Okay. Power's run. Belting is run. Resources are all setup. Clock speeds are all set. Let's power this shit up, and find the defects!

Obvious ones first, I forgot pumps on the water.

Next up, Copper's coming in, but not Iron. I traced it down to a missed pair of wires here.

Also, I hadn't clocked in the Iron Miners yet.

Sweet, Iron Ore has made it to the factory. As you might notice, though, it's on the wrong belt.

Simple enough to just fix, here at the factory.

Now, we get into more fun territory. You might notice the Iron Ore here is fully saturated on the belt, but none of it is making it onto the lift. This is a lovely little bug that apparently got introduced in 1.1, which presents when snapping lifts to support poles (instead of belts or ports), in "Reverse" mode. The only workaround I've been able to find is to place belts down first, at both ends, THEN snap a lift between them. This is definitely not the last time I'll be seeing this.

The backlog of Smart Plating is cleared out, now, so I can tear that down.

Next, one of the two Diluted Packaged Fuel loops is idling, cause the Fuel's fully backed-up.

Thaaaaaaaat would be why. That there is supposed to be Rubber, feeding 3 Refineries to make Recycled Plastic, with the Fuel from that loop. This one's a little problematic, since the Rubber's being made on the complete opposite end of the building, and since I kinda blocked the route for this belt with the sushi belt connection that I thought was so clever.

Ultimately, not TOO difficult to work around.

Sushi belt in action, now that those Refineries are running.

Other sushi belt in action, up top. Definitly not as many Motors as there should be, though.

Deadend line of Wire that never got connected.

Fixed.

Another bugged Conveyor Lift that needs to be re-built.

Fixed.

A chunk of Steel Pipe production that just.... never got finished.

Fixed.

That was all the defects I could find, for now. Tomorrow, I'll work on some cosmetics while the factory has a chance to prime itself and reveal any more issues.

Last thing we need before minimum-viable functionality is power.

I want to do the same thing here as I did with the other Project Assembly factories: this overhead pillar support beam setup. For that, I ended up needing to redo several of the ceiling belt setups. Like this one.

And this one.

That's all the framework in place.

And all the power.

So, today's task, before I can start using Smart Plating at the new factory, is to upgrade the current one to match clock speeds. The current factory is downclocked by a factor of 12.5%, so that everything could fit on a Mk.1 belt, while the new factory is tuned for Mk.4 belts, I.E. a factor of 100%.

Since the Smart Plating factory is so old, I didn't have nerd docs for it, as I hadn't discovered Satisfactory Modeler yet, so I had to spend some time reverse-engineering the factory to make the above layout plan. That lets me easily see all the belts that need to be upgraded. Thankfully, I didn't make any mistakes, and it is possible to get this factory up to 100% by just upgrading belts, in place, and raising clock speeds.

'

So, with the plan mapped out, I'll start the upgrade from the two Miners, and work forwards.

Of course, since it's all just upgrading belts in-place, there's very little to actually show off. I DID grab before and after shots of the main output belt.

Also, a nice wide-shot of the whole facility, cause why not?

Moving back to the new factory, I can finish running the final belt line, with another little dip to weave it around the belts I'll need to run for the next factory, even though I don't QUITE know where they're gonna go.

And I can drop all the excess Smart Plating I had from the old factory and inject it into the new factory directly. Finally, a real use-case for a Priority Merger, even if it is just temporary.

Time to fill in this last empty Conveyor Wall Hole. Oh, you thought we were done with resource collection? After 6 whole days worth of it before? And the one where I said there was only "one more"? Nah, there's one more MORE.

And it's Smart Plating, from a couple factories over.

First thing we can do is get rid of the buffer and uploader. The ONLY use for Smart Plating anymore is for making Modular Engines.

Next, I need to figure out how to route a belt from this new ceiling hole out of the building, and over to the new factory.

I think the best bet is just roundabout here, near the two input lines for the building.

While I was here, I went ahead and swapped out the weird nudged overlapping wall slots I'd made for the new proper Wall Holes. As much as I liked the old trick, this is better.

This, I think, is the best spot for a new wall hole.

And after that, I realized it would be much simpler, now that the Storage Container and Uploader are out of the way, to just swap the input and output to the top floor.

Belt's now in place, and weaved through the big mega-junction. From here's it's pretty much a straight shot to the new factory. I'll deal with that later.

Last floor to do is Manufacturers for the final product. And, you know what? Screw it, we're doing another sushi belt!

