At the start of Satisfactory you land, alone, as a pioneer on an alien planet with nothing but a FICSIT™ Build Gun and just enough basic resources to build yourself a HUB. Not far from your landing site you'll find seams of raw materials such as iron, copper, and limestone, and at first you'll need to mine these ores by hand until you have enough to make the parts (Iron Ingots, Iron Plates, copper Wire) to build automated Miner and Constructor machines, and conveyor belts to join them together. When you have enough resources, just aim the Build Gun at a spacious bit of ground and watch the parts assemble into the desired bit of machinery.
Urging you on is ADA, an AI built into the HUB, though her synthetic voice never sounds particularly impressed by your efforts. Your aim is to build up a chain of machines to turn ores into ingots, ingots into basic parts, basic parts into assembled parts, and assembled parts into complex components.
By sending specific parts and components into orbit, via the shuttle on the HUB, you unlock milestones which give you access to new factory machines, and recipes for new parts and components, and also increases to your inventory size. Along with completing these milestones, you must also build a certain number of sophisticated Project Assembly parts and send them into orbit via the impressively huge Space Elevator (which you also need to build first). Completing a phase of Project Assembly opens up a whole new set of milestones, and there are five phases of Project Assembly giving forty-eight milestones in total. By the end of the game your supply chains will be long and complicated.
Almost immediately after landing you'll need to start looking around to find seams of resources you need, and spaces suitably open to accommodate factory machines. Initially the only way to produce electricity to power your machines is to wander around grabbing plants and wood and shoving them into Biomass Burners, so you'll have to go hunting for a decent quantity of organic material to keep your machines running. Later on you'll unlock access to Coal-Powered Generators which you can connect to a coal mining machine so that your power generation can be fully automated.
Later on you'll need to explore further afield, leaving your landing area and moving around the twenty-one varied biomes found on the awkwardly named planet MASSAGE-2(A-B)b. Some of the biomes are forest, some desert, some swamp, some grassland, some are made of beaches, or craters, or canyons. Each biome has its own distinct appearance and mood. Some are relatively safe, hosting only the smaller variants of the planet's hostile creatures; others are very dangerous, rife with radioactive rocks and the largest variants of hostile beasts. Caves can be found all over the world, some entrances tricky to spot at first, and the size of caves varies from a modest pocket to labyrinthine. The total land area of the world is roughly 29 square kilometres, so there's a lot to discover.
Some of the hostile creatures, known as Stingers, strongly resemble spiders, so the game features an Arachnophobia Mode which lets you replace the spider shapes with hilariously unsettling, two-dimensional, glitchy cat head sprites which meow at you constantly, but still move and do the same damage as the spider-shaped versions. It can be quite exhilarating to find yourself lost in a large cave system full of Stingers, the smaller ones being fairly easy to avoid, the largest ones posing a real threat with their ability to jump great heights and emit clouds of toxic gas.
Other hostiles include Fluffy-tailed Hogs which likes to charge and ram you. Spitters will spit balls of plasma at you, sometimes with very impressive accuracy even when you're moving. And the numerous Flying Crab Hatchers which are attached on ground surfaces in all orientations, sometimes tucked out of sight, and will sit quietly until you get too close, at which point they release a number of Flying Crabs, which are individually not particularly harmful, but if you let a big batch of them bump into you then you're at serious risk of perishing.
Initially you have only a small Xeno-Zapper weapon to defend yourself with, but later on you'll gain the heftier Xeno-Basher, and then the powerful but clunky Rebar Gun, and later still a more convenient semi-automatic Rifle, and a range of ammunition choices. Early on you're earthbound and your puny weapons mean you're best off running from anything but the weakest of hostile creatures. As your weapons get better, and you gain the ability to attack from the air, you can eventually take on the nastiest of alien threats.
Travelling on foot is your only option initially, but soon enough you gain access to the Explorer, an all-terrain vehicle which lets you move quickly, even up steep slopes. And hostile creatures ignore you completely while you're in a vehicle, so it's a safe way to move around in unfamiliar territory. If you do take damage while on foot, you can gather berries, nuts, and mushrooms and eat them to restore your health a little, or you can use them together to craft an inhaler which restores you to full health; very useful when in combat against a horde of dangerous creatures.
