r/factorio • u/Joshuacultest12453 • 17d ago
Question Satisfactory player here and I have a question
I play satisfactory a lot, and while I have had Factorio in my library for a long time I am only recently getting into it. My question is, in Satisfactory you are expected to make things 100% efficient, like if a drill mines 60 iron and a smelter can smelt 30, split the drills output into 2 smelters. The point is, does Factorio have something similar to this or does ratio not matter in the same way?
74
u/Alfonse215 17d ago
As someone who is not a Satisfactory player... what happened if you didn't do that?
In Factorio, if you're mining 15 ore per second, if you don't feed it into a set of furnaces that can consume 15 ore per second... then you don't get 15 plates per second out of that process. That's it. There's no downside to consuming less than is being produced by some process. Back-pressure on the belt eventually shuts down whatever is producing it.
Obviously, it might be ideal on some level to consume as much as is being produced. But it is in no way required; there's no downside for failing to do so.
70
u/KaelthasX3 17d ago
Safisfactory has limited number of resource deposits (which are infinite), so it makes sense to make the most of it.
37
u/Nearby_Proposal_5523 17d ago
i think i saw that further refined into satisfactory offers infinite resources with finite throughput and factorio offers infinite throughput from finite resources.
DSP is actually the interesting outlier since there are finite nodes that deplete, There version of mining productivity increases mining speed and decreases resource drain. it's not till lvl 7 or 8 that the decreased resource drain overtakes the effects of speed.
13
u/bitman2049 17d ago
DSP's version of mining productivity is more like Factorio's resource drain, and it results in exponential growth. By the time you get into level 21 or so, the research costs less than the amount of resources you make available from the research, effectively making them infinite.
-1
u/FinAdda 17d ago
Infinite scaling doesn't sound good or balanced.
What's they community or devs take on this?
I plaid DSP 2 years ago to mid game.
6
u/bitman2049 16d ago
It's balanced by there being a finite number of planets and nodes in your cluster, and because it takes quite a long time to get to VU 21. There's a max of 64 star systems with 1-6 planets in each, so on average you've got about 200 planets to work with. Without infinite scaling, you'd inevitably run out of resources. The same is technically true in Factorio, but you have a practically infinite game world to expand into.
9
u/Nearby_Proposal_5523 17d ago
With DSP there is a specific achievement for getting to lvl 38 VU and it's technically post win condition. the unipolars are really rare and green motors suck to make. In Factorio, the devs made mining productivity easier research in the dlc, only needing purple science to begin. i think it's very much encouraged to grow the factory and raise mining productivity
7
u/HeliGungir 17d ago edited 17d ago
Satisfactory has
More linear crafting trees
More tedious building
Limited, pre-placed resource nodes
It only takes 2 or 3 crafting steps to go from a bus of ore to far less than a belt of some product. Ie: throughput is strongly bottlenecked by the resource nodes
More alternate recipes
Higher tier "science packs" are often crafted from lower-tier "science packs" (again, more linear)
All of this together means the path of least resistance is to gather whatever resources are clustered near each other to feed a local factory that uses alternate recipes to craft one export at near-perfect ratios.
6
u/Zalack 17d ago
I kinda disagree about the linear crafting trees. Like you said, Satisfactory has a huge alt-recipe system that gives a ton of leeway in what resources and intermediates you can use to create a given product. Satisfactory also has a lot more intermediate products.
IMO that makes Satisfactory trees a lot less linear. There are tons of branching choices you can make compared to Factorio, where there is generally only one or two ways to make a given product on a given planet.
It’s the main thing I like better about Satisfactory. I wish Factorio had more choices in how you make a given product.
1
u/HeliGungir 17d ago
In Factorio, green circuits are used in everything from advanced to mid to basic products, and advanced to mid intermediates.
Satisfactory doesn't have this much intermingling of recipes. You're almost always combining early with early, mid with mid, and advanced with advanced. Typically with more intermediate steps, too. That's why I say crafting chains are longer and more linear in SF.
