This was my first thought too. You get through Phase 3 felling pretty ok about your spaghetti, and then you unlock aluminum and realize that Phase 4 is going to take as long as the first 3 combined.
Yeah as soon as you gotta start trucking things from a 20min walk you have to consider rail and then realize this trips into fuel power and then extended powerlines
It becomes a lot bigger than banging rocks together after phase 3
Hey me too! I started in the dunes. The only train I needed was a single rail to go back and forth delivering aluminum ingots back to the dunes. Other than that juat belts as well.
I tried trains and was not enjoying them especially with all the elevation changes so completed phase 4 mostly with long ass belts until drones, then I droned between my main 4 locations for phase 5.
For what it's worth, I have beaten the game 3 times now, and literally never once have I considered using rail, drones, or trucks. Well, not true, I have used trucks for coal, but I still prefer to belt everything.
For me the big “holy shit this isn’t the game I thought it was” was when I was forced to seek out oil for the first time, I didn’t even realize I’d be leaving the grassy plains at that point for the whole playthrough.
I hope spoiler tags work here...for others. Like seriously, don't spoil yourself on this one if you plan on playing the game. If you HAVE played the game to completion or have gotten near the end of the game (at least nuclear power) then go ahead and read what I wrote and try it yourself in case you missed it.
Satisfactory gave me the greatest sense of wonder of any game I've ever played. The reason is not because of the game's literal beauty, but how completely planned everything is. When the game asked me to seek out nitrogen, I took the closest one that showed up. They even go so far as to tell you "hey, this stuff doesn't require pumps." So your first instinct, as you've learned so far in the game, is to build up and take it through the sky like you have been for the past 10-15 hours when you figure out the ground is very hostile. And then you reach this point where you're looking at the tallest mountain in the game (because they knew you'd build your base over there, because they fucking planned it that way) from the ramp you're building up to the sky to transport your new resource through pipes and there's this beautiful echo. There is this plateau between the nitrogen and the tall mountain that has a bunch of the curvy lines going between various areas, and you realize that it's basically a scale model of what you've built so far. I stood there literally 10 minutes in awe. My paths between the resources stretching up high in nearly the same arcs that were shown on the plateau. I am not sure any game will ever instill that level of pure wonder the same way. It was life changing.
I would say not even then. I think you feel so accomplished making the space elevator and providing the 50 smart plating, only to realize that ha! That was just the tutorial.
The game has a way of immediately humbling you, since the next tiers require 500 smart plating among other parts. Probably sounds tedious from how I'm describing the game, but trust me, it's remarkably, well, satisfactory.
There were a few times I would wake up thinking "all I gotta do is add some X real quick" which actually turned into 20 hours of rejigging multiple factories.
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u/FactoryOfBradness 4h ago
This was my first thought too. You get through Phase 3 felling pretty ok about your spaghetti, and then you unlock aluminum and realize that Phase 4 is going to take as long as the first 3 combined.