I became distracted by a distraction on the way to my Supercomputers (And Other Electronics) factory project.
Drones weren’t THE distraction but they were PART OF the distraction…
Much as I love the FICSMAS snowballs, I decided that it’s time for a more point-and-click experience when it comes to clearing obstacles: Explosive Rebar. Sure, it doesn’t allow you to set up a big chain of explosions like you can with either Nobelisk or “Snow-belisk” but the Rebar Gun has considerably better aim and the explosive ammo takes effect instantly, making it one heck of a time-and-effort saver.
I just needed to slap down some equipment to generate a modest trickle of ammunition into “depotspace.” Easy peasy, the work of an afternoon… plus part of the next morning.
One of the common questions new Satisfactory players ask is, “How much of [name an item] should I make?” Is one per minute enough? Five? Fifty? Five hundred?
This factory makes 55 per minute each of Steel Beams and Steel Pipes plus 40 per minute of Encased Industrial Beams. Which is either overkill or vastly under-performing depending on your POV.
This is also one of the common questions that veteran Satisfactory players wrestle with.
“Hey, that video channel I like is making a calendar for next year,” I thought, back in August of last year. “I should throw some money at that.” The estimated shipping date was November, that’d be plenty of time (even accounting for the holiday shipping rush) to make it here in time for 2026, right?
Hmm. So, about that.
November came and went, no shipping news. December came and a week or so in, backers received a “shipping soon” message. Another week or so after that we received a “shipping is happening” notification. On the 30th, the project told everyone that “shipping is complete.”
Huh. Well, that’s funny, because a bunch of us never got our promised packages. Or even tracking info. Grumpy comments accumulated on the Kickstarter project notifications.
Come January 2nd, they posted a “whoopsy-daisy” message: A “small percentage (between 5-7%)” of backers’ shipments just… didn’t. Communication issue of some sort, apparently. We were told we’d have tracking info by Monday the 5th. My calendar arrived, intact (thank goodness), on the 6th. Never did get a tracking number but I guess that’s irrelevant now.
That’s the “fun” of crowdfunded goodies: You place your bets and you take your chances. It’s a great-looking calendar, at least.
[edit, 1pm the day of posting – The ticket I opened on Dec 31 asking “where’s my tracking info” received a response… a few minutes ago, saying “looks like it was delivered.” Yes, thanks so very much, that’s great.]
When I left things off last week I was on the verge of actually beginning construction on a Rocket Fuel power plant, with a bonus bit of Smokeless Powder production so I can get a munitions factory going elsewhere.
As of last night I do, indeed, have an operational Rocket Fuel power plant. Just… not the one I started out building, at the location I started building upon.
Here you can see my experiments both with building design elements and the game’s photo mode.
I spent several days over the last few weeks ruminating on what to write about the year gone past. Music? Didn’t really buy much. Shows? Didn’t watch very many, and the only one of note I already wrote about. Games? Mostly the same games I’d been playing, or the return of really old games I’d given up years prior. Movies? A few, they were okay I guess.
Life wasn’t even that bad, honestly. My health’s fine, work’s fine, home life is fine. But the oppressive pall hanging over every waking moment? That’s nowhere near fine.
And so, I shall leave this year with the following heartfelt (yet delightful) image, courtesy of the cast (and presumably crew) of one of my all-time favorite TV shows.
Let’s enjoy the visual and pointedly not think about exactly how many of those pictured above are still with us today.
For the sake of us all I hope that ’26 treats us better. Maybe we could get a crab rave or two, as a treat.
“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t,” reads a great line from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I wonder what he’d have made of Satisfactory, a video game firmly in the realm of science fiction that also doesn’t mind if you pin foundation tiles, pieces of equipment, or even entire megafactories in the air with no physical tether to the world’s surface. And yet, I can’t bring myself to build factories or even run train lines high up in empty air just to avoid the frustrations that come with working on the bumpy, obstacle-strewn chunk of real estate that is our assigned patch of the planet designated MASSAGE-2(A-B)b. Something about leaving things hovering in the air bothers my brain.
Building a Rocket Fuel plant here is going to be… “interesting.”
Dealing with that can indeed be frustrating, though.
