One More Go

Construct, explore, exploit, automate. Those are your key directives in Coffee Stain Studio‘s Satisfactory. Delivered by a brief induction video that plays as your drop pod crashes down on an alien planet, you’re immediately exploring nearby locations for a safe spot to place the HUB. A handy prefab which acts as an office, a crafting station, a storage chest, and a power generator.

Once placed, you’re ready to start constructing. Use miners to dig for ore, which can be crafted into rods, plates, and screws, basic elements of the equipment and machinery to come. You see, manually crafting all of this stuff is time consuming, so you’re quickly pushed into automation. With conveyor belts you can feed ore from a miner directly into a smelter, the resulting ingots straight into a constructor, and the screws and plates produced can go straight into a storage container, ready for when they’re needed. Only, those machines don’t run on goodwill, they need to be powered, so your newfound downtime is spent rushing through the wilderness, grabbing flora by the handful to dump into your biomass generators.

Power consumption is one of the primary tensions in Satisfactory, and if you ever exceed your capacity, you’ll blow a fuse, halting any machines connected to the grid. The more you expand, the more generators you need, and the more generators you have, the more fuel you’ll need. It’s a vicious cycle which casts a large shadow over the first few hours of play. Eventually you’ll find a rhythm, and it doesn’t take long before you have enough parts to start completing the requests of your employer, the aptly named FICSIT incorporated.

At first items are delivered by hand to the HUB, unlocking new machines, equipment, and recipes. But soon, you’ll be expected to deliver items in such high quantities that you’ll need to conveyor them directly to a space elevator. One of the games most impressive structures which towers above the world, visible from anywhere on the map, acting as a handy navigation feature for when you’re out exploring.

The space elevator is your first hint at the scale in which Satisfactory operates. Each new recipe unlocked will stretch your existing factories to breaking point, with new machines tucked into any gaps, as conveyors snake around the factory floor to accommodate. It soon becomes chaos, and you’ll likely refactor the whole thing many times, especially as faster conveyor belts and alternate recipes are discovered.

This is one of the other tensions at the heart of Satisfactory. The constant pursuit of efficiency. That is, to have all of your machines running at full capacity without any downtime. You’ll pour over the recipe menus to work out how much each machine can process per minute, and how many parts your belts can carry. Solving the constant puzzle of optimsing for your current capabilities, with an eye on how you might expand when upgrades are unlocked in future, is persistently satisfying.

While the premise might sound a bit dry, Satisfactory is anything but. This is a game packed full of charm. The darkly comic communications from ADA your AI handler, the exaggerated animations of your pioneer, and the alien world with its strange creatures and curios to discover, all work to keep you engaged. On top of that, it looks incredible. The vibrant greens and oranges, the reflective metals of your factories as they catch the light, and some of the most beautifully rendered clouds in video games. Don’t be fooled by the screenshots here, my PC is more than beginning to show its age. The graphic fidelity available at higher settings has become one of my main drivers for wanting to upgrade my graphics card.

Satisfactory has been available in Early Access since 2019, that game was a shadow of what it has now become. Its focus then was mainly on conveyoring elements between machines to create more and more complex parts. Since then the game has been through fidelity updates, overhauled mechanics, and added entirely new systems in the form of trains, fluid mechanics, and cooperative multiplayer. Even in its final 1.0 release, yet more recipes and machines have been added to layer on further complexity for the game’s most devout pioneers. From an unrefined gem Satisfactory has passed through its own series of smelters and constructors, emerging in this polished and fully featured form. Satsifactory? It sure is.