Again, a Mk.4 belt is the upper limit, and that's more than enough to handle the 3 inputs we need, 2 of which are low-volume. Two mergers to get the three products onto the belt, and a Smart Splitter to handle any overflow, in an emergency, like before. ALSO, since this is the end-of-the-line, I turned the whole thing into a loop. So, any resources that don't make it into one of the machines, just loop back and try again, unless there's an actual backup.

I actually was going to use 2 Priority Mergers here, at one point, such that they would prioritize using resources already on the loop, before adding more on, but I realized that would be counter-productive. It would mean that the loop NEVER stops flowing, so the emergency overflow splitter would never trigger, in the event that the loop gets flooded with too much of one type of resource.

Maybe someday I'll have a legit use-case for a Priority Merger again. I'm had one in the playthrough I was doing with my wife, before they existed.

Some belting to connect everything up, an elevator to move between floors, an an AWESOME Sink to handle overflows. Also, I just realized, from the screenshot, that I need to split off a portion of the main product for uploading, before sending it to the Sink.

Only 2 more things to do before we can power on for a minimum-viable factory.

Alright, time to move on to the upper floors. Which means tearing down all of these earlier work, since I've already had to dismantle several portions of it, after adjusting the positioning of the Diluted Packaged Fuel loops, cutting into the foundations I had laid out on the first pass.

The layout I ended up with is roughly the same as it was before, but this time with actual belting, and shifted around a little to match the final foundation locations. I went ahead and marked out this screenshot with the logistics, cause it was pretty tricky to get right, and I'm SUPER happy with it. This here is 3 banks of Wire, consuming 2 lines of Copper Ingot from the 2 Refinery banks below. It's such a perfect fit for 38 Constructors, with the 2 little extra ones on the wings up top, that I have a hard time believing I didn't plan it that way from the start.

Similar deal on the opposite side of the building, with 2 banks of Constructors making Steel Pipe from 2 lines of Steel Ingot, which I was able to fit in right next to the Constructors.

With those in place, I went ahead and routed in the Copper Ingot, Iron Ore, and Petroleum Coke for all those machines.

So, it was tight before to fit in 2 floors worth of Assemblers for making Motors from this stuff, and with even LESS space now, that concept definitely had to get reworked. I ended up putting just the 8 Assemblers for Motors on the same floor as all the Constructors, and built a second mini-floor for two giant banks of Assemblers, for Rotors and Stators. Gotta love the symmetry of using the Steel Rotor recipe that takes identical ingredients as Stators, and produces them at the exact same rate.

Again, I'm happy with the logistics work here, with 3 lines of Wire and 2 lines of Steel Pipe to route evenly among the machines. You can kiiiind of see it in the first screenshot here, but it's unfortunately quite dark. I dunno, maybe I should have used one of the filters? The other logistics to feed the Motor Assemblers is much easier to see in the second one.

I realized after building all this that I prooooooobably am gonna need to raise the mini-floor up by like 2-4 meters, because I eventually want to put catwalks all around these machines, to match other Project Assembly factories I've done. But I'm gonna leave it for now. When the time comes, I'll probably just save-edit that part.

Also went ahead and blueprinted-out the resource trunk, as I no longer have anything that needs to change about it, up to the point of factory entrance.

Industopia is coming along nicely. I redesigned the plate to use fewer materials and about half of the individual parts for performance reasons. It uses steel now which was dumb, a lot of this session was waiting for my very inadequate surface steel factory to give me enough beams to keep building. That was the first (and so far only) thing I made sure I was producing up top asap.

I've got the iron, concrete and coal storage up, plus steel ingot & beam production. Next time I can play I just need to set up the steel pipe & encased pipe factory, then I can dismantle one of my few factories on the surface. After that the ironworks is probably next, then copper. By that point the surface will only have a power plant and a bunch of mines/smelteries (no point bringing ore up here to smelt, if something doesn't have other uses I'll just process it down below).

I've got 2 trucks and a tractor zipping around, I could watch them all day. Can't wait to get some more vehicles moving, I'll probably chuck in a time lapse when it looks a bit busier.

I definitely need to set up the fuel production sooner rather than later though, everything is currently sharing a single petrol station and it will most certainly become a problem. The first time I played the game I had dozens of trains but only a handful of road vehicles throughout the map, I'm hoping my road system is good enough, but I really don't know much about these vehicles or how they work. The fun, as they say, is in finding out.

Here's the plan:

I think that's everything except radioactive stuff. If I don't burn out by the end of the game (assuming I make it that far) I might expand into nuclear power. Dunno. I'll likely replace the portal hub with a drone base to have project parts flown in for delivery.

