I made significant progress this week in my solo Satisfactory save.

And I did so with trains and trucks.

Previously I’d completed a whole lot of railroading and sourced the quartz as well as the iron and copper ingots required for a 2nd Crystal Oscillators site. Well, that’s built now.

With that operational, I bopped over to the crude oil fracking site looking out over the Crater Lakes area and used the oil to make sufficient Diamonds for the Superposition Oscillators production line.

And then, well… this weekend I slapped together the Superposition Oscillators production site. Which sounds impressive but it was really only about a half dozen machines. They’re just… you know… big and complicated machines. But they emit really neat glowy effects, so there’s that.

Funny thing, though: I ended up putting the Super Os site somewhat closer to the Diamonds production than would make for very efficient use of drones (they’d spend more time landing and taking off than actually, you know, flying back and forth) and cramming a train station into that location was even less appealing. After a few moments’ consideration, a plan was born: The first actual in-production use of wheeled vehicles in any of my solo saves!

I’m not joking: I’ve literally never used trucks to deliver materials automatically for a production facility in a solo save during all the years I’ve been at this game. The kids and I had “Truck-kun” in our previous Early Access save… and it was a finicky pain in the ass, which is why we didn’t have it doing anything particularly… load-bearing. Now, with the improved pathing in the 1.2 update, I figured it was time to use a wheeled vehicle in its most optimal mode: Modest amounts of materials delivered across a modest distance at… very modest speeds.

(The truck seems to top out at about 30kph… on a flat straight road… with no obstacles or traffic ahead. It can drive faster, it just… doesn’t. One suspects a bug in the new code.)

To be clear, the results of my roadway build project are extremely slapdash. This first time out I’m more interested in function over aesthetics, featuring no precious design elements I might have to rip out again as I worked through the learning process. And I did learn some things:

1. Place all truck stations for the route circuit first. This gives you a starting point for your path segments and forces you to figure out the materials and fuel logistics before laying a bunch of asphalt. Building a path segment into a completely unconnected truck station can give weird results. Always have your “out” segment (snapped to the “loading point” indicator of the station) placed before you connect the “in” path segment to the station. (I think the stations default to a Left To Right path orientation and I was, of course, going the other direction for this first build.)
2. Trucks don’t have the tightest of turning radius, so you can’t expect to place an L-shaped run of single foundations and have your truck navigate that corner safely. Keep that inverse triangle half-foundation piece in your hotbar (unlockable in the Awesome Shop if you haven’t already bought all the goodies) for dealing with the inside corners. You can thank me later.
3. Don’t try to start a path segment near the edge of the rearmost foundation tile of a row if it hangs out over empty space. (This is a thing you might try to do as you’re building out your route.) The game will give you an error and disallow placement. It seems to boil down to: If the truck’s back end would be hanging off the back of the foundation tile when it’s sitting on your starting point, then the placement will be disallowed. Honestly? I recommend completing the foundation tile placement for the entire route before doing any path segment work.
4. Check the fuel readout from the truck’s configuration console before turning on autopilot. Is the truck going to make the full round trip from the fuel provided by one station or do you need to source a fuel supply for any other station(s) on the route? The nice thing is, the game does tell you up-front how much fuel will get used before you embark on your first circuit. (My first loop? About 1 Rocket Fuel per full round trip. I’m okay with that!)
5. If you’re going to make a shared roadway network for multiple sets of trucks and stations, make sure to place stations slightly offset away from the “main” roadway so as to prevent accidental traffic jams. Remember, the game’s navigation logic will take care of the traffic automatically, which means “path” and “block” signals like in rail networks are sort of… hidden but automatically placed, if you want to think of it that way. NOTE: Splits seem to be locked to originating at the start of an existing path segment, so choose your “start/end” points accordingly. (Joining/merging seems to… not care about that? YMMV. I may be wrong about all of this, too.)

Other than that… I don’t know yet. It’s still early days for “actually functional truck logistics.”

As for me, I finally unlocked the penultimate milestone in the Hub’s control board (Spatial Energy Regulation) and what remains is… the Mk3 Blueprint Designer unlock.

And making the final Phase 5 products, of course. Welcome to the actual endgame, me!