I am lost in my own factory. From every side, from every angle, conveyor belts, smelters, and assemblers obscure my senses and envelop my being. Twenty hours ago, I placed my first manufacturer near here. At the time, it represented the latest technology, churning out a perfect batch of 1.25 computers every minute – I forget where I put the damn thing now, after diving into the bowels of my factory and connecting that insignificant but still useful batch of old relics to my main production line. Now I make supercomputers, and the many manufacturers who make them are hungry.
There's always something hungry about Satisfactory, and that hunger drives you from task to task in a near-perfect and frankly beautiful travesty of an ever-rising industry. It's fascinating and terrifying, and after five years in early access, it's finally complete.
You know the gist: you're alone (or not alone in co-op) on a planet whose minerals must be turned into tools at the behest of a completely humane and non-exploitative corporation. The 1.0 update introduces a storyline filled with mysterious allusions to how the Project you've built will somehow save the universe, delivered by your Glados-like AI boss.
Forget that—back to my factory. Freed from my internal organs, I fly my hoverpack up and out, higher and higher as I realize how much of the planet’s surface is now subject to my whims. There are my first iron miners, belching out the plates I used to build the Mark One conveyor belts that brought my first supply of copper wire from a hundred yards to the west. There is my foundry, which grinds steel from my first real outpost, feasting on the ingots that flow from the last automated train shipment. There is my nuclear power plant, hidden far out to sea, far enough away that radiation cannot touch me. Above me is a drone, spraying sulfur into the rocket fuel that powers my jetpack and the half-dozen machines on the factory floor.
It's satisfying, selling a sense of scale better than any automation game, which is saying something considering Dyson Sphere Program forces you to literally cover a star. That's because, of course, you're right in the middle of it, creating refineries that tower above you and cause practical, immediate navigation problems until you unlock tools that free you from the dictates of gravity. Having to traverse every inch of my automated empire makes me enjoy it, turning even a mundane supply run into an opportunity to marvel at what my will has wrought. I've destroyed armies and toppled literal gods in other games, but creating planet-chewing factories is where I felt most powerful.
On a practical level, playing Satisfactory is like Matt Damon being stranded on Mars with a sci-fi omni-tool, only to find that instead of Mars, you're stranded on a lush planet full of kamikaze bees and armored rhinos. Great, they're comfortable as long as you don't get too close to them: all the hostile flora and fauna are their own, so you only have to deal with them while you explore. They add tension to a walkthrough, and every blow of your standard FICSIT-issued xeno-basher has weight, but they're not the main event. The main event is doing the math.
It’s pretty simple math! You’ll probably want to know how many furnaces you’ll need to process 180 iron, or how many gallons of oil you’ll need to run your generators, but how much calculation you do is largely up to you. I tend to calculate everything mathematically at the beginning, making sure each machine is fed exactly as much as it needs and no more. It’s hard to understand how satisfying a perfectly optimized production flow can be, and I have great respect for anyone who manages to stick to this level of organization as they go. As the complexity increases – and yes, it does – I tend to switch to an overflow system, sometimes without even bothering with the math, just cramming in raw material until the handy light on top of each building changes from ‘feed me’ yellow to a saturated green.
Your playstyle preference, and to some extent your nature as a human being, is also reflected quite brilliantly in the layout of your factories and how meticulous you are about keeping them tidy. Orderly zones, straight lines and neatly arranged angles? (Nerd). Or a sprawling spaghetti mess? (Unbalanced). The game adapts to both approaches wonderfully, with a plethora of tools for perfectly aligning your buildings, or the freedom to almost completely ignore clipping issues and scribble the world wherever you want. I (ironically) fall squarely into the latter camp, which all my friends consider perverts. That means statistically you probably will too, so I'm happy to give you all the opportunity to tease you with screenshots of my obscenity.
Even your AI boss mocks you for your organizational skills in one of the many comments that play when you deliver enough items to unlock a new technology. There’s a lot more of these in the 1.0 update, some of which are funny enough to catch me off guard by making me chuckle out loud. There was the reminder not to worry about memory loss, as the beloved memories of my animal companions would distract me from my mission. Or the Futurama-style celebration of transport tubes: “Hypertubes: because FICSIT is making pioneers’ closely watched dreams come true.” There’s also a brand new, sinister side story involving a mysterious, creepy voice who keeps babbling about blood and temples, so that’s fun.
You'll always hear that voice when you hunt down a Mercer Orb, as they've evolved from temporary curiosities to indispensable time-savers that allow you to build dimensional storage that you can plug into your production lines and act as a second tool to endlessly refill your personal inventory. These Orbs are found there with power slugs, which act as a great incentive to explore, as you can squeeze them into power part mixes and attach them to machines to increase their output.
It truly deserves to be hailed as an achievement in its own right, a magnificent, imaginative, and truly alien world with a variety of biomes and surprises hidden within its canyons, caves, and crevices. Shout out to the random rhino with the jetpack. I'll never know your story.
Jetpack! Another component that Satisfactory has nailed (factory joke) is its movement, from the power slide to the unlockable speedy robot legs and powerline wrestler. All of these are a real joy to use with the jetpack, giving you momentum and tapping your space bar to launch yourself forward. This becomes even more powerful once you unlock superior fuel (and naturally industrialise its production), and each new tricky traversal method is a better reward for effort than Factorio's spidertrons.
It’s all very tangible. That’s what makes this one stand out above Factorio and Dyson Sphere, both of which are great in their own right. The first-person perspective is part of that, but there’s a similar sense of tangible reward on a structural level (factory joke). You’re not pouring resources into machines that make science: you’re crafting a certain number of parts to achieve a specific goal, whether that’s starting the next phase of the Project or unlocking a new power pole.
Problems? There are a few. Hopefully some of my crashes can be attributed to the media build, but the occasional Crashes to Desktop that plagued Early Access haven't gone away (I literally can't get close to a cursed quartz vein.) Despite now coming with a one-time reroll, I find the alternative recipes you unlock from hard drives still very rarely work. The cart is very slow, and if I'm being cranky, the endgame factory can sometimes feel like it's asking for too much. 240 more plastic for just 22.5 computers per minute? Ugh!
But I don't mean that. Not really. Part of it is that I blame myself: I could have given the layout designer more work or built it more scalable. But I love the spaghetti cathedral. In fact, I love it.
I love the thrill of cruising a conveyor around my space, hunting down a faulty entry port like a freak shark. I love clearing a kink that has been bottlenecking me for hours without me even realizing it, then watching a dormant section of my factory come back to life (and I love being able to put up signs as reminders that this happens a little less often). I love most of all walking past old projects and grinning at the messy engineering that still hums, somehow playing its part in the overall edifice I’ve created.
Nothing eats up a weekend quite like Satisfactory, whose demands are often in that sweet spot where the work is complex enough without the capital S Satisfaction turning into drudgery. No management game has ever made me feel so powerful, let me savor how my labors shape the world at this scale. And nowhere else, or rarely, have I paid such loving attention to detail, whether in the bloops of a miner emerging or the whistle of a moving train.
You can also connect conveyor belts to your early game bioreactors with 1.0. Everyone at Coffee Stain Studios deserves a big kiss.