Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: You’re gearing up to start a new factory project. In the process of making sure you have enough materials to achieve the desired output, it comes to light that not only is there not enough already produced but in order to meet the supply that your desired output demands, you’re going to have to engage in a large transportation infrastructure build-out to get everything from everywhere to the best possible build site. “If I had a nickel,” as the meme goes.

And that’s how I ended up, this weekend, embarking on yet another large rail-network expansion project.

In the pre-1.0 days, conventional wisdom held that the Northern Forest, especially near what I always refer to as “Iron Heights” (the spot with the four pure iron nodes and two pure copper nodes tightly clustered) was the ideal starting location, especially since back then you also had plentiful quartz, coal, caterium, and even sulfur within fairly close proximity. With 1.0 and subsequent point releases, however, there are several arguments against this plan:

1. The quartz is gone, the coal is gone, half the caterium is gone (and the other half is under a rock that you need explosives to remove), most of the sulfur is gone. Iron Heights is still great for iron and copper (and limestone, but limestone is nearly everywhere). But it’s no longer the “top 1 of 1 starting spots on the map,” as my son quipped recently.
2. I no longer believe that starting out right on top of the strongest possible resource nodes makes sense, as your early factories are meant to be replaced with more-capable versions as your technology level increases. You build a factory at Iron Heights when you hit a project that needs something approaching 2000+ per minute of iron ore supply.
3. Building in the Northern Forest sucks.

Each of the biomes comes with challenges, since Coffee Stain Studios’ developers are good at their jobs. The Dune Desert has a lot of good-quality ore but also limited water, plus the entire ground level is wavy as heck. The Grasslands have low quality nodes plus a lot of “whoops, don’t walk there, you’ll fall off the world” hazards. (Which seems an odd thing to do for the ostensible “beginner” area, but what do I know?)

The Northern Forest? It’s packed full of hills, and trees, and weird “ribs of the earth” terrain features, and more hills, and gaping chasms, and precipitous drops, and rock piles, oh and also some hills. There are only a few decently-sized flat areas in the whole biome, and the best one is an area bordered by iron, copper, and limestone deposits. That’s it: There’s one decent spot to build a normal-looking factory. In the entire biome. Anything else you want to build in that space, you’re fighting the terrain the entire way.

And that’s to say nothing of transportation. The best way to move bulk goods in the quantities these quality nodes support is by train, and getting railways & train stations routed and situated in the Northern Forest is… a challenge.

Which leads me back to my project for the next N gaming sessions: I need to get a train network expansion built through the entire length of the Northern Forest, connecting to the rest of my rail network at each end. To the east, the hub connection is sited almost directly upon the three quartz nodes I need to harvest for the Crystal Oscillators that the Superposition Oscillators require. This plan is part of what’s going on in that annotated Satisfactory Calculator screenshot at the top of this post.

(Oh, yeah: Remember how proud I was of my west coast Crystal Os site? Apparently I didn’t make it beefy enough. Which is how I ended up in today’s mess.)

I’m starting at a roundabout just outside the western boundary of the Northern Forest and building eastward. Along the way I’ll place some roundabouts to allow branching off and possibly interconnecting lines to the north or south, if that ends up being feasible and/or desirable. (Going north means running spiral tracks downward into the canyon. Going south means connecting up somewhere along the rail line running through my first Rocket Fuel site. Neither of these would be simple. But they might become required. We’ll see.)

What’s amusing me about this build is that it reminds me of years ago when I just slapped some rails onto a bunch of hovering sloped foundations and called it “good enough,” going through almost exactly the same airspace.

I started several saves (solo and co-op) in the Northern Forest back in my early years playing Satisfactory so in one way, this feels like “coming home.” But in every other way, this feels like an annoying chore that I wish I didn’t need to plow through.

But I do, so I shall.