I've been putting down an unreasonable amount of time in Satisfactory lately. I'm constantly running from factory to factory to expand and optimize. The distance between factories can be long, and all that running can become tedious so I had to go and do something about it. I had to unlock the Zipline.
As with everything in this game, unlocking the zipline required me to set up another factory to get some research done. This factory needed to be based on an ore called Caterium which I had only found small traces of so far. The research to unlock the zipline required me to smelt Caterium ore into Caterium bars and then make those into so called Quickwires. I had to set out and search for a proper vein so I could start mining this stuff.
I was lucky enough to find a pure Caterium ore on an island not to far from where I have my main factories. I really only needed a small bit of Quickwire to unlock the zipline but I decided to just set up a full factory to mass produce the stuff. Having materials in backup is never a bad idea and I might end up needing more of the stuff later on.
I set up the small portion on the left in the picture to produce the Quickwire and that went pretty fast. I kept using these materials to do research and learned that I could use these Quickwires to create AI limiters. These again could be used to research Smart Splitters which means I'll be able to feed several types of items into a single splitters and that will then sort the different materials to different outputs for me. Smart indeed.
I needed to combine the Quickwires with Copper Sheets to create the AI limiters so I had to find a copper node as well. To my big luck there was one relatively close by so I set up a long conveyor belt and build the small factory in the right part of the image. The two then combined to create AI limiters for myself.
All in all this took me a good few hours, and perfectly describes how it is to play this game. You set out to complete a small task but end up down a rabbit hole and all of a sudden you got a brand new factory somewhere on the map. I can't even count the amount of times I've gone to "just do something" and then spent 3 hours on a thing because it led me from one thing to another.
At least I have my Zipline now so I can use that to zoom between my factories instead of making my legs tired. It's quite smart because it attaches to to my power cables that already runs between factories. No need to set up a separate network of Zipline cables. There's so many huge quality of life features to this game.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.