Satisfactory

I said no more early access games, and here we are, but to my credit this is one of those “never done” sort of games that trucks along in EA for years and is, in its current state, a complete experience.

Satisfactory is a sci-fi factory automation game with a first-person exploration. I felt like this was a pretty good middle place in the genre between the lower-key factory games and the grand pappy (you know who). The tutorial and barebones story has a corporate dark humor sci-fi tone similar to Journey to the Savage Planet and the Outer Worlds. You’re dropped onto an uninhabited planet with instructions to build… and build… and build. The majority of the game centers around collecting resources to unlock more tools and factory parts, and using those items to create factories so you can harvest or craft more quickly. The exploratory component comes into play more when you are trying to find new materials to unlock resource branches. Once you’ve found a resource, you can scan for it after that, which helps a lot.

My number one issue is I have a lot of difficulty building things from the ground. It can be tough to line things up correctly, leading to a lot of disassembly/reassembly. I wish this game had a top-down view or a build mode or something that made this easier. Evidently a lot of people use flying mods to get around this, and the game has a flying mode in advanced settings. I’m not quite ready to go there. Building foundations helps a lot, and I’m trying to get better about that.

My second issue is even the smallest factory is freaking HUGE, and running around between massive machines drives me slightly bananas.

My first game, I hit tier 2 and became highly dissatisfied with my weird snakey factory layout, as well as the need to contantly dig up biomatter to feed the five or so burners I used to run it. I read advice that starting out you should focus on handcrafting until you power your way to coal, and I decided to try that for my next game on a Grassy planet. I also toggled animal hostility off, since the game doesn’t really provide very good tools or frankly good enough play control to warrant running around shocking alien hogs with a spanner.

Second game went a little better, but I got bored of handcrafting everything. The main benefit of factories is multi-tasking. You can craft things faster at the workbench, but you can only craft one thing at a time and you can’t do anything else while you’re crafting. Setting up assembly lines to produce concrete, for example, removes some of that tedium.

I’m honestly not sure if I like this game or not. The things I didn’t like about Assembly Planter (the grinding, the sprawling automation) are multiplied here, since this is a much more expansive game. I like automation, but I don’t necessarily like some of the gameplay aspects that come with that. I stopped playing this game before I’d set up a coal generator, which is an automated power source, and I think that would help. I’m sure I’ll return to this one eventually.

I got the factory itch again, so I fired up yet another game in Satisfactory but this time I realized I could enable a no-power cheat. This makes the game a lot more fun for me. I also chose the desert planet, which has wide open expanses and limited fuel, which doesn’t matter in my case. A bonus of the no-power cheat is you can let the factories run and do their own thing indefinitely, which has helped curb my need to tear everything down and start over. If a factory starts to get on my nerves I just leave it and go build another one, but come back periodically to yoink the product.

I enjoyed building a factory line for basic parts, then seeing where I could improve and building another. Since power isn’t an issue I can set up shop wherever which is nice. Something I learned from my previous plays is it’s good to set up a little concrete factory and let it run, since concrete production is one of the slower early-game lines. Whenever I need concrete I run back out there and usually I have a stack of 500 or so waiting for me. Similarly it’s useful to set up a copper/wire factory early and attach a few storage containers and let it run. One copper vein can easily supply a setup that creates copper wire and diverts half of that to produce the next level of wire. Pretty soon you’ll have wire all over the place.

A bottleneck that frequently occurs is conveying goods into a storage container, they tend to get backed up but I found a super short level 2 conveyor between the merge and storage container eliminated this problem entirely. I’m a little hemmed in by my split/merge options, and I wish storage containers had more inputs but that upgrade may come later.