Feel completely stuck after 80 hours, that it’s the first time I faced problems and don’t know what to do, how to do
After 80 hours of playtime I feel completely stuck and paralyzed, like I never even played the game, it’s so weird. Everything went great for the first 80 h and then quickly spiraled into shit.
I unlocked Hub lvl 6 and now I need to complete Phase 3 of the Space Elevator to get access to Hub upgrades 7+. I have to use the new machine called the Manufacturer, and I realized I’m not ready. I can’t just place it and make it produce whatever Phase 3 needs. I have one starting base and it’s so random, so inefficient, most machines glow yellow (bottleneck — I still don’t know how to do math in this game). I have to manually feed some machines or they just stop for a while. Belts don’t move smoothly, completely random pace. It’s a mess, 80 hours down the drain. Well, I never played complex games like this in my life... I was just focusing on Hub levels, did some manual crafting and whatnot, now I regret everything, I’m stuck.
Can you give me tips, what’s the plan now? I see players love trains, I’ve unlocked them, but it feels impossible for me to build them, idk how to even start. I checked a few youtube videos, but it’s just pro-players with thousands of hours in the game flexing with their PhD in construction and architecture. “Just make this blueprint: place the Foundation piece, lock in, nudge 7 times to the left, rotate, nudge 12 times up and then 4 to the right…” Like... there’s no way I could repeat that, I’m not creative enough or patient enough to make these blueprints, but I also don’t want to download someone’s, I want an honest work, just much simpler. I couldn’t find anything simple on youtube. How do most people even build railways? I don’t care about beauty, I just want to get past the current phase of the game...
These youtubers, even with their custom-made, pre-built blueprints, still do a ton of manual fiddling to make railway turns, slopes, elevations etc, it looks so scary, I feel like I just can’t do any of these things :( Can you recommend anything? Should I just put down a basic Foundation 4m, climb the highest hill on the map and start placing these Foundations in the air around the map? Or how the heck should I approach this?
What should I even do first: build railways and make trains deliver oil and coal and SAM and whatever else to one place, and then build the base from scratch? Because as I said, I can’t imagine how to make Manufacturers work in my current random, chaotic, inefficient setup. This setup makes no sense, I simply did whatever I needed at the moment to complete the Hub upgrades, including manual feeding and crafting. I can't even walk around the base, everything is packed together, I can only slowly jetpack over it, so annoying.
How can I rebuild everything from scratch now? All in one place again, or somehow split everything? I know you all recommend the Calculator websites and Steam app, I tried them, but again, to get Manufacturers producing stuff for Phase 3, these calculators create such complicated chains out of like 50 items, I can’t imagine how to follow it and put it together in one huge chain. Should I maybe build one base for everything that comes from Iron Ore, in another place - everything that comes from Copper, and in another place - machines that only make stuff from Coal, etc? But what about higher-tier items that need a mix of completely different resources from different parts of the map? Like what if one item in the Manufacturer needs coal, plastic (so oil), and iron ore at the same time? This is what trains are for, I guess?
But again, since my one and only base is no use at all, how on earth do I get my crap together and build everything from scratch? I won’t even have enough inventory space for all the dismantled materials? And I have no trains yet... and don’t have the hover pack for building said railways... it’s a vicious cycle. What do I do? If I open these Satisfactory Calculator sites and choose literally every single item, it draws an insane, unrealistic one big chain, I can’t just implement that in the game, it's absurdly complicated to follow. I’m not even talking about alternative recipes, no matter how much I searched on the internet, everyone has their own opinion, everyone phased out different items, there should be a strict logic where you choose the right alt recipes together, it’s so complicated, I just randomly made a choice between the recipes in the MAM 😖