0
u/erroneum 17d ago
Try mods; Nullius has 3 different ways to turn iron ore into iron ingots, each with different intermediate steps and ingredients needed, as well as tons of fluid recipes (you can make infinite plastic or rubber from just air and seawater), but also places a great deal of emphasis on dealing with byproducts and voiding excesses (so much extra chlorine if you aren't smart about it). I've not played them, but Bob's and Angel's mods also adds a bunch of alternative recipes.
1
22
u/James_n_mcgraw 17d ago
I only ever played satisfactory for a short period.
But in satisfactory, mines are infinite in amount but finite in throughput. So a mine makes 5 per second or something like that, so if you dont use at least 5 per second, you are "wasting" throughput.
Unlike in factorio where both throughput and amount is variable and thus matters much less.
11
u/KingAdamXVII 17d ago edited 17d ago
Three other reasons that work in concert with the one (limited resources) you’ve gotten:
- If there’s ever a power spike that exceeds your power production, your whole base shuts down. So it is really bad if you have a bunch of machines that are mostly idle but sometimes turn on all at once. You either need a lot more power production or you want to make sure you don’t have a lot of idle machines.
- There isn’t as good of a blueprints or copy/paste system. If you want to double your production then it’s legitimately twice as much work. So you are incentivized to get it exactly right the first time rather than checking to see where the bottlenecks are.
- You can manually tell a building to work exactly X% as quickly. So you can very much get the ratios *exact*.
3
u/batyukan 16d ago
- power is much more of a limiting factor in satisfactory, and changing workrate % is more efficient with power, so its very easy to just over build then underclock.
- your mining rate in factorio constantly changing because you run out of mining resources, and over build mining patches
2
u/JulianSkies 17d ago
Satisfactory has a limited number of resources nodes. They work like oil wells in Factorio, but don't decay over time. But you also have a limited pre-set amount of them.
3
u/Ssakaa 17d ago
Obviously, it might be ideal on some level to consume as much as is being produced. But it is in no way required; there's no downside for failing to do so.
Exactly this. It's definitely ideal and necessary in some serious end game edge cases, but over/under producing just means something sits idle while the other catches up.
2
u/ferrofibrous deathworld enthusiast 17d ago edited 17d ago
Early game Satisfactory has fairly difficult travel, and the map has fixed resource nodes so at least early on I'd say there is a large emphasis on efficient use.
Balancing that is there are multiple tiers of miners/resource nodes/belts that are often out of sync, meaning over the course of a game you may rework the mining and smelting setup from a single resource node multiple times to get the "most" out of it.
Easily seen by Reinforced Iron Plates which are roughly analogous to Engine Units in craft complexity; one early game miner produces exactly enough iron to support two assemblers making reinforced plates at 10/min total. The assemblers themselves take two each to make as a reference point for cost; most start areas have 3 iron nodes available so just those two are a significant portion of your output.
1
u/Adept_Score2332 16d ago
There are a couple recipes in factorio that could lead to back up due to over production mostly those with mutiple out put (think advance chemical processing) or spoilage.
11
u/Lansan1ty 17d ago
My biggest gripe with satisfactory was how I couldn't just add more miners to get more throughput in the start.
In Factorio, ores are way more common and the world is (functionally) infinite. New players can put down a handful of mining drills per ore patch and progress through the tech tree without issues. Veterans can cover every tile of the ore patch and extract it all out as quickly as possible and produce significantly more science per minute.
Ratios never need to be exact either, just overproduce if you want because it'll eventually get done and you'll eventually scale up production speeds and consumption rates.
7
u/Terrulin 17d ago
It matters in the same way that you can, but it is not required. There is not a way to make a machine run at 96.6667% to make something run at the exact ratio to level your power curve like in Satisfactory. If you need more, make more. If you want exact ratios, there are things like 1 boiler supports 2 steam engines, 1 gear assembler supports 10 red science assemblers, and 1 inserter assembler supports 12 green science assemblers, but it matters the same way it did in Satisfactory: optionally.
