Do you fix factories if they aren't working efficiently? Or Let them run inefficiently?

Protip: it's ALWAYS the liquids. Even if your factory doesn't have any liquids as part of the production, somewhere out in the world, a liquid is watching your factory...plotting...

in a Test&Verification lesson, i learned that an error has different cost if discovered at a different moment of your work : - during implementation it cost 1 - during implementation/conception it cost 10 - during specification (what your thing should do, take as input and give as output) it cost 100 - during exploitation (like when you turn your factory on :D) it cost 1000 an other example of the similarities between the IT industry and the automatisation game niche

This . . . this is REAL engineering! Build the perfect system, and it FAILS -- then you go back and make it beautiful again. . . . And always ALWAYS live in terror that you missed something that'll make it fail again.

I love the idea of this video. I've gotten a few friends into Satisfactory, and it's easy to watch Let's Play videos and get disheartened feeling like the the streamers don't ever run into problems, when in fact it can be a integral, if sometimes frustrating, part of the genre. Especially at the scale of this particular factory, learning to track and troubleshoot issues like this is one of the most important skills that you can acquire.

Yesterday i lost 3 hours because 1 of my 3 truck stations has lack of resources. I thought it was because of the not-so-reliable trucks, so I converted everything to trains only to realize it was the same problem with trains. The reason was: 1 of 6 miners was not overclocked🤦‍♂

I love the shots of Factory Inspector Bean taking a stroll on the roof

I think this is a really important video to see. When I first got into factory building games I wanted everything to be as efficient as possible, so I’d research layouts, ratios and techniques to achieve that, which took the puzzles out of a puzzle solving game. All because I didn’t want to make a mistake due to my inexperience. Actually seeing someone redo a completed factory is a great refresher to make especially new players realise that the first iteration can simply make the output, even if it isn’t optimal, and it’s entirely possible to redo things without hassle. My perfectionism took away the fun for the longest time, embracing this almost ‘artistic sketch’ mindset definitely makes them more fun :D

There's just something so satisfying seeing all those belts in action.

Oh my god I suffered so much with this, even killed my mood for playing satisfactory. When you start off really nice and organized and the more you do the more spaghetti will be created eventually. And it happened to me, The spaghetti was slowly creeping into my factory and cause of confusion, I made mistakes and a lot of things broke after some time. Mood ruined after realizing I will have to troubleshoot a lot of stuff. This vid helped a bit, also gave motivation so thanks!

Pioneer: "I love my job so much I do it twice."

Thank you, for bringing us this content while we wait for 1.0. Literally the only way to live through these weeks!

I once build a 6 heavy mod frames /min just to realise i miscalculated the amount of screws by a order of magnitude 😭

This is why you should test small bits at a time, prevents stuff like this.

Very useful. It goes to show, even the accomplished hit similar issues as us mortals.

I made a nuclear power plant factory with 24 power plants that I was going to run at 250% and to challenge myself and use trains I put it where there was no water close. I wanted to package it in the spire coast and use trains to transport it to UN-packagers, then use the same train to take the empty canisters back to be refilled. Very quickly after turning everything on it all started to go south, I found out my trains weren't able to completely unload at both sides because the stations couldn't unload fast enough, this caused full canisters to pollute my empty canister lines and empty canisters to pollute my full canister lines. Fixing it was kind of frantic at 1st but after I got it all sorted, it was a lot of fun.

I'd add a couple of things from a "Fail fast" approach - find your mistakes *early* when they're *cheap* to fix: First, build one "slice" from initial resouce to output (end to end). Your factory may need, say, 80 refineries when complete at full capacity, but one of each recipe will sufice to prove it works in principle and you haven't missed anything. Second, build with the machines powered. Follow each item through the process. You won't make the mistake of thinking a belt should have item A on it if it clearly has item B waiting right there. Once you have the concept proven, build/connect additional "slices" one at a time. Keep an eye on your power as you do. This is for us regular players. If you're streaming then I can understand wanting the *big reveal* when you throw the power switch and it all bursts into life, but that has risks as demonstrated. Of couse if the big power on is your thing, enjoy that.

