After taking a few months off from the game due to a bug with the part of the game I was most excited to play with (drones had a nasty habit of using far more batteries than they were supposed to unless you stayed close by the drone port at all times), once Coffee Stain (the game studio) started showing off what was coming with the Update 5 milestone release I found myself compelled to start a whole new save game.

(You name your “save” which is basically the name of an ongoing session, and then you name the actual save points within that “save,” and yes that gets confusing sometimes.)

Thus I am, one could say, back on my B.S.

(more…)

While I’ve not been writing about the game much, I still play at least once per week on my own game and usually once per week in a cooperative game session with my son. I’m at what could be considered the “late” stage of the game, having sent off the third big Space Elevator shipment and unlocking access to the aluminum and nuclear tiers.

This is where things go from “moderately complex” to “rather fiendishly complex,” and the scale gets to the point where you can’t simply expect to make a variety of products from one resource node, let alone one group of resource nodes.

Case in point? Crystal Oscillators.

(more…)

I’ve been working on a railroad. Not all the live-long day, mind you, but I did put in a lot of hours over this past weekend on a very silly project in Satisfactory. You see, I just shipped off the third Space Elevator bundle and unlocked Tier 7… but the forthcoming game patch called Update 4 is supposed to do exciting things to the tech at that level so I don’t want to actually build anything from that tier yet. Either I need to shelve the game for the duration (yeah, right) or find something to work on that doesn’t involve new tech.

I decided, “Oh hey, let’s spend our vacation week doing a silly rail project.” (I’ll have more on that later this week.) Along the way I worked out a couple of useful techniques that I thought I’d share with the group as a sort of follow-up to the previous big post about the game’s monorail tech.

(more…)

Ever since a friend showed me the game, the goal I’ve worked toward this entire time in Satisfactory is unlocking the monorail. I finally got there, I have two working rail loops now, and I have some thoughts and advice for newcomers. Load up the cargo, release the parking brake, and let’s steam forward, shall we?

(more…)

You thought you’d get out of January 2021 without another one of these, did you? Well, surprise!

I’ve been in Tier 5 & 6 content in Satisfactory for a little while now, and the bulk of my time at this stage of the game so far has been spent getting to the point of making my first petroleum-based products (Plastic and Rubber) as well as generating power from Oil. Unlocking some of the really fun stuff, however, required fully (if modestly) automating production of a couple of key components: Heavy Modular Frames, and Computers.

Here’s a bit of how I got those production lines up & running.

(more…)