From what I've heard the in-game default bindings and stick sensitivity are ass, but you can change them at least.

What's so hard for devs to just ask someone using a controller to come up with a few good default profiles? idk.

Still, good news.

I also feel nuclear and the other related 'fuel rod' types need adjustment to make them worthwhile as currently to get rid of waste it's a negative sum in the end aka it costs more energy to produce then you get out of the loop. Especially since you can collect somersloops and completely negate most end game energy needs.

You can start crafting foundations to build on a grid pretty early on in the game, but as a Factorio player I also tried building straight on the ground in my first save and that was pretty annoying. But then you realize that foundations are pretty cheap and you can just cover a huge area and basically ignore terrain.

To me scaling isn't strictly harder than in Factorio, it's just different. Being able to utilize the third dimension and build ad-hoc layers ( or spaghetti :p ) where needed is awesome, I like the additional "modularity"

Not sure if you are aware, but foundations give you a grid system to use. A lot of players will build foundations up high, and build on a large, floating platform. I came from Factorio, and I actually really liked the factory size/shape constraints in Satisfactory, as it doesn't let me use the same design solution for every resource node. Some places trains can easily get to, others require trucks to get the resources to where the train can pick them up, and others still require drones. I felt like in factorio, I could use the systems I came up with early throughout the entire game, and the only thing I needed to change was how to pump resources into my factory and scaling up my defense system.

What helped me was two things:

1. Accepting that things didn’t need to be perfect and that there was actually a decent amount of wiggle room available to make things work.
2. I took a month break when it felt like the complexity took a major leap up. Games should be fun and I realized I was feeling daunted and like it was a chore. The break let me come back refreshed and feel the joy again.

Also, I leaned pretty heavily on https://www.satisfactorytools.com/ to help me wrap my head around the complicated builds and flows. Donated money to them since it was so helpful.

Of course, that’s just my experience. Hope you make it though! It felt really satisfying to get to the end. I really appreciated their progression system.

My first play through I got to oil production and restarted because I could see the complexity scale up fast and figured a clean slate would be easiest. I then got to the 1st stage of nuclear stuff and promptly stopped. I have yet to play again because I was waiting for the first patch a few months ago, and then heard they were working on controller support. I have a couple games I'm going to finish up and then start round 3 to see if I can increase efficiency to make it a smoother transition into nuclear. I had a massive bottleneck with building computer components that made it really tough to begin the nuclear options.

I honestly wouldn't mind replaying over and over and just stopping at aluminum/nuclear just because it gets a bit overwhelming.

I just wish it were easy to start a new map without resetting your tech tiers.

I'm terrible with starting projects just to get a particular component any a particular time and then not putting in the time to design it perfectly from the start.

Then my map gets super messy.

But I just want to nuke it and rebuild without resetting my exploration/tech unlocks/progress etc