Played the alpha on the weekend it had a limited tech tree with only upgrades up to the 4th hub level I think. I was starting to get to the more interesting levels of automation though as I got the multiple item assemblers (which allow you to take two inputs and make an item) and the first of the vehicles the tractor and it's drop off station as well as multilayer belts.
Pretty interesting game to play the tools to make belts and connect power work pretty well and laying out a series of production lines was pretty easy. It plays a lot of the logistics chain ie miners output ore at rate X smelters turn that ore into raw metal at rate Y you can optimise for maximum throughput by making the number of smelters to miners keep the belts at maximum capacity and that chains through your levels of production since iron ingots to plates or rods is a different match things that require multiple ingredients needing even more careful thought to get a well optimised production chain. To complicate this you can overclock your factories with these powercores made out of glowing slugs ... yes slugs. This increases the speed of production but also costs more power.
Power is something you have to manage with the initial power being from a single biomass burner on you default hub then that upgrades to two and then you get the plans to build the burners separately. You need enough for you power supply and initially these have to be manually reloaded with biomass (leaves wood flowers mushrooms) as you progress you get the ability to process the biomass into more complex types from raw to compress biomass to biofuel which burns slower and requires less constant refills. Towards the end I unlocked coal fired power stations which not only had much greater power output but also could be fueled via belts. Coal is less common and I had to go quite far to get it but at the same time I unlocked the tractor which can be setup to autonomously drive a route through truck stations that load and unload and refuel as it goes. So I setup a route to the nearest coal deposit.
The system for setting up the autopilot on the tractor is little odd you basically record a path and it drops down markers as you drive that the thing will follow when set to automatic mode. You can edit these in the world but it's a bit wonky and the path I eventually got working had the thing overshooting the stop backing up and then taking off again. It mostly seemed to work although it did run out of fuel a few times so I'm not sure I setup the refueling right.
By the end I had built a fairly messy unoptimised factory on two levels that was producing goods at a reasonable rate and had a single jump pad and jelly landing point to get up to the upper level and the first level of the space elevator was completed.
The level was pretty nice it's not procedural and they've made it pretty nice looking lots of verdant green terrain with hills valleys and such. The world has some animals in it some of which are hostile I unlocked two weapons a electric prod and what amounted to a nail gun. These are not that powerful but most of the time you can just run away and be fine. They mostly just attack you as well and not your factory or vehicles it's not like factorio where you have to make sure you are protected against the biters.
I did run out of things to do towards the end with the locked content the difficulty slowly increased with first unlocking individual hub upgrades in one go with simple materials (one step above ore) then having to complete a series of upgrades getting different tech with each one with first or second generation (ie ones requiring one or two steps of processing to make) products then in the final stages I played you had to first build the space elevator then load a bunch of high end goods into it dispatch them then you could unlock more tech with more items using second or third generation products. I assume this will progress up the levels with the tasks getting more and more difficult and require more and more.
In addition to the building there was also researching and exploring you could do finding items to research and so on unlocking some tech as a result. The building system is fairly easy lot of pointing with a tool that has a snap system to allow easier alignment. It has a lot of somewhat cosmetic pieces to build up a factory I didn't really use any of those.
All in all I'm still very positive on the game and looking forward to when it comes out in early access on march 19th
Submitted by Evilmatt on Wed, 2019-03-13 01:28
Thanks for a great write up, Biffa and the Yogscast have been hitting Satisfactory hard and it does look like a great laugh. Given that it's Epic + Coffee Stain, I think the alpha will be very playable for us on a Sunday night. I can imagine us bouncing between base building, exploring and building stupid shit, like chains of jump pads.
I'm really looking forward to the alpha, I'm keeping back some pocket money for it!
Submitted by brainwipe on Wed, 2019-03-13 10:06
although Astroneer is also epic and we've seen how unstable and shonky that can be :S
Submitted by Evilmatt on Wed, 2019-03-13 17:21
True . The latest Astroneer update has improved framerate and the changes to tethers aren't noticeable.
I'm a little worried about how the gameworld is not procedural in that with things like factorio or astroneer every new game is different so maybe it will not have the longevity of those titles where you can start fresh with a different world and with factorio tweak it to have a different harder or easier or just different experience
Submitted by Evilmatt on Tue, 2019-03-19 19:33
It's not procedural yet. If they never make it procedural, that would be OK as long as they create a map editor.
Submitted by brainwipe on Wed, 2019-03-20 12:54
I think they've explicitly stated it's not going to be procedural but maybe they'll change their minds.
The save from alpha carried over so I went on with adding more tech to my factory upgrading to level 2 miners level 3 belts and unlocking steel with the required new smelter type it was slow going initially having to hand make enough steel things to build the new tech required to automate the production. This has also thrown all the sums out of whack as level 2 miners produce a lot more ore and gotten increasingly messy need to do a complete tear down and rebuild as I've got belts going everywhere crossing over and loads of points where the production efficiency is not right probably need to move the space elevator just get enough room and go more vertical. Some of the third level items I'm producing are taking a very long time and since they are needed to progress filling up the space elevator that is holding things up a little need to look at getting more running in parallel.
