Satisfactory is a PC and console 3D first person game developed by Coffee Stain Studios that is one of the most popular factory simulation games, and for good reason. Satisfactory contains hundreds of hours of content ready to be harvested and explored.
The core gameplay of Satisfactory is to continue making your factory bigger, unlocking new technology through the resources you produce. In order to gain more technology, you must complete stages of the space elevator, a huge construct that requires advanced resources that get progressively harder and harder each tier.
Satisfactory features four main different environments of varying visuals and difficulty, with much more environmental hazards and resource scarcity on the harder ones. For first playthroughs, the default easiest difficulty is definitely recommended, due to kilometers of distance between resources on the hardest.
From creating automated miners and strings of different manufacturers to entire trains for moving resources, you can look back later in your playthrough and feel an incredible sense of awe and confidence knowing how far you’ve come. While that does sound daunting for someone just starting out, Satisfactory does incredibly well at setting it up in bite sized goals that never actually feel that hard.
Strategizing plays a huge part in this game – understanding your available power, each resource output and each resource input is critical to maintaining an optimal factory. Should you run out of power, most people resort to shutting down a portion of the factory in order to restore power and create new power plants. If you try to create new plants and then restore power, often the factory will power on before the plants are able to, collapsing the grid again.
Understanding how much input material each individual building requires is something that takes some time to master, but is a necessity when making sure your factory is efficient. You are able to overcharge miners, refiners or factories by converting power slugs into power shards, which directly increase your intake and output values at the cost of more power; this is more space efficient than making additional buildings. This works inversely, too, without requiring a power shard. This allows you to decrease your production so you don’t need as much intake in a building, which is a viable strategy if you just don’t have the input materials required.
Satisfactory is definitely one of the most unique games I’ve ever played. Between continuously trying to optimize production, fixing mistakes, and managing resources, it is just incredibly satisfying – no pun intended.
