February 4th, 2022 Video

Jace Talk: No Green Energy

https://youtube.com/embed/J4LlorYbVV0?autoplay=1&start=656&end=863

Topics

• Features > Power Management > Green Energy
• Features > Unplanned Features

Transcript

so the fourth thing that we're not adding to satisfactory is going to be green energy and by that I mean solar power or like wind power so the first reason we don't really want to add, green energy to satisfactory is because like thematically like lore wise it doesn't really fit so well the point of satisfactory is you come down to this beautiful pristine like planet and then you exploit it without care for it you know that's kind of one of the thematic you know driving forces of the game right, and so we think that green energy doesn't really make sense in this space like what why is fix it now offering green technology you know, it would certainly be interesting to have as a just a mechanic, and you know so so we can sort of understand it from that point it would definitely be interesting, but you know thematically doesn't make much sense but, you know and that's a reason but that's also like you know I would say kind of a weak one because we could just change the theme of the game and add green energy right but there is another major major reason which is the real nail in the coffin for green energy and why we can't really add it and that is simply because there's a massive balancing issue with it so in satisfactory all power sources require a steady supply of resources and in fact the entire game is built around not amassing things but but improving your supply rate right parts per minute or whatever power supplies such as, green energy would not need that at all they would break away from that completely they wouldn't have hard limitations of supply, applying to them and so that would make them incredibly overpowered as a power source time and supply per minute is like the the driving thing in satisfactory and they're the the limiting factors that we sort of apply whenever we look into any form of balancing within satisfactory and however green energy wouldn't rely on either of those things they would sort of rely on space like where you can build them build solar panels for example or just like parts you just need to stockpile a lot of parts but those two things aren't really resources in satisfactory they're effectively infinite you you're not going to run out of space you're going to run out of frames per second before you run out of space and satisfactory let's be real here and you're not going to really run out of parts either you could just leave your pc on overnight and you're going to come back to more parts they don't really work well with the systems that we rely on to create you know limitation and conflict or whatever within the game, to create challenge they they they green energy operates outside of that and for that reason we can't really add green energy to the game it's just kind of too strong there are like ways that we could solve it like there are some things that could be done for example, we could balance it by having the buildings, either cost a lot or maybe they, produce really really low amounts of power that could sort of balance it a little bit but but then you need to realize that the balancing there is just tedium right we're offsetting their power by making them really tedious to build so we need to think okay is that the kind of fun we want to introduce we need to introduce tedium more tedium to satisfactory so that you can have green power we just don't think that's adding a positive element to the game so yeah some folks have also suggested but what if you need to maintain them clean them or something like that but then we get back to the factory maintenance argument that we sort of mentioned before so yeah it really looks like green energy is not going to be going ahead in satisfactory there is one sort of caveat that we have talked about and that is like hydropower might be interesting because space is limited there's only so many waterfalls on the map so there's a potential for that there but we'll have to see the fifth thing that we're not adding to