So glad you showed off how you troubleshot your amazing and beautiful builds.

One great way to keep an eye on, or see problems before the power starts to turn on and off, is to use buffers in between each different lines and let them get filled up (at least partially) before starting the line it will feed. For starters, it will help your manifold fill up faster if you consume less than the belt's max output. Screw ups in belts where you mix wrong items/recipes is easy to spot that way. You can then note with a sign where the level of items (or fluid) is in the buffer once the line is fully started. If there isn't much machines you can boost it manually by putting items in the machines directly. Some time later you can check the current level of items with the one you noted and if there are a lot of differences, that means there is a problem to fix. One last advice ? KISS. Keep It Simple and Stupid. It's easier to maintain 10 lines doing the same thing than maintaining one line doing 10x the size.

When i build a factory i always do the math first, and at least a few times (mainly because i forget how much item X i needed to make item Y even tho i checked it 5 seconds ago lol) And i never make a factory that makes a lot of advanced items. Let's say, Computers, 3 Computers per minute are enough because by the time i'll finish the Crystal Oscillator production, it'll take me ~3 hours, so i'll have ~540 Computers, and that's more than enough for a couple of hours. So, if you want your factory to run efficiently, do the math, use over/underclocking and even a little overproduction is okay.

"I'm going to build a large factory for X. It'll save me so much time and I'll have a plentiful supply for a long time!" *Spends the rest of eternity trying to figure out why the factory doesn't work right*

I have a confession to make. For whatever reason, I don't really know why, I like troubleshooting. Going around trying to find where things are nominal and where the anomalies lie is kind of fun in my mind.

That's why I dont like closed off factories where you can't see anything. Open spaces where you can always hover over the belts or pipes is so much easier to troubleshoot.

Its like you're playing an entirely different game, man!

I find that trying to recycle stuff and creating a circular system always causes problems. It can work, but it’s so finicky. Classic example is waste water from something like aluminium, which also needs water as an ingredient. I tried to recycle the water but it was so buggy I ended up just using it to create wet concrete and sinking it, solved everything instantly.

Had one that drove me nuts. Upgraded my pipes, and instead of replacing the T1 pipe, it put a T2 around it, so it was an invisible choke point.

My guy… the frustration I felt just watching this…

There is a precisely 0% chance I would not use Satisfactory-Calculator when deleting an entire section of the map.

Your pipes were doing something like what mine did when I made my very first fuel plant. (sit back and enjoy my headbanging first time experience with fuel) I created it on the west cost, having those 4 oil nodes, giving me 4 lines of 300, that today is now 3 lines of 600 (and yes with some know how you can get full 600 pipes working fine) and starting from the source I did the whole item/fluid divide by how much the refinery was asking for to get the total amount the input could support. I was going for heavy oil right into fuel. I thought of doing the packaged stuff but.. it was a bit complex for me at that time. A side note, I never feed or try and run more fluid then the pipes could hold. I found early game with water that 99% of my issues were trying to connect whole sections of machines on one pipe like tutorials showed in those 'perfect starter Coal Generator Setup' vids like the one connecting 16 coal gens... on a single mk 1 pipe and have extractors every so often along the line. a.k.a trying to force 700+ water in a 300 flow pipe. Once I stopped doing that and just keeping lines isolated in groups, as in if a setup needed 400 total, it would be in two isolated groups of 200. I never had an issue setting up water. So I did that, got the heavy oil residue pipes sorted split between 300 pipes (didn't have 600 at the time) and calked how much I would be making and made the amount of fuel refineries I needed. Then up to the gen's. Started it all up in sections so liquid lines could saturate.... I had sinks in place to deal with the resin until I made sure the liquids were going and yet... My refineries making heavy oil were making it fine, but the pip's taking it off were backing up. This suggested I wasn't turning it into fuel fast enough. Yet the fuel refineries were idling, getting a trickle of heavy oil residue so they were not getting enough. Now the only 'head lift' I had to worry about was the oil, and that was an easy pump on each line before it went into the factory. Flushing the system the oil side was working flawlessly. The pipes from the heavy oil to fuel... while they were underfloor fed they remained on the same level. HOR would drop down, trail along the ceiling on the foundations that the refineries sat on, ran across and came back up to the fuel refineries. The pipes looked full, but the fuel refineries starved. I re-did the whole pipe setup several times, even removing floor holes and direct connecting the pipes, same issue. I then rebuilt the refineries... same issue. I added pumps, same issue. Redid all the pipes to say eff underfloor so they were 100% all on the same level with no up and down... SAME ISSUE. I sent the save to two users who offered to help. They could only offer suggestions as they couldn't figure it out either. It was to the point I had more game time trying to troubleshoot it then I did progressing to that point. It got to where I was so done with it I took my save into the calc site and yeeted the whole thing. Made extra coal gens that I never had issues with and worked on my pure ingot factory, that yep... lot of water and pipe fun... that never had issues with the water. I would come back and re-do the fuel plant setup, with the only diff being using coupons to get enough for mk. 2 pipes and enough to run them from the oil pumps to the refineries, this condensing 4 lines of fuel into 3 lines of 600. From there double checking math, same amount of refineries were placed... and it worked fine. Same underfloor fed as I did at the start, heavy oil flowed fine, all in their own individual lines like I did before, and it just worked... To this day I have no clue why in the world the old one had plenty of HOR yet fuel was starving for it. So sometimes, if you can't find the fix by troubleshooting, sometimes its best to just yeet it all and start over from scratch.

