tl;dr A mod for Satisfactory where you feed an entity on a platform increasing amounts of resources, growing it in the process.
Foreword
I had been playing around with Gain Factory Reloaded, loved the premise but found the core functionality of Factory building/automation was a real pain. Trying to sort out priorities of inputs into crafting stations, regulating the movement of resources around the base and avoiding a gigantic mess of spaghetti with no snapping/placement assistance left me with a constant feeling of friction. (Not a hit piece against kittykillerkuriosity. Seriously go play GFR, it’s great and more critically actually playable right now, which this isn’t.)
The entire time I was playing the thought of, ‘This would be so much easier if this was in Factorio or Satisfactory’ kept creeping in. As Satisfactory is based on Unreal and has pretty extensive modding documentation I chose that and decided to be the change you want to see in the world.
Main Content
Which brings us to ‘A Growing Void’ (WIP title)
Documentation Link: Here
The idea is fairly simple, build a giant platform with a bunch of conveyer inputs into the base and periodically wipe the inventory of the building. Then using the SINK points values each item has, calculate the total value of the contents, and add that to an ongoing number. Then based on passed thresholds, increase the mesh scale of the entity lounging atop the platform.
What is this entity you ask? Well I don’t really know at the moment. I’m a Designer by trade (No, I will not be sharing which studio I work at) and am proficient in Blueprint coding, but lack serious character modelling capabilities for something of this scale. So for now it’s going to be a cube.
The final entity is probably going to depend on what models I can find available online with the appropriate licences for non-commercial use. Ideas I’ve spit-balled are some sort of Blackhole girl, a machine queen or some sort of slime. Creatures that feeding an endless stream of mechanical components into would make sense for it to be growing.
First rule of designing anything is setting a stable scope for a project. I’m willing to take suggestions, but please do not feel personally insulted if I do not use them. Scope creep is how projects die. With a full time job I will be upfront that updates on this will be intermittent at best, but I’ll try and keep folks abreast of progress.
And that dear reader is where you come in.
Frankly I don’t have the play time in satisfactory to truly appreciate the scale of output that bases can achieve. I need data. With a fresh world, how long a given factory of a given output took to build, your total time played and more generally your relative experience with the title.
This is so I can have a firm starting point for how large the thresholds need to be for setting the weight increases. No point having the default tuned for mega-bases, but also too small that intervening stages are lost in singular jumps. This default then will be altered by a configurable modifier to either increase or decrease the time taken to grow your entity.
The numbers need to be enough that someone simply in this for the fetish can appreciate in an afternoon, or the dedicated looking for a long term goal can have a decent challenge.
So with a lot of yapping done, I’m going back to working on the mod.
Enjoy your afternoons.