large nails in order to justify the existence of said hammers. Ignore the potential for any other kind of fasteners, or the fact that sometimes a bolt is just naturally gonna be a better solution; hammers are what you get and so nails are what you're gonna make!

It's arse-backwards design -- the machines came first, and then the problems they're meant to solve were shoehorned in (and not very well), and as soon as it became apparent that this wasn't a very fun combination, the devs turned around and shoehorned in a whole buttload of extrinsic motivation in order to ping the "monkey brains" of people who just don't know how to recognise a pointless ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ chore when they're pointed at one. Instead of adding interesting or complex interactions between the game mechanics, the devs simply added More to the target numbers; and then a very loud minority within the community ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ate that up, and praised it so loudly that it alienated most of the people who have alternative ideas.

Satisfactory could be a good factory game if people like yourself just stopped being so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ psychotic about your aversion to ever actually using the off switch on the machines. Letting the machines do their job and then turning them off is a good thing -- it means success! The job was finished! Keeping the machines running 24/7 means you've designed yourself into a system that can never achieve its goals, and requires all this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like an ever-inflating currency of write-off tokens in order to justify its continued existence.

Instead of actually producing the parts you need to solve a problem, you're over-producing everything else, trashing the surplus, and saying "look how successful my design is! The number Keeps Going Up!" even though none of this ♥♥♥♥ helps directly to get closer towards the Project Assembly goal. At some point, after a billion other pointless chores, the fruits of those tokens will slightly help make the actual solutions for Project Assembly more efficient (by giving access to QoL things like wall mounted power)... but wasting all of those motors and computers and whatever else didn't actually help build any of that! The devs could just make wall mounted power sockets part of the power 2/3 milestone and skip all of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥; they choose not to because they've invested themselves in keeping that number going up in order to satisfy the psychotic urge to never turn the machines off.

The TL;DR: here is that you don't understand the first thing about project management or efficient design, and you're using virtual tax write offs to make your failing (virtual) factory look like it's productive when all it's really doing is creating products that nobody wants nobody has a use for, and then immediately shredding them. I'd like to see you try that in a real factory game like, say, Opus Magnum, and see how far you get. I really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hope that you have nothing to do with factories IRL -- and if you do, I pity everyone who has to put up with that kind of workplace that thinks that doing ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pointless jobs just to make the Number go Up is somehow a good thing.

holy wall of text im not gonna read