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.

Here’s how that turned out.

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.

While I’ve not been writing about the game much, I still play at least once per week on my own game and usually once per week in a cooperative game session with my son. I’m at what could be considered the “late” stage of the game, having sent off the third big Space Elevator shipment and unlocking access to the aluminum and nuclear tiers.

This is where things go from “moderately complex” to “rather fiendishly complex,” and the scale gets to the point where you can’t simply expect to make a variety of products from one resource node, let alone one group of resource nodes.

Case in point? Crystal Oscillators.

I’ve been working on a railroad. Not all the live-long day, mind you, but I did put in a lot of hours over this past weekend on a very silly project in Satisfactory. You see, I just shipped off the third Space Elevator bundle and unlocked Tier 7… but the forthcoming game patch called Update 4 is supposed to do exciting things to the tech at that level so I don’t want to actually build anything from that tier yet. Either I need to shelve the game for the duration (yeah, right) or find something to work on that doesn’t involve new tech.

I decided, “Oh hey, let’s spend our vacation week doing a silly rail project.” (I’ll have more on that later this week.) Along the way I worked out a couple of useful techniques that I thought I’d share with the group as a sort of follow-up to the previous big post about the game’s monorail tech.