Author: David

Satisfactory 004: Back to work, pioneer…

Satisfactory has clawed me back for now.

I have been really enjoying Captain of Industry and played it a bunch, but I was getting the Satisfactory itch again, especially after watching Coffee Stain’s Big Break event and getting excited for the upcoming expansion. I have begun work on updating my logistics systems to follow more of a star topology rather than a web of point-to-point routes.

Views of the work going into Sandstorm Logistics Hub, the future rail yard site, and ore deposits to be brought into the hub.

First step: New concrete factory

The first step was making a new concrete factory, even though it wasn’t necessary for my transportation overhaul. I have unlocked an alternate recipe that is far more efficient with the use of limestone so I switched to that. For the same amount of limestone I am getting 160 concrete/min instead of the 80/min with the default recipe.

I grew tired of the spaghetti at my old factory, and it was never much of a permanent solution. It also offered me an easy start to the new logistics system I am creating on this server. I built it on a road and only needed to truck limestone and water in. Easy peasy.

I am quite happy with the building itself. It is an interesting shape and fits in with the existing infrastructure. I especially like the curve I was able to give it. It is not a perfect building, but no building is. It does exactly what it needs to do, and it does it well.

Next step: Just the Basics Ltd

I am planning a mega factory for all the basic parts up to steel. This will replace nearly all of my starter factories so I can free up those resources and the space they take up. I might leave some buildings for prosperity but I am moving towards larger buildings with better appearances and organization. My first step is to decide what I want to produce, and then plan the production lines and what inputs I will need. I also need to consider the factories I have and what is being exported from them currently and accommodate that. Either building a small factory nearby the consumer, or packing enough capacity and send some parts back to my desert logistics hub.

What have I learned?

Tracking inputs and outputs is essential, and surprisingly easy

I built a simple spreadsheet with a list of inputs and outputs, then run SUMIF statements for all the resource types. I decided to limit my tracking to raw materials to keep it simple, and my production line design philosophy is to construct everything needed onsite with exceptions as needed and in-game signs will suffice for that.

Higher upfront setup, but huge payoff

There is an extra step now to creating a factory and getting resources to it, but I think it is worth it. I touch on it more below but I have better resource utilization with this method. Everything comes from one central location to distribute (per region). I can pop some truck stops or train stations down in my factories and know that all the materials will enter that way. No need for belts running across the factory with resources from all sides.

Better resource utilization

This one can be seen either way I think. On one hand I am still using whatever resources I use and miners can be idle. However this method does not require me to allocate miners to specific factories (not strictly necessary before). I can run them all at 100% capacity and I am tracking resources out vs in and can add more miners as I approach maximum capacity. Now instead of having miners running at 80% because that is all a factory needs I run them at 100% and can allocate those resources as needed, anywhere in the map (once I get my map-wide logistics transportation going).

Still figuring out

I am still working on the best way to get resource from areas that are further than practical for conveyor belts. I am torn between trains and trucks. I think a mix of both is in order. Trains where I can bring a bunch of resources together, and trucks for extremely far, or isolated, resources.

Factories are supplied in much the same way, I am supplying my new concrete factory via truck because I built it on a road and it is pretty small. My next factory for the basics parts will be supplied by train because of the amount of resources required.

Not entirely “figuring it out” but I just wanted to share how tight the clearance between my trucks and rail deck is.

In conclusion

I have finally found a system that gets me past my barrier of freezing at the thought of connecting loads of resources to factories in the late game. I am finally excited to keep building and working on more complex lines. I think the separation of tasks really helps me.

I have three phases to factory building now, actual building construction which happens on and off throughout the process of building the factory. Production line construction is the second. Third is either bringing resources to my hub to distribute, or simply distributing them if I already have the resources there.

Anyways, back to the factories for me. I must continue being efficient and rebuilding my old lines to optimize them so that I may continue working on mid-game parts and factories for that. The classic rebuild old lines vs build new. One day I will beat the game and provide all the parts to the elevator.

4 October 2026
Backing it up: Planning phase
Taking data protection more seriously, one step at a time.

I will be the first to admit that my backup strategy needs work. I have been chasing the 3-2-1 holy grail of back up strategies for a while now. Two main roadblocks keep coming up: time, and money. Time to configure the backups, test them, test a restore, and setup notifications to ensure that I am aware of any hiccups or failures. Money because well, everything costs money. Hard drives for local storage, and remote storage as well. Whether it is a rented box somewhere like Hetzner, or hard drives at a family member’s home. But like I said, I have been slowly working on improving that.

