My friend and I were playing for sort of our first time at 1.0. (We played a bit a few months ago, but stopped around computers when we heard 1.0 would be soon.)
We were having fun, but as we got later in the game, it felt like things got really overwhelming and slowed down a lot. Especially once we got to T7/8. We ended up spending like a week just to mostly get nuclear power running. (We still aren’t handling the waste completely.) 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.
At this point we’re on pause with the game. Does anyone have any suggestions for making things go smoother late game or is this just how the game is after a certain point? It feels bad stopping so close to the end, but the way things were going it felt like we might have ended up spending more time on the last few tiers than everything before that.
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 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.
It kind of just feels like compounding complexity. The projects themselves require a lot more steps and sometimes resources from around the map. Plus with all the increased throughput we get from upgraded miners and belts doing things at scale involves a LOT of machines. So the numbers kind of keep ballooning as we also need to handle a lot of different inputs.
Then there are all the old inefficient factories which I should tear down/upgrade, but it’s just really daunting knowing just how much I’m gonna have to add to make it all efficient.
Honestly that’s what I started doing at some point. Just try to overestimate so hopefully I don’t need to do more math.
For the compounding complexity problem, most lategame parts are just 3-4 complez parts slapped together, you can just make a factory for each of those, then feed the three outputs into a small “combiner” factory.
Also using satisfactory calculator makes the logistics easier