I just want to say: you aren’t alone! This is my first time through and everything was going mostly good until I finished T7. Now it feels very overwhelming.

What part is overwhelming for you?

My biggest issue is the factory has gotten quite spread out and items are being created and split up and going to different places. So even if I know I’m making enough cable or copper sheets, I don’t know that a given line actually has enough. The organic growth that was happening has hit a wall and I need a new strategy.

Feels like my options are:

1. Overprovision everything so I guarantee there’s enough everywhere.
2. Figure out a new plan. :-)

#1 feels like it’s a stop gap and it’s just turning this from a now problem into a later, harder problem.

So, I’ve started roaming the map again grabbing spheres, sloops, and drives. I’ve also made some smelting BPs and tapped a bunch of nodes. Thinking I’ll ship those ingots somewhere and get some new production lines going. Dunno if I want to do mega base or smaller factories. It’s a beautiful world, so that’s been fun.

I’ve also started watching some YouTube vids, but It’s not been as helpful as I hoped. When someone with 6000 hours builds something, there’s a ton of internalized thinking happening that you don’t hear and that’s the stuff I need/want.

So, I’ll just start experimenting soon with all those ingots I’m producing and see what happens.

Much like Factorio I tend to rip old builds out and replace them more efficient ones.

Take a couple hours and go artifact hunting for hard drives and loops to improve productivity.

I often just don’t do anything with my factory; instead, I go exploring and murdering and I then grind my murder victims into mush For Science™. Sometimes I work on my factory too though, but I’ve been recently reticent to untangle an unproductive early bit of my factory which takes some thinking juice which I don’t have a lot of these days because I’m also in school.

So, try exploring and murdering; not just building.

The progression you’re seeing is part of these sort of games. The best idea I can give ya is to go watch some YouTubers that spend their time building in satisfactory and clean some tips off of them.

The big things that I rely on are

• factory templates that I make myself in the blueprint designer
• using the Satisfactory calculator to help with the more complicated item dependency graphs (the more complicated the thing the more ingredients needed)
• scaling up production of my basic ingredients
• deciding if I want a Mega factory that does everything or if I want several smaller factories with more focus to them (i.e. this factory over here only produces frames)

We tried using blueprints a bit, but they were kind of clunky and it felt like there was only so much we could do with them.

I felt this way, too, until I made myself some mini blueprints. I’ve only ever seen people post the wacky, crazy “I fit 12 generators in this!” but I never liked those. What I made instead is a 2 constructor bp, with all the belts and power setup. I only have to connect the ins/outs. If I need more, then I place the bp twice, now I have 4 constructors. Do the same with assemblers and refineries, etc. It simplifies the builds.

Also, I use signs to leave myself post it notes. How many iron do I need? 37 per minute. Write that on the sign.

Treat it like an elephant you want to eat. One small piece at the time. I’ve unlocked tear 7 right now and have zero pieces for next stage of the space elevator even planned. I’ve spent evenings just running around, gathering mercer spheres, somersloops and hard drives. Spent few hours here and there on ziplining on power lines and setting up radar towers across the map (while gathering spheres, somersloops and drives), accumulated few stacks of various remains and just having fun on exploring the map.

Today I had few hours to spare on my save world and ran into an issue where my power network went down. I originally planned that I’d unlock nuclear power but instead I needed to debug my fuel generation farm (where majority of my power is coming from) and I found that I missed a belt on half of the refineries so they got filled with resin and after fixing that I found out that I might have miscalculated something since not all the generators became online, but that might be just that it takes a while to fill the pipes, so that’s a chore I need to take care of at some point before proceeding.

But if that doesn’t feel like fun I can run around and tinker with my other factories, install smart power switches so that I can keep the power generation on and at least some production running and keep the lights on in general. And when that’s been taken care of I have still a ton of map to explore, a lot more tinkering to do (turbofuel power plant would be nice) and so on.

And that’s what I’ve been doing so far. I’m just enjoying the gameplay. End game parts are a bit of a pain to mange, but I can split all of those into manageable parts and work with them whenever I feel like it. Like having enough copper sheets to run my computer production. I started on grassy fields and ran everything I need from couple of nodes from there with mark1 miners. That didn’t take me too far, but I’ve had my fun on upgrading the existing stuff. Tearing down all the ‘old’ stuff from the start and building them up better, or just upgrading the bare minimum to get to the steamed sheets or something else.

Late game stuff requires a lot, but I’ve just ignored it and tinkered on with what I have and I have a ton of room to improve pretty much everything. Eventually I of course move on to the late game stuff, but before that I’m just having fun on trying different build styles, figuring out efficient use of blueprints, hunting down more spheres and loops and so on.

I know some people are just speedrunning the whole thing and others who meticulously plan every step even before starting the game and run it with a spreadsheet on second monitor, but my play style is just to do whatever feels like fun at the time. Sometimes it means to jerryrig an existing factory to accept mark2/3 miners, other times it means tearing down whatever I already had and doing it better and sometimes I just enjoy the world and gather more DNA capsules.

You do whatever you find fun, it’s a game after all and rushing it to the finish line, at least for me, isn’t the most important thing. I have only limited number of hours I can sink to this and if it’s not fun then it’s not worth of my time. I stopped previous save a bit before coffeestain froze the updates and started to focus on 1.0. I was almost finished everything, but forcing myself to build a mess just to complete another stage wasn’t really fun anymore and I didn’t even think of the game for a half a year or so. Obviously the 1.0 release was a big part of it, but if you feel like it, just create signs or other clues to help you get back and let it sit for a while if you feel like it.