I rebuilt my core base in Satisfactory
I have been playing Satisfactory off and on since it first launched on EGS. Over the past two weeks, I decided to make a genuine attempt to finish the current content.
This meant deconstructing my core base in my current save. Here is what it looked like:
Real factoryheads find these images shocking and disturbing!! Here's some more to hurt you:
I've played Satisfactory several times, once reaching the end of the available content during Early Access, but I've NEVER built self-contained factory buildings before. I've also never before torn down my entire core production facility to rebuild it.
There's a couple reasons for this. Firstly, the game does not provide you with the tools to construct useful buildings until quite deep in the game. A navigable factory building requires catwalks and ladders. Ladders, in particular, are absolutely crucial - the biggest benefit of the factory buildings is that you can go vertical.
But ladders, catwalks, and other traversal aids are only unlockable with a currency system that transforms excess resources into tickets you can redeem in a store. This system is never part of the core objective track, so I always underinvested in it, prioritizing new facilities and resource extraction.
That behavior is my right! I am the beast that the designer both dreads and accomodates - I ignore entire mechanics all the damn time, and that's just part of the core experience of a game like this. It's stuffed so full of systems. I'm convinced that every player is ignoring something.
However, I've been thinking that it would have been flatly better to grant the player the most crucial items from the store - ladders, for one - in the course of the main objective track. If you don't give the player ladders, they simply won't be able to build effective factory buildings.
It's also extremely... emotionally painful???... to tear down a factory rat's nest like this one. You've essentially got to rebuild all the core production functions again, starting with the most boring, early-game ones. I was OK with doing this. It did seem like a pain, though. I steeled myself and began to tear it all down:
Once I got that foundation platter clear, I started slapping factory towers onto it:
Enclosing a production process in a factory allows you to forget and ignore what it is inside it. I cannot overstate how important this is. Most factory games test the player's ability to ingest vast quantities of highly detailed visual information. Can you walk away from the game for one day and still understand what the fuck you're even looking at when you return? Well, with a factory building, you don't have to. You just hide that shit. You never have to think about it again if you build it right.
Anyway, I built a bunch of factory towers, then started adding floors to them:
I have now returned to the point where the visual information is getting to be a little too much for me. Perhaps there is no escaping the spaghetti tangle of conveyors. At the very least, it's more organized than it was before:
It was very interesting for me to try and deliberately transform myself from the kind of nightmare player who builds without planning into the kind of player who wraps processes in tidy buildings. At first, I felt like I was trying change who I was on some fundamental level, or something.
Along the way, I decided that I wasn't actually inherently the kind of player who builds messy things - I was just really, really committed to the main objective track, so I'd neglected all the mechanics that didn't contribute to it in a direct and essential way. I think Satisfactory trickled out its mechanics and systems in such a way that it makes it really easy to neglect things like catwalks, doors, and ladders. So I can definitely blame the developers in some way for part of my behavior!!! Take that, developers!!
I haven't fully completely my transformation - a lot of these buildings do not contain resource "sinks" to siphon off extra materials and avoid a production backup - and I don't yet do all the math I should be doing to make sure that all my processes are feeding into one another in a balanced way. But I'm getting there!
I do appreciate that this game accommodates both of my playstyles pretty well. You can definitely muddle your way through this game without using a lot of the tools that extremely mathbrained factorygeniuses use... but it seems like your progress might be a lot slower.
One of my flaws is that I cannot really tell when taking the time to tear everything down will speed me up in the long run. I imagine that this is something some people find very easy to identify, believe, embrace, etc. I just don't!
I do now wrap everything up in a building when I can, though. It makes visually scanning the landscape so much quicker and less stressful. And that verticality is key!!!