Satisfactory is introducing a photo mode, enhanced construction features, improved controller compatibility, and customizable elevators.

Coffee Stain remain dissatisfied with Satisfactory, their first-person factory sim, despite Matt Cox giving it the Cox’s Orange Pippin Award in our Satisfactory 1.0 review. They’re just about to release update 1.1 into public testing. This adds Photo Mode, programmable personnel elevators, and a bunch of twisty furnishings.

One thing it doesn’t add is rain, which used to exist in Satisfactory but was removed because it wasn’t working properly. Apparently, Coffee Stain need to do an Unreal Engine upgrade before they can restore the missing precipitation. Many players are sad about this. Ah, I think it’s kind of poetic that there are people in the Satisfactory community who wish only to be rained upon.

Here’s a video in which the developers break down update 1.1’s additions.

And here’s a quick summary of the highlights. They’re adding branches for hypertube networks, allowing you to shoot down one or the other branch as though switching rails in Sonic Adventure 2. They’ve got some fancy new throughput counters for conveyor belts so that you can easily track how many items a line is carrying. The editor now supports curved building modes for belts, and straight building mode for pipes. There are also new vertical belt splitters and mergers for people who like to expand upwardly, perhaps because they’ve covered every inch of available soil in metal.

New bits and pieces include railway buffers to close out railroads, and the aforesaid personnel elevators – more of a cosmetic flourish in a game with jetpacks, perhaps, but you can customise what the buttons do, and I imagine Satisfactory players will find many arcane applications for such functionality. Just don’t use them to transport vehicles, because the game will act as though you’ve chucked a bunch of forklifts onto a bouncy castle.

Last but not least – proper controller support for your Eggbox and PlayStaycation peripherals! There’s no final public release timing for the update yet beyond its experimental branch rollout from tomorrow, 1st April. That choice of release date is obviously cause for suspicion, but the developers assure us in the video that, unlike the Cox’s Orange Pippin Award, update 1.1 is a real thing that exists.