Needing a lot more power too my one coal generator is now 6 for a peak power in the 400MW and I think I'm going to need more of them. Which means my coal production needs working on the single tractor hauling a load now and then was starting to run out due to needing coal for steel as well as power. I upgraded to level 2 miner on the coal which helped but can't really run more tractors on that route in parts it runs down a narrow cliff path which just barely fits one tractor two would collide at somepoint. Probably need to find a second coal seam and setup another miner there.
So fun and games
Submitted by Evilmatt on Wed, 2019-03-20 17:29
Desperate to play; migraines have been plaguing me in the evenings.
Submitted by brainwipe on Thu, 2019-03-21 10:32
reorganised everything ... think I made things worse :S
Submitted by Evilmatt on Thu, 2019-03-21 22:52
reorganised again switched to what is essentially a main bus system ala factorio but this time instead of four lanes across I went with a stacked single belt but it got to maybe 7 or 8 belts stacked upward. Which is probably not ideal as getting stuff down is now tricky involving a huge looping belt setups. Redid all the production to use this technique works pretty well and it made adding extra capacity identify where I was losing capacity and required more or getting a set of intermediate goods for more advanced construction without having to make them locally much easier.
Found you can just snap mergers or spliters onto existing belt setups which makes having busses distribute items much easier and allows you to tidy multi product assembly machines inputs much easier.
Got the oil level of upgrades which included oil refinaries a set of plastic and rubber products which allow for the truck (the larger vehicle) and fuel power plants which replace the coal ones and then player upgrades like jetpack and gasmask filters. Unlocked all that stuff replace the tractor automated coal and oil runs with truck ones. Found that you can't just assign a vehicle to an existing recorded track which means when you swap it for a new vehicle you have to record the whole thing again which is a bit annoying also the trucks while faster and with greater haulage capacity seem to be a bit unstable and turn over fairly easily.
After that basically ran out of content you need to do another space elevator delivery but that is locked in early access so probably leave things with this game and come back when they add some more content. Pretty fun game and rife for replays to further optimize the various strategies. As with factorio I thing I didn't give myself enough space to grow thing just stacking stuff as I needed it this makes expanding difficult but it's something to work on.
Submitted by Evilmatt on Mon, 2019-03-25 04:17
Christ on a bike. Been in migraine land. Felix has been playing it and enjoying it. Can't wait to play. Got pics, EMW?
Submitted by brainwipe on Tue, 2019-03-26 09:47
I'm not sure epic has a screenshot button yet :S
The scale is so vast that it doesn't lend itself well to screenshots but I'll see what I can do next time I'm able to boot it up. I'm off to pax east tonight so will be a week or so till I'm back at home.
Comments
COOOOOOOOOOOL! Can't wait for this. I have good feelings about it.
My favourite YouTuber Biffa is going to be releasing a video on it today...
Played the alpha on the weekend it had a limited tech tree with only upgrades up to the 4th hub level I think. I was starting to get to the more interesting levels of automation though as I got the multiple item assemblers (which allow you to take two inputs and make an item) and the first of the vehicles the tractor and it's drop off station as well as multilayer belts.
Pretty interesting game to play the tools to make belts and connect power work pretty well and laying out a series of production lines was pretty easy. It plays a lot of the logistics chain ie miners output ore at rate X smelters turn that ore into raw metal at rate Y you can optimise for maximum throughput by making the number of smelters to miners keep the belts at maximum capacity and that chains through your levels of production since iron ingots to plates or rods is a different match things that require multiple ingredients needing even more careful thought to get a well optimised production chain. To complicate this you can overclock your factories with these powercores made out of glowing slugs ... yes slugs. This increases the speed of production but also costs more power.
Power is something you have to manage with the initial power being from a single biomass burner on you default hub then that upgrades to two and then you get the plans to build the burners separately. You need enough for you power supply and initially these have to be manually reloaded with biomass (leaves wood flowers mushrooms) as you progress you get the ability to process the biomass into more complex types from raw to compress biomass to biofuel which burns slower and requires less constant refills. Towards the end I unlocked coal fired power stations which not only had much greater power output but also could be fueled via belts. Coal is less common and I had to go quite far to get it but at the same time I unlocked the tractor which can be setup to autonomously drive a route through truck stations that load and unload and refuel as it goes. So I setup a route to the nearest coal deposit.
The system for setting up the autopilot on the tractor is little odd you basically record a path and it drops down markers as you drive that the thing will follow when set to automatic mode. You can edit these in the world but it's a bit wonky and the path I eventually got working had the thing overshooting the stop backing up and then taking off again. It mostly seemed to work although it did run out of fuel a few times so I'm not sure I setup the refueling right.
By the end I had built a fairly messy unoptimised factory on two levels that was producing goods at a reasonable rate and had a single jump pad and jelly landing point to get up to the upper level and the first level of the space elevator was completed.
