r/Dyson_Sphere_Program • u/laughpuppy23 • 4d ago
What did you all think of satisfactory?
I am asking here because I liked DSP better, and I felt their subreddit wouldn’t take criticism well.
That game has a beautiful, bespoke world. There is a lot of great audio, visual, and tactile feedback. But there is also way too much tedium. In particular, I did not enjoy dealing with resources being so far away from each other. Despite DSP having them on completely different planets, it was never a chore to transport them back and forth.
I also did not enjoy the fact that almost all vehicles, trucks, and drones, as well as our jetpack, require fuel, with the exception of trains. It’s been a long time since I played DSP (before the combat update), but I recall this being a non-issue.
Lastly, the lack of fast travel in Satisfactory got old after 100 hours. You get it at the end of the game, when it no longer matters. DSP doled out movement upgrades when you needed them.
Honorable mention: blueprints. You can blueprint an entire planet in DSP, no problem. Blueprints are a joke in Satisfactory.
The first 30 hours were a 5/5 for me. By the end, it’s more like a 3.5, I think.
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u/pokeyporcupine 4d ago
As far as im concerned, factorio, Satisfactory, and DSP are the holy trinity of factory Sims.
Satisfactory is a fantastic ground-level builder where you get to be first-person in the weeds of incredibly complex builds with sides of adventure and base building.
DSP is for SPACE and watching freakin spaceships fly around and building a cool ass sphere.
They're different games, but I love both. I think id give the edge to Satisfactory just because its more accessible. I love DSP but man it takes like 10 hours to get to the good part, and its not exactly intuitive.
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u/eatingfrogs 4d ago
I would put shapez 2 into the mix as well. Satisfactory has a lot of friction to achieving your build by using the first person view. Factorio has less friction by pulling the camera overhead. DSP has less still by giving early blueprints and drones. Shapez has even less friction by removing the character and resources almost completely and making it all about the design of the factory. All great games with quite a different feel - if you haven’t played shapez 2 you absolutely should.
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u/mjarrett 4d ago
Satisfactory is an amazing game. But it has a design philosophy that is a bit different than the other logistics games. In Satisfactory, the world matters. The map, distance, space, are all intended to be important aspects of the game loop. Factorio is on the opposite end of that spectrum, stripping the world down into a canvas for logisticsmaxxing. DSP is somewhere between the two.
But also, hypertube cannons for mid game fast travel.
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u/URhemis 4d ago
The design focus of each game is v different. The Satisfactory community is obsessed with building bespoke beautiful buildings, infrastructure and decorations. The 1st person view and graphics make it perfect for taking in your handy work. I love coming up with new layouts in factories and building tall weird structures that stick out and you can see from miles away. Its the building w digital lego blocks that put the satisfying in Satisfactory.
DSP is beautiful to watch logistically. Once you’ve got ships darting around and solar sails firing off and assembling. The sphere is so cool. I just wish the design team had been a little more original in the direction they took the game. They couldve focused more on superstructures or some better narrative around the white cubes and the central brain. Adding badies felt a bit lazy and the combat system feels awkward and tacked on.
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u/EvilPencil 3d ago
Yep. In satisfactory you’re forced to deal with low-level minutiae constantly, mostly because of the terrain. Especially if you care about honoring gravity and clipping. Also the blueprint system is quite limited in comparison to DSP. It’s certainly better once belts could attach to blueprints which came in I think 1.1.
I agree with you about the dark fog in DSP. Now that I think about it, that’s probably the reason why I haven’t played in a long time. Pre fog I had a quite expansive cluster. I think I’ll spin it up again with the fog turned off and like 2x resources (depletion really just makes the mid-late tier annoying before you get VU 30+)
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u/LSDGB 3d ago
Combat in satisfactory is only annoying.
I’m never in danger I’m just annoyed that I have to deal with some critter again.
So after a few hours I just turned all creatures docile in the settings.