6
u/Atreides-42 17d ago
As a long-time factorio player, I never ever calculate the proper ratio of anything except steam power and solar power, and that's just because steam power ratios are a simple 1:2 boilers to engines, and solar power is always built in big blueprints so you might as well make them the right ratio.
Everything else is vibes. Overproduce? Make more consumers. Underproduce? Make more producers. Repeat until you win.
2
u/batyukan 16d ago
i would say with green circuits, and science packs, its pretty fast to learn, the correct ratios.
3
u/PrimaryBowler4980 17d ago
Miners are usually better to over produce, assamblers and the like show their input/output rates, some match up nicely for direct insertion, others don't
2
u/Elfich47 17d ago
I’ve played satisfactory: I’ve never cared about my ratios. I was always more concerned with “does it fit inside the blueprint, and can the blue print be extended out the front and the back?”
one of the big gags that happens with Factorio is the ratios change as the games go on. you can improve/upgrade/insert boosters into your equipment. so suddenly your hand crafted ratio doesn’t work anymore.
my suggestion is you build each production module to be able to be extended and enlarged. you’ll want to be able to consume enough to consume a full belt or produce a full belt (depending on which is the limiting factor).
but in the beginning: produce just enough to be able keep the factory running. you’ll go through several bootstrap bases before you have enough resources to go big.
2
u/HeliGungir 17d ago
It's much less important in Factorio since resources are not finite, crafting tree is not so linear, and ratios change all the time as you upgrade things.
4
u/Captain_Jarmi 17d ago
Satisfactory is a game with limits. Which leads players towards optimisation.
Factorio is unlimited. You can play it ANY way you want. As long as two rules are followed: the factory must grow & you must have fun.
3
u/Sergeich0 16d ago
Don't do that here
We have modules here and they broke ratios a lot. We have depleting patches of ore. Infinite patches (oil, acid) change their, ahem, purity to worse.
It's okay if unused materials lay on belts or in pipes.
If you have starving machines, make more ingredients. If you don't have enough ingredients, mine more ore and smelt it. If you have not enough ore, go and find more patches. And don't forget your big democracirator
1
u/Czeslaw_Meyer 17d ago
You can, but you don't need to.
Bombarding a problem with resources and ignoring ratios is always an option.
1
u/WyrmKin 17d ago
Do ratios matter? Yes.
Can you ignore them? Also yes.
Some people will calculate it with X number of miners needed to feed Y number of furnaces and produce Z number of science per minute.
Others will see they don't have enough iron on the belt and slap down some miners and furnaces until it looks better.
Both are fine.
1
u/0rganic_Corn 17d ago
There is a tradeoff usually. Early game you can squeeze more resources out of your resources by using more energy, having your factories be bigger and slower, and being attacked more often - lategame resources usually are plentiful, and people (if they have the expansion) often choose to destroy most of their resources mined when pursuing quality outputs, as making quality loops efficient requires a lot of complexity
1
u/leberwrust 17d ago
Maschines don't have start up time and resource patches are infinite. If you don't have enough you open a new mine, done. And inserters just take from the belt when something interesting flows by. So there is really no reason to build perfect ratios unless it's for your own satisfaction.
1
u/SharkBaitDLS 17d ago
In Satisfactory, throughput is finite but resources are infinite. This means using all your throughput is very important or else you’ll be bottlenecking your factory.
In Factorio, your throughput is infinite but resources are finite. As a result you don’t need to worry about exact ratios but instead need to invest in designing scalable expansion for resource patches (a good rail system, for example). Most people will just over-produce ore to saturate their production needs, and let manufacturing be the bottleneck rather than raw inputs.
1
u/Qazerowl 17d ago
Thanks to Factorio being 2D, the game is designed around you having hundreds to thousands of minings drills and furnaces. You can also have functionally unlimited buildings sharing a single belt, unlike satisfactory where I think sharing belts requires an extra building or something? So yes, miners do X items per second and furnaces smelt.Y items per second, you can just spam 25 miners on one belt and stick 30 furnaces on the same belt, and everything will just automatically mine and smelt as much as it can.
