I planned to use this website to write more about Satisfactory. (Among other things.) What’s stopping me? All the free time I could be writing, I’m spending in the game. So, my love of the game gets in the way of my plans and principles yet again. Same as it ever was.

Anyway: At just about the 24 hours (in-game time) mark in the new save, I completed my Ironworks.

I’ve been referring to various purpose-built factory sites as [whatever]works since my very first play-through about four years ago. This one’s the best I’ve built yet. Which you’d expect given all the practice over the years, I suppose, but I really do feel good about this result. Let’s get into why.

First off, it’s using nearly all of four “pure” (an indicator of items-per-minute availability) iron ore nodes at the site. In the above image you’ll see some smelters & what-not off to each side. Those are the ore-to-ingots parts of the factory. All of those ingots are sent topside at the main building, where 52 constructors (single input, single output machinery) turn those iron ingots into Iron Plates, Iron Rods, and Screws.

(They don’t bother indicating that the screws are iron despite there being no such thing in the game as, say, steel rods. The collective mind of a game development studio can be hard to read, sometimes.)

Below the constructors deck is the “logistics floor” as the game’s community likes to call this layout element. Basically this is where we hide the mass of conveyor belt “spaghetti” away from the actual factory machinery floors so if you need to go in and do stuff to the machines, you don’t have splitters and mergers and belts all in your way. Also it just makes things look nicer, and that’s not worthless.

I mean, it makes the machinery floors look nicer. The logistics floors are a hot mess.

Wow, right? But unless something goes horribly awry I’ll never need to deal with the logistics floor again. (Honestly I should never need to set foot in any of this again, but that’s beside the point!)

As an aside: Part of the later beautification (once I have some spare time and all of the decorative goodies unlocked) will be the addition of lighting. Having to use the flashlight all the time gets really old.

Once all the materials are sorted and distributed to the correct locations in the logistics floor, they go down via conveyor lifts one more time, directly into the rows of assemblers (dual input, single output machinery) at the main factory floor. Ten assemblers make Reinforced Iron Plates, ten more make Modular Frames, and another five make Rotors.

All of that material gets sent down to the bins out front where I can just walk up and grab whatever I need for the build I’m working on. Later on, there will be some kind of vehicle pickup option(s)… train, drone, truck, not sure which yet. We’ll find out when I get there.

I went from a fresh cold start (with tutorial, even) to a fully functional Ironworks in 24 hours of game time. Not bad. Not bad at all. Wait ’til you see what I get up to next!