Last week I completed production on the second-to-last thing I need to make all four Phase 4 shipment products. This week I completed the actual facilities which are manufacturing all four Phase 4 shipment products. Just a few hours of work… if you don’t think too long or hard about the fact that I’m at 219 hours into this save and there’s about an hour to go before I pull the lever to send everything skyward.

But I’m going to rest on my laurels for a moment anyway.

Here’s the funny thing about the Space Elevator shipment parts: Sure, they’re expensive… but they’re (mostly) made out of stuff you should already be making. This includes “last phase’s stuff.” That Phase 3 factory from however-long-ago? I just let it sit dormant for a few months until it was time to provide Versatile Frameworks, Adaptive Control Units, and Modular Engines for the Phase 4 parts. Then it was just a matter of building all the other bits that go into Phase 4 parts… that I also need for every other part of future milestones, plus the impending nuclear power plant, never mind the final shipment who-knows-when. Turbo Motors and Cooling Systems and Radio Control Units and Fused Modular frames? Need ’em all anyway. Completing projects like the Supercomputers (And Friends) site a while ago contributed to this project, too.¹

Which is a long way of saying that all those hours upon hours of work doing stuff I needed to do anyway resulted in the actual production of the Phase 4 parts requiring surprisingly little effort.

Well. Almost.

In order to produce Nuclear Pasta, I needed 32 refineries’ worth of copper ingots (using the “pure” recipe) to feed four constructors making Copper Powder. Which has literally no other use than to make Nuclear Pasta, a Phase 4-and-5 shipment product.

So that took a little while.

The rest of the Phase 4 build was remarkably simple: Slap down a couple of train stations, place a few assemblers and/or manufacturers, route inputs and outputs, and that’s that. It’s not often that I can bash out an entire new production line in the time between dinner and bedtime, and this week I did that twice. Lining up all the dominoes takes ages. Tapping over the first one in the sequence sure goes quick, though.

Now, let’s be clear: I’m not producing massive amounts. All four products are in the “about one per minute” range. I don’t care about speed, not for this stuff. It’s just a matter of filling the bins, there’s no throughput metric beyond my own patience… and given that Phase 4’s requirements are much, much lower than they were when Satisfactory was still in Early Access? Things are going plenty fast enough. Heck, in the time it took me to finish the “Copper Powder Works” factory for the Nuclear Pasta, two of the other products’ Space Elevator bins completely filled up. I’m done with those already! (Until Phase 5, obviously.)

If you came here looking for useful advice (beyond “make sure you produce enough stuff that pivoting to Phase Shipment work will be a relative breeze”), here’s a tip: Consider how you’re going to get stuff to the Space Elevator as far in advance as you can. I, for instance, slapped down a train station with three freight platforms back when I was preparing to deliver the Phase 3 stuff. Which was great… for Phase 3. There are four lights items each in Phases 4 & 5. Whoops.

Okay, fine, that station isn’t a total write-off. The Space Elevator is now my “taxi” train’s home base… which also solved the problem of finding an aesthetically-pleasing way to route and place a dedicated, convenient taxi platform elsewhere. So that more-or-less worked out.

Instead, for final delivery (and intermediate logistics) I pivoted to… drones!

This save is by far the furthest I’ve gone into relying on drone-based goods transportation. This coincides interestingly with my forays into using the Blueprint Designer for things that aren’t railway-related. (For a change.) I built a set of modular blueprints for creating drone towers. The base includes buffer bins for the inputs & outputs, power routing, and signage. It’s just a matter of stacking the blueprints, connecting the power plugs, running conveyor lifts (input, output, and fuel) and it’s all set!

I realized yesterday that there’s a minor design flaw in this system. I have buffer bins for all three inputs and outputs… but that means I’m hoarding 24 entire stacks’ worth of fuel for each one of these towers. “Big deal!” you may say, but good drone fuel isn’t cheap. It is efficient, though. So unless for some reason I want to use one of the lesser fuel options, all that buffer bin is doing is keeping valuable fuel out of reach of other drone ports that might need it more. If a cross-map jaunt takes, say, ten Packaged Rocket Fuel per round trip and there’s 100 waiting in the fuel port of the home platform itself, do I really need 2400 more piled up in the base of the tower below?

No, I do not. That could be going elsewhere, instead of uselessly draining my supply chain. It’d take quite a while to burn through 2400 Packaged Rocket Fuel even if the supply ran out for some reason. This is not efficiency! So, I have another modification to make to my drone tower base blueprint.

In my defense, I’m (kind of) new to using drones on an industrial scale rather than one-or-two here-and-there. I will undoubtedly make further goofs. Learning!

At any rate, I’ll probably send off the Phase 4 shipment later this week and think about what to push onward to next. Odds are, it’ll be nuclear power… but I haven’t decided yet.

Stay safe out there, fellow Pioneers!

1. Side note: Between this save and the current family co-op game, I’m convinced that my previous two saves were built on a faulty premise. The trick isn’t to build The Phactory (mega factory for all Phase parts), the trick is to build such that you have the materials to do whatever you want, wherever you want to do it. ↩︎