Do you have a video covering How you unload materials into these factories? I feel like unloading the train station is such a bottleneck.

No hours wasted, lets start 1.0 as fresh so we get whole storyline...

And the full conveyor, and having to replace pipe bugs… praying they’re fixed for 1.0.

Very insightful !

"In your case, you might have something much more simple than this (shot pans over thousands of perfectly arranged machines)... Yes. Yes it is. :)

loved this

It’s always liquids, or that one meter of conveyer you forgot to connect between a smelter and a constructor.

I have a splitter for my excess plastic etc so it doesn't clog up the oil.

I wonder if someone will make a scenario mod or something where you start a new save with an exisiting broken factory and have to get it back up and running again

Step 1) Rerun all numbers for all machines, belts, splitters, and pipes, 10 times, from scratch. Step 2) Never ever ever split a belt or lift by placing a splitter or merger directly on it, nor split a pipe by placing a junction, pump, or valve directly on it. Step 3) Check power lights, clock speeds, backed up, empty, or surprise sushi belts. Step 4) It's always your pipe bugs. Step 5) Pipe floor hole head lift bugs. Step 6) Pipe pump head lift bugs. Step 7) Pipe junction flow bugs. Step 8) Pipe randomly disconnects bugs. Step 9) Pipe and possibly belt blueprint disconnect bugs. Step 0) It's always pipe bugs, yes even when you already fixed the pipes and it worked yesterday all day and there wasn't any update or anything.

Heh. I've had to do this several times. Turns out I have a fluid buffer that doesn't get emptied fast enough. Makes me wish for a fluid Awesome Sink.

Kibitz coop for 1.0???? Pls i have been wanting this for so damn long

funny thing my ENTIRE base is in the blue crater (horrible idea)

5:25 that was hard to explain? Lol.

sounds like a sushi-belt skill-issue

Couldn't you have just manually loaded the system to capacity? Once full you would have no problems.

👌👌👌👍👍👍👍👍

What did the valve say to the unpowered pump? You're trying too hard.

When i was making my first steel factory i wanted to use trucks to give iron to stell fatrory and then to my main base as i was connecting station to iron i didnt remember if it was ore or ingnots and though ingnots make more sence (you get where its going) After a while i wondered why is still not comming but just iron ingnots then i hit me and i spend 15 clearing the system And then i unlocked alternative recepi that used iron ignots and required less iron and had to clear system of iron ore this time How i love making problems for myself 🫠