You build a conveyor belt from the output port of a Miner and join it to the input port of a Smelter. Then you build a conveyor belt to join the output port of the Smelter to the input port of a Constructor machine, so that the ingots can be turned into basic parts like iron rods or iron plates. The conveyor belts are effective, but the early grades of conveyor belt are fairly slow (Mk.1 belts can only move 60 items per minute) and running ribbons of conveyor belts over long distances will quickly turn your factory into a metallic spaghetti sculpture.
To break out of your initial, small-scale factory into something bigger and tidier, you eventually gain access to vehicles such as the Tractor, which can be programmed to automatically drive between Truck Station stops, picking up items at one station and depositing them in a target station. The Tractor, and later the Truck, can hold a reasonable quantity of items, and can move at a reasonable pace, but the main advantage is being able to move goods over long distances without having to build absurdly long conveyor belts. This allows you to create separate, modular factory sites, building parts close to the resource most greedily needed by the recipe, and then using a Tractor or Truck to bring along the other resources less eagerly needed for the recipe. While this works effectively, it's quite embarrassing to watch a Tractor or Truck on autopilot, as they frequently drive themselves off of cliffs, somehow failing to follow the path you've clearly marked out for them in advance (by driving the vehicle manually and recording the path). They get the job done, though, with driving mistakes conspicuously corrected by the game (simply teleporting the vehicle back to where it's supposed to be).
As soon as you've unlocked the ability to build railway lines, you can give up on Tractors and Trucks and instead build Train Stations and railway lines to join them over potentially long distances. You can build Trains with multiple freight cars, allowing a Train to carry vastly more than a single Truck can carry, and the Trains will travel at 125km/h so they'll leave the road vehicles in the dust. Using careful placement of signals, you can have multiple Trains running on the same track, allowing you to create a network of stations and lines such that you can reach any Train Station from any other Train Station on the network, allowing you to grow your factory across the entire world, and allowing you to build a Train and jump in whenever you need to get from one side of the world to the other. Building a two-track train network takes some time and effort, but it is very satisfying to be able to jump in a train and tell it to go to any of the stations you've built. (Tip: build your two-track line so that Trains drive on the right. I made the mistake of having them drive on the left, and realised too late that it totally messes up the placement of signals.)
As your factory gets bigger, your energy demands grow too. Coal won't be able to keep up, and eventually you'll have to extract crude oil and turn it into various fuel types to be burned in Fuel-powered Generators. Geothermal Generators can be placed on a number of natural geysers dotted around the world to gather freely available energy, but they don't add a huge amount of power to your grid even if you exploit every geyser on the map. If your power demands grow big enough, you'll probably want to build Nuclear Power Plants, which require a complicated chain of factories to extract Uranium Ore, turn it into Uranium Fuel Rods, then take the resulting waste and process that into Plutonium Fuel Rods, and ultimately turn the waste from that into Ficsonium Fuel Rods which can generate nuclear power without producing any waste.
But note that the raw Uranium and all of the intermediate nuclear fuel and waste components are radioactive, which will be lethal to you unless you have a radiation suit and a large number of consumable filters to keep radiation damage at bay. You can complete the game without doing anything with nuclear power, but if you want to overclock all your factory machines and put heavy demand on your power grid then you'll probably have to go nuclear to produce enough power to keep up with demand.
You'll likely start off by building factory machines on the bare ground, but this leads to higgledy-piggledy layouts which become very difficult to scale up. A much tidier approach is to use FICSIT Foundations to create a large, flat, uniformly delineated surface on which you can snap factory machines into place, giving neat, regular, reproducible production lines.
Given how much time you can spend building a particular factory, and how many factories you'll end up building, it's nice to be able to finish off each factory by making it distinct in its own way. To this end, you can purchase different Foundation and wall/roof materials, such as concrete, steel, and glass, from the AWESOME Shop. You can also purchase doors, catwalks, ladders, and fancy roof structures to add a more sophisticated look to your creations.
To pay to unlock these customisations, you use the currency of FICSIT Coupons, which you receive for dumping surplus parts (and alien DNA) into an AWESOME Sink. The ability to sink items is not just useful for collecting FICSIT Coupons, but also an important way to make sure that unused byproducts (some recipes produce more than one output at the same time) do not clog up your production line (which would cause it to grind to a halt).