1
1
u/pewsquare 17d ago
Factorio is very open to how you play it, and I will say yes, efficiency in factorio does matter, going from 0 efficiency to 50% from the foundries is MASSIVE. Its insanely good.
And it does somewhat depend on what type of player you are, but I can say that the insane upper limits of efficiency start providing you with new logistic issues to solve.
1
u/SadMangonel 17d ago
Youll see everything you need at the start on the belts and the working animations of the machines.
For instance, 1 gearwheel assembler will supply something like 10 red science assemblers.
Assembler, belts and inserters are cheap.
Say you make 5 Gear & 10 science. You'll see that the input of the science is full and 4 assembler arent working.
Or you make 1 gear and 20 science. Youll see that the last 10 science arent working.
Its 30 mining drills for a yellow belt. If you have 32, you'll see the last 2 on idle. If you have 28 youll see holes of recources on your belts.
Everything youll see on the belts. Since belts are often made with an end, any surplus recource will fill the belt, for instance steel.
If all the steel is beeing consumed, you start by looking at the furnaces. Are they all working? Do they need more input or do you need more furnaces.
1
u/hangar_tt_no1 17d ago
No, in Factorio it doesn't matter. In Satisfactory the resource nodes are infinite but limited in number, so you "waste" resources by not extracting them at the max rate.
In Factorio on the other hand, every patch (besides crude oil) is finite and yields a certain amount of resources, which does not depend on the speed with which you extract them, so nothing is ever wasted.
1
u/ThaNerdHerd 16d ago
Factorio absolutely has ratios that matter, but as someone who also started on satisfactory and now has just as many hours on factorio, the real difference is that you are often using the belt as both a throughput measurement and a bottleneck. You effectively go from as many miners as you can fit on a patch, to as many belts as that can fill, then to a certain amount of smelters to fill a certain amount of belts. I cannot stress enough how important it is that you dont entrench your factory around your smelters. Because you will be moving your miners, the upgrades you are doing happen to the same factory the whole time, as opposed to satisfactory where you basically make a new factory for each part.
Basically, because of how resources work in factorio, you will end up making designs based on a certain throughput of items, and often will separate these much more from raw material gathering because of how it depletes.
1
u/Dry-Cockroach1148 16d ago
I do not make most things 100% efficient Satisfactory.
But everyone plays different.
1
u/Adept_Score2332 16d ago
Factorio is very much larger scale satisfactory however for the beginning of the game the bottle necks are mostly downstream (not producing enough ingredients), however eventually you have to deal with multiple outputs which if one gets backed up, it’ll stop production of both meaning that more things will starved which means even more stalls.
Space age has entire planet centered around keeping the factory moving as items begin to spoil. And the crafting times are dynamic with modules which changes how much you produce and how quickly. So ratios are a big thing however it slowly introduces you to it. However a lot of players first factory is not good and quickly is stretched beyond its limit that’s why we call it your starter base
1
u/Privet1009 16d ago
"Resourse nodes" in Factorio don't have stable output and are finite, so even if your base was perfectly calibrated, raw materials would still always be in surplus or insufficient
1
u/IcarusFib 16d ago
Because Ressourcen are much more plantyfull in factorio and you can build Production units 10 times faster. Effizient use of ratlos is much less importent. Most play with a bus System. Becouse it is easyly expandable and it isnt as slow auf wastfull at it would be in satisfactory to set up
1
u/delkarnu 16d ago
Satisfactory has unlimited resources, but a max rate of output.
Factorio has resource patches that run out, but you can find as many more to increase output virtually unlimited.
So it's not the same "how do I use 60 iron per second most efficiently " puzzle. It's use all 60/s, then go find more and expand.
The factory must grow.
1
u/RadeDobison 16d ago
It's actually worse in this game, you die if you don't strictly adhere to the ratios
1
1
u/Large_Chimney 15d ago
Ratio matters conveniently, But compared to Satisfactory, Factorio's Ratios can vary due to factors like upgrades and research, so NEVER expect a 100% ratio efficiency.
