While the universe is mostly endless expanses of nothing, when there’s stuff, it tends to be highly concentrated. That would be great for efficiency except there’s a big difference between “concentrated” and “organized” so there’s still a lot of work to do to turn all that matter into something useful, especially when that something is made up of multiple different types of material. Metal is great, but iron and copper do different things in different ways while concrete and plastics have their own specialties. First you’ve got a thing, then it’s almost good enough but not quite so it needs to be modified into another thing, and pretty soon it’s all high-end technogoodies and quantum whatsits. It’s all made from standard materials, but refinement and assembly just gets more demanding the deeper into the tech tree it goes, and it’s far more than any one person could ever hope to create. But that’s what the automation is for.
Building Bigger, Building Better
At this pointSatisfactoryis in the “This game needs no introduction” phase of its lifespan, thanks to its ridiculously-successful five-year run in Early Access, but for the sake of being thorough:Satisfactoryis a first-person automation game set on a pure and untouched planet, where a single worker from FICSIT Incorporated is tasked with harvesting its resources and building an endlessly-intricate network of machines to transform them into useful products. Iron becomes ingots, copper gets transformed into wire and sheets, limestone becomes concrete, etc.
None of these items are useful by themselves, but FICSIT has supplied their worker with a handheld construction device that can instantly create fully-functioning machinery, so long as the needed resources are in inventory. Her first job on planetfall is to use the Build Gun to disassemble the landing pod and use those elements to create the framework for a home base, and then things gradually start getting out of hand.
Satisfactory Lives Up To Its Name in Open Alpha Weekend
While starting out the tech is little more than portable miners and hand-crafting the necessary parts to unlock the first milestones, it doesn’t take long to earn smelters to turn ore into ingots and constructors to transform a single resource into a component. The veins of automation come next with the earliest, slowest version of conveyor belts, and then full-size miners become available to drill into the unlimited ore patches while pumping out a steady stream of raw minerals. Put everything on top of foundations, which let constructors and other machinery snap to the grid in an organized fashion rather than the messier analog placement on bare dirt, and suddenly the very first baby factory is born and the addiction starts sinking its claws into your brain.
Like any good automation game, it’s quickly apparent that efficiency is a game of numbers. Ore patches put out a set amount per minute, with different patches providing higher or lower amounts depending on whether they’re pure, normal or impure. The output is easily divisible by the units per minute needed by the smelter, which generally holds true down the manufacturing line. This might take a bit of merging and splitting of conveyor belts, such as when manufacturing a component like screws (a constructor makes fifteen iron rods per minute, constructors making screws can only process ten iron rods per minute, so merge two lines then divide them into three for maximum efficiency and zero wasted time), but the math isn’t overly complicated and there’s no need for spreadsheets yet. With each new milestone cleared by delivering the requested products, though, new tech gets added and the manufacturing requirements start ramping up.
Exploring the World For Fun and Profit
But that’s not allSatisfactoryis, because its hand-built world needs to be explored not just to find resource deposits, but also because it’s a big open wilderness with secrets and hidden pathways. There’s a scanner that pings the environment for whichever mineral you specify, assuming you’ve earned its spot in the scanner’s menu, so turning up a new seam of coal is just a matter of sending out a pulse and walking straight there, but that would ignore cave systems, cliffside routes up to the heights, hidden alien collectibles that unlock strange new tech, or something as simple as exploring just for the fun of seeing what’s out there. Paying attention to the environment can even pay off with early access to useful tools, with destructible outcroppings of minerals providing just enough to research and build equippable items that would take much longer to earn if you waited to stumble across an unlimited deposit. It’s a big map with a lot to see and find, and barring running out of power before you can fully automate that system the factory will keep churning out items while you go for a walk.
Still, it’s an alien planet out there and not entirely safe. There are creatures and hazards that are by no means friendly, and it can take a bit to earn a weapon with a good punch behind it. Hogs and spitters guard resource nodes, horrible spidery stingers patrol the caves and insect nests infest the forests. Fall damage is also a real possibility, and the map has more than a few bottomless pits. Death just means dropping everything except for equipped items in a box where you fell, though, so as long as you may get back there in one piece it’s more an inconvenience than major problem. Death is also avoidable, seeing as most enemies can be bypassed by either retreating or walking around them, while fall damage can be eliminated by placing foundations, catwalks, ramps and ladders wherever needed. It’s your world after all, and if you want to be on the other side of a canyon, there’s no reason not to drop a dozen foundation plates in a row to make a bridge.
The exploration aspect does tie directly into growing the factory, though, and back at home base any new items can be fed into several different ways to earn new items and tech. The milestones give the bulk of the rewards, where delivering an ever-growing number of items earns everything from assemblers that can take two or even four items as inputs to build more complicated components, to equipment upgrades that mine or transport more items per minute, to new power sources, plus a large number of other themed options.
The research center has its own set of tech rewards as well, granted by supplying and identifying new items, and finally the Awesome Shop runs off tickets earned by sending unneeded production items into a disposal unit. All of them provide vital tools to expand the factory, whether that be mobility equipment to get around better or new paint finishes to make the place look nicer, and probably the best QOL item is the dimensional depot. This acts as a second personal storage item separate from the player’s main inventory and when used with a bit of planning almost completely eliminates the need to backtrack to the main base to pick up components.
That’s not allSatisfactoryis, because its hand-built world needs to be explored not just to find resource deposits, but also because it’s a big open wilderness with secrets and hidden pathways.
Closing Comments:
And it just keeps growing from there. Newer, faster machines mean tearing out and rebuilding the current setup, while new resources such as quartz and oil open up a host of options like enhanced computing, different types of fuels and plastics. Transportation items like trucks and trains or eventually the aerial drones allow moving large amounts of resources across the map, and each new upgrade requires rethinking the current setup to see how it can be made better. There’s a story with an end-point, although not at all intrusive, but climbing through the tech tiers to complete it can easily take a hundred hours or more. That sounds like a lot, but in a game with the scope and polish ofSatisfactory,that can be just the beginning of retooling a planet to be the industrial powerhouse of your dreams.
Satisfactory
Version Reviewed: PC
A lone operative of the Ficsit Corporation lands on a beautiful alien planet to turn every resource it’s got into the biggest, most intricate collection of interconnected machinery in the galaxy. The factory must grow, and every piece placed is another step towards bigger, better, faster and more efficient in Satisfactory.