Along with custom materials, you can also customise the colour of most man-made things (factory machines, conveyor belts, FICSIT Foundations, vehicles). The size of the saved colour palette is fairly small, but it goes a long way. It's also possible to spray symbols, such as warning signs and digits, onto Foundations, to convey simple information clearly.
If basic symbols aren't enough, you can also build signs and billboards which can display a graphic and/or text. But in terms of finding your way around your network of factories, it's probably easier to just add a marker to the map, which you can search later on. For example, you can add a map marker at your current position, name it "Radio Control Units" and put it in the subcategory "Factories". Do that consistently for all of your factories, and you'll have an easy way to find any factory you're looking for (because after hundreds of hours, you may have no recollection of where you built that Nuclear Pasta factory).
None of the resource seams ever run out, so you can mine them infinitely. But you might find your stamina begin to wane as you reach the later phases of Project Assembly. The components you need to deliver become wildly complex, requiring a lot of different production steps, and the building of a lot of factory machines. For example, to complete phase three you need to deliver 500 Modular Engine components, which means that in total you need to have produced (and brought together) all of the following:
This isn't as bad as it sounds, as the basic parts (such as Iron Ingot, Iron Plate, Iron Rod, Copper Ingot, Wire) are easy to produce in large quantities. (Once you have access to the Mk.3 Miner, a pure seam can produce 1,200 Iron Ore per minute.) And most parts have alternative recipes that let you use fewer resources, or fewer intermediate steps.
But the complexity only grows, and by the time you're in phase four and five of Project Assembly, you have to have in place factories for a large number of components, all of which rely on each other, or compete with each other for common resources. You might build a new factory to produce Fused Modular Frames and then realise that it's never going to actually generate any output because the Aluminum Casing it requires is all being greedily consumed by a Radio Control Unit factory you built hours ago, and the supply chain for Aluminum Casing is itself long and demanding, requiring the building of a large number of Miner, Water Extractor, Refinery, Smelter, and Constructor machines. Which means that making more Aluminum Casing available will take quite a lot of additional time and effort.
Blueprints help to reduce the repetition of building rows of identical machines, allowing you to design a group of machines, conveyor belts, pipes, and power lines and save the design as a blueprint file for later use. But even the largest blueprint can only be 6×6 foundation squares (48m×48m) and there's no way to automatically join up the built groups, which leaves you to manually connect them with pipes, conveyors, and power lines.
As you unlock milestones you gain access to better equipment and buildings. Faster mining machines and conveyor belts allow you to greatly increase the output of your factories by allowing vastly more ore to be carried from mining machines to smelters and foundries, and far more intermediate parts to be moved between your rows of machines. (The Mk.6 conveyor belt can move twenty times more items per minute than a Mk.1 belt.)
And by building a MAM you can research the alien flora, fauna, and artefacts which you find whilst exploring the beaches, canyons, deserts, and caves of the world. Dotted around the nooks of the world are hundreds of Power Slugs, and these can be turned into Power Shards which allow you to overclock your factory machines (at greatly increased power consumption) so that you can increase output without finding the space to build more rows of the same machines. And the well-hidden, pulsating Somersloop artefacts can be used to boost the output of a factory machine without increasing the amount of parts it consumes (again, at the cost of greatly increased power consumption).
Most useful of all are the Mercer Sphere artefacts you find spread throughout the world. These allow you to build a Dimensional Depot which lets you push parts into the ether, making them available to you no matter where you are in the world. This saves a huge amount of time, because without a certain part being available via a Dimensional Depot, the only way to get hold of that part is for you to travel from wherever you are (for example, building a long railway line into the Dune Desert in the north-east) all the way back to the factory which makes that part (for example, in Grass Fields in the south-west).
