I think it is unfair for me to punch down on a game as technically sophisticated, optimized, and functional as Satisfactory. Not only is it a good game, it is an exceptionally good running game considering its flaws, what it is about, and how it handles scale. The game is still in early access, and has only now hit Update #8. My singleplay factory for this update is around 260 hours (more actually) and I've hit the grind from Tier 1 through to the last part of Tier 8 before the final major hurdle of the giga milestone that is the 4th and final Space Elevator phase. The TLDR here is that I like this game a lot but it's really fucking shit about helping you actually organize and manage its scale, and insidiously does little to prepare you for the type of game that it is.
Satisfactory lets you build Trains, Drones, and Trucks to help move shit around which is very helpful if you put the time into setting up a few basic routes. But here's where the issue is: I have to rejigger and rebuild countless dozens of hours worth of infrastructure, and some of it is far, far more critical to my present operations than other components. Done solo, this is a daunting task which has me hitting my upper limit of patience and capacity to motivate the effort. Tier 8 is almost... too complicated. It feels like the production lines from earlier tiers just don't prepare you for how many layers of processing the average Tier 8 item has, and ultimately I think this is a rough spot that speaks to the difficulty not only in translating a game like Satisfactory to players, but also in how damn complicated and left-brain heavy all of the mechanics to its core factory systems operate.
I have so, so much more to say. The new physics engine doesn't play nice with the driveable vehicles you could automate for transit, meaning construction of level roadways across the map is far more critical than it ever was before. The issue is... why bother? Just run a belt. If it's too long, well... you won't spend less time running a belt. Belts never fail, belts don't require power, belts don't drive off path and clip through the ground, their throughput is constant, and if you plan for it, you can belt anything anywhere at any time. The reason you don't? It looks a little tacky. But the problem is that the fundamentals of the infrastructure are just as fast to place down as all of the other options, with the ONLY exception being the airborne drones... but those are such a hassle to set up production for their battery needs.
In short, I think satisfactory has a fundamental design disconnect between the incentives of Infrastructure at Scale and its capacity to manage the very logistics chains it intends to model. I can't dictate, for instance, that I want a truck to pick up "300 Concrete, 500 Screws, 2000 Coal" at Station A, offload it to Station B and load up Silicon and Refined Quartz equally half-and-half capacity, and have it drive to Station C where it drops that off and picks up 1/3rd Steel Ingots, 1/3rd Copper Ingots, 1/6th Caterium Ingots, 1/6th Iron Ingots which it runs back to Station A. These little features are absent from virtually all control surfaces in the game, and since your only method of controlling product flow is through Over/Underclocking and Belt Flow Rate / Splitter and Merger Meta, you have only so much direct control over the product volume going through vehicle ports. It'd be nice if I could dictate "This is Factory A" to a Smart Plug that connects to some kind of scanner and tells me if product is being made, how much per minute, and some kind of useful Map ID that I don't have to manually generate.
You don't have many ways to query your output without manually investigating each individual production building and checking belts to make sure they're appropriately saturated. In short, you lack control that you need in order to make a lot of how the game works a lot less tedious. This is due to the fact that you can't establish Quotas or Regionalized/Outlined Factory spaces. Not being able to define (using any tools what so ever) that a given set of networked buildings share outputs for census means you have none of the tools necessary to help you hold all of your information accessible without going to the ol' pen and pad (character limits and format restrictions on the in game notepad restrict its use severely), a method that I do not mind but am increasingly growing tired of. This is compounded by the inability to cleanly measure outputs and dictate manual splits by volume, with the best systems being Splitter and Merger Logic Gates and manual use of the Belt Tiers. There's a hidden cost to these little tricks too, micro-inefficiencies which can compound significantly.
But primarily, and I think worse than macro-data management of your factories being completely fucking absent in a game as big as Satisfactory is that you can't even configure vehicle docks to have Quotas and Filters for goods. That requires Smart Splitters and again, Logic Gates of mixed Belt Tiers, Splitters and Mergers. Without a Quota system for vehicle docks, loading goods becomes a gamble if you are mixing goods for shipment. This becomes noteworthy with Trains, as you can wind up with crates and crates and crates of one product overwhelming the supply line to the point it backlogs if you dare mix product in the same cargo slot. That can result in unfortunate consequences if you don't use what little filtering options the Train Timetable system lets you implement (cannot just be set at the station in question, must be set on the Time Table inexplicably, adding extra steps you can fail to save configuration changes for). Considering how much extra work goes into laying out Traintracks or chasing Trucks into not falling through the world terrain... you'd hope you could at least have more choices other than "20/30/60 Min" as your lowest per-minute flow rates, or at least have solutions more elegant than "this is my battery of Smart Splitters". It's unnecessarily complicated to make certain things happen, and as the game spans across plural cubic kilometers of map, it only is compounded as your to do list grows completely out of control.
If you don't use the Meta or Recommendations, you are actively hampering yourself and will probably burn out on the game. I don't even wanna get into how Hard Drives make the whole situation miles worse by making the aforementioned mass dismantle problem many times more extreme. I think a factory outline / designation system would make this great, especially if you could define a boundary based upon Foundation Blocks, that way when you're trying to mass dismantle a huge factory, you can have more options like "inventory full, spawn crate? y/n", which would make life way easier.