Adequate, sufficient, up-to-snuff

September 9, 2024 8:30 AM

After five years in Steam Early Access (previously), the automation marvel that is Satisfactory receives a 1.0 release tomorrow.

A factory-building sim that some might consider a "Dad Game". You start off as a new employee with a chisel and a dream on an alien planet with a sumptuous first-person view, and end up the architect of grand industry spanning the continent.

Sometimes a bit of outside planning assistance can go a long way to map your production pipelines, and sometimes you look at master builders like TotalXclipse or Kibitz for some starting tips and megabuild inspo. The kinds of constructions one can get up to range from the astoundingly industrious and gorgeously developed, to an utter mess of hilarious catastrophe.

posted by FatherDagon (13 comments total)

I played Satisfactory about six months ago and really liked it. I've played through the other big two (Factorio and Dyson Sphere Program) and Satisfactory is different. The 3d view, obviously, but also the ability to build vertically. It encourages you to construct compact multistory factories that take raw materials in and spit out complete products like motors on the other end.

When I played it was mostly a finished game except the story. And the endgame challenge (Tier 8) was sort of un-fun, building very large scale of parts that were more complex than I wanted to deal with. Excited to revisit once the dust has settled on the 1.0 release. Or maybe just restart my old factory, not sure which makes more sense.

The one thing that really did not work for me in this game was trains. Building tracks in 3d turned out to be very frustrating and fiddly and that's in addition to the usual logistics and signal management. I haven't seen whether that's been improved in 1.0. I was tempted to start a new game with a map that was fully empty except for a completely built rail network. Takes a lot of fun out of the game but at least I wouldn't have to deal with the track laying UI.

Shapez 2 deserves a shout-out here too. It's another Factorio-like but has a refreshingly abstract presentation and is fully puzzle solving, no survival crafting or combat. You can try out a demo of the original Shapez in your browser. (Wildly, the game is written in Javascript and performs remarkably well at scale.)
posted by Nelson at 8:51 AM on September 9 [3 favorites]

I tried playing it a couple of times and stopped each time in frustration at the bad UI. I prefer my factory games in top-down view, but I recently started playing Foundry and that was a much more rewarding experience than Satisfactory.

Will give the 1.0 release a try later in the week.
posted by Pendragon at 10:30 AM on September 9

I've definitely been interested in taking on these games but I have yet to find a multi-week block of time when I have nothing to do but play them. Glad this one seems to have gotten as good as early access players hoped it would.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 10:30 AM on September 9

I also kind of bounced off of Satisfactory tier 8 and had similar issues. But it was very fun overall, especially early on.

Another early access factory game that I found to be an interesting variation is Captain of Industry - it has a bit of city builder mixed in, and it has less exponential growth than the others. Instead of having to scale up to make multiplicatively growing numbers of lower-tier parts in order to make higher-tier parts, tech advancement generally provides ways to make parts/materials that are more efficient and produce less waste (or capture waste to reprocess into useful inputs) but are more complicated, energy intensive, etc.
posted by allegedly at 11:02 AM on September 9 [1 favorite]

I think this is only the second game I've put a calendar entry up to remind myself about (TOTK being the other). My initial foray into Satisfactory was so bad I demanded a refund. I was furious about it, badmouthed it to everyone. Then, a few months later, I went back and spent dozens of hours immersed in its weird world, making a complex web of factories and conveyor belts that made no sense--then going back every few major updates, and doing it all over again. The most recent, release 8, I finally let myself use the always-flying mod. If you haven't played it before, a lot of your time is spent on the ground in the early game, where it's hard to get an overall sense of how your factory is laid out, and then later in the game you get various tools to fly, which psychologically really opens it up. I realized that what I loved most about the game is the flying--I mean, yes, building stuff, solving the puzzle of how to get this many widgets created here and shipped way over there in the shortest time possible--but flying to do it was so nice, and allowed a sort of meditative approach. I'd veer away from my construction and just sort of explore, not engage with any of the beasts or dangers, just float above them and enjoy the fact that they exist.

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to version 1, and my family is already rolling their collective eyes about it.
posted by mittens at 11:27 AM on September 9 [1 favorite]

Pretty sure that video was a Satisfactory number 2.0.
posted by nushustu at 12:04 PM on September 9

I am SO looking forward to this. I'm already thinking about where I will start building, where to expand to, which crash sites to loot first, etc.

The release drops at 08:00 PDT / 11:00 EDT / 16:00 BST / 17:00 CEST. They'll have a live stream starting three hours before that. (Source: Snutt, the community manger at Coffee Stain Studios, in this TotalXclipse youtube video at 1:08:45.)
posted by swr at 2:04 PM on September 9 [1 favorite]

I got Satisfactory back when it was an Epic store exclusive. I haven't played Update 8 at all, so it should be fun to get back into it once 1.0 comes out.
posted by netowl at 2:07 PM on September 9

I bought this a couple of years ago but bounced off it hard because I couldnt manage the critter-shooting component. and I didn't buy the game to shoot critters! I bought it to build stuff! it's possible that the monster component can be deactivated but for now I just abandoned ship and went back to my endless obsession with path of exile.
posted by hearthpig at 4:28 PM on September 9

Yeah the critters are a bit of a puzzle. They provide a bit of an obstacle but aren't very interesting. They added a passive mode so they don't attack you but still exist. I think you still have to kill some for components they drop.
posted by Nelson at 4:57 PM on September 9 [1 favorite]

There are only a couple of things hard-gated on critter parts, and they are related to dealing with hostile critters. Everything else has some sort of vegan alternative. Also, critters aren't always smart about avoiding environmental hazards, so even in peaceful mode you may find monster parts through no fault of your own.
posted by swr at 6:05 PM on September 9

11.07 gigs for the update? That's a whole lot of reinforced plates.
posted by mittens at 8:28 AM on September 10

Release is out. This Reddit post has lots of official info and links. Here's a content summary and here's patch notes. Sounds like you don't have to start over but enough has changed (including the story) that it'd be better to.

A little sad to read this: "The story has been made smaller than envisioned." See also this video. This kind of game has never been story-centric but I was curious because they had the scaffolding for something that seemed pretty ambitious. OTOH a lot of this game is ambitious, it's impressive to see them get it all the way to a 1.0. Anyway the video suggests they rewrote almost all the story and retconned all the characters.

Now I'm wondering when Dyson Sphere Program will reach a similar milestone. It's my favorite of the factory games because it's got 3d beautiful graphics but 2d simplicity of gameplay. Also the inter-stellar system is novel and fun and for me, no trains! They had a big release earlier this year where they added combat but still have a lot on the roadmap. Unusually it's a Chinese company making the game, but a small company more like a Western indie studio than the gacha mobile shovelware that so much of the Chinese game industry represents. They've done a good job so far.
posted by Nelson at 10:12 AM on September 10