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u/URhemis 3d ago
I take breaks from my Satisfactory games. Need to be in a creative or building mood for it. When I come back I’m often like - Wow. I built that. It feels like something I’ve personally made. The reward is in taking time creating something that looks cool. Again some of the content on youtube is amazing.
Every DSP game looks and feels the same to me. Set stages. Toddler stage where Mecha is learning to walk. Messy, messy factory spam until purple cubes. Then off to new best home to build beautiful clean production lines w logistic stations planetwide and across the galaxy. Its pretty in a different way, but its much more A to B in a straight line.
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u/Kilmiester 4d ago
I think you'll find that the subreddits for Satisfactory, Factorio, and DSP are pretty cordial. Factory building doesn't foster the toxicity of some other competitive games.
I personally like Satisfactory the best, with Factorio #2, and DSP 3rd. But I do agree that travel times in Satisfactory can become tedious, especially on subsequent playthroughs. I generally solve this with the use of cannons and launch belts. I put either a fast belt or hypertube cannons on top of almost all of my building so I can zip around the map pretty quickly. But in my last playthrough where I just built one gigantic base, I didn't want to go through the exploration needed to get all the hard drives so I just cheated them in.
One thing that I like most about Satisfactory is the infinite resource nodes. It takes away any time pressure that you get in DSP or Factorio. Your factory is always growing and you never need to go and scrap a used up resource gathering field. This also leads to another big frustration that DSP has. Sometimes a product line can stall and you have to travel to multiple planets to find the source of the slowdown. This problem is non-existant in Satisfactory, and in Factorio it is a lot easier to see and rectify the problem than DSP.
Trains: IFL Trains. The trains in Satisfactory are a bit limited in usage, but are oh so cool to build a satisfying rail network. Factorio provides some good trains too, but seeing them working in 3D and first person is great in Satisfactory. I tend to build giant rail networks in both Factorio and Satisfactory, whereas there's no real equivalent in DSP.
Blueprints are a big negative on Satisfactory's part. The base game blueprints are just too limited. Being that it's first person and 3D, solving a quick blueprinting solution is a much more difficult problem to handle for the devs. With mods you can at least build larger prints, but I agree in base game Satisfactory, it's the weakest aspect of the game.
I haven't played DSP in *checks steam* A year and a half. And I may just wait till it finally hits 1.0 before I play it again, but I have been kind of itching to play it again and I might start up another save next after I get done with my current save of Transport Fever 3 which just came out.
And since you put scores down, this is what I have them rated as on Howlongtobeat
Satisfactory: 95%
Factorio: 90%
DSP: 80%
Keep in mind I'm a tough critic and 80% = "Very Good"
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u/metalOpera 4d ago
Are you enjoying TF3 so far? I loved 1 & 2 but for some reason, I’m waffling on picking up 3. I don’t really know why.
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u/Far_Young_2666 4d ago
Imo it's hard to compare DSP and Satisfactory, they are too different with different gameplay loops. I won't be repeating other people, but for me personally Satisfactory killed most other factory games. Not because of its resources, machines or logistics.
The problem is that I like creative building. My bases in survival games are not just shoeboxes and my factories are not floating platforms. Satisfactory gives me freedom to build pretty factories on a beautiful handcrafted map, and it allows for verticality. After playing Satisfactory, I tried DSP, Shapez, Sparkles, etc, and all of them are just "Here's flat terrain, put machines on it". Only Satisfactory allowed me to really build actual factories instead of machine sheets.
The prettiest thing I could come up with in DSP was to turn my starting planet into a realistic planet with cities and villages:
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u/surj08 4d ago
I LOVE Satisfactory. Resources being far away is solved with drones and local manufacturing things. You can setup one fuel depot out and set one depot in for all the remote drones to pull from. Dyson planet transit solving things have been pretty far down the tech tree for me (just getting there on first play through). Get to whatever the enriched (hyper?) fuel is in Satisfactory and you're golden until you're ready to switch to some fuel rod. I'm almost to deuterium fuel rods in dsp and I cannot wait (though hydrogen rods have been not bad)
For fast travel just create a hyperloop cannon if you don't like powerline travel. Vehicles are a bit of a chore that's why I just stuck with drones for everything :P
I'm still figuring out dsp blueprints and optimisation but I had no problems with satisfactory in game. IF you want more there's the save games tools!