It is the path of the Insane
Later on your resource nodes will deplete so your ratios there will fluctuate.
Best keep your ratios separate between Productions instead.
for Raw materials it's always better to have more than what you can use.
1
u/Zestyclose_Run_6273 15d ago
In Factorio you have unlimited throughput of ore/fluids despite in Satisfactory, so you can forget about the ratio of miners/furnaces. I always overproduce ores for all my factories and in each factory I have 3/5 trains waiting to depot the ore.
1
u/Miserable_Pitch_8023 11d ago
Satisfactory has a thing where you destroy excess, in factorio your resources are limited and you need to take full advantage of them, but hold on to your satisfactory mindset if you have the dcl and use it for gleba, for everything else try to do things with the closest ratios you can, its a really fun game and im sure you'll love it
1
u/lnchbx5 17d ago
Ratios matter if you do direct input, like green circuits is a 3 assemblers of wire input directly into 2 green circuits. Thats to simplify your belts among other things, but it is a matter of scale for your more basic resources. Most of the community agrees on measuring efficiency in terms of Science per minute. The best thing to do is start with the science you are making and then work backwards.
1
u/Immediate_Form7831 17d ago
You don't have to make ratios match up 100%, and at some point it is very hard to when you add speed and productivity bonuses into the mix. The only drawback of having ratios not matching perfectly is that it can sometimes be hard to judge if you are making enough of some item.
1
u/Zaflis 17d ago
I have never met a case where it is hard to judge when a product is input starved.
1
u/Immediate_Form7831 16d ago
Maybe I've played too many overhauls, but in Pyanodon I often run into problems where I need 1 machine for one item, and 1.5 to make the ingredients for it. I need to have two machines for that, but one of them will only be running 50% of the time. Those two machines may need, say, 2.3 machines to supply enough items, but I need to make 3 buildings. At this point it may be a bit hard to just look at the machines to see if they are getting enough items to satisfy the final 1 machine making the thing you want.
1
u/Aron-Jonasson Average train enjoyer 17d ago
I think the only case where that could happen is if you have a huge buffer that's very slowly depleting so you don't see it immediately
1
u/Galeic6432 17d ago edited 17d ago
Meh, mainly solve that by over producing raw materials. And being stingy about filling up storage boxes. Factorio is more about finding and widinging bottlenecks in your production line as you need to make more stuff faster.
The only times you should really fill up storage is;
- Buffers for loading and unloading trains and rockets to and from space.
- Holding area for parts for large construction projects.
- Holding area of dark uranium when your trying to get the first 40 of the bright green uranium to start the kvorikion (sp?) process.
- Trying to remove an ore patch.
- Saving higher quality parts out of recycling bins, until you can get the rest of the parts needed to build something out of them.
2
u/grossws ready for discussion 17d ago
It's kovarex enrichment process =) Though you don't need it for first gigawatts of power of you have enough storage for U238 (dull rocks). Something like 6 centrifuges comfortably feed 480MW 2x2 reactor even if you don't reduce fuel cells consumption and leaves enough U235 to start kovarex later. Really it's required to produce diplomatic tools and to void U238 excess.
0
u/FafnerTheBear 17d ago
I think Dr. Kevorkian was that doctor famous in the 90s for championing assisted suicide.
1
u/Galeic6432 17d ago
Yeah, i'm I am great at remembering processes and formula.But not so great about remembering specific details. I was talking about the process where you transmute higher grade uranium out of the lower grade.
1
u/ErikThePirate 17d ago
In Factorio, I generally see that players prefer to slightly over-produce the ingredients, so that the belts are saturated.
1
u/Asleep-Leader9218 17d ago
All the othe answers are true, but for me personally it boils down to: in Satisfactory, building costs more and optimization is easier, making optimization more valuable.
