The Tractor is remarkably terrible.

[Leiraion]

After putting about a dozen hours into a new game getting into a solid position with early materials (plates, rods, wire, cable, etc) and starting to pump out some intermediary items like Rotors, Reinforced Iron Plate, Smart Plating.... I'm transitioning into coal for power.
It is very far away.

I decide, "Hey lets build this new vehicle, surely it will be faster than walking all that distance!"
No. It isn't. On a flat plane, you definitely move faster but holy good lord if you go up a ramp.... You can LITERALLY go up a ramp faster by getting out, dissembling the Tractor, walking up the ramp, and rebuilding it. That is absolutely ridiculous.

Don't believe me?
Test it yourself:
Set up the following path, 2 flat foundation then 10 Ramp (4m).

Run the path with no movement altering gear on. It takes literally 10 seconds.
Drive the path in a Tractor. It takes, I kid you not, 28 seconds.



I like this game a lot so far, but the grind is starting to get very very tedious when the progression feels this slow.
Resources are getting very far away making centralizing everything very difficult when you can't cover large distances in a reasonable time.

For example, I'm sure people compare this game to Factorio a lot.... I can have a car that VASTLY increases my speed in early game and trains for covering resource logistics in great distances. These both get significantly faster in late game.

The tractor by comparison moves something 1/5th the speed of a basic train in Factorio on a flat plane.

So tell me, am I simply missing something major here or does this section of the game just really suck ATM?

[Huren Ogeko]

with blade runners you can keep up and sometimes outrun the tractor. its not really meant for transporting you but you but rather its meant for moving materials in place of a conveyor belt over long distances.

If you want a personal vehicle the explorer is a bit nicer but I just prefer to use blade runners and jetpack myself. and good hyper tube is never a bad idea.

I use the tractor when I need to go collect biomass for my generators as it gives me more inventory slots in the early game. after that i use it to move materials over distances I dont want to bother with a conveyor for.

You are not missing anything you just misunderstood the purpose of the tractor.

[Leiraion]

These are all suggestions for things I have not yet unlocked. I believe I could have Blade Runners but the closest Quartz to me is 1800m from my base. Farther than the coal.

So, after finishing the transition to Coal and Steel I'm headed for Quartz.
I tried once before with the one 1500m~ from my base, and it was covered in gas so I couldn't access it.

So, again, my complaint is around this section of the game, the transportation available to me feels horrible.

[Huren Ogeko]

I am bit spoiled by the fact my normal base start is close to everything other then uranium and oil.
but the tractor is more for moving things then moving you. I use it sometimes to carry m ore things at once before I unlock trains.
The blade runners will let you run faster so get them when you can. the explorer is the vehicle you want for personal transport as its able to go over terrain the tractor just cant handle. but nothing beats a good jet pack though or hypertubes.

in the early game I go all over the map collecting HDs from crash sites. And I do this without any vehicles sometimes without even blade runners. Once you get around the map a few times you will realize its not all that big. Its only 8km wide and 7km tall. Many people run platforms and conveyors longer then the 1600m you are away from the quartz. and if your coal is closer then that you are in good shape. My main base is 800m across which is half the distance to your quartz. I have a power plant tht stretches for over 1.3km in the great canyon.

The more you play the game and closer things will seem to be. Right now it just seems like a long distance.

[Leiraion]

I understand what you are saying, and could see in the future feeling that way.
However, from my perspective as a new player right now, why would I think to play the game this way? Nothing implies I should do this. Crash sites aren't even introduced, you just find them.
The natural progression of the game does not lead you to quartz for a while and once it is introduced at the same time as Steel and Coal, you can see high value in getting off of biofuel generators and starting steel for major progression.
Quartz does not come across as a priority.
The only thing the game directly offers you for movement by this stage is the Tractor.

[Valen Logan]

The vehicles, except for the explorer, all struggle to climb the 4m ramps. You want to use the 2m ramps. Even the trains need 2m inclines and anything steeper the tracks simply refuse to be placed.
Like others have said, the tractors are mostly there as a logistical option but it is perfectly fine to just drive them around though, I do.
As for the game not telling you clearly what to do, you are correct. This is a noticeable thing missing at the moment and I can only assume all that is being saved for the 1.0 release which will have the story added. The game as it exist now should be seen as sandbox mode.