My current strategy is still mostly lacking the 1 offsite copy, though I have selectively achieved it. Perfect is the enemy of good, and I have started building backups around that philosophy. I kept getting paralysed because I didn’t have all the 3-2-1 components figured out. It got to the point where I had no backups because I didn’t have everything in place. Then I decided to just start even if it’s imperfect. Having no backups is far worse than having functional backups that aren’t following all best-practices.

My current backups

As it stands, I have a NAS with Proxmox Backup Server on it for my Proxmox backups. Those run every 2-3 days and backup whole VMs and containers. This is great, most of my services are not what I would describe as critical, and the data often does not frequently change much on 80% of my services. However, there are a few things like Nextcloud and Immich that should absolutely be backed up every night. For this I currently run restic, and backup to a REST server also running on my NAS.

The Plan^™️

So, it sounds like I have a pretty decent solution so far, why would I change it? Well, ease of use for the most part. I’d say that Nextcloud and Immich are absolutely critical to backup. I want to make this as easy as possible for myself. I am going to be migrating from my current Nextcloud stack with an image from LSIO, and managing all the containers myself to the Nextcloid AIO image. AIO includes BorgBackup in it, so I am going to start using Borg for backups. I can pretty much migrate over my backup scripts from restic to Borg pretty easily since it is just bash.

I have goals set out below for my backup solution:
1. Must be configurable via Ansible.
2. Must be on my TrueNAS server in a dataset I can then backup offsite.
3. Notifications for backup failures.
Number 1 is pretty easy with BorgBackup, there is even a page in their documentation with guidance and an example for configuring hosts via Ansible. The challenge will come with generating a script to backup all the various services and all the pre/post actions required to take safe and complete backups of the data from all my containers.

Number 2 is also pretty straightforward. I am running BorgBackup in a container on TrueNAS SCALE, and then I attached my BorgBackup dataset into my user’s home directory, this is where the Borg repos will live.

Number 3 is also something I am fairly certain I solved with UptimeKuma for my restic backups. I have a service that expects a push from the backup scripts ever 24 hours + 15 minutes. The restic script only pings if the restic backup completes successfully as reported by the exit code. The next challenge I need to solve is automating the creation of these watchers so I don’t have to create them by hand for every service I wish to back up.

Next Steps & Conclusion

My goals ultimately aim to reduce the friction for setting up backups. I will have follow-up posts with details from my setup as I work on it. My first steps will be to automate connecting and setting up repos with my BorgBackup service and my VPS, then working out how to best approach automating backup scripts and notifications. I will leave my currently working backups intact until I am comfortable switching them over. Don’t fix what isn’t broken, and improve upon it only when ready.
26 September 2026
Satisfactory pause, new game, other work

Taking a pause from Satisfactory for the time being to work on my other websites, and I also found a new game to consume my time.

I have had some more down-time lately, unplanned, but it has been fine. Working through some fun medical stuff. The Ontario healthcare system needs some attention and love. Unfortunately Doug Ford is incapable of providing either unless he or his buddies can profit. Maybe I will post a rant about that later. We’ll see.

So, there are some games that I can rotate between at the same time and some games that I can only really play because it requires some focus. The strategy and logistics games are part of that. I can only play one game at a time in that category. Mostly I just play one game at a time anyways. Sometimes I play on my Minecraft SMP server in the midst of another game.

Anyways, I had been playing Satisfactory, and then I switched to Transport Fever 2 for a bit. Then I recently bought Captain of Industry, and I am hooked. I sat down to play a session and suddenly it was 4 hours later. For me it is the perfect blend of Satisfactory and Transport Fever 2. It is exactly what I want to play right now. Of course I will come and go from this but I have built up a nice rotation of games to play.

Aside from gaming, I also do website stuff. I mentioned it before in my first post here but I have been migrating everything to WordPress. Not because I think WordPress is the best tool to make websites with, but it is a good tool. Despite the tool running the company behind it. That has been one of my holdups with switching entirely to WordPress, Matt freakin Mullenweg and his irresponsible tech bro-isms. However I eventually came around to understanding that WordPress would let me get started with minimal friction. I had so many grand plans but I just never started because the barrier to entry was too high and my current work-life balance does not allow me the luxury of sitting down and dedicating time to developing new technical skills. Perhaps in the future though.

