Satisfactory: a Satisfactory Review!

Satisfactory is a crafting, building, and production game where you’re tasked to explore and create a manufactory base on a charted (or possibly uncharted) alien planet. Players will explore the landscape for raw resources, survive the hostile alien lifeforms, and ensure the best productivity only the player can imagine. Once the basic mechanics are learned, which is creating one production chain, be prepared to blow your mind in planning how to best lay out your dream production line on an alien environment. 

A basic production line comprised of the smelter, production, and storage. The leftmost smelter can be connected to the automatic Miner Mk. 2.

Upon landing, players must build their HQ first, scan for the nearest mineral veins, and then start transforming those raw minerals into usable goods. Personally, I found it ironic (a poor joke) that perhaps the most difficult thing to do is decide where to place the HQ — as players can only have one HQ throughout the world. Would it be near the iron veins? Between the copper bed and the lime stones? Away from alien life? It really depends. If the HQ is too close to the ore veins, then you would need more space to run your conveyor belts. Too far means a lot of running between collecting and storing resources. Fortunately, you’re able to build remote structures in the game and not depend solely on the HQ.

Not sus. I was in comms.

Satisfactory can be played solo or co-op. I’ve tried it with a friend on his private session as a “guest”, and there’s no limitation to what I can do in his planet. In co-op, the players are able to host their own server as a private session and friends can drop in to help. Solo means that there would be more work to do, but there is no significant difference in the features.

The main challenge of Satisfactory is efficiency. Players will need to figure out how on what exactly is the optimal base. One must place those conveyor belts and power lines intricately like painting on a canvas — no, more like designing a circuit board. Longer conveyor belts will take up more space and more resources, but shorter conveyor belts means carefully placing all your big structures on a small lot. But why stop there when you can also build vertically with a conveyor lift but you know what– my mind just had to call it a day when that was discovered. 

A pair of good boy Miner Mk. 1s mining for limestone.

Expect so much designing to be involved in this game. My friend and I resorted to drawing a rough plan on paper on how our production line may go. It reminds me of the Fallout 4 Contraptions DLC, but Satisfactory is on a whole new level centered on mass production and efficiency. There’s always the question about how can we connect mining, production, and storage in one line? 

Crafting is easy as you would only need to satisfy the material and hold click the mouse until one good is crafted. I confess that it took me a few minutes to figure it out without asking. This is manual crafting though — the bigger point is automating crafting (or production) by linking the raw material into a smelter via conveyor belts, and link the smelter into a production structure and then you can link that to a storage unit. Voila, you have one production line. There are also vehicles in the game, so you can haul and transport your resources. So we’ve only scratched the surface!

Satisfactory is a fun game especially with friends. It is currently Early Access on Steam, but there is so much to expect in the game. As mentioned previously, alien life inhabits the planet and so add the building aspect with survival, and it’s bound to get more fun.

There’s this walking whale thing that passes by sometimes. It’s harmless but it walks past my personal space.

Perhaps something I anticipate would be the aspect of being able to get out to outer-space and do something else outside of local production. Or perhaps introduce a primitive tribe of alien life that you players should be wary of. I recommend Satisfactory and it’s sure to be much more fun with another pioneer with you.