[Xerxes86]

Originally posted by Letsatsi:

These are all suggestions for things I have not yet unlocked. I believe I could have Blade Runners but the closest Quartz to me is 1800m from my base. Farther than the coal.

So, after finishing the transition to Coal and Steel I'm headed for Quartz.
I tried once before with the one 1500m~ from my base, and it was covered in gas so I couldn't access it.

So, again, my complaint is around this section of the game, the transportation available to me feels horrible.

My MO is to get Quartz first so I can make blade runners. All the vehicles are trash as far as I am concerned. Blade runners, and those tubes later on are the best way to get around. I have never gotten to rails, always get bored and move on to other games.

[joebobku]

I find all of the vehicles to be trash. Even trains are pretty limited in their uses in my opinion. They're huge and bulky and require an insane amount of space and resources to set up. The only vehicle that is worth anything is the Drones in late game which can totally alleviate you from having to set up massive train or belt paths to move finished goods around the map

[LostME]

You're missing out on a lot. For example, why should a heavy tractor easily take off on a four-meter ramp? Unlike factorio, this is a 3D game, and there is a decent height difference.
The point of a tractor is to deliver resources. You record the path for the autopilot and can copy it to other tractors. And the beauty of this system is that when you are far away, it is simply calculated in the likeness of a conveyor. A quick tool for exploration is explorer vehicle lol. But in many places it is faster to build a ladder from the shop and climb the mountain.

You have tools, a conveyor, a tractor, a truck and a train. How will you establish a transport connection with your base, and even more so where to build a base is your choice and your problem. Someone is building 100-200 kilometer railways, someone is building hundreds of kilometers of convoys, and someone is sitting on 3 deposits and complaining about the grind.

p.s. I also always thought that a factory cart is a piece of garbage. It is almost impossible to drive it on the ground. Recently I saw on the stream how they carry uranium from the cave and the autopilot does it very well. It was funny, these things with sirens viu viu viu attention uranium hahaha. It's all about imagination.

[DaBa]

I still don't understand what the point is. You're complaining that a vehicle that clearly isn't really made as a personal transport is not a good transportation device? Okay, and what's the point? I mean, it's pretty obvious it's not supposed to be a transportation vehicle for the player. It's unlocked as a part of a milestone that gives you stuff to automate vehicular item transportation, it is not much faster than the player, and if those things were still not enough of a hint: it's called a TRACTOR.

[Rincewind]

you complain everything is too far away ? simple.... get a better base position....
I never had such issue in any playthrough like you

[lauruswolfe]

Originally posted by Letsatsi:

After putting about a dozen hours into a new game getting into a solid position with early materials (plates, rods, wire, cable, etc) and starting to pump out some intermediary items like Rotors, Reinforced Iron Plate, Smart Plating.... I'm transitioning into coal for power.
It is very far away.

I decide, "Hey lets build this new vehicle, surely it will be faster than walking all that distance!"
No. It isn't. On a flat plane, you definitely move faster but holy good lord if you go up a ramp.... You can LITERALLY go up a ramp faster by getting out, dissembling the Tractor, walking up the ramp, and rebuilding it. That is absolutely ridiculous.

Don't believe me?
Test it yourself:
Set up the following path, 2 flat foundation then 10 Ramp (4m).

Run the path with no movement altering gear on. It takes literally 10 seconds.
Drive the path in a Tractor. It takes, I kid you not, 28 seconds.



I like this game a lot so far, but the grind is starting to get very very tedious when the progression feels this slow.
Resources are getting very far away making centralizing everything very difficult when you can't cover large distances in a reasonable time.

For example, I'm sure people compare this game to Factorio a lot.... I can have a car that VASTLY increases my speed in early game and trains for covering resource logistics in great distances. These both get significantly faster in late game.

The tractor by comparison moves something 1/5th the speed of a basic train in Factorio on a flat plane.

So tell me, am I simply missing something major here or does this section of the game just really suck ATM?

