They scale just fine. Plus, they have no ongoing fuel or electricity costs.
Well, conveyors start coming and they don’t stop coming
Well now I have to rewrite my title to better fit the rhythm of the song…
“Some dummy once told me, I shouldn’t use conveyors, 'cause conveyors don’t scale worth a da-amn…”
valid.
I have a small tall stacked belt system I wish I had more broadly built out, but at least I have a tiny segment of it to grin at
Ok but you don’t have to do it this way
What better way is there to run 40 parallel conveyor belts?
At leash by 3 wide
But making it wider really complicates trying to join in or separate out conveyors. When they’re all in a single stack, it’s easy to add a splitter or merger or route a new conveyor in or out of the stack. None of that needs to cross other conveyors to get where it needs to go.
Also, there’s no automatic guide to building side-by-side belts, so they’ll always end up not quite parallel, and I think that makes it uglier.
More difficult to actually build as well. Laying the first foundation layer of stackable supports is kind of a pain in the ass, but once you have the first layer, it’s very easy to add more layers on top. In order to build side-by-side stacks, the tedious work of laying the bottom layer has to be repeated multiple times.
This guy conveys
I read that title to the tune of Smash Mouth’s “All Star”
ScaaAale
I played this game like crazy during covid. Then decided to do a start from scratch, some update broke my automated card and stopped playing it. I still wanna get back but not sure if it’s similar or have much better quality of life changes
the recent ish updates have been very quality of life heavy, though if you can wait for a stable 1.2 release then you’ll have even more quality of life
(right now trucks are kind of mediocre to useless, and 1.2 fixes them completely)
Yes, I did this entire run with no trains, no vehicles of any kind. And also no nuclear power. And, honestly, I think it’s better that way. Saves a lot of unnecessary trouble.
Most of my world is criss-crossed with a complex network of floating conveyor belts that don’t in any way adhere to any principles of physics, but I did also create a train network for a couple products, and built a nuclear power plant, just for the challenge
Really curious if anyone has done the math for most efficient factory
Is there a Satisfactory speedrunning community?
Because ‘efficient’ depends what you’re optimizing for. (And in my eyes, the most obvious goal to optimize for would be to complete the entire project as quickly as possible.)
I watched some speed runs several months back. I don’t recall them bothering with trains.
My current factory uses nothing but the little personell carts to transfer stuff. It’s inefficient as hell, but it’s funny.
The issue isn’t that they don’t scale, its that running 40 high conveyor belts across the map looks so bad and feels like you’re doing somethjng wrong.
I like stacked conveyors for individual factories tho.
Shame I can only see the thumbnail because pawb banned vietnam.
running 40 high conveyor belts across the map looks so bad and feels like you’re doing somethjng wrong
But it’s so efficient!
It doesn’t cost any electricity to run, but it isn’t so efficient in time or or resources to expand. I do use it a little tho.
I see a slug :)
Honestly, it’s a waste of time to try and collect every single slug you see. You really only need a few.
IMHO, they’re only really useful for speeding up resource extraction from mines. For everything else, it’s better to just build more machines than to overclock the existing machines. Better to build two machines, rather than overclock one for double production. So the slugs are only useful for machines that you can’t simply build more of, either because there are limited places on the map you can put one (like miners) or because you’ve painted yourself into a corner with your factory design and don’t have room to add more.
I stopped bothering to collect them in my current playthrough when I hit 500 power shards, enough to fill the fully upgraded dimensional depot, which was pretty easy by making the shards in a constructor with a somersloop.
Same way I make alien DNA capsules, though that process quadruples the output instead of just doubling it.
Later, you can make them automatically, so there’s really no point in collecting even as much as I did.
Anyway, extraction is the best place for overclocking, but sometimes it does make it easier to smooth out output without adding several additional machines. Not something to just do everywhere through
If only trains didnt suck.
They’re not so bad. It would be cool if you could set up and simulate signalling from a centralized view, and you often have to make round-abouts and sidings absolutely massive to fit the longest train that might use it, but I mean they work.
I wish they would just run on consistent schedules and not block the storage when loading and unloading. For a game about logistics, it falls short all over. It’s spaghetti code held together with duct tape. It’s fun, but so many problems.
