Fifteen minutes to record, four hours to edit and add a slew of text cards, and half an hour to convince YouTube to post it and let me select a thumbnail of my own choosing instead of picking one of the three automated options.
My ongoing “save game” wherein I play with design elements and such is called “eSthetics” because I’m an absolute dork. I know, you’re all shocked & amazed.
I didn’t want the trouble of recording, cleaning up, and editing a voiceover track so the audio is just what’s in the game footage itself. Also, I thought the idea of going all “silent movie text gags” with title cards would be fun (and I was right). I’m not sure which method I’ll settle on if I do more of these, but I’m glad to get some practice under my belt with this particular style.
Forgive me, FICSIT Inc, for I have sinned. Instead of proceeding onward with my existing resource-harvesting goods-manufacturing project, I have started anew with a fresh world. Oddly enough, it looks almost exactly like the old one…
From such humble beginnings shall a continent-wide rail network grow.
All kidding aside, what happened? Trains happened. Which is to say, I decided that I wanted to take trains “seriously” and make a proper rail network. (My previous savegame ended up more devoted to drones than trains, and that went… only partly well.) In order to make a rail network possible in that save, though, would’ve involved ripping out almost everything I’d already built. Ha ha, no thank you.
Update 6’s new skybox is amazing. Absolutely amazing. And the game was already extremely pretty before!
So here I am, climbing the tech tree again. Grubbing around for every blade of grass and stick of wood to power my meager collection of equipment. Fighting off the hostile fauna with an electrically-charged stick. And so forth.
Current status: I sent off my first Space Elevator shipment, unlocked coal power, and have accumulated enough material to commence building my first actual power plant.
There are reasons not to start near what I call Iron Heights in the northern forest, but they aren’t particularly compelling reasons, let’s be honest.
I got this done, start to finish, in the span of about a week. This included taking yesterday off from work (as an ostensible mental health day, which I definitely needed) to hunker down & finish adding clips, editing footage down to a somewhat-reasonable 39 minutes, and recording my voice-over.
This meant listening to my recorded voice bits repeatedly until everything was trimmed down and slotted into place. It was every bit as cringe-inducing as you suspect.
At any rate, here you go:
All things being equal? I’m actually proud of this one. I took the fact that the game loaded in with a reset/default player avatar and used that to create a kind of narrative path for the video to follow. During the edit, I discovered a couple of other fun things to do along the way.
It could be better, but I could’ve done much worse, too. Go, me.
I picked Satisfactory back up a couple of months ago in anticipation of the Update 6 patch landing on the Early Access branch. Instead of starting yet another new save, however, I decided to keep going on the save I started back before Update 4 landed. This neatly avoided having to climb the tech tree all over again, not to mention it takes advantage of the fact that I deliberately left the Spire Coast region alone the entire time so far. (The developers warned everyone that major map changes were coming to that area.)
Update 6 and its quality-of-life improvements arrived at the same time that I unlocked my very first ever “Turbofuel” recipe. I needed more electrical supply anyway (the lines on my power graphs criss-crossed a lot more than I was really comfortable with) so I decided to try out the more potent variety of fuel generation.
Gus? Buddy? You know that the Blender is not your friend, right? No, no you don’t.
I’ve been back on my Satisfactory you-know-what since late last year with no sign of letting up, aided by the kick-off of a co-op savegame with my daughter, who saw me streaming the game one day and expressed some interest. As of last night our multiplayer savegame is at the furthest point along the tech progression I’ve ever been in the game, and today that makes me ponder the differences between the solo Satisfactory game experience and the cooperative.
So let’s talk about co-op play’s pros and cons. (Not to be mistaken for prose and cones.)
After taking a few months off from the game due to a bug with the part of the game I was most excited to play with (drones had a nasty habit of using far more batteries than they were supposed to unless you stayed close by the drone port at all times), once Coffee Stain (the game studio) started showing off what was coming with the Update 5 milestone release I found myself compelled to start a whole new save game.
(You name your “save” which is basically the name of an ongoing session, and then you name the actual save points within that “save,” and yes that gets confusing sometimes.)
Thus I am, one could say, back on my B.S.
The Space Elevator will probably stay there for the duration of this save, but everything around it is subject to demolition once I get to the point of being able to build things “better.”(more…)