The tractor will go slightly faster if you navigate hills at an angle but if you're going up a big ramp you made it will be very slow.

[YetiChow]

The missing piece to the puzzle (that you've correctly identified the absence of) is that you're not supposed to use one tractor, but 20, and copy/paste the self-drive path. More, more, always more -- that's the design philosophy that the game is balanced around.

... which means that when you first hit a point where a tractor should, theoretically, be an upgrade, yes it is actually a downgrade. At least, until you realise that you're not supposed to be building your "first coal power plant", but your first bank of 8 or 80 or however many you can feed with the water nearby (the limiting factor for coal power isn't coal, it's water -- which is much more difficult to transport than coal is); and then it makes sense that you would use multiple tractors to cart all that coal in a continuous relay.

The game is balanced towards late-game established setups; and yes that means it completely sacrifices the balance of the early-game exploration phases. It relies on a tinge of novelty and some "ooooh, pretty!" from the (completely static!) handcrafted map locations to encourage players to push past that grind... but it really is just a lot of "do your chores so you get new toys!" only to discover that the new toys are actually just more chores in disguise.

And if you've ever played other factory games before, you recognise that for what it is sooooooo much easier because you can see the difference between a real upgrade and an "increment for the sake of increment."

I'm sad to report that once you unlock the Explorer, you'll discover that while it is marginally better than sprinting everywhere, it still doesn't beat the "pro strat" of jump-crouch-slide-boosting everywhere (especially if you have parachutes so that you can fling yourself off of any elevations); the trucks have a much larger carrying capacity but by the time you get them you're half a step short of trains.

Also, much more unfortunately, the distance from the start locations to the nearest coal deposits really is nothing compared to how far you'll travel for oil or quartz; and then aluminum, uranium and nitrogen are even further out. That will be the one real use of trucks -- bringing enough building supplies with you to build the tens of kilometers of track needed for retrieving those late-game resources.

What you say about Factorio having meaningful upgrades is bang on. Factorio does also have chores, but the process of automating around them is rewarding in itself; and along the way you'll get the research materials and subjects that you need to do fun stuff. Like, the last time I played Factorio (ages ago, tbf), clearing out biter nests meant access to the new type of science that you can use for 'personal' upgrades to your suit, giving yourself new abilities! It was something that naturally happened alongside the chores you'd have to do to expand your factory. In Satisfactory, by contrast, choosing to work on unlocking a new piece of kit (like blade runners) means neglecting everything else, diverting resources from your other ongoing projects.

One of the things that Factorio does right is to make the research for its big end-game item/production sink separate and prior to the actual start of working on it. If you have a choice between researching something for your factory or something for the rocket, it's easy to focus on the factory (and in the cases where the research towards the rocket is required to progress the factory, you also get handed toys at the same time.) Like, one of the first things I remember needing to research towards the rocket was "combustibles", and yes it's obvious why/how that's a step towards the rocket... but it's also a step towards new power generation (and a new fuel source that can feed those old boilers which have by that point probably chewed up a bunch of the local coal!), better turrets, and an obvious step towards vehicles and explosives. There's lots of fun stuff gated behind that one! Satisfactory, by contrast, makes you build the first tier of the space elevator and do a big (for the time, at least) production push for parts that seemingly have no other use (spoiler alert! you'll use smart plating, smart wiring and etc. as components in building future higher-tier Space Elevator components too, so don't go tearing down your smart plating factories just yet; apparently you're just meant to store the output for later or run it directly into the AWESOME SINK), and then as soon as you complete it you're rewarded with... hahahaha turns out that your previous production of screws, rods, plates and so on is all woefully under-sized for the new tier. You can either tear down the current machinery and re-balance your production priorities (and make use of new tech along the way -- you did spend your down-time collecting and analysing hard drives, right?), or else abandon your current factory and go build a new, bigger, better factory to do exactly the same thing again, but 1-2km further out from your HUB/central base of operations.

