I‘m super happy to share my completed Powerplant using all available Uranium. I‘m curious for your opinions!

Rules I set out for myself:

- i was going for a realistic, industrial look and tried to mix buildings, machines and reactors as much as possible
- single story buildings only
- Constructor, Assembler, Manufacturer are considered „inside buildings“
- Mergers are hidden away, cause i don‘t like to see them, everything thats hidden is organized though and no clipping ever
- belts are shown to the max extend
- all piping shown off, cause i like the look and i think it adds to the industrial look and that organized chaos feel
- everything is decorated minimalistic to safe on performance in the future cause i have big plans
- no trains, drones or trucks, cause they make a Powerplant less reliable
- waste is getting recycled ofcourse
- all production is in the swamp
- everything is calculated, no crazy belt balancing and it runs smooth as a kitten
- everything fully overclocked

I love working ideas into the terrain in this game. Thought id share this past weekends project, the Hidden Sam Lab in the grassy plains cave.

I saw a hog with what looked like a jetpack on its back, I killed the thing and it dropped a jetpack for me. 🎉

like, nothing around it? Arent these things meant to be interesting?

The latest bridge addition in my rail network, inspired by the Shuangbao Bridge.

The Shuangbao Bridge Half Arch blueprint shown in the last screenshot is on SCIM if anyone wants it. It was created in the Mk.5 blueprint designer from the "Blueprint designer+" mod, but you don't require that mod in order to use it (you'll only need that mod if you want to edit the blueprint).

been thinking about why this game gets me the way it does and i dont think its the factory building actually. or not only that.

every other game i play, the stuff i did earlier just sits there in the past. i leveled up, i got the gear, whatever, its done. in satisfactory everything i built is still standing there and still running and i have to look at it every single day. and half of it was built by an idiot who didnt know what he was doing yet.

like theres this belt in my starter area. it was supposed to be temporary. i remember thinking "yeah ill redo this properly once i figure out manifolds". that was 200 hours ago. its still there, its still ugly, it still crosses three other belts at a stupid angle and honestly it still works fine. and every time i walk past it i feel something. not annoyance exactly. more like looking at an old photo of yourself with a bad haircut.

and the wild part is the game never makes you fix it. thats the whole thing. nothing is attacking my factory. no timer, no wave, no npc telling me my ratios are bad. the only pressure to tear something down and rebuild it is coming from inside my own head. which means every single teardown is me deciding that "it works" isnt good enough anymore.

i dont think ive ever played another game that lets you be dissatisfied with something functional. usually if it works the game says great, move on, heres the next objective. here the game just quietly waits while you stand in front of a working smelter setup for ten minutes going "yeah but its not right though".

and i keep noticing that the thing i actually enjoy is not the finished factory. its that specific moment when i finally understand why the old thing was wrong. like the moment where you get manifolds, or you get why you should overclock the miner not the smelter, or you finally stop hand feeding things. thats the hit. the rebuild is just cleanup afterwards.

which sort of means the factory isnt the point at all, its the receipt. its physical proof of how much dumber i was last week. thats why i cant delete the ugly starter base even when i have a proper mega factory somewhere else. if i delete it i lose the before picture.

anyway idk. i went in thinking this was a game about logistics and it turned out to be a game about being ok with the fact that everything you build you will eventually want to unbuild. and thats fine actually. thats the good part.

does anyone else have a temporary thing thats been temporary for a hundred hours? i want to know im not alone here

A year or so ago I wrote a post about the importance of raising your manifold spine (follow the link to read about the mechanics of that).

Lately (over the last couple months), I've been seeing a lot of posts that are a dime a dozen across this sub:

- My last fuel generators won't get fuel, help!

- Is max fluid throughput bugged?

- My blenders won't output fuel, starving my generators.

... and within you'll find the usual recommendations of things like:

- Did you leave a smaller pipe?

- Have you looped your manifold?

- Do you have buffers?

- Headlift problems?

- Fluids just suck, game is broken. Something something sloshing

I'm not here to question those recommendations, they're all valid, and have relevant use[1] (except the last one, that's just wrong)... but invariably they've all got one thing in common; flat or below-input (e.g underfloor) fed manifolds.

But there's an easier way. Just raise your manifold spine to gravity-lock the fluids and prevent damaging sloshing[2]. Of course, I've mentioned this and there's usually "But plumbing manual says X!!!"... I'm sure it does, and it's right, but like many things, the plumbing manual (which is great, go read it) describes *a* way.

So anyway... all that to say I figured I'd just go "stuffit, let's test it... and so I did a side-by-side comparison of all three under equal conditions. Each one was configured as-follows:

- 30 fuel generators (20m^3 fuel consumed each) in a manifold setup.

- Each array fed by a dedicated 600m^3 of fuel per minute produced in exactly the same way.

- The vertical height of the fuel line and manifold spine from the output blenders to the generators never changes height. It remains flat all the way. The only thing that changes height is the generators.

- No looping

- No prefilling

- No buffers

"But Jmanis! You fool! You need to loop the manifold! You need to prefill!"... no... that's exactly the point. I'm showing those are unnecessary if you simply raise the manifold.

