I’ve reached endgame for my “ChooChooingScenery” game of Satisfactory, the point where I gear up to send off the final Space Elevator shipment consisting of four products: Assembly Director Systems, Magnetic Field Generators, Nuclear Pasta (which, despite its name, contains zero radioactive source material), and Thermal Propulsion Rockets.

The math is all sorted out, source materials (almost) entirely in production, and I have a vague notion that I’m going to build a gigantic factory in the “dune desert” to house this last great project. But I want to make it nice and neat for a change. I want to build a set of machines that not only fit together well but looks good doing it.

And I can’t do that if I’m not absolutely clear on the exact order of what things I need to go into which other things to make the next things.

Now, the superb website Satisfactory Calculator will make a flowchart for you. Provide the desired output materials and a list of already-produced input items (plus any desired alternate recipe selections) and it’ll tell you how many of which machines you need, plus how they all connect. Problem is, the resulting chart is automatically generated and can look a bit… chaotic:

Which is fine! The website’s already doing a ridiculous amount of heavy lifting, asking it to be human-readable and all tidy would be kind of greedy. And while you can move all those nodes around to achieve greater readability, the only way you can save the results is a screenshot. You can bookmark the URL of the plan itself but every time you load it into the browser it reverts to the automated result.

So. I went looking for diagram-making software so I could make my own flowchart which doesn’t rely on a website. I started with draw.io and… pretty much stayed there. It does what I needed, which isn’t actually all that much when you get right down to it, and could probably do an immense amount of other more complicated things besides, if I had the inclination.

Seriously, take a look at this:

Not bad for a few hours’ work, eh? And yes, before you ask, I did in fact just drag-and-drop images right out of the official Satisfactory Wiki into those objects. (Which… was actually kind of a mistake because those PNG files are rather large and bogged the software down something fierce. Whoops.)

Anyway. I have a spreadsheet, I have a flowchart, I just need to get building. Wish me luck.