Aldekotan wrote: Fri Jun 26, 2026 3:16 pm
Can you elaborate, please? I have some questions to the SA expansion too and base game is arguably more dense and well-thought to me, but I wonder what makes you unhappy about it.
I've written stuff elsewhere. This won't be comprehensive, but is an attempt to summarize and give some examples to illustrate broader points.
The main thing I enjoy about Factorio is building an increasingly complex factory and managing the logistics challenges that come both with growing complexity and growing quantities of items that need to be distributed. SA ruins this for me, because instead of a single complex factory, it's 5 (plus platforms) mini factories, with only a basic logistics challenge between them. By the time I would want to "megabase", I can't, because I'm already hitting UPS limitations just by building what's required on each planet. And much of what I'm doing on each planet is just replicating things I've already done - building power and iron and copper etc.
Quality helps with this somewhat, as well as stack inserters and faster belts etc, because I can increase throughput without adding buildings. I like this aspect of SA. But quality is only useful up to a point, because once I have everything at legendary I don't need it anymore and it becomes a dead system. I think it would be cool if I could continue to scale with quality science, but it's not worth doing this, partially because productivity is just better, and partly because the quality system is quite tedious for that application.
So one of the main things where I think SA missed the boat was having no reliable way to produce quality items without having to deal with a lot of unwanted crap. My suggestion was to have recipes specific to quality, using reagents to reliably produce quality items, so that I could be rewarded with more science by making a more complex factory. Another aspect where this factors in is the productivity research. You get additional productivity without changing your factory at all. I would prefer if there were more complex recipes to get the productivity to reward. The place where I really feel those two things are at the endgame, where the most effective way to progress is to literally do nothing and just wait for productivity research and quality upgrades.
And this brings me to the endgame and the concept of a sandbox vs an adventure. In a sandbox, you have all the tools and can play with them as you want, and the goal is whatever you want. In an adventure there's an end goal - a big accomplishment to work toward. The SA design is partially a sandbox, but not really - there are a lot of restrictions. And it's partially an adventure, but the end goal is really bad, and certain design choices make no sense if SA is considered this way.
First consider SA as a sandbox. I would like to do stuff like build biolabs on other planets. That in itself would open up a bunch of different possibilities. I'd like to be able to build multiple landing pads. I think that would be cool. I'd like to be able to build crushers on planets, and plant Gleba plants on Nauvis. Stuff like this, where the game opens up and I can do whatever. But the design is very strict in what's allowed and what isn't, and it doesn't necessarily follow a logic I can discern other than "the devs want people to play a certain way".
Now consider SA as an adventure. The endgame challenge is to reach the solar system edge, which is an almost identical challenge to reaching Aquilo. It's not a challenge really. And also, nothing you unlock on Aquilo is necessary other than railguns, and even they aren't strictly necessary. And then after that the only two things to do are to gather promethium science, which just makes a number go up, and to reach the shattered planet, which is clearly not intended, and there's no reward (or even acknowledgement) for doing so.
I've played through SA seven times, trying a bunch of different strategies, and each time I'm left frustrated and unsatisfied. I end up abandoning my factory with a hollow feeling because the only thing left to do is wait for technology to unlock. It sucks. And some of the stuff you get on Aquilo is basically useless because it comes so late that I've already built my factories by the time I have it, so I don't need it. Foundation is an example. By the time I get it, I don't need it.
And with regard to playing through, the railroaded design hurts this experience too. For example, quality is not really worth using unless you have recyclers, because it just jams your factory. But if you're integrating quality into your Nauvis factory, you need to design around that from the start. So I basically have to go to Fulgora first, because otherwise I can't use quality. Or if I play with cliffs on, I basically have to go to Vulcanus first, because cliff explosives will change how I play Fulgora and Gleba. This particularly irks me because cliff explosives were attained on Nauvis in the base game - and I could say more on this point with regard to Vulcanus (artillery, coal liquefaction, speed modules). The Nauvis experience is WORSE in SA.
Continuing with being railroaded, other things which are not as critical but also annoying are the oil tech requiring me to go to an oil field first and Kovarex and logistics chests being behind space science. It's less critical, I can work around it, but it's another annoying roadblock that disrupts the want I want to play for no good reason - these things use to be Nauvis techs, but now I'm FORCED to do things in a particular order.
I have other issues with quality that I've mentioned elsewhere and ways I think it could be improved which I won't reiterate here. But there are other things that I think are missed opportunities. I'm disappointed that there is no agricultural stuff on Nauvis, other than wood (and fish I suppose, but it's basically nothing). I think it would be cool if you unlocked the ag. tower on Nauvis so that you could use trees to control pollution. By the time you get it it's redundant for this purpose. Just an example of something I think would be cool, but has a barrier to entry that makes it useless. Give us the recycler when we unlock quality, the ag tower when it would be useful to control pollution, and foundation when it would be useful.
And there's stuff like having an alternative to violence when interacting with biters, but that's probably beyond scope.
Other than that, I feel like SA is just missing content. It feels like 4/5ths of a game. It feels like there should be SOMETHING else at the endgame - the above suggestions about different recipes for quality and productivity would suffice. But also I feel the planets are lacking. As I wrote above, the thing I enjoy most about factorio is the increasingly complex logistics challenges, but the planets' only sustained production is a single science pack. The rest of it is just power and the basic resources. And so because of this, the planets barely interact with each other, and they feel like a minigame.
I like the challenges on Gleba and Fulgora and Aquilo (I find Vulcanus boring), but once I've set up my factory I find myself not even thinking about them for many hours. I don't think this is fixable - the design is baked in now - but it's worth mentioning. I would actually have preferred less planets for this reason. I didn't expect it, but I had hoped that maybe in 2.1 there would be an "all planets on Nauvis" mode. The mods that exist don't look good to me. Simply allowing biolabs on other planets would help a lot with this problem though.
But all this (and this isn't everything) to say, it's impossible to give feedback when we don't know the scope of what's possible. My
ideal SA experience will never happen, but some things could be done. But the thing that's really tipped me over the edge was the removal of the space casino. To be clear, I don't even use them, but it's more railroading, a snub to the sandbox and a middle finger to a bunch of people for NO GAIN. It's symptomatic of a design mentality which I think has crippled SA - certainly my enjoyment of it. And it feels disrespectful. Who is this FOR exactly? It only effects the people it hurts.
And then the degenerate idiots come in and derail the conversation and mock and insult without adding anything, but when I spend time writing something it gets moved into the middle of a thread and disappears. And we report bugs and get mocked by the devs "lol that was actually a feature". And they change concrete recycling for what reason? And then when someone says something, "oh, you can just cheat in an infinity chest and void it". Huh? So for this FFF to say "we listen to feedback, please give us feedback"...