Another important reason to go hunting is in search of crash sites, which will reward you with hard drives that you can research at the MAM in order to unlock alternative recipes. These alternative recipes give you more options when you're trying to produce certain parts. For example, the standard recipe for producing for a Copper Ingot is simply putting 1 Copper Ore into a Smelter and getting out 1 Copper Ingot, at a rate of 30 per minute. But if you unlock the alternative recipe "Copper Alloy Ingot" you can instead put 5 Copper Ore and 5 Iron Ore into a Foundry and get out 10 Copper Ingot, at a rate of 100 per minute. So this recipe is preferable if you have easier access to iron seams than to copper seams. And when making Heavy Modular Frames, the "Heavy Encased Frame" alternative recipe basically allows you to use Concrete instead of Screws, which is always a welcome swap because so many Screws would be needed that they create a bottleneck in almost any production line. It's well worth hunting down the crash sites to gather these hard drives, and from fairly early on you can build a handheld Object Scanner which tells you when you're getting close to a crash site (or to a Mercer Sphere, Somersloop, Power Slug, depending on which mode you set).
To help you get around quickly and safely, a Jetpack can be crafted at the start of phase 3, and this lets you ascend up the side of cliffs, and allows you to break your fall from any height. Different fuel types gives different burn times and speeds, but all fuels have only a few seconds of airborne burn time before you must land and allow the Jetpack to refill from your inventory (or don't land, but fall out of the sky). The Jetpack is a little jerky but it can be used anywhere. Much smoother is the Hoverpack which you don't get until early in phase 4, and which only works when within a few metres of an electrical junction (such as where a power line meets a machine or power pole, or where two pieces of railway line are joined). The Hoverpack makes it a pleasure to assemble factory production lines, because it gives you an overhead view, which is a lot easier than trying to connect pipes and conveyors when you're down at ground level.
A somewhat disappointing addition, made available halfway through phase 4, is the Drone Port and Drone. These can carry a modest number of items, take almost a minute to take off and to land, but travel very, very fast, which in theory makes them great for moving late-game parts (which are almost always low in quantity anyway, due to their complexity). But in practice the Drone is difficult to use because it's so inflexible compared to Trains. A Drone can only be programmed to go from one place to another, and it can be tricky to get fuel supplied to one or other Drone Port for each route. The end result is that Drones are far less impressive than Trains, though they do come in handy sometimes, particularly for getting the most sophisticated parts to the Space Elevator.
Also less flexible than it could be is the portal technology, which is not made available until late in phase 5 at almost the end of the game. A Main Portal can be told to connect to a Satellite Portal, at great cost in electrical power and also in expensive Singularity Cells, and this lets you jump into one end to almost immediately reappear at the other. But it's not possible to change what the Main Portal points to unless you are at the Main Portal, so you cannot just travel (by train/car/foot) to the other side of the world, build a Satellite Portal and then use it to get back to the Main Portal. Instead you have to travel (by train/car/foot) back to the Main Portal, and then reconfigure it. Given that they don't become available until so late in the game, it really feels like the portals should pretty much let you travel to any part of the world you want to get to, so it's frustrating that they're so obstinate.
A game of this size is almost certain to have quirks, and there are certainly a few in Satisfactory. Railway lines were a frequent source of trouble, often because when building new railway line segments the game would inexplicably try to insert a junction switch on a section of track where there was no junction. And trains cannot actually move through such a confused join, which breaks the route-finding of any trains that rely on that section of railway line. Often I'd find myself exploring on the other side of the world before the trains all began to grind to a halt (and you only discover this by chance if you happen to look at the map and see a lot of exclamation marks where the train icons are), forcing me to travel all the way back (which can take several minutes even in a car) to find the corrupted bit of railway and fix it.
Also related to railways is the problems with train signals. The signalling system is better than I found it during Early Access, but it still has some bizarre behaviour, such as two trains being given a green signal to move into the same bit of shared track, and then one train suddenly halting after moving a fraction of a metre. This is fine once or twice, but if it keeps happening then eventually that train might be sticking out far enough that the next train to go through will crash into it and cause a derailment. I found this was happening frequently until I learned to leave a lot of space ahead of a signal before allowing two railways segments to turn into each other. Especially given that at one point two trains derailed over a section of deep water, and the locomotive fell into the water and could not be retrieved, so I had to reload an earlier save point to avoid that happening.