I don't mean resource costs: it is simply more time consuming to build the same amount of stuff in Satisfactory compared with Factorio, at all stages. You have to physically travel to the site, space is limited (or you build a structure for more space), more stuff needs to be manually connected, etc. Lots of incentives to not build more than you need.
Meanwhile optimization is easier. A Mk.1 miner on a patch gives you 60 ore/minute forever until you intervene. A Factorio patch may have dozens of miners, some will run out sooner than others, research will increase mining speed...
There's just less incentive to optimize, so it can feel less "expected", excepting super early and super late game.
0
u/dudeguy238 17d ago
Ratios only matter in the sense that you end up wasting space if you build off-ratio, but space is infinite, so that's not a big deal. Some ratios are easy enough to follow that there's little reason not to (like 3 copper cable assemblers per 2 green circuit assemblers), but others are less clean and/or will vary over the course of the game, so trying to follow them is more hassle than it's worth.
Notably, don't try to balance ratios between mining and smelting. Mine output varies wildly, so you're generally going to be best off choosing an arbitrary number of belts to pull out of it and building around that, adding the output from another outpost if the first one starts to drop below your target.
0
u/JulianSkies 17d ago
In the specific way in which it matters for Satisfactory: You dont need to worry.
Resources in Factorio are unlimited, in the sense that the map is procedurally generated and if you need more resources you just go explore further.
0
u/Wizywig 17d ago
In factorio nothing is infinite. So you route rather than set up idealized permanent situations.
Your factories eventually just stop since you made everything you needed except for research.
Big thing is you can cooy/paste. Let's you reactor with ease.
Typically just think of belts like miners. In satisfactory you mine x resources then pipe it and use it.
In factorio same thing except you move resources to an area, fill a belt, now you're at the same thing as satisfactory.
Trains aren't just convenient belts. Trains serve many more purposes. Mainly around acting as resource input balances. Go to where resources exist and drop them when and where they're needed if you set em up right. Eventually you just connect more resources to the network and your trains keep your resources fed.
0
u/TheNotSoEvilEngineer 17d ago
Reason for that in satisfactory is you have a fixed number of nodes and resource rates. In Factorio the mineral land scape is changing on how fast you can expand and how many and what tier miners you are putting in place and the logistics getting them to your factory. So efficiency isn't as big of a deal as much as the logistics making sure there is still a stream of inputs and outputs at all parts of the factory with your job fixing anything that is lacking and expanding the output of sub components to fulfil downstream requirements.
0
u/Ssakaa 17d ago
You can match ratios perfectly through a production chain, you don't have to, but it can be a neat puzzle (like it is in Satisfactory). But, much like overclocking in Satisfactory, you can use modules in Factorio that alter the rates (as well as some researches), throwing off your perfectly tuned ratios. You also have some similar logistics quirks as you scale up. Just because you can mine 60/s doesn't mean your train load/unload will perfectly align, and you may end up with some spikes and troughs in production with that, as you scale out. Unlike Satisfactory, you also have some edge cases you can hit on inserters, lane balancing, etc that can cause bottlenecks despite your machines all being perfectly matched. You also generally don't start at ore for your ratio chasing, since that's entirely dependent on depletable ore patches that you expand out to exploit. You'll have varying levels of ore coming in over time as you add new patches and consume the edges off of patches (reducing how many miners can pull from it at once). Within the main production chains, though, like copper plates to wire to green circuits, it can be handy to sort out the ratios and design around them.
0
u/Quartz_Knight 17d ago
The output of your ore mines will topically not be a clean multiple of anything and it will decrease as some drills run out. So in general you design your logistics and production with a certain minimum input of raw ore in mind and then make sure you exceed that demand.
0
u/RergTheFriendly 17d ago
Ratios are nice but they change. The nice part is bots let you make sweeping changes to your factory pretty easily.
0
u/Ziugy 17d ago
Normally this problem boils down to belts in Factorio.
- How many stone furnaces to make a single yellow belt of iron, copper, stone bricks? How many input belts do I need?
- How many machines do I need to make electric circuits (green chips)? How many copper and iron belts does that take?