The level was pretty nice it's not procedural and they've made it pretty nice looking lots of verdant green terrain with hills valleys and such. The world has some animals in it some of which are hostile I unlocked two weapons a electric prod and what amounted to a nail gun. These are not that powerful but most of the time you can just run away and be fine. They mostly just attack you as well and not your factory or vehicles it's not like factorio where you have to make sure you are protected against the biters.
I did run out of things to do towards the end with the locked content the difficulty slowly increased with first unlocking individual hub upgrades in one go with simple materials (one step above ore) then having to complete a series of upgrades getting different tech with each one with first or second generation (ie ones requiring one or two steps of processing to make) products then in the final stages I played you had to first build the space elevator then load a bunch of high end goods into it dispatch them then you could unlock more tech with more items using second or third generation products. I assume this will progress up the levels with the tasks getting more and more difficult and require more and more.
In addition to the building there was also researching and exploring you could do finding items to research and so on unlocking some tech as a result. The building system is fairly easy lot of pointing with a tool that has a snap system to allow easier alignment. It has a lot of somewhat cosmetic pieces to build up a factory I didn't really use any of those.
All in all I'm still very positive on the game and looking forward to when it comes out in early access on march 19th
Thanks for a great write up, Biffa and the Yogscast have been hitting Satisfactory hard and it does look like a great laugh. Given that it's Epic + Coffee Stain, I think the alpha will be very playable for us on a Sunday night. I can imagine us bouncing between base building, exploring and building stupid shit, like chains of jump pads.
I'm really looking forward to the alpha, I'm keeping back some pocket money for it!
although Astroneer is also epic and we've seen how unstable and shonky that can be :S
True . The latest Astroneer update has improved framerate and the changes to tethers aren't noticeable.
Release day! Release day! Release day! Release day! Release day! Release day! Release day! Release day! Release day! Release day! Release day! Release day!
looking forward to firing it up tonight :D
I'm a little worried about how the gameworld is not procedural in that with things like factorio or astroneer every new game is different so maybe it will not have the longevity of those titles where you can start fresh with a different world and with factorio tweak it to have a different harder or easier or just different experience
It's not procedural yet. If they never make it procedural, that would be OK as long as they create a map editor.
I think they've explicitly stated it's not going to be procedural but maybe they'll change their minds.
The save from alpha carried over so I went on with adding more tech to my factory upgrading to level 2 miners level 3 belts and unlocking steel with the required new smelter type it was slow going initially having to hand make enough steel things to build the new tech required to automate the production. This has also thrown all the sums out of whack as level 2 miners produce a lot more ore and gotten increasingly messy need to do a complete tear down and rebuild as I've got belts going everywhere crossing over and loads of points where the production efficiency is not right probably need to move the space elevator just get enough room and go more vertical. Some of the third level items I'm producing are taking a very long time and since they are needed to progress filling up the space elevator that is holding things up a little need to look at getting more running in parallel.
Needing a lot more power too my one coal generator is now 6 for a peak power in the 400MW and I think I'm going to need more of them. Which means my coal production needs working on the single tractor hauling a load now and then was starting to run out due to needing coal for steel as well as power. I upgraded to level 2 miner on the coal which helped but can't really run more tractors on that route in parts it runs down a narrow cliff path which just barely fits one tractor two would collide at somepoint. Probably need to find a second coal seam and setup another miner there.
So fun and games
Desperate to play; migraines have been plaguing me in the evenings.
reorganised everything ... think I made things worse :S
reorganised again switched to what is essentially a main bus system ala factorio but this time instead of four lanes across I went with a stacked single belt but it got to maybe 7 or 8 belts stacked upward. Which is probably not ideal as getting stuff down is now tricky involving a huge looping belt setups. Redid all the production to use this technique works pretty well and it made adding extra capacity identify where I was losing capacity and required more or getting a set of intermediate goods for more advanced construction without having to make them locally much easier.
Found you can just snap mergers or spliters onto existing belt setups which makes having busses distribute items much easier and allows you to tidy multi product assembly machines inputs much easier.
Got the oil level of upgrades which included oil refinaries a set of plastic and rubber products which allow for the truck (the larger vehicle) and fuel power plants which replace the coal ones and then player upgrades like jetpack and gasmask filters. Unlocked all that stuff replace the tractor automated coal and oil runs with truck ones. Found that you can't just assign a vehicle to an existing recorded track which means when you swap it for a new vehicle you have to record the whole thing again which is a bit annoying also the trucks while faster and with greater haulage capacity seem to be a bit unstable and turn over fairly easily.
After that basically ran out of content you need to do another space elevator delivery but that is locked in early access so probably leave things with this game and come back when they add some more content. Pretty fun game and rife for replays to further optimize the various strategies. As with factorio I thing I didn't give myself enough space to grow thing just stacking stuff as I needed it this makes expanding difficult but it's something to work on.
Christ on a bike. Been in migraine land. Felix has been playing it and enjoying it. Can't wait to play. Got pics, EMW?
I'm not sure epic has a screenshot button yet :S
The scale is so vast that it doesn't lend itself well to screenshots but I'll see what I can do next time I'm able to boot it up. I'm off to pax east tonight so will be a week or so till I'm back at home.