Satisfactory tips and tricks?
I'm completely hooked on this game.
My buddy and I have been sneaking in some Satisfactory at night when our families are in bed. If it makes it funnier, you can picture it like a secret love affair. Late night messages, slipping in and out bed trying not to wake the wives, and mid-day texts about our big plans (with our factories). Friends, I literally play this game in my head when I'm not able to play for real. And it's just as good since most of it based around planning.
Anyway, I'm surprised by the depth. A lot of it is intentional while a lot of the rest is the natural result of players kind of hacking the build mode to do things you can't normally do such as curves and 1 meter vertical conveyers.
What are your favorite tips and tricks for this game?
I have about 250 hours from early access and 1.0, here's some tips I learned on the way-
If your preferred method of traversing areas is power lines with the zip line thingy, you can right click when equipped and it will automatically attach to any power line and stay attached, no need to hold down the fire button. Learned this after my first 100 hours lol
Once you setup elevator part factories, don't tear them down/repurpose them as almost all of them will be reused for future parts.
I changed the default hologram color when placing to white as the arrows were difficult for me to see in the default
Even if it seems simple, automate it! Edit: and even if it's not efficient, still automate it!
When your trains go to a station, they can use freight platforms that aren't directly attached to it. What I mean by this is you can have like freightA-freightB-freightC-station1-freightD-station2 and a three car train pulling into station2 can use both freightC and freightD. Obvious in hindsight but it just didn't occur to me to try when I started trains
If you have to do something with resources to keep things running (looking at you oil) - just sink the excess into an Awesome Sink. Smart/Programmable splitters are fantastic for this as you can send the bulk into your industrial storage containers and factories with the overflow output going to the sink.
Abuse dimensional depots. Seriously, after you unlock them, reserve at least ten spheres to build depots for the most common parts like concrete, belt materials, rods, cable, wire, etc. Nothing sucks more than building a new factory and having to run/drive/fly all the way back to main base to get more parts.
Elevate your conveyors and forgive your own spaghetti. Spaghetti is better than manually moving stacks of materials.
Also, you can simply point at an existing conveyor to upgrade it. MK3 conveyor causing a bottleneck? Equip a Mk5 and just over-write it with the build tool. No need to delete and replace. Same goes for vertical conveyors.
Same with splitters/mergers, floors, walls, doors, and windows while building. Hold CTRL and overwrite the incorrect type. The amount of time I wasted by accidentally building a Splitter when I needed a Merger or vice versa and then having to rebuild the entire thing is incalculable. Knowing that you can simply overwrite the damned things with the other is a godsend and will save you time.
Otherwise @Wolf_359, I recommend having a look around the three main websites if you haven't already. Just a small warning, they may contain spoilers for buildings that you can't access yet. I personally don't care about knowing whether or not a Constructor exists, the meaty part is what it does. Both tool websites allow you to disable recipes and buildings so you won't get shown options for things that you can't use yet.
https://satisfactory-calculator.com/
https://www.satisfactorytools.com/1.0/
https://satisfactory.wiki.gg/wiki/Satisfactory_Wiki (The official wiki, possible spoilers though)
Since I don't know what Phase you're currently in I'll just go with general info:
Tier 7 Infrastructure Spoiler
Tier 5 Power Spoiler.
- Turbo Fuel is pretty incredible for power generation. Far more efficient than Fuel itself. It's highly recommended to keep a three or four Hard Drive in stock so you can unlock the recipe Turbo Fuel, Turbo Heavy Fuel, and Compacted Coal from the MAM as it spikes your power generation and allows you to scale into the future production of other stuff as well. Turbo Fuel is also decent in your Jetpack. A bit jumpy and not as consistent as Biofuel, but easy to get and fast.It's not a bad thing to prioritise Dimensional Depot research. That thing is incredible.
Overproducing, automating, storing and subsequently SINKing everything is recommended.
Almost all Space Elevator parts are used in subsequent phases to varying degrees, overproducing is also recommended here.
Build SINKs everywhere or make sure everything can handle overflowing supply chains (input, throughput, and output) by leveraging an infinite hole. You can build as many as you want.
Always Automate. Producing something by filling a couple of containers and letting the Assembler do their work is fine, just don't rely on that method for anything but one offs.
Manifolds have their uses. So do Balancers. Get comfortable with both because knowing how they function can give you the freedom to build a little prettier and efficient.
Some people hate it, but it's not always a bad idea to buy high tier items in the Awesome SHOP and sinking them. There are break even points for all items for when it's no longer worth doing so, all listed on the wiki, but it can help you reach higher Coupon counts early.
This ties into that buying items to unlock milestones is also not always a bad idea. It can speed up certain production chains by having the next thing available already. Also not something everyone does so make sure to communicate with the friends you're playing with. Coupon points scale so much that the 1000th Coupon takes just about as long as the 999 before it.
Anything else?
A couple of important realizations I had that sort of relates back to the first idea that:
Screws suck.