At least Factorio gives you tools to adapt to the changes that come with the switch from early to early-mid to mid and then late game. In Satisfactory, half the time the "obvious" way to solve one problem is a direct detriment to solving the next one. Like, it gives you nodes with unlimited reserves of resources, tells you "we've identified a good starting location for you", the obvious implication is to make a base here and bring in resources from the surrounding area right? Turns out that no, the actual areas designed to be "base of operations" friendly are between 3 and 5kms from those landing zones -- you're supposed to stretch out towards them, and then put down roots and spread out from there. But Satisfactory doesn't give you any tools to do that efficiently! So you'll need to build clearly suboptimal temporary factories along the way, and probably tear them down (or abandon them) to later replace them with improved tech once you have the full range of options to build with. Factorio gives you construction drones for that. Satisfactory makes you do it all by hand! In fact, Satisfactory does have a system of blueprints... which you unlock halfway through the game, long past the point where they would have had the biggest impact (all of that build-research-replace futzing around), and even once you have them you have to go design these comparatively tiny "modules" in your blueprint designer because you're only allowed to create blueprints that are a few floor tiles wide at a time. Factorio lets you copy and paste entire screen-widths of factory, or just mark massive areas for deconstruction; and allows you to have automated resupply of your building materials so that even if you do prefer to build by hand you don't have to constantly replenish your materials. Satisfactory has nothing like that -- the best option is to load up a truck with resources, and even then you only get access to trucks halfway into the game as well!

It's just chores for the sake of chores, all the way down. The reason it feels boring and grindy is because rather than focussing on the creative challenges of building a factory or any large engineering project, Satisfactory focusses on the work of building something big -- it simulates the process, the gruntwork, while removing a lot of the creative freedom (because the map is static and the machines are all X-in-Y-out boxes, so in the vast majority of cases there's only one 'correct' solution for the challenges presented.) In the few times that Satisfactory does offer you a choice or a trade-off, such as with some (and I do mean only some) of the alternate recipes which aren't either just obvious direct upgrades, or obviously designed for use much later in the game, even then the choice is basically made for you by where you've chosen to build. The knock-on effect of all of the grinding is that you'll always pick the option that reduces the grind, because the grind is the only real challenge this game ever presents you.

[Huren Ogeko]

I think the main thing here is that the tractor is not meant to be a form of quick transportation of pioneers..its meant for an easy game conveyor belt that requires less effort to get built. when long distances are involved.

[Leiraion]

I think y'all are missing my point here..
The natural progression of this world lead me away from Sulfur and Quartz. Both were farther away than coal was.
It's not about HUB positioning. I had many close Iron and Copper nodes, and 2 close Limestone nodes. Coal was 1k and 1.3k away from the base, and Quartz was 1.5k (but was covered in gas), the next closest Quartz was 1.8km away.
Sulfur and Quartz are also not involved what-so-ever with T1-T4 progression.
If you are meant to get Blade Runners early, the game does a very poor job of showing you them.
And, there are no other vehicles until you are far down into the MAM tech tree (Explorer)

Do you think it's reasonable that the Tractor slows to a speed of 10 when going up a 4m ramp?
That's literally my only issue with it.
You can quite literally run up surfaces like that, without Blade Runners, 3 times faster than you can with a Tractor.
It is actually 3x+ faster in many cases to dissemble the Tractor, walk up the ramp, and recraft it, then refuel it and continue than it is to drive up the ramp with the Tractor.

This is extremely unnecessary. There is no good reason it needs to slow that much. It would feel completely fine as an early game vehicle (which then transitions into automation) if it went up ramps at least at the speed of a player walking.

For reference, a Tractor operates at ~50 KM/H on flat land and goes up a 4m ramp at 10 KM/H
An Explorer operates at ~80 KM/H on flat land and goes up a 4m ramp at 70 KM/H.


And no, it felt tedious because that work of building something big is being immensely slowed in this section of the game.
Now that I have Blade Runners and the Explorer, things are completely fine again. But that couple of hours I had to use only the Tractor (or walking) for the great distances the game was just annoying.

[Huren Ogeko]

If walking is faster then walk. The tractor isnt for personal travel its for resource movmement like a conveyor belt.
The early game vehicle you want is called the Explorer.
https://satisfactory.fandom.com/wiki/Explorer

Everything becomes better once your come to the realization that a tractor is not for anything other then moving materials.