Now that I have a roadmap I don't really need the pillars for signage, but they're still nice for motivational messages I guess.

Oh and the first project of this session was to build a hypertube so I don't need to die of old age waiting for the lifts. If anyone was wondering how long that'd last there you go.

Next step, I think, is gonna be to setup water.

As it happens, I only need 4 Water Extractors in total, so I can divide them up into 2 per side.

However, this is the point where I hit a design snag. I realized that the way I had all the Refinery banks laid out was going to result in quite a lot of splitting and crossover of the water pipes. After like half-an-hour of brainstorming, I decided on a solution that involves reorganizing most of the Refineries, and more importantly, rebuilding the 2 Diluted Packaged Fuel loops, so that they're on opposite sides of the building. This is actually something I kiiiiiinda wanted to do yesterday, but I didn't have a compelling-enough reason to do it. Now I have several reasons.

Specifically, the advantage I was thinking of yesterday is that if the smaller bank of just 2 Refineries is on the same side of the building as the resource trunk, and then I don't center it, I get a nice open space where I can bring resources into the building.

And I can go ahead and plop down the Water Extractors on that side, as well.

Logistics work.

At this point, I've got interconnectivity between machines mostly done, so it's time to bring in resources.

One caveat: with the way all these lines ended up, one of them (Iron Ore) is on the wrong side. I need to figure how to weave it between the lines that need to move on to the next factory, so I can pull it off here.

Orrrrrrrr.... I can go re-weave it way back at the source.

Kinda tough to see, but the two belts that were crossing over each other before now don't, eliminating the issue.

Presumably, I'll put a wall here, eventually. We'll see.

Lots more logistics work.

Now, this here I can't help but smile about. I've got two banks of Refineries producing Plastic, one from Fuel, and one from Polymer Resin, which then need to combine to feed into making Recycled Rubber, which is the product I actually NEED. Unfortunately, the two Plastic banks are not adjacent, and this was the last bit of logistics I laid in, so I was having trouble finding a nice path to route a belt, between other stuff that's already there.

Until I realized that the only thing between the two Plastic Banks is the big long line of Polymer Resin.... whose belt isn't saturated. It's a Mk.3 belt carrying 135.31/m, which is coincidentally the identical saturation of the Plastic belt I'm trying to route. And the max belt I can use is Mk.4.

That's right, I have a legitimate use-case for a sushi belt. Only the second time ever, for me.

So long as neither Plastic nor Polymer Resin backs up to this here Smart Splitter, this should work flawlessly. I think. I've never done something QUITE like this before, so I also added the overflow line there, on the side. The AWESOME Sink for the whole building is probably gonna end up right nearby, so I can connect that up later.

So, to get started with logistics, I spent a while coming up with yet another setup for a Diluted Packaged Fuel loop.

It ended up quite compact, so I'm pretty happy with it.

All the machines rest on a 2m elevated set of foundations, but with 2m troughs left in, for the package loops. You can barely see them at all, normally, unlike my previous iterations of this kind of loop, but you can see it just barely here, underneath the main belts going in and out of the Refineries.

Same thing on the other side, but half-size.

Then I setup a bunch of the Refinery banks that take both pipe and belt inputs, with this little number.

Also connected up this bank of pipelines that'll be for Crude Oil.

WE MAY NOW ACTUALLY START THE FACTORY.

Man.... I dunno why I thought this build was gonna be rather small, cause..... 47 Refineries..... just to start.....

I think this layout should roughly work. I'll adjust the positioning later, as I actually build out the logistics.

Now, since the Refineries are only about HALF of the machinery I need, I'm gonna need additional floors. This was my intention in keeping all the refinery exhaust stacks as close to the edges as possible, so we only lose one or two foundations around the edges, as we continue upward.

That captures all the machines for this build, in a rough layout that should mostly work, but like I said, I'm sure I'll be adjusting all of this as I build it out proper. The 2 little mini-floors of Assemblers in particular is a very tight fit, right now. I suspect I'll have to split them up into 4 mini-floors, instead of just 2.

For those who don't know, Snutt & Jace were the two community managers who really embodied Satisfactory, and for the last several years they've brought us some of the best Satisfactory content and have really set the gold bar standard for community management.

I'm very happy to see them working together again and hope others will enjoy it as well.

Today has been a fun day. I've been rolling this idea around in my head for months, and finally got around to starting a new game last week. Today I began construction of Industopia.

