Finally reached my breaking point

[tdb]

Almost 400 hours into this save and I just can't continue anymore. I've gotten into phase 4, set up aluminum ingot and basic part production. But then I look at all the advanced parts I need to manufacture to finish the game, and think of how I'll need to build the same factory buildings, the same production lines, over and over and over again. And all the railway tracks and stations to transport the items. I've made tools to create plans of what to build. The interesting part is done. Only the tedium of actually building it all is left, and I can't bring myself to do it. It's no longer fun, it's just a chore. It doesn't help that the game lacks copy-paste or meaningfully-sized blueprints to make the repetitive tasks easier. So I'm taking a break, in hopes that I can return with a different plan later, for a fresh experience. See you after the 1.0 release, however far away that might be.

[Flash✪Gordon]

That they drilled us to report to mask the fact that they dont have any kind of technical support (no hotline, nor contact form, nor email they answer to) is they biggest trick they pulled.

Instead they have a PR machine on multiple plattforms to work on their "good reputation".

With that "good reputation" I can't buy a sandwich, I can't pay my rent and certainly it doesn't help me to get a technical problem solved.

Till last month I was also part of the "hype" and a fanboy of CSS, ready to tell anybody what good company that is. Hats off for the smartness of the Coffee Stain machinery! They are very smart.

So long, wishing everybody a nice time
Your Doc Hollywood, currently as Gordon Gekko as insider joke for Fenix

CU in next life!

[Schlappspaten]

Originally posted by joebobku:

The transportation of items becomes tedious and the time to haul material between biomes to build the next factories is laborious and insanely time consuming. There are mods to let you expand your inventory... but if you're like most people you don't mod the game and play the game as it is. They need to drastically expand inventory capacity to make the late game significantly less tedious.

I created a work train of 14 cars, build a rough track to the target location and had an insane amount of stuff on the train. But still drove back'n'forth a few times to haul even more supplies. All to set up a 10 fold nuclear powerplant at north eastern swamp and waterfall with all related supplies and waste handling. But the train has proven to be very useful before setting up a local supply chain for building and later use for the nuclear plants.

[Jimmy]

Originally posted by Gordon✪Gekko:

That they drilled us to report to mask the fact that they dont have any kind of technical support (no hotline, nor contact form, nor email they answer to) is they biggest trick they pulled.

Must be a personal issue there. Maybe it's your attitude of how you're asking for help. I have an extensive e-mail chain with Coffeestains support and they went out of their way to help me.
Also: There is a contact form. I told you the link.
You behave like a karen - and nobody wants to deal with such people.

Originally posted by Gordon✪Gekko:

So long, wishing everybody a nice time
Your Doc Hollywood, currently as Gordon Gekko as insider joke for Fenix

CU in next life!

Good riddance. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

[Lawn-Mower]

Originally posted by tdb:

Almost 400 hours into this save...I'll need to build the same factory buildings, the same production lines, over and over and over again...

You realise there are alternate recipes and a plethora of various building pieces with customisable colours/materials? No two buildings/production lines need even be similar. Some items don't have alt recipes, but you're unlikely to need more than 1 production line for them. Factory diversity is only limited by your imagination at 400hrs.

Though I do find large production lines can feel a little tedious and monotonous to build out - so I keep em small; rather than maxing a node, I just take what's needed for the localised modular factory goal.

[Migz - DH]

I kept myself amused while waiting for my Tier 4 stuff to finish by cleaning up my lines, adding more lines, decorating the area, troubleshooting water supplies, finding 100+ more slugs, finding distant oil locations, building 20 more fuel power plants, building two more nuclear plants (yes, very far away from anything else), diverting surplus goodies into SINKs, and generally running around exploring.

I began Tier 4 before 100 hours in my 2nd playthrough (this time in the desert) though.

[Migz - DH]

Now, of course, the FICSMAS event is keeping me busy. Too bad we have to wait days for new things...
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3105624495
I'll probably build a winter wonderland somewhere once everything unlocks.

[Lawn-Mower]

Originally posted by Migz - DH:

I kept myself amused while waiting for my Tier 4 stuff to finish by cleaning up my lines, adding more lines, decorating the area, troubleshooting water supplies, finding 100+ more slugs, finding distant oil locations, building 20 more fuel power plants, building two more nuclear plants (yes, very far away from anything else), diverting surplus goodies into SINKs, and generally running around exploring.

I began Tier 4 before 100 hours in my 2nd playthrough (this time in the desert) though.

There's always a priority list (even with good time-management and planned lists for optimising), so there's never any waiting unless the player chooses to spend their time playing in that way. Ties in well with not having an official pause button too.

That being said, if a player's primary joy with playing this game is just doing the maths and the rest isn't fun, then that's when it stops. Ultimately, it's still pretty good going for a game to entertain you for 400hrs.