Seriously. Screws are the components that ruis a lot of your logistics with the numbers needed. For that reason alone, they should only ever exists where they are needed. Don't move them by train or try to full optimize its use because you're just setting yourself up for some frustrating math.
Resource rarity and abundance
Because the map is hand made, there's a set number of nodes available to harvest. Even with their Infinite capacity, material converters and overclock potential: there will forever be a throughput cap on your world. Iron is the most plentiful resource around, which means you'll always have facilities to make screws and other basic iron components where you are. But with the abundance of iron, you can pull off a bunch of neat tricks with...
Alternative recipes
This is the reason I love this game. Tier 4 needs 100 nuclear pasta and you could probably have a different production line for each one. Having a good recipe library let's you build for the situation you're in and not force you to spiderweb miner-belts across biomes. But it also has the potential to eliminate screws from almost all productions. You can also eliminate copper. And most caterium and steel. And I think aluminum too. You can get some very clean lines by working in the excess iron around the map and...
Under/precision-clocking
If you don't want to fine tune lines around weird numbers, you can just make it a clean number with precision clocking a bottleneck. My old goto was always fully overclock for max output, but that can be hell on power in terms of draw and big fluctuations as different machines cycle to make 1 item. SINKing excess is always an option, but in the late game the energy economics are way off for tickets you don't need anymore. But when you unlock overclocking tech, you can set exactly how much the machine produces (instead of moving the slider, you can set any of the numbers and the others will adjust) and can copy/paste that setting across your array. Amazing when you have to manage bad bulk items (screws) but it also lets you eek out some extra materials for a factory while smoothing out the power draw.
Other minor tips:
If you're not using blueprints, do. Once you reach the point where you're building 20+ refineries or 30+ constructors at a time they'll save you huge amounts of time
Random things I missed during my first 100 hours of the game:
Read those instructions on the bottom of the screen while placing objects/belts!
Many of the things you can build have alternate build modes. For instance, Zoop mode makes laying out foundations a breeze (I spent ~60 hours doing them one by one). Belts have an alternate build mode that tries to follow right-angles, which vastly reduces spaghetti and makes things more pleasing (to me, at least). Pipes have a nice horizontal-to-vertical mode that also helps.
Pipe junctions can be placed on the ceilings. I like to place the junctions first, then connect them up with pipes to keep my pipes neat and organized.
If you have to craft things by hand, which can be a faster way to produce some late-game parts, then just tap the spacebar. You don't need to hold down the mouse or spacebar to craft multiple items manually.
Rails convey electricity, which is useful for a late-game item that requires being in powered areas.
You can copy/paste settings between machines. The copy includes details such as power shards and overclock settings.
I used the decoration mode to color-code my factories. (e.g. I made my plastic producing refineries blue, and my rubber producing refineries red so I could quickly tell which were which - very important in multiplayer games where I am not the only one placing things down!)
Looking at a pipe while building a pump will show a little ghost animation showing how much head pressure the pump will produce, which is how far up it can push the liquid. If you're building a second pump on a pipeline which already has a pump, there will be a little ghost element where you can snap your new pump to to maximize the head pressure distance.
Coffee Stain confirmed that pipes will also get a straight mode soon. Which is going to be incredible.
I didn't know that about the pumps! I guess one can always learn something new.
All of the other tips here are great. Here are a few I didn't see that I wish I knew earlier.
My friend and I have been doing the same thing for years, we have revisited both factorio and satisfactory over the years and both are excellent games. Space age expansion in factorio is amazing and I highly suggest you and your friend rotate it in.
On to satisfactory, what is great about it is you can play at your own pace and what you feel like that night, more factories, expanding resource income, exploring, moving a base around, or just making things look nice, so the biggest tip is to make sure to do what you want that night and don't feel pressured to get things all tied down or untangled.
Lots of good tips already, one thing that took me years to find out is that you should definitely play the game near the end of the year, it has some stuff for you to do!
With the planning in satisfactory it's nice to remember that resources come out at an unlimited rate, and you can increase that rate later on with better miners and power slugs. So when planning things out, you can dedicated mines to specific build plans. In the mid game you can look at several resources you might need for a product and see you have mines for both around, check out the max rates, then build to what you have available.
For later game resources and pushing through, don't underestimate just making an assembler hooked up to nothing and hand crafting or hand placing in boxes the ingredients for it. The amount needed to unlock stuff isn't usually too big and you can get away with unlocking tech you'll use in factories this way rather than feeling the need to have it all hooked up to your supply chain.
In the awesome shop, the walls with conveyor holes, the wall conveys, and wall power outlets are amazing pickups that make factory design much more neat and tidy and should be early pickups.
Can't think of too much more to add in as i'm currently deep in factorio right now so my memory is fading, but still both games are great (dyson sphere too) and each have their strengths despite being very similar. Anyway enjoy satisfactory, it is a game you can keep coming back to again and again.