So first things first, I’m on a hell of a bender for games with logistics. There’s a ridiculous dopamine hit when you solve a complex mathematical puzzle and I can use some of that due to IRL works stuff. Solving a 5 step chain of production to “perfect” balance is a crazy feeling.

I gave Satisfactory a shot about a year ago. It’s what you’d get if you put Factorio into first person. Or conceptually it is. What Factorio does extremely well is scale the logistical challenge. The first logistics chain is complicated and rewarding, and the next one needs that first plus another. It compounds the logistics and by the end you’re running hundreds of machines to make thousands (if not millions) of things. Dyson Sphere Program is as close as you’re going to get to Factorio in that regard, with a 3D 3rd person view.

Satisfactory takes that logistical challenge but does not handle scale well. And this is for multiple reasons, which can be seen as a boon or bane.

• The world is custom built, with every node places by developer. This means that you can’t do everything in one spot and will be forced to move. Which creates the next challenge.
• The world is designed to be explored and vertical. Logistics work best horizontally, and the tools to explore vertically are limited to ramps. A hover pack is unlocked very late, and has limitations in terms of high you can actually go. A ramp made of 40+ sections is quite normal.
• Transportation is very limited. Belts require no power and are lightning quick, but can quickly develop a “spaghetti” look to the world. Vehicles really don’t work well without roads, and also require fuel, a giant pain in the butt to coordinate (you won’t bother until you unlock oil). Trains are the ultimate transportation but are finicky to build and network. Plus, their vertical climbs are only 2:1, so that 40+ ramp becomes 80+ if you want a train on it.
• The blueprint function is limited to a 4x4x4 cube. With very few exceptions, that won’t work for any production chain.
• Merging and splitting is life. The tools to lay that out here only work 1 at a time. If I have 16 smelters trying to collect from a belt, I’d like to split to each one. Well, that’s at least 16 clicks, but more like 25 because the splitter function “bugs out” frequently.
• The field of view is limited in 1st person, meaning you can’t really build large. Maybe 4 buildings at a time.
• The largest change is that you cannot pre-fab buildings. If you want 16 assemblers, you need to carry the materials on you. In other games you can automate everything. DSP I had machines building hundreds of smelters for me (I needed thousands). In practical terms, this means that building a new factory requires a crap ton of planning and great inventory management. It’s math-ier.

The image above is a factory that uses 480 iron ore per minute to create 20 modular frames. There are 16 smelters, 25 constructors, and 16 assemblers required. It took about 2 hours to build and a few trips to fill my inventory of material.

In this image, I’m in my train station (2 cars long) and in the distance you can see the path I needed to create to get the train all the way up that mountain. Heck, you can just see the train too, if you squint a bit. Laying 2 stations, the path, and the track, took about an hour. A 1 way trip is 30 seconds by train, almost 5 minutes on foot. Trains rock.

Finally, this image is a “basic” aluminum factory of 240 bauxite, 120 coal, 240 water, 120 quartz, and 20 copper – that results in 60 sheets and 120 casings. There are 2 water extractors, 3 refiners, 1 smelter, 8 constructors, 4 foundries, and 2 assemblers. This factory is at the other end of the train path, and took close to 3 hours to build. The coal is close by. The quartz is halfway up the train path. The copper is at the other end of the train and I have to use belts to get it up there… close to 1500 pieces in length. This is an incredibly painful build. And next, is finding a way to get the quartz BACK to the starting point too.

The “good news” in all this is that I effectively only have 2 more types of material to collect – sulphur and uranium. The less good news is that those materials are rare, to the point where there are only 4 uranium nodes total on the map (I have ~20% of the map discovered now).

Scale

I am picking on the game here because the main issue with all logistics games is the transition from micro to macro. Satisfactory does a superb, insane, amazingly great job at the micro. You are quite literally dwarfed by these awesome machines. It’s a right maze to navigate and the scale of it all, and there’s a clear sense of joy when you click pieces together and the things whir into action.

Where the game struggles to transition, as most do, is the macro level where you need to juggle more things. You’re given transportation tools that allow some macro transportation, but to get that to work, or anything else, you’re stuck with the tools from the start. It’s like building a deck and then transitioning to building an apartment complex with the same toolbelt… sure, you can get it done, but damn it’s going to take a while.

This is a tooling thing. Let me craft 15 smelters with a drag of the mouse instead of 15 clicks. Let me configure them ALL the same with 2 clicks, not 30. Let me manage the Z axis with much better tools, like a scroll wheel or other key. Give me a global production screen!!!

These are quibbles about balance and optimization that are part of early access. I figure another 18 months or so of stuff before it launches… unless they want to add an entirely new set of tiers after nuclear. Worth a play if you’re into excel sheets that move.