u/Inquisition8

I 'beat' this game back in June and put it down since as I was just too lazy to write a review, but with Update 2 on the horizon I wanted to give some thoughts. I think this game has a LOT of potential, but it also has some serious issues along with a significant lack of identity. I've done several playthroughs and the one where I maxed all the buildings took ~300 hours, with ~100 hours of 'active' playtime and ~200 hours of afk time while stuff cooked. Some thoughts in no particular order:

• The factory building aspect is good and the complexity provides a lot of depth, but it is very far away from Satisfactory-level building (maybe years away) for reasons I will discuss later. As such, it's a bit of a hybrid game where factory building is one of several aspects, but not THE main aspect. I'm actually not sure what the main aspect is.
• The vermin are too basic, nonthreatening, and only 'exciting' when there's either a massive swarm or a goliath, which is the only moderately interesting enemy. There's a huge missed opportunity for human NPCs (like rogue scientists) and a more sophisticated living environment.
• The survival aspect of the game is nonexistent. The rupture is fine as a mechanic, but stamina is easily overcome with items and food/water is just a nuisance that is likewise easily overcome with capsules (1 of each every hour), which are very easy to make en masse once you get to the southeast gigabasin. As such, all other consumables are (currently) completely useless.
• The weapons are generally a bit of a joke. There's exactly 1 loadout for the AR that will suit all your needs, with some very situational use for 1 specific loadout for the MG. Everything else may as well not exist.
• The main 'quest' is cool, but the game desperately needs more of this. There's a giant ruined ship/moon/thing in the sky and we're building parts to go into space, so what's up with that? Where's the STORY?? Are we going to continue upgrading the world engine? I sure hope so.
• The base defense aspect could be a huge differentiator for this game, but it is very basic and bad in a number of ways. After a few upgrades, your core is either hit and instantly destroyed, or nothing comes close. Just set up a bunch of T2 turrets and everything melts. There's no strategy, no walls, and no way to prevent the long-range enemies from hitting your core aside from just killing them as soon as they spawn. There's also no reason (currently) to keep upgrading your core past 4-5. This entire mechanic is a nuisance at this point, creating a scenario where you just create a core to upgrade far away from everything else and just teleport there sometimes.
• There is no long-term progression system. I know it's weird to say that given that you can get 300 hours into it, but this type of game does lend itself towards a 'forever grind'.
• There's lots of jankiness due to a pull system. Calculations go 'off' sometimes (especially with roundabouts), causing entire lines to stop across multiple bases for no real reason at random intervals requiring a manual dump across multiple lines. If/when your base gets complex enough, you will experience this.

THE PERFORMANCE IS ABYSMAL.

If any devs read this at all, please, I implore you, strongly consider switching to a push system before it's too late. You are still early on in development. The calculations required to run a complex pull system are several orders of magnitude more complex and this quickly and EXPONENTIALLY destroys game performance. This is not about base size in a linear sense, but rather about base complexity. I have a beefy system (13th Gen i7, RTX 4080, 32GB RAM) and this game gets progressively worse and worse the more complex a base becomes, unlike any other game I've played.

I don't want to hear 'it's a you issue' or 'it's your system' or some other handwave variation of 'it's not the game'. It is 100% the game (Satisfactory runs smooth as butter with 100x the geometry) and you will see this for yourself once you exceed a certain threshold. For me that threshold was a ~9mb save file with a full endgame base.

I'm convinced this issue is due to exponentially increasing calculations. See, in a push system, even if you want to create components that go all the way from A > Z, it's always A > B until stop, B > C until stop, etc. Z doesn't care about A or B or X. Z only cares about Y.

In a pull system, Z cares about A-Y and has to make a full determination across this entire chain for EVERY requested piece, balancing and prioritizing it along with every other full-chain determination being made. This is absolute nonsense. I have no idea why the devs decided to code it this way, but it will not work. In a push system, adding a single extra production unit adds 1 decision. In a pull system, adding a single production unit could add 30, 40, 50+ decisions, which are further compounded by a prioritization decision tree.

Anyway, hope ya'll can cook because you have something potentially really good on your hands, but unless you fix the performance the game will be stuck exactly where it is now regardless of how much you add.

Decided to start another world (my final-FINAL one I promise) in 1.2. 0.25x on everything, all pure nodes, +advanced resources ratio. Apparently I can just get through all the phases without leaving the starter area, which leaves the entirety of the map ready for mega builds. 30hrs in already midway through phase 4 is crazy. The screenshot is oil, 2x copper, coal, 2x sulfur, bauxite, SAM all right there. The starting location alone has everything except uranium which is fortunately a bit further out (had to reload a few times to avoid having uranium right at spawn). I'm gonna enjoy this!

This was a huge PITA in 0.4 because although you could alt-click to check the radius by hovering over a node on the skill tree (and later by hovering over the highlight-able text on the item), now you can actually have the radius up in perpetuity. You still have to have the presence window open, but can drag it around (as you see above). I don't play like this much, but it's good for a while to get a feel for what your presence actually is (as a minion player). NICE (this was not present in 0.4 in this way). Try it out!

