Matt Cox
I am lost in my own factory. From every direction, every angle, conveyor belts and smelters and assemblers obscure my senses and envelop my being. Twenty hours ago I placed my first manufacturer somewhere around here. Back then it represented the state of the art, hatching me a pristine batch of 1.25 computers every minute – now I’ve forgotten where I put the damn thing, after delving into my factory’s guts to hook that piddly yet still useful batch of old relics up to my main production line. I’m building supercomputers now, and the many manufacturers that make those are hungry.
Something is always hungry in Satisfactory, and that hunger pulls you from task to task in a near-seamless and frankly beautiful daze of ever-escalating industry. It is mesmerising and it is fearsome, and after five years of early access it’s finally complete.
You know the brief: you’re alone (or not, in co-op) on a planet whose minerals must be turned into gizmos, at the behest of a totally humane and non-exploitative company. The 1.0 update introduces a story that peppers in cryptic allusion, delivered by your Glados-like AI boss, to how The Project you spend the game building will somehow save the universe,
Forget that – back to my factory. Free of the innards, I use my hoverpack to zoom up and out, higher and higher as I appreciate just how much of the planet’s surface is now yoked to my whim. There are my first iron miners, belching out the plates I used to build the mark one conveyor belts that brought my initial copper wire supply over from a hundred metres to the west. There’s my foundry, chugging away at the steel brought in from my first proper outpost, feasting on the ingots that stream out from the latest automated train shipment. Out to sea lies my nuclear power plant, tucked away far enough that the radiation can’t touch me. Up above zooms a drone, jetting in the sulphur that ultimately gets mixed into the rocket fuel that powers my jetpack, as well as half a dozen machines on the factory floor.
Satisfactory sells a sense a scale better than any other automation game, which is saying something when Dyson Sphere Program has you literally encase a star. It’s because you’re there, of course, in the midst of it, conjuring refineries that tower above you and cause practical, immediate navigation problems until you unlock the tools that free you from gravity’s diktat. Having to traverse every inch of my automated empire is what allows me to relish it, transforming even a mundane supply run into an opportunity to marvel at what my will has wrought. Other games have had me annihilate armies and topple literal gods, but conjuring planet-chewing factories is where I’ve felt most powerful.
On a practical level, playing Satisfactory is like being Matt Damon if Matt Damon had been stranded on Mars with a sci-fi multi-tool, and instead of Mars he’d been stranded on a luscious planet filled with kamikaze bees and armour-plated rhinos. It’s cool, they’re chill as long as you don’t go near them: all the hostile flora and fauna keep to themselves, so you only need to tangle with them when you’re exploring. They add tension to a stroll, and there’s heft to each swing of your standard FICSIT issued xeno-basher, but they’re not the main event. The main event is doing maths.
Pretty simple maths! You’ll probably want to know how many smelters you need to handle 180 iron, or how many gallons of oil you’ll need to fuel up your generators, though how much calculation you do is largely up to you. Early on I tend to maths everything out exactly, making sure each machine gets fed exactly as much as it needs to and no more. It’s hard to relate just how satisfying a perfectly optimised production flow can be, and I respect the hell out of anyone who manages to stick with that level of organisation as you progress. As the complexity scales up – and boy does it scale – I tend to swap to an overflow system, sometimes not even bothering with the maths and just cramming in raw material until the handy light on top of each building swaps from ‘feed me’ yellow to sated green.
Playstyle preference and to some extent your nature as a human is also rather brilliantly reflected in the layout of your factories, and how fastidious you are about keeping them neat. Regimented zones, straight lines and neatly regulated angles? (Nerd). Or sprawling spaghetti mess? (Unhinged). The game’s gloriously accommodating of either approach, with plentiful tools to keep your buildings lined up perfectly, or the freedom to almost entirely ignore clipping issues and scribble over the world wherever you please. I fall (ironically) squarely into the latter camp, which all of my friends regard as perverted. That means statistically you will too, so I’m glad of this opportunity to taunt you all with screenshots of my smut.
Even your AI boss teases you about your organisational prowess, in one of many remarks that play whenever you deliver enough products to unlock a new tech. There are loads more of those with the 1.0 update, too, some of them funny enough to catch me off guard with an out loud chuckle. There was the reminder not to worry about amnesia, because beloved memories of animal companions would have been a distraction from my mission. Or the celebration of Futurama-style transport tubes: “Hypertubes: because FICSIT makes pioneer’s closely monitored dreams come true”. There’s also a whole new sinister side-plot involving a mysterious creepy voice that keeps raving about blood and temples, so that’s fun.
You’ll hear from that voice whenever you hunt down a Mercer Sphere, which have gone from placeholder curiosities to indispensable time-savers that let you rig up dimensional depots that you can hook up to your production lines, which serve as a second, infinitely re-filling personal inventory. Those Spheres are found out there with the power slugs that already served as a fantastic incentive to go exploring, seen as you can squish them into power shard smoothies and plug them into machines to boost their output.
It really is a sumptuous, creative and properly alien world that deserves acclaim as an achievement in its own right, with varied biomes and surprises tucked into its canyons, caves and crevices. Shout out to the random rhino with a jetpack. I shall never know your story.
The jetpack! Yet another component Satisfactory nails (factory joke) is its movement, from the powerslide to the unlockable sprinty robo-legs to the powerline grappler. Using all of those in tandem with the jetpack is a genuine joy, building up momentum and giving your spacebar little tippy-taps to fling yourself forwards. That only becomes more powerful as you unlock (and industrialise production of, naturally) superior fuel, with each tantalising new method of traversal a better reward for your labours than even Factorio’s spidertrons.
It’s all so tangible. That’s what elevates this above Factorio and Dyson Sphere, even though both are tremendous in their own right. The first-person perspective is part of that, but there’s a similar sense of concrete reward on a structural level, too (factory joke). You’re not pouring resources into machines that Do Science: you’re manufacturing a specific number of parts to accomplish a specific goal, be that to launch the next phase of The Project or unlock a new powerpole.
Problems? There are a few. Hopefully some of my crashes can be pinned on the media build, but the occasional Crash-To-Desktops that plagued early access haven’t gone away (I literally can’t go near one cursed quartz vein.) Despite now coming with a one-time re-roll, I still feel the alternative recipes you unlock from hard-drives are too rarely useful. The car is too slow, and if I’m being grumpy, a late-game factory can at times feel like it’s asking too much. Another 240 plastic for a mere 22.5 computers a minute? Gah!
I don’t mean it, though. Not really. That’s partly because I’ve got myself to blame: I could be putting the blueprint designer to more work, or building in a more scalable way. But I like my spaghetti cathedral. In fact, I adore it.
I love the thrill of threading a conveyor through my domain and hunting down an errant input port, in a weird shark-like sort of way. I love cleaning up a kink that’s been unknowingly bottlenecking me for hours, then watching a dormant part of my factory spring back into life (and I love that I can now place signs as reminders that make those happen slightly less). Most of all I love passing by old projects, grinning at hodge-podge engineering that’s still thrumming away, playing its part in the overall colossus I have somehow crafted.
Nothing devours a weekend like Satisfactory, whose demands are so often in that sweet spot where the work is complicated enough to yield capital S Satisfaction without tipping into choredom. No management game has made me feel as powerful, letting me relish in how my labours have sculpted the world on such a scale. And nowhere else, or rarely, have I appreciated such loving attention to detail, be that in the bloops of an unfolding miner or the toot of a departing train.
Also with 1.0 you can hook conveyor belts up to your early-game bioreactors. Everyone at Coffee Stain Studios deserves a big kiss.
ranzware
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