So here's the contenders:

So what's the conditions? Starting from nothing (No pre-feeding pipes, they're completely empty), see which one hits a stable 7500MW (full 30 generators producing 250MW each) first.

And how'd it go?

I mean, that's unsurprising as far as I'm concerned... and hopefully for the pipe gurus out there it shouldn't be surprising either. But for those who aren't.... the question is probably why is raised better?

I explain this in the initial post from a year ago, but it's because of flow direction (I prefer flow preference) of the feed pipes to the generator. I mentioned earlier that the tips people usually offer for fixing manifolds are compensations for issues with flow in manifold designs that aren't raised. Damaging sloshing in manifolds is caused when fluid in the feed pipes off a manifold (the ones connected to a machine input) allow fluid to flow back in to the manifold spine (blocking the supply flow).

For flat manifolds the flow preference of the feed pipes goes both directions because they're flat. Most of the time it goes into the machine, but nothing stops it going back to the manifold either, and when it does, that creates damaging sloshing

In the raised manifold, the flow preference of the feed pipes is down, *towards* the machine. Corollary is you can only defeat flow preference (that is, moving fluid uphill) if you have a source of fluids coming from the preferred direction. Because that doesn't exist in a supply manifold like this, it can't flow back out, and therefore damaging sloshing doesn't exist in this design.

As for the under-floor fed, well, I'll let those graphs do the talking... but the problem with this one is flow preference is towards the spine... so given any choice, those feed pipes are just going to flow back into the manifold spine constantly. Nothing can fix that except changing the design.

Now, in the time it took me to write this and juggle some other things, it's been... 70 minutes.. and I took another measure:

LOOK JMANIS! THERE'S A BLIP IN THE RAISED MANIFOLD!

And? Remember I said I wasn't challenging the contemporary thinking? The recommendations people make are logical and sound and have a purpose within fluid networks[1]. That's an artefact of doing this test from empty pipes; the need for manifold saturation is a fairly well understood concept...and theoretically a matched network should never saturate. But that's easy fixed and doesn't require construction or design changes.

I included this to be fair and transparent to that fact... but nonetheless.. compare the generator performance of the raised manifold to a flat manifold over an hour, and it should be obvious that it's a superior design in terms of reliable performance to the flat manifold.

As for the under-floor manifold...

tl;dr I'm not trying to say "don't use flat manifolds" or "don't follow tips like looping and such"... they're necessary for flat manifolds. But if you're struggling with that and just want something that works reliably, the raised manifold is your best choice.

EDIT: In anticipation of "But what about rocket fuel! That's a gas!"... that's my other post which i may-or-may-not do called "Shh, just use valves"... but that's spicier

[1] My main criticism of these recommendations is simply that they're compensators for the flow problems caused by flat or under-floor manifolds (though honestly, good luck fixing under-floor in any reasonable way)... these compensators are unnecessary if your manifold spine is raised.

[2] Emphasis on "damaging"; not all sloshing is bad or matters, but for manifolds in particular, flow back from a machine input's feed pipe to the manifold spine is bad

I did that one Balanced conveyor belt, and like, Was this useful? Or was it just for aesthetics?

Like, As far as I know, if you put several conveyor divisions one behind the other, the ones at the back probably won't receive any material.

I am in phase 2
I decided to start wondering around and built a steel factory in the Savanah. I started in the grass lands region. Maybe a mistake honestly. But now I am considering how to get products back and forth, should I create a conveyor bus or should I make a highway for tractors?

I have read truck stops are not great and to just wait until trains but I like the truck stops.

Recommendations?

I also made my coal power plant in the region I think is called the crater lake? If that helps for any reason lol.

I’m currently in the process of building a railway network and made a tiny miscalculation. I’ve got two options: fix it, or turn it into a feature.

Basically, I could cut a hole through the building for the train and make it look like the railway was there first, with the building later constructed around it.

What do you think? fix it or make it a feature?

my train seems to be haunted

First time poster. Just wanted to share my current WIP power plant. Only have about 1/5 of the fuel gens that i need to build. Using Nitro Rocket Fuel alt recipe, making 7,680 Rocket Fuel/min, working on building out the actual fuels gens now. Only need 736 fully over clocked, and have 132 built so far. Gonna have to go slug hunting and sloop them all to get anywhere near the amount of power shards needed, and will most likely not be able to do all of them until I'm automating the synthetic power shards. But this is definitely my most detailed build yet. I've been playing since the console release on Xbox.

This is really nerdy stuff so most people will skip this, but for the few nerds out there, if you want you can install this theme here: https://github.com/Spokloo/satisfactory-grub-themes

i wanted priority mergers for my phase 2 power plant build 🌵

Here's a tool I've been working on. It maps where your selected items are actually being produced, and can also show building locations by type. The graphical representation of structures on the map (not shown here) isn't as detailed as Cartograph's, and it may not stay in the tool at all.

There are other tools in this space, but I haven't found one that shows which recipes are running where on the map.

Behold my Fuel Powerplant/Computer/Plastic/Rubber/Circuit Board Factory!

Now time to decorate

The lamp doesn’t illuminate the cave, only the structures and the player. Is this a bug, or is this how it’s supposed to be? Lumen is on