In the meantime, I plan to learn plugin development for WordPress, I already have the foundations and just need to learn to work within WordPress’ plugin framework. I am developing my first plugin for my server community’s website to display our server archives. Exciting stuff, but starting simple and I can get more complex as I go. Next will be a plugin to post updates to Discord and Chatto. I might write more about Chatto later. I am awaiting their v0.5 release to start approaching my community about it.

Anyways, that is all I have to say for now. I hope somebody enjoyed my rambling.

17 September 2026
Satisfactory 003: Logistics Epiphany

Enabling larger projects by separating resource gathering from factory building

I was learning more about another favourite game of mine, Transport Fever 2, and the video I was watching talked about logistics hubs and the benefit of hooking up resources to the transport network meant that they would be available for use anywhere in the network. Now the logistics handling in Transport Fever 2 is much more automatic than Satisfactory in terms of allocating resources and materials. But the concept of connecting materials first and then sending them off to manufacturing later made something click in my brain.

When I start to build a large factory, the most intimidating aspect of it is sourcing materials and importing raw materials or parts. In the early game this is the most efficient way, direct to factory. But as parts get more complex it gets more challenging to efficiently import materials and avoid spaghetti and/or convoluted and inefficient transport networks.

The Plan

Starting with Sandstorm Logistics Hub, which I wrote about earlier, I will begin bringing resources to the hub and setting up train stations to be able to transport these resources to nearby factories.

Longer term I might replace my starter factories and decommission them in favour of a consolidated factory, but that is not even on my list at the moment.

Regional Hubs

I will start with Sandstorm Logistics Hub as my first regional hub. These regional hubs will be connected to a central logistics hub, more on that later, and resources will be distributed that way.

Regional hubs are gathering spots for all the materials in a region of the map, hence the name. From there, materials will be distributed to factories within the region, and transported in or out via this hub.

Central Hub

The central hub is a mega-project for later, and I will need to do some R&D on how to best balance resources so that I can automate resource sending. I think it may be as simple as saturating storage containers with resources and therefore any demand will not exhaust supply to another regional hub. I will experiment and see how that goes.

I want to get my first regional hub going before commencing work on the central hub. I am currently unsure where I want it located.

Hub Design

I am thinking of having at least two yards in each hub area. A large yard for the main system where train car arrangement is standardised, and then a smaller yard where local trains come and go.

The main yard (yard A) will have a siding for inputs from the central hub, and a siding for outputs to the central hub. Including two through tracks.

Resource Tracking

I have a spreadsheet to track inputs and outputs from each hub, and transfers. This way when I am designing factories I know what I have to work with, or the alternative, knowing if I must secure more resources for the desired output.

Next steps

Now, this has me excited to play and work on end-game parts to complete the game and space elevator. I was always daunted by building large factories and organising inputs and finding/sourcing materials near a good site to build on.

Now I am split into two modes; resource gathering, and planning and building. I will have a good sense of what resources are available. When I am planning a large factory I can decide what I want to produce and then work on gathering the resources required from wherever in the map now rather than relying on what is close enough geographically to use.

This may have been obvious to some players but I never stuck to a save this long to reach this realisation.

6 September 2026
Satisfactory 002: Transport Transformation

Massive transformation underway, but like other large projects in takes time

I love large projects, I think I am slowly getting better at them. The biggest challenge I had for large projects in the leisure category of my life was finishing them. Now I just keep track of where I am at with them, and I will bounce around to other projects and finish it over time.

My road blueprints in the Sandstorm Logistics Hub

I have been hard at work building my new logistics hub. I still need to work on a better way to track what each place is called, and what the code for it is. I sense a spreadsheet in my near future. But I have been making lots of progress and I am happy with it. Even made more after I took these screenshots.

The train line is in the process of being re-aligned, and will eventually be fully, and properly, integrated into the design of the hub. I am hoping to keep building off of what I have and eventually expand to a city of sorts connected by roads and trucks running through.

Another example of the re-alignment happening to my rail line

I have many rail lines to remove so I can free up some space and add trucks in for small logistics transfers. My ultimate goal is to have long trains running between the stations. I would love the look of that.

Here is a long stretch featuring the road blueprint I made. I am very happy with it. I like having the curb, and it helps it integrate into large swaths of other foundations and not seem out of place.

I have lots of things to do still, such as clean up the truck depots and figure out if I want to make them look nicer, and how. Then re-aligning some rail lines. Luckily this corridor was not being used yet, so I can take some time. I think I will need to raise everything below and rebuild my HUB area around the road and rail network. This will be a large undertaking but I can integrate the old with new stuff and create an underground city for things that can stay. I have a fondness for “renovating” things instead of tearing down. Though the foundations need to be good. That old building I am tearing down, was not build on the world grid and therefore is not useful so I am tearing it down. The HUB area is built on the world grid so it is salvageable.

