Satisfactory

You are a FICSIT employee dropped onto an alien planet with a pod, a drill and instructions to build. There are no wages, no rescue and no explanation. There is an enormous, beautiful, handcrafted world, and a tech tree that wants an increasingly absurd list of things fed into a space elevator.

The loop: find a resource node, put a miner on it, belt the ore to a smelter, belt the ingots to a constructor, and keep going until the thing at the end of the chain is what the next tech tier asked for. Then the tier after that wants six ingredients instead of two, and your neat little factory becomes a problem you have to solve again.

• It is first person, so scale hits differently. A factory you built is a building you walk through.
• The map is authored, not generated, and exploring it is a genuine second game.
• Wildlife is a nuisance rather than a threat. There is no hunger, no thirst and no base defence.
• Nothing is on a timer. You can stand and think for an hour and nothing bad happens.

1. 1

   Follow the onboarding to the HUB

   It walks you through the first milestones and hands you the core machines. Do it in order, it is short.

2. 2

   Automate iron before anything else

   Miner into smelter into constructor into storage. Once iron plates and rods make themselves, everything else gets easier.

3. 3

   Build ugly, on purpose

   Your first factory will be a mess and you will tear it down. That is the intended experience, not a failure.

4. 4

   Get power right

   Biomass burners need feeding by hand. Rush coal power, and always overbuild generators before you add machines.

5. 5

   Explore for hard drives and slugs

   Crash sites give alternate recipes, power slugs give overclocking. Both are free power and both are out in the world.

6. 6

   Feed the space elevator

   Each phase is a big shopping list and a genuine milestone. It is the game's only real progression gate.

• Belts, splitters and mergers move items. Ratios between machines are the core puzzle, and getting them wrong just means idle machines rather than failure.
• Power: biomass, then coal, then fuel, then nuclear. Each step is a project in itself.
• Alternate recipes from hard drives can halve a build's cost. Hunt them early, they change plans.
• Overclocking with power shards trades power for throughput on a single machine.
• Trains, drones and trucks solve distance once belting across the map stops being practical.
• Vertical building is free real estate, and the blueprint designer lets you stamp out repeated modules.

Coffee Stain hand-built this planet, and it shows: caves, canyons, floating islands, spore forests and biomes that look nothing like each other. Going for a walk is a legitimate way to spend an evening.

• Hard drives at crash sites, power slugs on cliffs, and somersloops and mercer spheres in awkward corners are the collectibles worth chasing.
• Traversal upgrades change the game: jump pads, hypertubes, the hover pack and eventually flight.
• Some resource nodes are in places that are genuinely difficult to reach, which is the point.
• Dangerous fauna exists, but a rifle and patience handle all of it.

The story is delivered almost entirely by ADA, your onboard assistant, and by the increasingly unhinged corporate cheer of FICSIT Incorporated. You are stripping a planet for a company that measures your worth in throughput.

• ADA is funny, and then occasionally not funny at all, which is the tone in miniature.
• Something else was here first. The alien ruins, the artefacts and the deeper structures are not FICSIT's.
• The 1.0 release added a real ending, so the tech tree now goes somewhere rather than trailing off.
• The joke underneath everything: the planet is beautiful and you are the environmental catastrophe.

• Co-op shares one save and one factory. Everything anyone builds is permanent and shared.
• Agree a plan before you both start belting, or you will meet in the middle at different heights.
• Split by role: one on power, one on production lines, one exploring for hard drives.
• A dedicated server keeps the factory running and reachable when the host is offline.

• Leave space. Every factory you build will need to be twice as big later.
• Build one floor above the ground so belts have somewhere to run underneath.
• Label your storage. Future you will not remember which container is screws.
• Overbuild power. Always.
• Do not chase perfect ratios on your first build. Working beats optimal.
• Take the hover pack and the jetpack seriously. Traversal is half the quality of life in this game.

• The official site and patch notes for what 1.0 and later updates changed.
• Satisfactory Tools and similar ratio calculators, if you are the spreadsheet sort.
• The community wiki for alternate recipes and node maps.
• Ask in our Discord. Factory screenshots are a competitive sport in there.