The core focus of Satisfactory is on automating the production of things. Iron products, steel products, aluminum products, all of these things need factories to extract the raw materials and turn them into fun and useful objects. In the process, however, you end up with leftovers and other unwanted fillers of inventory, such as plant matter and the remains of hostile creatures. Once you’re past the early game stages and no longer need biological gunk to power your empire, nor do you need spare ingots and whatnot, what do you do?

You sink them for Awesome Shop tickets, of course. And the best way to do that is with a fully automated waste management factory.

I completed such a build this weekend, and here’s how it went:

My vision, if you can call it that, involved being able to drive back from far-off excursions in the Explorer and dump off the biological gunk and random nuts & bolts into a bin, and then I’d never have to think about the results.

The bin’s contents are sent to the next floor upward where it’s separated out by a long line of Smart Splitters: Leaves, then wood, then the three (normally four, but I have Stingers turned off in Advanced Game Settings) types of creature remnants, and if something in the bin doesn’t match any of those objects then it passes on through directly to the Awesome Sink, known colloquially as “the smasher.” Leaves and wood are turned into Biomass while creature remnants go through a two-stage process that results in “Alien DNA Samples,” which still go to the Sink to generate tickets but at a higher rate of return than you get from regular materials.

The Biomass from leaves and wood is then upgraded to Solid Biofuel, and both items are sent to storage bins at ground level for easy access. Why? Because sometimes you need Biomass for things (jump pad landing spots, for example) and don’t want to have to hand-craft stacks of it on demand. And since Solid Biofuel is still the only thing that can power the chainsaw, well, you always want some of that available.

All excess Biomass & Solid Biofuel goes, of course, to the smasher.

As one of the purposes of this build was to replace the “leaves and wood processing” site from my early game stretch, and all of that processing previously went to the biofuel generators which powered that stretch of time, I decided to memorialize those generators by adding a row of them at the top floor of the waste management plant, fed by an offshoot of the Biomass/Solid Biofuel belt via yet another Smart Splitter.

Another feature of the top floor is a walkway leading from the external doorway all the way over to the Awesome Sink. Otherwise I’d have had to hop over or wend my way around various conveyor belts. The goal was to make getting at the tickets as easy as possible while still putting the Sink at the upper part of the building for visual flair. This way I have an easy path from ground level all the way to where tickets are accumulating.

I still have some decorative detailing to do, such as finishing off the window trim and tidying up the corners, but overall: I’m quite pleased with the results.

Not bad for an afternoon’s work, eh? A place to park my vehicles and a place to dump off unwanted materials. Multipurpose construction at its finest. Now, onward to the end of Phase 3 production…