I leave you with this photo that I particularly like. That rail line to the left has already disappeared since I swapped it to a truck connection utilizing my new road.

There is much more to come. I hope you enjoyed reading and seeing the screenshots. I am having a great time sharing them and my progress. It also helps keep me on track and remember what I am up to in the game when I have to pause for work or life. Until next time.

23 August 2026
Satisfactory 001: Picking up where we left off

Trains & Trucks & Transport, oh my!

Having been inspired by greyduck.net’s play-through and posts about Satisfactory I decided to revisit the game on a server I host for my friends and me. The last time I touched it was in January of this year (2026). Since then, update 1.2 has been released. This update massively improves the way “road” vehicles can be pathed. I am very excited to give it a try. I have grand plans.

State of the save

Here is an introduction tour to the current state of the save. I will share more areas as I do more posts.

View of the spire from my WMD factory in-progress.

In the current save I began by building with modules I created in the blueprint designer. These modules were for various basic parts or materials and I would expand vertically and stack one on top of the other. Now as I got into the later stages of the game I have pivoted to creating large factory floors and designating areas for production. Also when I can, manufacturing the parts locally to the nodes and then transporting them into the factory for the final steps of assembly.

There is another view of the spire, though this was before I unlocked radar towers. Next is the manufacturing campus at the base of the tower. Then a view of the WMD Factory in progress. There will be a name for this factory later. Finally, the last photo is my basic steel component manufacturing campus.

Transport Overhaul

The future site of Sandstorm Logistics Hub.

The large building in the background of this photo is the future site of Sandstorm Logistics Hub. I like to give my larger projects names so I can theme them after it, make signage, all that fun stuff.

The rail network will be getting a significant realignment to accommodate my new transport philosophy, and to facilitate a network of road vehicles. I do like the blueprints I have created, I plant to continue using them for the time being.

In the meantime, next time you see this save there will likely be a lot of temporary rail infrastructure keeping things connected while I integrate trucks and tractors into my builds.

Looking into the future

As always, with great planning comes great responsibility. This game is one of my favourites but gaming time is lower down my list of priorities these days.

Satisfactory

I am going to re-work my entire transport network with this. Prior to 1.2 I would consider trains as the only viable, reliable, transport option. Now with this new pathing I am excited to use trucks and tractors for regional transport, and building massive transit hubs for inter-regional transport. Inspired by real-life logistics networks. My goal is to lower the barrier for transporting goods short distances, and when there is enough demand being able to put it on rail to move a lot of it great distances.

Progress Sharing

I plan on posting every month or so. My post frequency will vary with my play frequency. I am not committing to anything so that I do not feel any pressure to write. But when I do have updates I will start compiling a post to share.

14 August 2026
Hello, world!

My first post on my new blog.

I will be the first to admit that I have had nearly a dozen first posts across the many many versions of my blog. So who can say if this one will be the first of many posts on this blog or if I will end up replacing WordPress with something else in the future. My journey has lead me back to this CMS after some time. More on that below. At this time though I am happy with having a platform like WordPress to be able to create content on.

Why WordPress? Well the answer is pretty simple and unfortunately boring. It is what I have time and capacity for. It gives me a website out of the box that I can just leave at default settings, and while not perfect, is good enough. I have been adopting this philosophy lately because I noticed that I was drowning in projects and things I wanted to do. Perfect is the enemy of good, and I just need good enough.

I love the concept of static site generators, I think it is brilliant and would be perfect for my blog. However they are not perfect for me. I am a busy person with a full-time job that sees regular overtime. I also have pets, a partner, and.a household to take care of. I love the concept but I cannot commit to the execution. Likewise with other frameworks like Wagtail, Gatsby, Next.js, 11ty/Build Awesome, or whatever the framework-du-jour is.

I discovered that I enjoy and understand the systems administration aspect of self-hosting more than programming and coding. I used to make websites by hand with just HTML, CSS, and some copy-pasted javascript. It was fun, but for right now I just want a platform that lets me easily publish. Otherwise I will never do so because I want to make that “perfect” website with the neat framework that I want to learn all about.

Anyways, I am excited to be here, excited that you are reading this (thanks for reading!), and I am excited to see what I post in the future, and how the site may evolve. I may or may not plan on doing light theme and plugin development, but this time I am not putting any pressure on myself to do so. The website is started, everything else can be extra.

11 August 2026