Satisfactory is not 3D Factorio.
Satisfactory cannot escape defining itself by its contast to Factorio.
I first heard of Satisfactory from the Factorio blog.
I refuse to write down the cringe official name of that 8 hours cheevo
While waiting for the release of Satisfactory 1.0, a release after years of Early Access, i decided to wrap up one of the most difficult challenges in Factorio 1.0: finishing the game under 8 hours.
In Factorio, every object is perfectly aligned to the grid, but every ratio is messy. Production lines starve and clog as you tinker. Buffering production to store in chests can be as much a necessity as it can be a trap.
I rarely play vanilla Factorio. At the very least, i need a good amount of Quality of Life mods.
In the last year of Wube software announcing the upcoming Factorio expansion, half their posts had the same theme: “That great mod everyone uses? We made it obsolete. We greatly simplified it, we balanced it better, and we gave it the most self-explanatory UI possible”.
Once in a while, they outright hire modders, too.
Malignant misalignment
Satisfactory is designed around flight. Don’t pretend otherwise.
To build anything in the first person, you need a good vantage point. The lookout tower has a permanent slot in my hotbar.
Aligning any object is messy. Snapping is unreliable. Every building has variable dimensions. Things clip easily.
And everything has to be set up manually. The small blueprints offered only reduce the drudgery.
It’s very easy to build something off by one meter, not realize it, and go, “come on, seriously, fuck it, why do i even play this game” as you tear down your last hour.
Yet for how difficult it is to make anything snap or line up, the factories are remarkably precise. Every machine has predictable inputs and outputs. Once a crafting manifold saturates, it ticks rigorously. Builds exist mostly in isolation, rather than interconnected.
It feels like everyone plays a different game than i do.
They share beautiful, impressive megastructures, builds that make me think “i could make this”. I could, if i had good tools. It makes me wish to whip up environments in the Unreal Engine editor directly, instead of within the game.
Building something beautiful is what i enjoy, but this is not what the game has decided the first 40 hours are about. It’s more expedient to plop down whatever, and link it with 500 meters long transport belts.
It’s no wonder that most people i randomly peep on Twitch.tv opt for a gigantic floating platform in the sky, dropping to the world below only to set up mining drills.
Before you fly
The world is too huge to travel by foot.
Pros travel it by exploit: parachute launchers and hypertube launchers exploit Unreal Engine physics, in a way the developers chose to embrace. You will never learn of those techniques within the game itself if you play it solo, and you will feel dirty using them.
After you obtain the Blade Runners, either 20 minutes in or 20 hours in, depending whether you know you ought to obtain them as soon as possible, movement by foot feels good for a FPS. Run, slide under obstacles.
But inhabiting an agile body is not what i want out of my engineer. I want to build something beautiful.
Every tool i need is concealed behind an unlock: the game i want to play starts in the endgame, that i have never reached legitimately without mods.
Dimensional depots solve beautifully one of the biggest frustrations in the game: being stranded half the world away without the materials you need. Whether you obtain them early or not entirely depends on whether you know they exist.
Halfway automated luxury gay space colonialism
To progress and unlock the real game, you should build factories that produce the items you must feed your space elevator.
Instead of factories, i always found it more expedient to simply place a small ad-hoc production zone in front of the space elevator, with machines fed from container boxes filled up from my own inventory.
Turns out, almost everyone plays like that.
The game will never let you forget: you are a body, capable of carrying objects.
Hand-feeding, what Factorio deems an ugly hack to bootstrap a game, is the core of the Satisfactory mid-game experience.
How to stop being punished by labor? How much can you, or should you automate?
As a Factorio engineer, you are a time-inefficient but complexity-efficient crafting machine capable of resolving any chain of dependencies. To finish the game in 8 hours, your hand crafting queue should always be full.
Yet in a more elegant game than a speedrun, you do not hand craft. Robots deliver to you directly the items you need.
As a Satisfactory engineer, you are a reasonably large inventory capable of long-distance movement and obstacle traversal.
For a speedrun, you automate whatever makes the run faster, and you provide any labor that’s faster to do yourself than to automate.
For a satisfying run, you automate anything you will do more than a few times. It’s not about saving time. It’s about saving unengaging labor.
This is where a more clever, or more insufferable blogger would quote some big brain shit Marx said.