There’s a specific cadence to playing through a new Satisfactory save. You build some power infrastructure to meet the current shipment phase’s needs, you unlock milestones to allow you to build the factories to make the materials to meet the current shipment phase’s needs, and eventually you run out of anything else to do but… get the phase shipment sent up to the orbital platform. I’ve arrived at that third step in the waltz once again: It’s time to send up the third space elevator shipment.

Of course, having done this a few times now, I couldn’t let myself just piecemeal the process as I’ve done in (most) previous saves. (“New Clear Plan” is an outlier adn should not be counted.) Not this time around. Go big or go home, right? And FICSIT Inc. isn’t sending a shuttle to let me go back home any time soon, which narrows my options somewhat.

This may be a while.

I’m adopting a philosophy similar to what I aimed for with the “New Clear Plan” save. The Phase 3 parts factory will be a permanent structure, with the caveat that I might shut it down (with a Power Switch) once the shipment’s sent off and I’ve built up stockpiles in advance of Phase 4’s needs. Stockpiling Phase 3 parts should save me some ramp-up time in future Phase projects.

I decided to aim for one per minute each of Modular Engines & Adaptive Control Units and five per minute of Versatile Framework. After some time fiddling around with alternate recipe options in Satisfactory Tools and looking around the map in Satisfactory Calculator for ideal build sites, I decided on what’s known as the “Blue Crater.”

Which is… not easy to build out to from any of the starting areas. But not impossible, especially when one is armed with a Power Tower blueprint, the Zipline tool, and a Jetpack. A couple sessions of scouting, building, rerouting, and rebuilding later and I arrived at the lake at the bottom of the crater.

And then built Power Towers across the lake, ’cause I’m gonna need ’em.

To the east are crude oil nodes. To the south, iron and coal. (Technically also copper, but getting at that is an exercise in Oh Hell No.) To the west… various other things, as well as what might turn into a good railway routing & staging zone. Sure, it’s a challenging place to build, but if I do this right? I’ll only need to build here once.

(Later shipment phases? Those factories will be elsewhere.)

This build plan doesn’t require much copper but it does need some. Luckily there’s a “normal” quality node nearby. Unluckily it’s crammed into a narrow space between a large cliff and an outcropping… which itself features a Caterium node. I live in hope that I never need to tap that one, or at least that if I do it’ll be after drones become available.

While plotting out the solution to the copper products problem, I realized two things:

1. I’m going to need train stations for this anyway, I might as well build a rail system between the copper source and the Blue Crater’s lakeside. Connecting it to the rest of the map can be a later project. Like, “After this Phase 3 factory is running and I need to deliver the results to the Space Elevator” later.
2. I only need barely more than half of what this copper node can normally supply, so why not… turn the rest into my new “depot source” production? This will allow me to shut down the half-assed slapdash original copper products site, and this one will include an Awesome Sink so that excess production can be turned into sweet, sweet shop tickets.

While routing the train lines down through the weird fungal-growth-looking rocky shelves wasn’t easy, this is hardly my first time threading the map’s needles with railways. Having my spiral railway blueprints from the previous save helped a bit. Within a single play session I had most of what’s needed in place.

Then came the new copperworks. I routed raw ore to a set of Smelters on the top floor of a building placed over the edge of the cliff leading down to the crater. The resulting copper ingots go to the bottom floor to be fed into Constructors making Wire, Copper Sheets, and Cable, which are all directed one floor upward (kind of: they go back down to the lower logistics floor to be collected into one unified belt per product, which then go to the upper logistics floor) where a bunch of belts and Smart Splitters provide some routing logic:

• Copper Sheets and Wire are directed to storage bins that serve as a buffer for the train station’s loading platforms. If those get full, overflow to:
• Copper Sheets, Wire, and Cable are directed to Dimensional Depot units to provide ready availability of material wherever the Pioneer happens to be on the world map. If those are full, overflow to:
• An Awesome Sink awaits all produced material with nowhere else to go, allowing for a steady stream of shop ticket production.

And just like with the Heavy Modular Frame factory, I included a personnel elevator and used my fun new “hidden power pole” blueprint to keep dangling wires as out-of-sight as possible. This time I learned something about the personnel elevator: There’s a minimum spacing between floor stops.

I tried to place a stop at the 4 meter mark, so one “wall height” above the lowest stop already in place. It wouldn’t let me, instead insisting on a minimum 1m spacing. So I made the old 4m stop into the new 0m stop and simply changed how I’ll enter/exit the building. Problem solved!

With the new copperworks online (and the old one deactivated, its Dimensional Depots “harvested” for the new site), I can concentrate on the next step in this big, messy build.

You know… tomorrow or so. I could use a break.