Despite all the monsters I’ve killed, worlds I’ve conquered and players I’ve outshot or stabbed, one of my gaming accomplishments towers above the rest. It’s a work of unparalleled effort, ingenuity, and arguably ill-advised engineering shortcuts. The totality of it spans deserts and jungles, with multi-layered pipes and drones criss-crossing over meadows and alien forests. When you hover anywhere within its beating heart, the natural world becomes subsumed into a maze of conveyer belts and hulking machines. It’s a blight on the planet, frankly, but it’s my blight on the planet, and I couldn’t be more proud.
Let me show you around my Satisfactory factory. Don’t worry about your shoes.
Before you peek at that, though, you’ll need a primer. Satisfactory is an automation game, which means it’s about making stuff that makes stuff. You begin with a pocket full of drills and dreams, which you use to set about transforming a verdant world’s resources into increasingly complicated techno-bits. Within your first hour, you’ll have a suite of miners pumping iron and copper ore into smelters, and from there into constructors that whisk up wire, cable, plates and rods. Within two hours you’ll be pumping those basic ingredients into assemblers, which then feed into more assemblers, which eventually split off to feed manufacturers, blenders, refineries and more.
Within 60 hours, you might have something like this.
A factory that big tanks my framerate, but it buoys my heart. I adore the way I can look around and know that every little bit of it is there because of me, from the most ostentatious particle accelerator right down to the lowliest screw factory. It’s all there for a reason, every component churning away at its specific task, clunking towards greatness. Other automation games let you build similar wonders, but they don’t let you wander amongst them in first-person. That’s key: Dyson Sphere Program lets you encase a star, but it still doesn’t sell the same sense of scale.
It’s remarkable how smoothly all of this can be conjured up. Your ultimate goal is to load a space elevator with high-tech equipment, and while that ultimate destination might be devilishly complex, most of the steps you take to get there are simple and straightforward. The end of every task bleeds seamlessly into the next, which is a core part of why everyone who plays fears and respects the way it can devour their time. “Oh, I’ll just whip up a bunch of constructors so I’ve got enough copper wire for those new stators”, you’ll think, before blearily coming to your senses at 3am having built an entirely new steel production outpost. You should go to bed. You need to go to bed. But surely it’ll only take another 20 minutes to sort that train network out, right? There’s always a significant, achievable milestone just around the corner.
