It’s been a while since my last check-in on my ongoing train-centric Satisfactory save game, so here’s a bullet-point catch-up:
- As of this afternoon I’m making several of the late-game building materials, Fused Modular Frames and Turbomotors and Cooling Systems. I’m a couple of years and several fresh starts into my time with this game, and never before this weekend have I ever made any of those products. I just couldn’t work up the enthusiasm to proceed in those earlier saves, but with the kids & I looking into nuclear power in our co-op session I figured I should get some experience with automating the materials we’ll need to build the power plants and such.
- I’ve done some work on modifying the template I use for rail roundabouts (as described in possibly-excruciating detail previously on this site) to allow for right-turn bypass of the main roundabout loop. No point doing a 270-degree run through the loop when just hanging a right turn will bypass the whole affair. Adding a couple of those to my biggest “traffic jam” site improved throughput considerably, and I haven’t seen a seven-train jam-up since. I need to work out the exact rail placements so I can write up a proper addendum. It’s on my to-do list.
- I love trains, but drones are entering the materials-transport mix. One big selling point? They don’t require anywhere near as much real estate as rail-based solutions. It’s not just the train station, it’s also the railway in, the railway out, and if there are multiple stations at the work site you have to factor in room for splits and merges. Drone platform? Just slap that thing down wherever, provided you aren’t planning to build anything above it. Your biggest worry is making sure one of the pair of platforms receives a steady supply of batteries. My “Tier 8 Products” factory (barely visible in the above screenshot) is fed by three train platforms (one short-haul single-car run bringing nitrogen gas and two dual-car stations for the drones’ batteries and actual materials) and three drone platforms. It’s a busy little place!
- The game increments station numbers as you place them. I built two more stations today (a send and a receive for two of the three newly-produced items named earlier) and one of them showed up as Station 40. I thought, “That can’t be right…” then checked the actual in-game map. Oh. Well then. To be fair, I deleted a few misplaced stations here and there during the process of making this savegame work, but… the actual current tally is much closer to that 40 value than it is to 0, let’s put it that way. No wonder I have traffic jams to sort out, eh?
- Speaking of batteries for drones, yesterday I discovered that my battery factory had stalled out again. As usual, the problem is water recycling. (The waste product of the final stage of making batteries is water, and you can’t just “dump” water, it has to get either reused or packaged & sunk. It’s part of the mid-to-late game challenge, you see.) Thanks to a clever player (MkGalleon on that red “it” site) who put together an All Things Pipe document, I replaced my valve-based water merge with a “variable priority junction,” which is to say a pipe merge where the recycled waste water is pumped through a lower pipe while the “fresh” water comes in from above. Due to a quirk of the fluid mechanics in Satisfactory, this apparently guarantees that the recycled water at the bottom will always get used before the newly extracted water at the top. Time will tell if it works out like that in my game but I’m cautiously optimistic.
- Next up? I need to get Electromagnetic Control Rod production under way. Unlike the three items I started producing this weekend, I need this new item to get made in bulk quantities, which pretty much means I’m going to dedicate a whole new production site, nodes and all, to cranking them out. I might go out to the dune desert for this, which means first I need to run my train network out that-a-way…
And that’s that for now. One of these days I will make a new, full train tour video, but every time I think I’m ready to do that I end up planning another entire batch of new stations. Whoops!