Hit “N” on the keyboard to bring it up
You can also type into the calculations on the machines themselves, so if you want 133 instead of 120/min you can simply type that in and it’ll tell you what the clock speed should be.
I have seen your profile picture before and it didn’t dawn on me what character it was until this moment…
The game has the most hours I’ve ever played in a game, I figured it’d be pretty representative of me
Holy shit.
Is there like a documented list of all of these little tips? I feel like the longer I play, the more I realize just how incredible the controls actually are.
Almost all of these the game literally tells you about right there in the GUI… When you are building, you get an info bar telling you what button combinations do what. This is smart enough to even depend on what exactly you are building, so it will not tell you about R for build modes when you are building things that don’t have build modes.
Another small thing not everyone knows about: when building normal hyper tubes or pipelines, you can rotate the end point vertically as well. While placing it ( hold left mouse button), you can drag the cursor up/down for elevation, but you can also use the scroll wheel to tilt the connector. This allows for more aesthetic long gradients, without having “steps” on the connectors.
I’ll add this to the hot tips I’ve learned way too late
Also included
- Zoop mode
- Middle mouse button to “copy” something
- Overclocking takes exponentially more power (not linear)
Ctrl-c on a machine will also copy what’s setup, and ctrl-v on the new machine will paste thos esettings
This one is huge for programmable splitters, and pretty good on smart splitters, too.
It remains a major gripe of mine that there is no hotkey to apply this while just looking at the building. I am jealous of how easy building configuration in factorio is.
You can ctrl-c and ctrl-v from outside the building ui while just looking at it, but you do have to be close enough to be able to open the building ui
Yeah, and copying a machine using middle mouse doesn’t copy its configuration. That only works with blueprints.
It would be so neat to just point at a bunch of smelters and going, YOU’RE ALL SMELTING IRON.
This was one of the (many) great features of the SMART mod.
Do you know about quick switching?
Tapping “E” will toggle between all the types of a constructable. On belts, for example, you toggle through the tiers.
So you can have just tier one belts on the hotbar, and to select tier two, three, etc. you’d just tap E the corresponding number of times after selecting “belt”. You can to get to a shitload of constructables really fast with just one hotbar.
I’m a little disappointed in quick switching for certain objects though, particularly the wall-mount power nodes.
Oh.
That’s why I had power troubles when I got overlooking lmao great tip
Generally speaking, the only things you should be overclocking are resource extractors to be able to feed more production from the same nodes; overclocking production machines doesn’t really make sense when you can just build more machines, space is pretty much the least limited resource in the game.
That said, there are exceptions and sometimes a little overclocking helps things balance out without weird machine counts that are hard to plan for, or if you just misplanned a space and expanding would mean tearing a lot out and redoing it
I’m just over clocking my entire production chains I built the first time I learned of them. Planning? What is this, Prince2? :)
If you saw my first factory, I didn’t even start using foundations until somewhere mid phase 3, though I did have an intricate and elaborate weave of belts load balancing to get perfect counts… Manifolding didn’t really occur to me for quite a while either
What got me to finally use foundations was when I realized they had snap points which make lining systems up substantially simpler
In some cases, it can actually be smart to underclock. It’s exponential in that direction too, meaning machines become more power-efficient the more you underclock them.
What’s zoop mode?
R to toggle build mode. In Zoop mode you can drag the mouse to build dozens of foundations, walls, fences, whatever, all in one go.
Ah; just hadn’t heard it called that. Made me think of an old SNES game I used to have lol
It’s literally what the tooltip says when you switch to it in game
Build and snap multiple copies of a thing at once. Super helpful for foundations.
I use this all the friggin time, it’s such a huge time saver
Though, if it’s a particularly complex build, I’ll usually use Satisfactory Tools’ production calculator along with Satisfactory Calculator’s interactive map to plan where to source materials…
I do have a construction planner tab open in my steam overlay.
The fact that steam now remembers the tabs you had on a game-by-game basis makes it extra useful. You can close the game, and it wont appear in other games, but start up Satisfactory, and all your plans are right there.
Dude I was just thinking the should be an in- game calculator button. Sweet.
I wish there would be a in-game production/consuming statistic. So that I can see, if I have to build more machines of type xyz. It’s really annoying to use SCIM for this.
holy shit
Another cool tip is when you look at a machine it will tell you it’s efficiency. So if something is 10% efficient it’s being starved on an ingredient.
Especially useful when you aren’t there watching the line all the time or if it’s barely stuttering. Can really add up
I learned this one since my last play through and it’s coming in quite handy in 1.0! No more alt tabbing to a calc or spreadsheet.
