Some games come and go with the seasons, like most of the “gacha” type mobile games. Others fit a very specific niche in one’s life and can stick around for ages. Case in point for the latter: Gems of War, which is celebrating 10 years in operation. I started playing shortly after it launched, which means two entire residential addresses ago.
Dang.
Unfortunately, the team behind the game seems to be phoning it in lately. The “improvements” tend not to be such at all, they’re getting more obvious about just wanting people to pay them money for no meaningful reward (in or out of game), and… well, then there’s the quality control:
“Anniversay” Week, eh?
Come on, y’all. At least try.
Adding insult to mockery is, of course, the fact that this reward system relies on a bunch more in-game grinding to get absolute scraps of “rewards.” At no point have they done something like, say, gift the playerbase a nice chunk of in-game currencies to thank us for ten years of loyalty. Nope, it’s just “glad you’re still here, now grind for a pittance. GRIND, WE SAY.”
I had some time off this week and… ended up not spending much time in Satisfactory because we had trouble with the furnace and then I had trouble with my internal systems. (We’ll just leave it at that.) This evening I eked out a couple of hours of progress, though, including the revival of an idea I tinkered with in a previous save but never implemented: A power control building.
The asymmetry is deliberate. The other design choices remain as haphazard as ever, of course.
I’ll be clear, this is a slightly ridiculous creation. If I want to put a power control switch in charge of a building’s state of on/off-ness there are much, much easier ways to go about it. Simply putting the switch by the main doorway and making sure that’s the only point at which power enters the factory building would do the job.
But… I have a Blueprint Designer and so far all I’ve done with it is create railway structures and light fixtures. Clearly I’ve been limiting myself. Why not have some fun?
Using the 5×5 Mk2 Designer space I set out a 3×3 bed of concrete foundations, then created “stairways” where the front/back doors go. For purely silly aesthetic reasons I walled the interior with the “half-pipe” foundations making a floorway bounded by curved floors that become walls. Just off-center inside the building is the point of the exercise, a power control switch. I perched it atop a small piece of decorative steel beam for “didn’t just want it sitting on the floor” reasons.
I ran a set of concrete pillars horizontally along the “wall” closest to the power switch as a way to hide most of the power cabling. This gives me a power wart at each end of the building, easy to reach.
This was taken about ten seconds before I realized that I could make those floors shiny by switching to the coated concrete foundation pieces.
Then, through the power of nudging, I surrounded all this with windowed walls and slapped some glassed roofing on top. To finish it off I put steel walls all around, used some more beams (regular and painted) for trim, and saved the blueprint for later deployment in the field. Huzzah!
I’ll be the first to admit this isn’t terribly practical. It eats up nearly as much space as a two-platform railway station. But it’s fun and that counts for a lot when you’re busy making factories for your corporate overlords. Don’t we all need a bit of self-indulgent fun in our lives? And hey, it doesn’t look too shabby:
The two concrete pillars on the “power” side of the building simply get extended (“zooped”) down to ground level, and on the other side I chose to use a huge support pillar to give the illusion that this structure looks like it belongs here.
Once you hit a certain point in your progress in the game called Satisfactory you find yourself in need of a way to track things outside of the game. The game gives you several tools such as the equipment codex and the mathematics calculator feature and the To Do list and the Notes sidebar but those can only carry you so far. You’ll see jokes online about how you’re not a real Satisfactory player until you start making spreadsheets and… well, that’s not wrong, honestly.
Maybe just not in the way you might think.
This image has nothing to do with the topic at hand, but by golly it looks neat, so here you go.
Let’s get into the note-taking aspect, the part of the game you engage with outside of the game.
There’s an old line which goes something like, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” It’s hard, incredibly hard, to convey one’s thoughts and information about one medium in a whole other, wildly different medium. Just ask any of those YouTubers trying to get their takes about film and song across, I imagine they’d agree.
The release of 1.0 hit just a few weeks ago, and I’ve played… a lot. Not every day, though! In fact I took several days away from the game over the last week or so. Burnout is real and to be avoided.
With that said, I have finally hit my actual favorite part of the game:
Of course, true to form, after taking the above screenshot I almost immediately removed this station so I could move it over a few foundation tiles’ worth and raise it a bit higher above sea level.