Industopia is going to be an entire city built about 600m above the surface (high enough that I'll never run into mountains or anything) but sadly as you'll see in these screenshots I appear to be inside the clouds so everything looks kind of rubbish. Turning off fog makes the world boundaries in the distance look awful, but I might end up having to do it anyway just to be able to tolerate playing up here🤷

You might want to bring snacks, this is a long ride in the lift. There are 3 lifts in total because they can only reach about 200m each. The two exchange floors on the way up are nothing special, I didn't take pics. I used a lot of chrome and lit-up emissive beams (mod) because I wanted it to be gaudy and excessive.

The underside of the plate is unnecessarily detailed. It has a bunch of the 4m thick steel beams, plus some lit up ones for flavour, then a layer of concrete foundations before the actual foundations that get built on. This balloons out the material cost, but... well whatever. I'm not super thrilled with how it turned out, but I didn't dislike it enough to bother changing it.

Say goodbye to the yucky surface world. All that green, all that life. Horrible.

Here we are. Yeah, that's it so far. The plan is to have a big road grid (it was originally going to use trains but the design I was putting together in my head was getting obscenely big and complicated), with 8x8 factory plots. The build area for the factories will be 6x6 but as high as needed vertically, then the outside has space for truck stops. I was also going to have a train line coming up here for resource deliveries from the surface, but I decided against it because that's not really the focus of this playthrough. I've played before so I'm just using a mod that adds dimensional depot downloaders that can spit out stuff from storage.

Design-wise I don't have a heap of rules, but the main one is all grey, all the time. I want this to be the most miserable looking place you've ever seen.

The foundations are made up of 4x4 blueprints that each use about 400 concrete because I'm extremely inefficient. You've got the factory plot which is just concrete & coated concrete with that big pole in the corner, they'll hold up road signs as needed for directions once we have some more buildings, obviously it'll always be easy to get home because it's right next to the space elevator. Then there's the road blueprint which is the two painted lanes with street lights, and the intersection which has the 4 corner lights and dotted lines. Super simple.

I'm probably going to halve the amount of street lights before I continue building, they're a bit much.

Can't forget the petrol station!

Inside the base we've just got the top of the lift, then the usual base stuff - HUB, AWESOME sink & shop, research & crafting, etc. I'm going to light it up better once I figure out what to do about the clouds.

That's the difference with the fog turned off btw. And that utilities area you can just about see tucked away to the left behind the lift is just a very sad and lonely lighting panel for the street lights.

Anyway, that's all I've got so far. If anyone wants more I can post again once I've got a handful of factories and stuff moved up here, I'm only in Phase 3 right now because I wanted to get this project started as soon as I could.

Thanks for reading.

Edit:

I've cut the street lights down from 4 per road block to 2, it's much nicer. Also, the most important part of any industrial area: the parking lot.

This is the first time I’m using a well and I wanted it te look nice. It was definitely a challenge because the outputs are all positioned differently. But I think it came out really nice! I especially like the circle ring around the pressuriser.

Oh, you thought we were all done collecting resources? Nah, we've got one more node to branch off to, roundabout here.

Fun fact! Today's session was played ENTIRELY on the living room couch, streamed via Steam Link, with a controller. relaxing on the couch made for a pretty chill experience, but I definitely felt a little crippled the whole time. On one hand, I would have had less trouble going into it without having to fight against KBM muscle memory, but on the other hand, I think things were made easier by me knowing what all the different actions are that I SHOULD be able to do, like locking, nudging, mini-nudging, mass dismantling, etc. So, maybe it balances out. Still, on the whole, a better experience than I expected. An entirely viable game to play on controller.

So, unfortunately, this trunk segment does have belts in it already, AND as you can see, they're centered, instead of staggered to leave room for a third, so they'll need to be moved. On the upside, we only need one new belt, so we don't need to rebuild the framing, AND the belts in question are for the FICSMAS factory, which is currently offline, so tearing them down doesn't really mean anything.

New scaffolding laid out. Not a particularly long run. Even get to do it along a really nice vista.

Belts moved and new belt laid in.

At the other end of the line, is a sort of double-junction, with a LOT of beltwork going on, and absolutely no room to weave a new belt through to the other side. So, the best option was to run it underneath. I figured something like this might happen, a long time ago, so I left lots of room underneath all of the trunk lines in this area, so I could add new belts in later, without having to raise the walkway.

Aaaaaand, that's that whole line done, and run to where the new building will be that needs it.

Alright, so we've got the new resource belts we've been running sitting on the right-hand side here, and we have some more to pull in from the left, before we can finish this junction to take them towards the new factory.

