This is a container category for media reviews and related drivel.
With the 1.0 release of Satisfactory comes the first “true” version of the annual FICSMAS event. The inaugural rendition came in December of 2020, right at the time I’d just bought the game… which made for a slightly odd first impression, indeed. The developers tinkered with it a bit once or twice since then but mostly it was just a low-priority side-project amusement for the team.
Now, though, it’s fully fleshed out and polished to a higher sheen. Let’s get into it.
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When you break past the point of sending the Phase 3 shipment up the Space Elevator in 2024’s Golden Joystick Award Game-of-the-Year-winning Satisfactory, what you’ve mainly done is unlocked the twin titans of the mid-to-late game: Aluminum and Uranium. I have a couple of posts about nuclear power in the archives, and yes I’ll need to revisit that topic at some point because things have changed with the advent of Version One Point Oh. Today, however, I want to talk about waste water reclamation, a key part of the Aluminum production process.
Let’s get into it.
(more…)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:
(more…)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:
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.”
Or “we anniversay,” if you will.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Let’s get into the note-taking aspect, the part of the game you engage with outside of the game.
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