Satisfactory Early Access – Episode 2.5: Improving Efficiency by Splitting and Merging

As alluded to when I started the series, our first of likely many “bonus episodes” is here. The idea behind the bonus episode is that while I will be actively playing the game, I won’t really have the most lofty objectives. I expect these episodes to be a bit longer running, and when they end it may not seem like a lot actually got done.

To make things simple, if an episode features repeatedly using game features that we have already covered in a previous episode, it will probably be considered a bonus episode. In contrast, a regular episode will feature activities such as building a key structure, exploring a new area, or overcoming a looming challenge.

[G^G] Satisfactory Early Access – Episode 2.5: Improving Efficiency

Impressions from Episode 2.5

While I found diving into the mechanics of splitting and merging to be very interesting, I am really glad I decided to deem this a “bonus episode”. There was a definitely a fair bit of fumbling around that took place that has been generally avoided during the regular episodes.

That all being said the lessons learned from episode 2.5 were extremely valuable in improving the efficiency of my factories. Figuring out ways to maximize the pure and normal ore deposits will let me get a lot of bang for my buck, and help speed up the manufacturing process in the long term.

However, one issue I ran into was that my miners on pure ore deposits were actually mining the ore faster than it could transported it out. This lead to a bit of an awkward situation where even though the miner said that it was mining 120 ore per minute, setting up the factory chain downstream to handle that chain(in theory) was resulting in an in-efficient setup. I eventually scaled down my configuration to save on power, but I feel like the game should do a better job of providing information around things like belt speeds so people don’t build structures on bad assumptions.

Lastly I am really starting to see the value behind laying down a foundation early. It really does help you keep everything neat and tidy while you are building up your factory chains. I’ll definitely need to rethink things a bit in the near future, but for now I’m pretty happy with how everything is progressing.

Lessons Learned

1. Belts don’t move fast enough to support miners on pure resources nodes. I am hoping this will change at some point, but for now I will need to essentially need to treat pure nodes and normal nodes when it comes to automation.
2. I could probably have started building out my foundation early. On a related note, I should have automated limestone production right away, and basically never turned the factory chain off.

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I hope you enjoyed my content, and until next time… stay efficient everyone!

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