![]() In Satisfactory, you need to surrender enormous amounts of space to this sort of thing and spend endless time trying to get the conveyor inputs and outputs to line up properly. On Factorio’s grid, this is just a matter of slapping down the right parts. But since I need 3.5 of A for every 2 B, then I need to take output conveyors, combine them, then split them again to properly balance the load. creating endless blockades for you to bunny hop over, turning even the simplest of factories into a spacebar-destroying obstacle course.Įarlier I said that having machines operate in odd ratios is fine. Worse, the conveyor belts are infuriating analog things that don’t care about your grid. I don’t think ANY machine in the game fits neatly into 8m. This would be fine if everything was powers-of-two, but no. The internal grid is based on meters, which means 1/8ths of a tile. Machines are always 1.125 tiles wide by 1.675 tiles deep, or some similar bullshit. The natural thing to want to do next is to treat these tiles like a grid.Įxcept, nothing fits on this fucking grid. In Satisfactory, you can slam down these huge 8m floor tiles. These floor tiles make an excellent grid. That’s not making the puzzle more interesting, it’s just making your tools worse. It feels like programming with a variable-width font in a language where you can’t leave comments. What I don’t like is if a game is designed to make the second two things difficult. Sure, make it so that I need 3 of machine A for every machine B, but 2.5 of C for every B. In fact, it would be boring if it didn’t. I don’t mind if a game makes the first one a challenge. It should be easy to tell where things are made and where they go. The machines should be packed close together and there should always be some walking space. My base shouldn’t look like a big pile of tangled up Christmas lights, with conveyor belts crossing randomly all over the place. Everything should be tuned to flow smoothly. I don’t want machine C to be stalled waiting for B, and for B to get backed up because of irregular output from A. In a Factory-building game, I have very similar goals: I want that code to be beautiful and readable, and I want it to be organized in a way that makes sense and is easy to maintain. Satisfactory seems like it offers this same sort of puzzle, but once you’ve spent a few hours with the game you realize that the puzzles are sort of shallow and the whole process is buried under mountains of inconvenience and busywork.Īs a programmer, I want to write code that runs fast. Maybe I’m committing some sort of ecological crime, but damn if this isn’t one fine-looking, well-maintained ecological crime. The world of Satisfactory looks amazing, and watching the sunrise over the vast industrial complex I’ve carved into the face of this otherwise virgin planet fills me with a deep sense of accomplishment. The idea of having this style of puzzle-solving in a first-person world sounds almost too good to be true. I’m always looking to make it a little more efficient, get it working just a little faster, or pack the whole thing into an even smaller space. ![]() It’s this constant process of visualization, experimentation, and implementation as I work on various optimization problems. ![]() Every game ends up being its own puzzle, and no matter how well I do there’s always that nagging suspicion that I could do it all even better next time. I love solving emergent logistical problems. I’m not saying that Satisfactory needs to copy Factorio, I’m just explaining what initially drew me to the game. In order to discuss a game we need to start somewhere. “Satisfactory is not Factorio! If you want to play Factorio, then go play Factorio and don’t criticize this perfect jewel of a game!” Now, the defensive fan-boy response here is: According to Steam, I’ve clocked almost 2,000 hours in that game. To get where I’m coming from: I loved Factorio. There's no Lorax around to speak for these trees.
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