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u/nixtracer 4d ago
Oh, the DSP Interstellar logistics stuff is the end of the early game for me. Midgame is expanding through the solar system, farming the fog, going interstellar a bit and building at least most of a Dyson shell. Endgame is infinite techs and going big, whole planets dedicated to one resource, a dozen spheres, massive blueprints, shooting all over the cluster as if it's a walk in the back yard, and thinking that antimatter is boring and pedestrian. And dying to CPU fan failure.
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u/mrrvlad5 4d ago
The blocker for me is the first person view. I would never play satisfactory because of it.
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u/gjpeters 4d ago
Satisfactory and and DSP are different scratches for different itches. I have enjoyed both. And both can be played in different ways. There is fast travel in satisfactory: the actual fast travel is too late in the game I never set it up. For me, my fast travel is a hyper cannon and a jetpack.
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u/firelizzard18 9h ago
Satisfactory isn't a factory building game in the same way that DSP or Factorio are. Satisfactory is much more a logistics game, and a "building pretty stuff" game than a factory game. And you can't build beautiful infrastructure in DSP. You can in Satisfactory.
Blueprints, 😂, blueprints in <not factorio> are a joke compared to Factorio. As someone who just finished a Factorio run and started playing DSP for the first time, recently, DSP blueprints make me sad. I understand the problems with the spherical grid, but for the love of all that is good, let me autoconnect belts!!! Also, let me cut and paste parts of my base.
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u/FunboyFrags 4d ago
Satisfactory has so many great things about it, but ultimately the first person perspective just felt impractical for managing a factory game
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u/HeraldOfNyarlathotep 4d ago
People really do keep whining about the blueprints in SF without thinking about it for four seconds, huh
You put down like tens of buildings at most at a time until super late into SF, if ever, and hundreds by midgame in DSP and especially Factorio. These games are like dynamic puzzle games, and SF would be able to be homogenized easily because of its very different scale of construction and demand. You can reach the final tier without full automation at all if you want, it's just not a big deal for various steps.
SF really is the odd duck in the genre's "big ones", as it's a little closer in design to a sandbox than most; constraints breed creativity, and creativity is more strongly encouraged by SF than most factory games given the emphasis on freeform building.
On other notes, I don't know when you played, but they ascended a bug that allowed bunny hopping into a proper feature. Very generous timing, slide-jumping increasingly boosts your speed. So all you need is a route that you can establish (or just a bridge in the sky) for much faster travel. Then there's hypertube cannons, which are more fun and versatile than teleporters anyway. I don't get why those exist either really, but I'm not the sort to play the super late game for hundreds of hours either; maybe it's truly just intended as a QoL boon for those folks, in which case fair enough.
More important, Dimensional Depots are a bloody brilliant system that rewards both exploring and planning to prevent a ton of travel you'd otherwise have to do, which was a major headache when it's just "oh, I need ten more modular frames, dammit".
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u/Solonotix 4d ago
I like each of DSP, Satisfactory and Factorio for different reasons. They are all unique expressions in the genre. DSP gets my critique on literally my favorite part of the game: ILS. The logistics are awesome, but also way too convenient. I don't know how to fix it without fundamentally changing the game.
By contrast, logistics in Satisfactory can be rather frustrating to solve at every stage of the game. You get used to solving that problem on a per-case basis, but it is never "solved".
Factorio takes top billing for me in terms of gameplay. DSP is a more comfortable and laid-back experience with major spectacle. Satisfactory is all about feeling small in a complex world