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Comment by foobarian | Hacker News Reader

Satisfactory had even more of that effect on me and the kid when we played it. Perhaps because of being 3D and having all sorts of native flora and fauna that was very good at being annoying and getting in the way of construction.

It essentially made it fun to destroy the native environment and replace it with concrete. It's not even that we didn't mind doing it, it's that we enjoyed it. It was kind of unsettling, since it made me think that is how I would feel if I were a 19th century British colonialist bringing "order" to various native lands.

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I got sucked into Satisfactory a while back. After about 100 hours in the game, I was standing at the top of a cliff looking at my creation and said to myself "I'm the worst ecological disaster this planet has ever seen."

I'm planning to start a new save soon, and I think I'm going to try playing with some self-imposed rules, like not removing vegetation. Not as much, anyways. I'm not exactly a budding architect; where I bothered with buildings at all they're mostly giant boxes filled with machines. But I've seen some pretty creative, inspiring buildings on the Satisfactory subreddit and I think the game is flexible enough that I could create a factory that incorporates the nature around it rather than just smashing everything flat.

>myself "I'm the worst ecological disaster this planet has ever seen."

Really? Worse than an asteroid strike, a massive volcanic eruption, a massive flood? Blights and other naturally occurring diseases that have wiped out entire species are much worse ecological disasters than building an entire Manhattan.

If you building was the worst thing that ever happened to that planet, it wasn’t modeled as a real planet in the first place.

In a sense they were the only ecological disaster the planet had ever seen. Something isn't a 'disaster' unless there's some sentient observer to judge the outcome. Asteroid strikes, volcanic eruptions, floods, gamma ray bursts, black holes... they're not disasters, just events, until someone gets upset about them.

I had that moment of clarity when I got the chainsaw, and again when I looked over my giant field of coal generators.

Satisfactory was fun for a while, and I want to try the v5 features still, but even as an FPS vet I get headaches and frustrations trying to do accurate placement of buildings, let alone tightly optimal.

Amazing graphics optimizations, considering the dynamic lighting and how many objects are rendered.

The 'zooping' or whatever they call that allows you to build multiple things at a time is outstanding. Enormous time saver.

With a few exceptions, I think building placement is outstanding. Hold alt and it snaps, even if the other building is far away, with audio cues. Conveyor belts give a dopamine hit every time I place a long one. That is with foundations of course. Without them you get the spaghetti mess.

What is more difficult than Factorio is that there are no blueprints or robots to build stuff for you. Also, the terrain doesn't help, we can't just destroy cliffs. But that's also interesting.

Satisfactory is in my top 3 of all time, just ahead of Factorio. 2200 hours vs 1600 in the latter. I like it for the 3D exploration and hand crafted map. I love that (if you don’t cheat yourself out of it by abusing ramps) you can spend hours on expeditions through treacherous terrain to get to the next resource.

However my gripes are the same as yours. Placement is an unwanted meta-game that they ought to remove via better QoL features. The existing alignment, snapping, picking, and repeating features are inadequate for a game like this.

A lot of recent changes to the game have been quality of life changes to make it easier to align things.

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