It’s been a month since my last post about Satisfactory, and to be honest I’ve been on a sort-of-break from the game while I wrestle with how to cross the finish line on my current somewhat-botched save. (The nuclear power plant is a mess, but replacing it would mean building a whole second one elsewhere, and the first one took long enough as it is! And that’s not the only problem.)

I might yet start fresh soon. We’ll see. I’d have liked getting two FICSMAS events in a row out of one save but if I’m going to be miserable the whole time, why bother? But if I start fresh I want to kick that off before month end so I’m ready for presents to start falling out of the sky…

Anyway: I’m here to talk about the Dimensional Depot and how its ability to make all sorts of materials available anywhere in the map changed one of my long-held snobby opinions about alternate recipes.

I have my coworkers to thank for this one, as it turns out.

I played a lot of this game during the Early Access years. We didn’t have the Dimensional Depot, a special kind of storage bin, back then. The game developers kept that under their metaphorical hat until it was nearly release time for version 1.0 last year. If you wanted to place a miner, you had to make sure you were carrying all of the material costs on your (virtual) person, and that included Portable Miners… or at least the ability to make some. Since those parts (iron plates and iron rods) are commonly used for other things as well (Mk.1 conveyor belts, etc) it was common practice to just carry the resources required to make Portable Miners and just slap down an equipment bench when you needed a few. You certainly didn’t carry around spares, not when inventory space was so valuable.

And yet… for nearly the entire run of Early Access, one of the alternate recipes you could get from crashed pods’ hard drives was an automated way to crank out stacks of Portable Miners. Why on Earth MASSAGE-2(A-B)b would you want that? I spent years cussing out the MAM’s alternate recipe extractor every time it came up. What a useless recipe that is!

Right?

But… during one of the recent sessions of the multiplayer game series we have going on between some of us at Resource One, one of the guys pointed out something I really should have considered: Now that we have the Dimensional Depot, the alt recipe makes a lot more sense. We aren’t usually carrying around iron plates and rods. Those are in “depotspace” (for lack of a better term). Which means, yes, we can still slap down that equipment bench (since it can pull from depotspace directly)… but why bother when you can just task one Assembler with cranking out stacks of Portable Miners that get fed directly into a Depot so you can just place a Miner wherever you want, whenever you want, without any intermediate fussing around whatsoever?

Oh. Huh.

So many assumptions about inventory management go right out the window when you have the ability to pull directly from depotspace. Even better, you can upload directly to depotspace (with the right research upgrade) so you don’t get bogged down with random materials while exploring, etc.

And so, I must apologize to the much-maligned Automated Miner alternate recipe. I’ve been shown the error of my ways at long last.