For low volume cargo, it’s usually not a problem. For example, I manufacture computers at the Desert Advanced Manufacturing Node in the rocky desert, and I ship them by train along with five other products also made at the D.A.M.N. to the PRoject Assembly Tower to be made into adaptive control units and to the Super Heavy Industry Terminal to be made into Radio Control Units. In both cases they just get belted straight to the machines that take them because those machines won’t realistically consume an entire train load before the train returns.
For high volume cargo, I handle it like this: I make plastic at the West Heavy Oil Resource Extractor, 60 refineries worth. Each row of 10 refineries is belted into an industrial storage container with one MK4 belt, and then that storage container is belted into a single freight platform with two MK4 belts. The same is done at the D.A.M.N. to unload the train there for manufacturing computers, supercomputers and such. The same is done at the Aluminum Swamp Site to handle the massive amounts of silica the plant consumes as well as the huge number of aluminum casings produced, which are shipped to the S.H.I.T to be made into…everything made there, directly or indirectly, from fused frames to nuclear pasta.
I call that technique a “buffer box.” The storage container won’t block when the station is loading or unloading a train, and it can be fill the platform or be filled from the platform twice as fast as the belt from/to the factory. I then plan each freight platform as if it can carry the same throughput as the belt that feeds it.
I will sometimes split the box/platform connections, connect Box 1 to platform 1 and 2, Box 2 to 2 and 3, and so on, and then box 6 to platform 6 and 1. Sometimes at the load end one end of the train or one specific box or something will end up feeding faster than others so that’s a way to balance it, so I don’t end up with 5/6ths of my A.S.S. totally backed up with the remaining 6th struggles to meet demand.
A quirk of industrial containers: They sort of work as mergers and splitters. They don’t guarantee proportional bandwidth the way actual mergers and splitters do; you might see one of the two belts going into a container feeding while the other is backed up, or one of the two coming out of a container full while the other is empty, but since we’re connecting the side with 2 belts to the same platform it doesn’t functionally matter in this use case.
Yeah, I’m not saying theres no work arounds. I’m saying you shouldnt have to fight the game this way just because the developers cant be bothered to fix it.
If you just want to do the story part, then you only have to deal with a few problems. But when you are building mega factories, sinking millions upon millions of points, these issues are amplified and the game becomes unfun and limits the way you have to design everything.
Nice acronyms too aha
this was a delight to read.
All of the petroleum coke necessary for operating the A.S.S. is belted in on a single Mk5 belt from that impure oil well near the southern edge of the swamp, designated the Automated Swamp Site Heavy Oil Liquid Extractor. The A.S.S.H.O.L.E. is also where the S.H.I.T. gets all of its gas, from the nitrogen well in the nearby dangle spires.
Trains are great!
I love trains, I dont love the randomness of Satisfactory ones!
What’s random about them? In my factory they seem extremely reliable.
They dont have consistent speeds. They can take 60s to make a journey, then 59s to make the same then 62s. They should use their variable power, to keep a consistent speed, making deliveries predictable, when the game revolves around pm calculations, it falls short on this.
If that level of variability is dropping your throughput you should add another train or more cars.
The way I view it is the train has a max throughput that is <total capacity of all cars> / <worst case time to complete the circuit> which is generally pretty high compared to belts. If the train is the bottleneck, you can simply add more cars or trains to boost the top of that ratio. I am to keep the theoretical throughput of my train system above what I actually use so there is some buffer.
I’m not saying there isnt work arounds, I’m saying that it’s impossible to achieve peak efficiency, a train might randomly run slower and it might deliver at 1199.99pm instead of 1200pm, that happening just one time has cascading effects on the whole production chain.
Trains that share the same lines that were previously spaced out to avoid interferring, will suddenly be queuing. If you prefer this jank and randomness, they could leave a toggle in and then update it to be consistent otherwise. I should be able to make an actual timetable and carefully weave trains, it would look so cool seeing trains not need blocks because they are on a schedule and all dodge each other.
Same for fluids too, give me less annoying predictable fluids instead of someones attempt at “realism”, put a toggle in for the diehards to keep the current one.
I don’t use any vechiles for transport of resources and I just finished phase 4.
