I started in the Northern Forest, and took my time building up some factories to deal with all those pure iron nodes, and I’m just about to finish tier four. Has anyone been blazing a trail through the tiers? I’m curious what tier most folks are on.
I finished the first phase of the space elevator, maxed out tier 3 and 4, then got distracted trying to get coal power up and running before moving on. I was getting tired of running back and forth, constantly feeding leaves and wood into a production line for solid biofuel so I'm not dependent on biomass generators anymore.
The last thing I did was set up a steel production factory using two iron nodes, a nearby pure coal node, a copper node, and a limestone node. I'm producing tons of steel pipes and beams, then feeding about 2/3rds of them into another production line to make stators and encased industrial beams, respectively. Once I've built up a respectable supply, I'll dedicate my time toward finishing phase 2 of the space elevator so I can unlock tier 5 and 6.
My wife is playing for the first time, and despite spending way more time than me building her factories, she's barely done with tier 3. I have over 600 hours in Satisfactory, so while I'm taking my time and enjoying the journey, my experience with the game means I'm progressing much faster than her. But she's really into the math of it, trying to squeeze every ounce of power and resource production out of her factories, so she's going to have a much better build than me by the end.
I'm only 5 hours into my 1.0 save (I have over 1,100 hours total), having already cleared Tier 1 and 2. I'm especially thrilled that the biomass burners have a conveyor input now so I don't have to manually feed each one! My next goal is getting my blade runners and building a coal power plant.
My wife and I have been putzing with coal power and blueprints and experimenting with architecture for 3 days now. Haven't really done anything productive in that time. Have completed Tier 3, and part of Tier 4.
I'm on the verge of declaring blueprints to be more trouble than they're worth. Anyone else?
Yeah...I found that blueprints were of limited use building structures because although you could put down foundations marginally faster than zooping (16 tiles rather than 10) 4x4 isn't a very convenient size for this, and if you have a lot of blueprints all at once the way a large building does the game doesn't handle it well.
With manifolds of machines it's a problem, because say you have a manifold of assemblers. Well there's a left-handed and a right-handed version of the input belt manifold. If you include an output belt, does it go the same or the opposite way of the input belts? Then if you need higher tier belts than you built it for, you either have to upgrade them once placed or go to a blueprint designer, make the change, notice 25 hours later that you missed one and that half your factory has been running at half speed the entire time because one Mk 2 belt didn't get replaced in a blueprint...
Oh and exactly one manufacturer fits. I don't think it's usable at all with refineries or coal generators even though you use a lot of those machines.
I vastly prefer the SMART mod, and probably by the time I've finished this playthrough, done something else for a year or two and am ready for another run of Satisfactory it'll be ready for 1.0.
Me, it's not the size of the blueprint, particularly since they added 5x5 and 6x6 blueprints in 1.0, it's the fact that blueprint placement is horrendous for seemingly everything except perfectly-rectangular structures. And non-rectangular structures are basically the ENTIRETY of thing the things that are difficult to build, and thus worth blueprinting.
I just got into tier 6 today and burned through some milestones. This is my fourth play through though so I basically rushed everything with bad spaghetti just to get trains.
I got basic steel and coal power up and running. Started in the Northern Forest this time, but I got annoyed pretty fast with the lack of flat space to build. So I moved my HUB to the Grass fields because I haven't build there in a long time and it's actually really beautiful. Currently building my base around the HUB and will move to advanced steel soon.
Oh, and I also rushed the collection of mercer spheres because the Dimensional Depot is absolutely amazing!
Just cheesed my way into tier 8, now I have to make a new proper base somewhere and just ignore the old spaghetti, just bought computers from the shop to pass all tiers.
I just started today right around when I should've been getting to sleep. Got iron plates, rods, and screws as well as wires automated before forcing myself to stop.
I first (and last) played in I think update 5. It was a major PITA getting Proton to run it. I had gotten the space elevator built, but pretty sure I didn't progress beyond that before a patch hit that caused the game to not even launch anymore.
I did a rocky desert start at a site I don't normally use for anything, built a starter base, got my Project Tower partially built, I've got a good start on my steel mill and I've got some starter plastic and rubber in production at a temporary slap-it-down refinery.
I struggle to keep track of phases/tiers/milestones, I'm working on the second payload to the space elevator and I've just unlocked trains. I've got a LOT to build before I pull the Space Elevator handle a second time, the Desert Automated Manufacturing Node, the West Heavy Oil Residue Extractor, and a lot of railroad need to be put in place.
I finished up my Update 8 run in like March. I spent the last several play sessions just dumping as much as I could into the sink to get enough points to buy the Golden Nut. I had a dreadful habit of letting factories sit backed up and idle rather than letting them run into sinks. Took months to do from onboarding to buying that final trophy. But it felt complete. Entire play sessions I would just let stuff run into the sink while I was out hunting the monsters for their parts to sink because coupons were costing hundreds of millions of points by then.
I picked up a game server with Indifferent broccoli thinking my friends and I could build mega factories with all that sweet sweet server ram. Set the server to not pause on exit. Build my initial product lines and let the server build items while I sleep. I had damn near infinite building supplies by the second day and one friend came on, complained about the start area, and restarted the game in his preferred starting area. And haven't seen anyone since. Meanwhile I'm on Tier 6 and have built entire tube subway lines for my friends to head to all corners of the map. And all I get in discord is "sweet" and "great" literally these same guys were talking non-stop and played for hours when I got an abiotic factor server, and beat it in a week. They even voted on Satisfactory as the next game.
I my group's server just unlocked hyper tubes. But the real measure we are using is how many slugs are on the belts that make up our slug racing league.