And not technically a bug, but a frequent problem, is the menace of deadlock. Once you have a lot of trains on the same rail network, you will inevitably realise that you've not left enough room for trains to queue while waiting to pull into and out of their stations, causing the train to block the mainline while it waits. This will lead to the problem of a train being unable to pull out onto the mainline because there's a train there which is unable to move because it's waiting for another train which is trying to get into the same train station the first train is trying to pull out of. It's usually easy to unjam this mess by manually taking control of a train and simply driving it through a path section which you can see won't lead to a collision, but it's less easy to redesign your railway line to avoid this in congested areas, so it can be difficult to remove this problem from your network.
On the plus side, once you work around these quirks the trains are much less moronic than the Tractors and Trucks.
Oh the hours I spent cursing the auto-snap feature while trying to connect pipes or conveyor belts between machine or merger/splitter ports. The auto-snap targeting is so sensitive to mouse movement that inevitably just as I hit the mouse button the conveyor would hop left or right and build from totally the wrong side or port, and force me to dismantle it and do it again. If there's a way to reduce the sensitivity, I didn't find it.
If you have Power Storage buildings connected to your power grid then you can keep going for a while even if your electrical power demand exceeds your power production. Which would be a lot more useful if the game gave you any warning whatsoever that you're operating on stored power, but if it does give such warnings then they are so subtle that I always missed them. So do expect to experience the sort of panic Mr Arnold experiences in Jurassic Park (the novel, not the film) as you realise that you've been running off of auxiliary power for who-knows-how-long and it's seconds away from shutting off. A nice, clear, eye-catching warning box in your head-up display showing "Time To Stored Power Depletion" would be really helpful.
When a new update was released, adding fixes and minor adjustments, I found that new Mercer Spheres had been put back on the map in places where I'd already found and taken them. This didn't remove from my inventory the ones I'd already found, so I ended up with a huge number of the things (far more than you ever need). This didn't really cause any trouble, but it did sort of take the thrill out of finding Mercer Spheres, because suddenly they were everywhere.
And often when fighting the larger variants of Stingers and Fluffy-tailed Hogs, I would find that just after unleashing a load of ammunition at them, they'd teleport away or disappear half-a-metre into the ground, making it difficult to to attack them (and impossible to actually collect their remains, for DNA purposes, even if they could be killed in that position). This mostly happened when creatures were jumping or charging onto uneven terrain, but it was frequent enough to be a nuisance.
I bought Satisfactory on Steam when it was still in Early Access, and the game only went as far as phase 4 at that time. But it still took me 250 hours to complete what was available, and it felt like an amazing experience.
Now that it has left Early Access and been declared a finished product, it still feels like an amazing experience. The world is rendered beautifully, a place full of varied landscapes and wildlife, each biome taking on different looks as the sun and moon(s) move across the sky and alter the lighting radically. It's a beautiful thing to take a long train ride or car journey across the world while the sun rises or sets, and I frequently gawped at the striking sight of the neighbouring planets and distant galaxies moving across the night sky.
Exploring the world, especially early on when it's virgin territory and you're on your own without nearby factories and train lines, and without the lethal convenience of the rifle and the devastating agility of the Jetpack. Hunting for caves and then fighting off Stingers while you try to explore or escape is very enjoyable. And later on, when you're so agile and powerful that it seems unnecessary to kill hostiles, it's fun to try to build factories while dodging the plasma balls thrown at you by Spitters, and the rocks hurled at you by the largest Fluffy-tailed Hogs, and avoiding the ire of Flying Crab Hatchers.
The scale and complexity of the final production line is impressive, but I have to admit that in the mid-to-late game it did feel at times that the demands on time and effort to advance were a little too much, especially in getting from phase 4 to phase 5. I would argue that in terms of factory-building logistics, Factorio has the advantage, because the pace moves on more quickly throughout the later stages. But Factorio can't hold a candle to Satisfactory in terms of the world as a whole, and Satisfactory's three-dimensional structures allow vastly more room for expression and experimentation.
When Satisfactory left Early Access a few months ago, I started a brand new game. To get to the end of phase 5 took me 365 hours of gameplay. (To gather enough FICSIT Coupons to purchase the Golden Nut Statue took that up to 375 hours total.) If you have the time and the stamina, Satisfactory offers an incredible amount of enjoyable gameplay.