[Ultima]

Took me 222 hours to beat the game, including phase 4, on my first game.
91 hours total the second time, I tried go as fast as I could.
And on my third game here for Update 8 I'll finish phase 4 after 105 hours total or so.
(Yeah I like starting from the beginning again when I come back after a pause.)

It's long indeed but it's not hard. It takes patience to build and rebuild your factories, upgrade your belts, duplicate your production lines when you go from Miner MK2 to MK3.
But eventually, step by step, you can only beat the game.

The first item of the 4th phase (x4000) is the longest and "hardest" to build in my opinion. But the next are way easier. If you manage just to try creating the production line of this item, you'll see the end of the game coming faster than you think.
You don't even need Nuclear plant to finish the game.
I usually create Nuclear plant factory after finishing phase 4, just for fun.
Game is beatable with 15.000 ~ 20.000 MW (even less if you are patient: with no slugs, means also smaller production line), just using fuel from oil.

I noticed a lot of people not using trains. If you don't mind creating infinite converyer belts it's fine. But trains are in my opinion the best way to transport ressource. It takes way less ressources to build the rails than conveyer belts (even if you add fundations with the rails).

Also about the amount of ressources needed to beat the game, you need like 1 spot for each ressource (except basics of course: Iron / Copper / Concrete / Coal / Water)
Example with Plastic:
Craft 400 plastic/minute with 600 oil (two normal node with 3 slugs, a spot with oil usually has more than this) and just move this plastic to your base (use a train :o ).
With 400 plastic/minute you have enough to finish all sub-recipe to beat the game, you never need 400/minutes at the same time. If so, you should think about phase 4 and not some other unneeded stuff.
Do the same for other items, such as Rubber / Motors / Steel / Concrete / etc.
And you'll have a base full of ressources. Then just divide those for your recipes, even manually is okay at first.

1 Manufacturer, 0 slugs, takes 88.9 hours to finish the first item of phase 4 if I remember correctly (it's like 0.75 item / minute).
During those 88.9 hours you have all the time to craft the other items, they need less production time tho.

You can do it peeps !

[nfgman]

For me, finishing tier 4 was not even a halfway marker. Then I got serious. Tier 5 ?... pfft.

[ostlandr]

WARNING: SPOILERS

There must be something wrong with me. I just spent way, way too much time building a really cool girder railroad bridge. Was so satisfying to finally get it looking just right and take a screen shot. Also see my post on the Monorail 1:4 challenge I set for myself.

I'm surprised FICSIT hasn't fired my butt yet. I haven't delivered a single modular engine or adaptive control unit to the space elevator so far. I was just getting into tearing down my initial spaghetti factory and moving all the production after the smelters into an awesome indoor factory when FICSMAS gifts started dropping from orbit.

So part of the original factory foundation got appropriated for FICSMAS production. That is now in the way, and needs to be automated anyway, so I'm going to have to relocate it all (wish there was a snow biome) and turn it into an appropriately painted and decorated high-tech version of Santa's Workshop.

Speaking of Spaghetti, my refinery/power complex looks like a bowl of pasta dumped on the floor, with the exception of the train station. I was going to rebuilt it, but a bunch of Pastafarians have turned it into a shrine and pilgrimage site.

Which reminds me, I need to take Refinery #2 off of plastic production and start cranking out rubber for the modular engine line I'm eventually going to finish.

Oh, and I need to add a freight platform at the oil patch (and consequently at the main base also) so I can automate hauling the overflow solid biofuel to the refinery complex. "The trees are the real enemy." -Katherine of Sky That's getting processed into packaged liquid biofuel and going straight into an AWESOME sink. Of course, the upside to making regular truck trips out to the oil patch is "harvesting raw material for DNA samples" via roadkill.

Which also reminds me, to make my life easier, I need to connect my outposts to the main base with proper roads, like I'm doing in Valheim. Off road driving is fun with the Explorer, but a pain with a fully loaded truck. First truck trip out to the coal power complex, I got hung up between a cliff face and a guide rail. Took some doing to get it out of there without the truck falling off the cliff and landing in the lake. Losing that load (and the truck) would have definitely gotten me fired. So now it's going to be asphalt and/or concrete roads with a max gradient of 1:2. And street lights, because why TF not? Already built a bridge to the oil patch from the mainland even though the water is fordable.

TL/DR: I have so much fun stuff to do, I may never get that coveted "Employee of the Month" (err, Planet) coffee mug.

[ждун]

I took a break after update 6 or something, but now started it again with everything unlocked from the start. This is fun actually when you don't have to care about space elevator and progression at all. You are not forced to build factories in certain order. For instance i started with coal power right away and having all alternate recipes unlocked from the beginning completely changes your style of playing. Just unleash your whole creativity without the game guiding your through the progression process. Maybe try that. Its really very different. Forget about space elevator, start clean design from the start. Why not starting with nuclear power from the beginning etc? Or why making iron with standard recipes in smelters, when you can try advanced iron production with founderies and water from the start?