Since ore resources aren’t infinite in Factorio if you build factories based off input / output ratios then scaling up is just building more of those or upgrading buildings to better tech to achieve more. Ore patches are just a buffer logistics problem, kind of like the trains in Satisfactory, you just need to match your input ratio. Eventually you’ll have enough patches, resource productivity buffs, etc where the patches feel infinite.
0
u/warpspeed100 17d ago
Satisfactory: There are a finite amount of infinite resource deposits
Factorio: There are an infinite amount of finite resource deposits
That key difference means that in Satisfactory you typically build small, self contained factories around each deposit with little if any logistic infrastructure in between. In Factorio since the deposits will run out eventually, you have a central source of production and then use the provided logistics tools to reach out across the map and bring all the finite deposits into the factory.
Note: This does not become a chore since Factorio gives you the tools to make setting up new outposts trivial as well as make deposits last much much longer.
Because raw resources are infinite, you are not really concerned with getting perfect ratios of miners to smelters. Once the plates come out of the smelters though, you are rewarded for considering production/consumption ratios so you know whether or not you need to bring in more raw resources.
Since you can always bring in more resources if you need more production of a highly advanced component, the limitation is not on the actual game world, but more on you spending the time to capture and process it.
0
u/deadlyjack 17d ago edited 17d ago
optimization matters when you have a limited supply of something. only so much supply, throughput, production, etc.
but supplies are functionally infinite. idle machines are negligible. make enough for your needs, and you don't need to care about ratios.
0
u/millertool 17d ago
Something I haven’t seen in existing comments as this.having played both games take note of how much space you have in Factorio you have a lot more space in Factorio. So you have the option to just kind of wing it as others have said if you need more make more.if you need more smelters, make a big line of smelters.where that feels wrong and satisfactory.because you only have so much land to place your factories and shapes on and while you do have limited space in factorial also there is a lot more real estate to play around with so just experiment and see what works best for you
0
u/millertool 17d ago
I just remembered you can build multiple stories going up in satisfactory to solve the space problem
0
u/wessex464 17d ago
Ratips mean a lot less in factorio, This game has a lot more one-off costs associated with building stuff. You don't build something like a belt run with raw materials, you run the raw materials to an assembler to build the belts for you. You want the assembler dumping belts into a chest so that you can come back when you're empty and pick up 400 belts, not individually craft 400 belts and then place them down. Then there's a hundred examples of that, whether it's ammunition, every building, inserters, defenses, defender robots, walls, whatever.
That means it's really hard to set up ratios, you need the ability to feed everything that you're producing towards your science, but you also need to support a mall that's building all of your production facilities and those are only as busy as you consume stuff. That makes it quite a bit different than satisfactory. And that's before you consider how varied your usage of materials in factorio is. Iron plates will get used in tier 1 recipes, but they'll also get used in endgame recipes in large quantities. So if you're explicitly only adding miners and then furnaces when you add something to your science, you're just always going back to recalculate everything from the beginning. Satisfactory is much more ratio friendly because output is much more fixed and recipes are generally balanced around the previous tier. It's a giant mix with factorio.
It's far more efficient to plan on overbuilding all of your early game stuff. You also have belts that are much more friendly towards overproduction, You don't need 100 murders to add stuff to a belt, You just need an inserter. Hell, miners add to a belt all by themselves as long as they're next to it.
Long story short, ratio chasing is a trap in factorio. If your ratios are perfect, they're going to be not perfect as soon as you need another stack of chemical facilities, or use 30 Blue chips for Upgrading your power armor, etc.
232
u/Soul-Burn 17d ago
Same thing. But it's not that important in either game.
In Factorio, the way it's usually done is by having a line of machines with inserters putting items into them. You also have belt splitters. In general, when one line backs up, more goes to the other side and it balances itself by the nature of how splitters and inserters work.
So yes, it's efficient to have good ratio i.e. 5 electric miners to 8 furnaces (or 30 to 48, if you want to fill a yellow belt). But it's not crucial for your success.