The second-best time, I’ve learned, to plan your Phase 4 shipment production for the Space Elevator in Satisfactory is about 250 hours into your session. The best time to plan your Phase 4 yadda yadda is before you start the game.

So that’s what I spent the bulk of the middle of my Saturday doing. Behold:

This isn’t tracking everything I’m going to produce through the entire game, just the elevator shipment stuff. The goal here is to make sure I’m always making enough of a specific list of things that when each “Phase” hits and it’s time to make Space Elevator shipments, all I need to do is route the relevant materials to the Space Elevator Shipment Factory and watch the magic happen. If all goes well, this will be orders of magnitude less frustrating than my “Final Destination” project turned out in my previous savegame.

As a bonus: I worked out which alternate recipes I want to use along the way, at least for everything directly related to elevator shipments.

And yes, I’ve come up with the name for the upcoming save. In order, my solo saves are named:

1. Rocky Start (the one where I made a whole lot of new-player mistakes, on purpose)
2. eSthetics (the one where I tried to learn to make things look nicer)
3. ChooChooingScenery (the one about trains, and also my first attempts at nuclear power and the Phase 4 shipment)
4. New Clear Plan (the one about planning ahead, and also doing nuclear power bigger & better)

I’ll be kicking things off… soon-ish. (I’m debating with myself whether I want to wait until after FICSMAS ends later this month or just ignore the event entirely. Eh. Six of one, half dozen of the other.)