[Schlappspaten]

There was a point where I was short of canceling a safegame: The moment I read "nuclear pasta" I thought I have to go through all the trouble with radiation. I ran into some radiation trouble while searching for harddrives and just didn't want to bother. And then I noticed: You need those accerlators but nothing radioactive at all. I then just finished off all the last tasks and that was that.

[tdb]

Originally posted by Lawn-Mower:

You realise there are alternate recipes and a plethora of various building pieces with customisable colours/materials? No two buildings/production lines need even be similar. Some items don't have alt recipes, but you're unlikely to need more than 1 production line for them.

I am aware. However I'm much more mathematically oriented than creative; my mind automatically looks for order and patterns, and if two things are almost the same I have an overwhelming urge to make them exactly the same. My original plan was to build small factory towns that blend in with the landscape, but then I was reminded of how absurdly huge train stations are and I had to revise my plan. I came up with a design where a bottom "basement" floor houses the train stations and there's an upper deck on which I construct multi-floor buildings containing all the production machines. Unfortunately with Satisfactory's limited blueprint size I had to break everything into bits and pieces so building is rather tedious.

Originally posted by Lawn-Mower:

Factory diversity is only limited by your imagination at 400hrs.

And that's exactly the problem - my imagination with small things is rather limited. I find it hard to come up with decorations to put on factories, because they have no purpose. I can derive production line layouts from logical rules like nobody's business, but when it comes to making something that doesn't follow from any facts, I'm stuck. I did come up with a building design that I think looks nice, but like I said Satisfactory's limited blueprints make building them tedious.

In total I have over 700 hours in this game. But I've also played Factorio for over 1000 hours, and let me tell you, that game has building tools miles ahead of Satisfactory. Especially once you get robots. Need to move a large factory three tiles to the left to make room for a railway line? No problem, just cut and paste it in two seconds. It may take the robots a while to disassemble and reassemble everything, but they work independently and you can go on to do other stuff meanwhile. The map view with remote interaction lets me quickly give commands to robots all over the map, without needing to physically travel to places. In Factorio I feel like an architect, making the big decisions while my servants take care of the tedious busywork.

I'm reasonably good at coming up with big designs, and in fact halfway through this run I came up with some new ideas for an entirely different factory. It will be a huge tower, 350 metres in diameter, which will house everything in a single facility and be supplied by underground railway lines bringing in raw materials (since there's plenty of space underground for the stupidly large train stations) and probably some drones for lower volume stuff. But I find it inordinately difficult to build two different designs in the same save (initial spaghetti factory notwithstanding). I'll be able to get more out of those plans by saving them for 1.0.

Originally posted by Lawn-Mower:

Though I do find large production lines can feel a little tedious and monotonous to build out - so I keep em small; rather than maxing a node, I just take what's needed for the localised modular factory goal.

I kinda tried to do that, but coming up with a logistics system that works in the endgame is difficult. This time my approach was to use 8-wagon trains, with one train layout per phase, most wagons carrying only a single thing. I also tried to arrange logistics so that only high-volume stuff is distributed to multiple factories, because Satisfactory's lack of logic circuits makes it so very annoying for a low-volume producer to supply multiple consumers. But this causes endgame factories to be very complex as they need to produce everything from ingots (or equivalent). Like for example a turbo motor factory would need to produce motors locally. On the other hand my existing motor factory is probably larger than it needs to be, but my rules prohibit taking motors from it for turbo motor production.

Maybe I could put together some spaghetti and even manually transport items between places, in order to have some closure. But to be honest I've gotten over the feeling of leaving this save unfinished like all my previous ones (that's why I made this post), and there aren't even any achievements yet. So I think it's better to just take a break until 1.0.

[Kilroy]

I so feel this. I spent around 300 hrs getting the stupid assembly director systems automated https://i.imgur.com/CjQlvwg.jpeg
This is what it takes to get 12 ADS per min which will meet the quota in 5.5 hrs of runtime which is what i feel the devs want folks to do, build out a massive factory to make the final tier parts but what i should have done is just built a single factory and it would have been done in 88 hrs of continuous runtime. Thankfully they have said that tier 9 project parts are placeholder recipes and they will rebalance the tier for the final game release

[Migz - DH]

Originally posted by Kilroy:

I so feel this. I spent around 300 hrs getting the stupid assembly director systems automated https://i.imgur.com/CjQlvwg.jpeg
This is what it takes to get 12 ADS per min which will meet the quota in 5.5 hrs of runtime

Impressive dedication!