Don't sleep on the wolfram arcs, they are goated for building! Also, there's reasonable stability expansion room from last pillar - I think maybe 5 tiles? I have an even better location/idea for higher level core upgrade, with the goal being that goliaths can't get up there. The one shown here is in the starter area, which is a pretty good setup for core defense (tip: have it as an isolated base with a teleporter in and only visit it when you feel like having a fight). Turrets are auto fed from a bullet generator with plenty of overflow storage. The new turrets go brrrr ... pretty cool, I don't have to fight anymore can just watch.

Tit island filled up quick! Guess that's pve for you (but game is ded)

Short version is annoying griefer scout shows up with thumpers and just keeps bringing up the worm. No one gets eaten, but it's annoying. Not to mention grav grenades/activating shields. I don't know what to do about the latter, but can we just disable thumpers in pve dd? I've never used one for pve purposes, ever, so it really does nothing here. Eventually they'll get bored I think, so maybe we just wait it out ... I dunno, I was having fun in general but gnats will be gnats I guess.

Took just over 15 hours on this 'final' playthrough to activate the World Engine, so it's time to say goodbye to the starter base. Rushed teleporter and occasionally come back here to add more cargo senders, but it's now just a remote outpost. There is an area on the map, the farthest southeast that you can go (blocked by radiation initially), which is unlike any other.

It is a massive basin, almost entirely flat, and has literally every resource except powerium (which you can see off in the distance in screenshot #2, which is the entry point to the basin). This is where I'm setting up my mega base. It is loaded with multiple pure nodes of every kind, the enemies are mostly light although there are a couple goliath spawns, but this is all fixed by gridding out the area with cores which eliminates respawns (I estimate it will take about 15-20 cores to fully grid it out). Don't sleep on this area, it is worth the 3km trek from the starting area (just make sure you have teleporter set up because you do NOT want to make that run back ever). I cannot overstate how much real estate is available here and since the game does not allow for vertical building or significant height adjustments, you really do need a flat zone to make your dreams come true, and this is it!

This is a 6hr build, level 5-7 corps, last screenshot is 9hrs in, all parts done up to mega press.

Area just north of spawn, right at the first radar tower. This area is GOATED. 4 nodes of your basics - titanium, wolfram, calcium, and helium just across the hill (slight north), very easy to run a line and don't have to fight anything. Zone is very flat with lots of room, so you can easily triangulate/converge all your resources into the center. Plenty of meteor cores and ignitium right on your doorstep. No need to worry about sulfur (not required for power cell recipe).

I've tried different starting areas and this is just IT for me. This is not my first playthrough, but it's my 'final' one as I've now identified where to set up my pre-engine base and then endgame megabase. Some things I've learned/do:

- I don't use a planner. The stuff makes sense after you're played for a while and trying to math it out pre-endgame seems like a total waste. Most things are 1:1, some are 2:1 and a few 4:1 mainly based on the purity of ore node you're starting with.

- I make 2 of every production facility, with 3 storage units (mega base will be completely different setup) in-between. This allows for buffer which I think is really important in a pull system, as well as providing opportunity to split your resources when needed as well as load balance. If you have a 3x2 storage setup, you can run lines between them to load balance as needed, just off of feel as you will see which containers are empty vs. not.

- 4 cores is what I have total, slightly overlapping each other. Connect everything with foundations so the power grid is shared, then place power at the lesser used cores.

- Not upgrading any cores until later and will only do so with an isolated far away core to hit level 4 for the upgraded boosters. The base defense stuff is kind of fun but gets really annoying after a while. I'd rather do it on my terms.

- THE MATH FALLS APART. There are too many nuanced things here that make the math 'dirty'. There are slight delays between start/stop, multiple items on rails will cause lag that will resolve itself but only stays resolved if you produce non-stop (which you don't), senders/receivers got a welcome change but there's still a delay you can't really account for well, just all in all I think this is more of a 'feel it out' game due to its pull nature.

Just for context - have about 125hrs clocked in SR, 1k hours in Satisfactory. Moderately OCD. Had to rethink my approach due to pull system and having to run different items on a single rail.

Biggest thing for me out of all this was buffering production in-between buildings with sufficient overflow storage, otherwise you will 100% hit some sort of massive bottleneck at level 10+.

Building games are fun, there are always neat little ways to go where you want. Nothing special here because I got tagged by radiation before I could get too far, but from the 10 or so dashes I could get the map is quite unfinished past the borders. Not really usable for anything, but you can force clip yourself through geometry with some 'tactics' teehee.

This is at ~50 hours in, main base, everything is fully automated up to level 10 corps (working on 11+ but that instantly hits a production wall by comparison). There's a calcium base off in the distance that's decently built out and 3 satellite bases (sulfur, helium, geothite). I gave up on trying to make it clean or scalable. As a 1k hour Satisfactory player I've had to unlearn a lot since this game is fundamentally different in its factory building approach. I'm also of the opinion that scaling is a) completely unnecessary until level 10+ and b) all goes out the window once you do finally max out the corps/'quests' and get the tier 2 production units. So, I'm saving any scaling attempts beyond what's necessary until I've maxed everything out.

It seems the game incentivizes having a bunch of satellite bases and just crisscrossing everything with loads of cargo senders/receivers, so any kind of methodical planning just goes poof. I think this is fine with the update 1 change to how they work and my satellite bases are looking much cleaner!

Now if only the turrets weren't so dumb I might want to upgrade more of my cores...