Since the inception of the Final Destination site project in my current solo Satisfactory game, I knew I was going to make “content” out of it. (Sorry, Patrick Willems.) There was always going to be a tour, it was just a question of what format the tour would take. I went back and forth on whether to make it a long post with lots of pictures or just record a tour video and put text bits in it. Both options have merits and downsides, and the internal debate allowed me to put off doing anything for several weeks even after (more-or-less) completing the build.

Yesterday I woke up and decided, it’s time to record a video. Thus, the following:

Now, some notes:

1. In the video it states that I’d put a link to the flowchart in the description. Turns out, Google requires ID validation before you can add a simple hyperlink. As in “please take a picture of your photo ID with your phone” validation. Yeah, no.
2. Awfully quiet, isn’t it? I goofed up when recording the footage, saving the audio track in a format that Davinci Resolve doesn’t like. By the time I realized my mistake I was about halfway through the edit process.
3. As noted in the video, I didn’t make the under-floor belting areas part of the tour (except brief glimpses, mostly on accident). This is mostly because those views would have been dark and boring. It’s kind of a shame, though, because I’m actually proud of some of the work I did on hiding “the spaghetti” from the “main” view of someone touring the factory floors.
4. I probably didn’t need to edit out the bit where I turned off auto-saves, because by the time I got hit with an auto-save I was nearly done recording footage anyway. (And if it’d happened a second time I could’ve just sliced out the “freeze” a second time.) Live and learn, I guess. As it stands the video suggests that my computer can perform a game save in a fraction of a second! The truth is, sadly, much… chuggier. Despite Coffee Stain Studios claiming that Update 8 features “80-90% speed improvement” on save file creation. Bzzt!
5. Davinci Resolve lets me play with animating text (positioning, zoom, etc) and I love that about it, but I lost an hour yesterday because somehow between the last time I played with that feature and this time, the process changed just enough to throw off my workflow. It’s sorted out now and I’ve made notes for future reference… provided those notes hold true by then.
6. One of these days I want to find somewhere better than YouTube for this kind of thing. I know PeerTube exists but the last time I looked into it, the service seemed not-ready-for-prime-time. (There’s a rant about how well the “fediverse” model is working out in general, but that’s for another day.)

Once the four products are completed and shipped off I will probably mothball this save and prepare to start a new solo game. Sure, there’s beautification to be done and so on, but I’ve used up most of the good nodes and build locations and in order to improve any part of my sprawling, train-integrated factory network I’d have to tear down large chunks of it and rebuild them from the ground up. At this point it makes more sense to take the lessons from this save into the next one instead.

I hope you enjoy my little annotated tour video. If there’s anything you’d like me to show off or describe in further detail or what-have-you, let me know in the comments!