What's new
The Simulated switch we added yesterday now does what it promises. Type 500/min into a simulated input and every machine below it that nothing else sizes runs on that supply: auto machines scale along the whole chain, and whatever comes out at the end that nobody asked for shows up as surplus at the port. If a machine further down has an explicit target, that target still wins — a promise feeds a factory, it does not override your plan.
Your savegame now carries a lot more into SatisfactoryBase. On the worlds page you can create a world straight from a save: pick the file and the form is filled in for you — name, seed, purity and randomisation, and the alternate recipes you have unlocked in the game. You edit whatever you like, then create the world; the save is linked to it right after. Every world now knows which alternate recipes are available: there is a new section in the world settings with a search box and the actions All, None and From save. New factories start with exactly those recipes. In the planner, alternates your world has not unlocked wear a small lock, but they stay selectable — what-ifs are still allowed.
If you link a save to an existing world, we now offer to apply it: seed and modes for the world, the recipes from the save for the world, and — if you want — adding those recipes to all factories in the world. Adding is always additive; nothing you allowed by hand is ever removed. And the map has a new layer, Occupied per savegame, which marks every resource node where an extractor is already standing in your game.
Two small things on the side: recipe names no longer say "Alternate:" right next to the ALT pill, and a summary panel you closed stays closed when you select a node.
What we're working on
The save we tested with uses the default resource randomisation, so we could not see how the game stores the other modes yet — we are looking for a save with a random world to read that setting too. Beyond that, the planner still links only to buildings that have a Wiki page, so those pages are being written, and the Pipe Merger is waiting for its own build cost.
Why we changed it
Both changes came from the same afternoon. The first version of the simulated input showed 0/min everywhere below it, and the reason is how the planner thinks: it is demand-driven. Machines run because something downstream pulls on them, and a simulated input was only a cap on how much could be pulled — nothing pulled, so nothing flowed. We deliberately did not just force the number through: a fixed machine below that cannot take 500/min would make the whole factory unsolvable. Instead, machines that no real demand sizes now treat the promise as their supply, and a real target still decides.
The savegame round started when we uploaded our own save and expected the recipes, the seed and the resource nodes to carry over — and the first version only displayed them. So we looked at what a save really contains. The seed and the purity setting are in there, and our world generator reproduces 576 of the 577 node purities from that seed alone, so there is no need to copy nodes out of a save — the world is already right. What the game does not tell us for free are your unlocked recipes, and those are what the new world settings are for.