Luckily, the trunk segment on the left here is empty, and we only have 2 lines to run, so we don't need to tear down and rebuild all the framing, just add in the lines inside of it.

As you can see, we started by scaffolding the whole length.

Yeah, we're going for oil.

There's only 2 nodes left here (not counting the pressurizable well, I guess), and we're pulling both of them. This pathing should do it.

Pumps are set up.

Piping laid in.

New junction installed.

All framing built up and scaffolding removed.

And the final junction built up.

So, I kind got ahead of myself several days ago, when I was tearing down segments of the trunk, to make room for the new belts. I forgot that THIS junction here is where I actually want to pull the new belts off, to the right, and I tore down a bit more than I needed to, on the left. So, we'll have to repair that, after building this junction.

Meanwhile, I need to work towards tearing down this short segment of trunk that the belts DO need to run on.

I figured the best way to figure out how far down the trunk I need to go is to build towards it from the opposite end. So I built some scaffolding in towards the coast, from out in the sea, and connected them up.

A little more power bypassing, and it was safe to tear down the trunk.

Belts are all laid in, from the junction where the Copper meets up with the Iron and Limestone, down to where the final junction will be.

And that's everything tidied back up, including all the bypasses removed and the unnecessary teardown rebuilt.

You can only just peek over the mk5 belts as a normal height person.

So, last time, I brought all the new belts up to a junction point where I said I had one more belt to add in. This is where we'll be running that new trunk line, a little bit upstream from where the unfinished junction is.

Got the rough outline of the new trunk line laid in.

Built out the miner platforms.

And started blueprinting out the trunk frame.

I had a problem with the slopes, though: as much as I tried when I was laying down the scaffolding, I could NOT get this to rise fast enough without doing 4 slope foundations in a row, in a couple places. Problem is that I only have blueprints for up to 3 slopes in a row, since that was all I could fit inside the Mk.1 Blueprint Designer.

NOW, though, I have the Mk.2, so I just had to go spend some time making a new blueprint.

Figured I'd also go ahead and do a blueprint for a straight segment, 5 foundations long.

With that, I was able to get the new trunk branch fully finished.

So, with everything (theoretically) fully completed up to this spot, I'm going to need to tear down a pretty long segment of the trunkway, and rebuild it to fit the new belt lines.

That means setting up a power bypass, for the 3 different power lines running inside the trunk (main power, miners for the Versatile Framework factory, and mines for the Ficsmas factory).

Also, need some scaffolding for placing all the belts and blueprints.

With that, we're clear to rip the trunk down to just the existing belts.

Rare opportunity as we're placing down new belts adjacent to existing belts, to compare curve mode to the old approximations we could do with separate straight mode segments. The difference is WAY more subtle than I expected. Curve mode looks great, but the older belts are close enough, I ended up being fine with just leaving them as-is.

And that's all the new belts in place.

A handful of blueprints later, and we're all rebuilt. At least, up to the point where we're going to have to add one more belt of resources, that we've not yet run. That'll be next time.

Alright, let's get this mining complex finished. Time to whip up some blueprints.

Bam.

Now in the daylight.

Next big project is gonna start here. I've got a big ol' clump of resources I need to harves from this area.

To start, I needed to pull a new branch off of the main tubeway, to carry the belts.

I brought that up to the node cluster, and roughed-in paths to all the nodes.

And did some some clear-cutting.

And that's all the beltwork laid in.

Also managed to get the big main chunk of the tubeway completed, including the giant vertical section. I'm quite happy with how that came out.

Played more with my son today. He managed to complete Phase 1!

My son wanted to play with me today, so that's what I did.

He pretty much just worked on this, while I explored and killed shit the whole time.

We're finally there. The last last last thing to do, for this project. Like, actually. Just 3 unfinished miners, and that's it.

I really like how this walkway aesthetic came out. The new 1.1 build pieces are doing their job.

The slope transitions ended up slightly wonky, with the transition from 1m-thickness to 2m-thickness, then back to 1m. Doubling up on the covering cable looked marginally more acceptable than just leaving part of the foundations exposed.

And that's it! Actually! Project complete!

Wide shot of (mostly) the whole area, cause why not.

Traditional nerd docs.

The last thing to finish out this whole project is the resource trunks coming into the two satellite factories. Crude Oil, on this one in particular.

Definitely an opportunity for blueprints.

And one more, carrying Copper Ore.

.

Didn't quite get this one finished. Should be doable tomorrow.