I’ve been playing Satisfactory since December of 2020, from the (mostly) delightful jank of the Early Access days all the way through to the release of 1.0, then 1.1, and now 1.2. In all of that time I’ve never relied upon a wheeled ground vehicle for materials delivery. (We had “Truck-kun” in the first family co-op save, but I had almost nothing to do with that.) I will drive the Explorer around as a fun way to get here-and-there but that’s the extent of my regular interaction with that part of the game. Why? Because programming in a route for a delivery truck was, until very recently, an absolute pain in the keister.

As of this week, however, that part of the game is dramatically improved. But is it actually ready for prime time? Let’s discuss.

Before that, though, a status update: The nuclear power plant is fine, the water recycling problem seems to be resolved (without the need for a “wet concrete” sink, yet) but I had to double up on drones for the Caterium ore supply because one row of manufacturers was starving for Quickwire. I’ll have to keep an eye on that but I think I have it sorted out now. I’m still learning drones, really.

Take note! Drones only have 9 slots of capacity, meaning they can only take 9 stacks of material from one port to another. The port has 18 input and output capacity each but one drone can only fill (or take!) half of that.

I also went down to the Blue Crater site to rip out and replace the haphazard mess of fuel generators I’d attached to my first Rocket Fuel site back when I was in a hurry to get anything working to boost my power supply. This wasn’t really critical work, especially now that the “main” Rocket Fuel site and the nuclear power plant are both fully operational, but it was bothering me. You know how it goes. Along the way I came up with a new blueprint for fuel generators.

It’s stackable, it looks better, it’s easier to connect to power… and I’m probably going to make some more adjustments to it after I finish this first deployment because it still needs a better way to route power between levels. Overall, though, I’m vastly happier with this than with the previous harder-to-place-properly version. Hitting the 100k MW power supply mark was nice, too.

Along the way, during the middle of the week, I tinkered with the new vehicle pathing. Good news! If you’ve ever placed rail lines in Satisfactory, you’re already most of the way to having ground vehicle pathing mastered. It’s almost exactly the same mechanism. Even better: You don’t have to worry about Block and Path Signals.

Yeah… the new vehicle pathing system does that automatically. Which suggests that an improvement along the same lines for trains isn’t outside the realm of possibility. Maybe someday.

Note that you don’t have to place these path guides on the ground like I did. I was just playing around on a workday evening to get a basic feel for it. But it really is almost exactly like running rail: Start at a point, build in a direction until you’re happy with it or it tells you you’re out of reach, end that section, start at that point and move onward until your next break point, etc, etc. There are some key differences, however:

• While there are no materials required (you won’t be going through steel materials like with trains), the only time you can actually see what’s already placed is if you have the build gun out (in “build” or “remove” mode) or are in a wheeled vehicle.
• These paths are directional. One-way roads, each and every one. If you want a dual pathway, you need to first decide which set of road rules to standardize on (right-hand drive or left-hand drive?) and place your pathing segments accordingly. Make sure to space them apart to avoid crashes!
• Splits and merges seem to just be a matter of wherever you can convince the path placement to snap to. It took me a bit of fiddling to get a feel for what I could get away with. I recommend playing with it a bit before you start your first cross-map highway system.
• You will need to make room for the occasional fuel stop, either as part of the materials pickup & drop-off sites or along-the-way for longer runs. (Oh, and figure out how you’re getting fuel to these stations!)
• Choose the right path tool for the right job: There’s a “universal” mode which is suitable for whatever vehicle (tractor, truck, explorer) you might want to run along that path, and then you can pick a per-vehicle-type mode. (Mostly what this changes is your turning radius.) Being aware of this may help you make more optimized routes… or cause weird problems when you forget which mode you were in later on.

One aspect of vehicle pathing that may feel counterintuitive is that a vehicle not already on a path line can’t be told to start automated driving. Even if the path is just a couple meters away, it won’t “go find” that path. It’s a bit like playing with a slot-car race track: Gotta put that pin in the groove to make it go.

If I use this in any serious fashion I’ll probably build actual roadbed blueprints, but initial testing suggests that just slapping down some paths right onto the ground can work fine, provided you don’t get too tricky with the terrain you choose to go over.

Overall, it actually does Just Plain Work. Heck, wheeled vehicles can run on just plain coal, if you don’t mind using some of your available coal supply for that instead of for power plants or making steel. This makes them a (potentially) viable option surprisingly early in the game, as they were always meant to be… if the pathing hadn’t been so awful.

With all that said, I have a couple of quibbles:

• Speeds are weirdly variable. I’ve had the Explorer drop down to a 16km/h crawl on (basically) flat terrain on a (nearly) straight path segment for no reason I can discern.
• When placing path segments it can be frustrating to figure out where your start point is (or was) and where you’re going, because you’re doing all of this from ground level unless you have a lot of available hoverpack power along the entire route. A good overhead vantage point makes a huge difference, but is that going to be an option in your coal-powered early days? Nope.

I’m sure the speed thing is a bug they’ll work out in a later patch, and while I don’t know what the day-to-day solution is for the other… issue… it’s not dire enough to prevent me from playing with this further at some point.

Overall, I’m moderately entertained. Decently well pleased, even. And hey: We got rain back! Did you notice? Ah, rain, I’ve missed you.

Next up: I’ve put off figuring out how to make Superposition Oscillators since hitting Phase 5. I can’t put it off any further. (Well. I can but I shouldn’t.)