Satisfactory currently has 6 phases. The tutorial (0), Biomass (1), Coal(2), Oil(3), Nuclear(4), and well the new stuff that I guess I’ll call Ficsite(5). The tutorial is exactly that, giving you the foundational parts that don’t require power. Phase 1 has you collecting plants and wood (with a chainsaw!) to have a basic powered production line. You need to grow over time, and unless you’ve played before, you will have spaghetti lines everywhere. Let’s just say that floors/foundations are the key to staying sane. Phase 2 is Coal, which should give you a huge chunk of power to make a decent sized factory work. You’ll learn about buses, load balancing, and manifolds at this stage. It is long, as the items needed to move forward require massive boosts to basic productivity at the start of a chain – a theme that continues. Oh, you get trucks at this phase to help transport items – you should not use them as belts will be infinitely better for some time.

Phase 3 is where the game jumps from backyard to the next town as you need to process oil into plastic, rubber and fuel. No matter where you start in Phase 0, oil patches will be a distance away, so you will need to use the build queue system to ensure you have enough material to build what you need in the new location. An additional hurdle here is that all oil production chains produce by-product, and you either need to use it for something or “sink it”. (The AWESOME Sink is a powered building that acts as a garbage disposal and rewards points used for cosmetic items.) Petroleum Coke should absolutely get sunk.

Phase 3 gives access to trains. Trains are life. Trains bring life. Trains. Ok, back on track (sorry!). You will need to build your first train line at this phase to bring plastic/rubber back to the factory, belts will not be enough and don’t scale. Building your first railway is a massive investment – it will look horrible and get the job done.

Fuel generators will dramatically (5x) increase your power output and allow for the next phase of factory construction. Without this major step, you cannot create enough machines to produce space elevator parts.

This specific phase is where Satisfactory starts to enter the scaling challenge. You will have 16 fuel generators, sitting on nearly 300 foundation pieces. Your train railway will require a thousand base material. You will need Manufacturers, that have 4 inputs, which take a few minutes each to configure. Blueprints help (a lot!) but they are really limited in size (4×4) and do not allow connections to other blueprints. Mods (which are currently broken) allow you to chain multiple buildings and configs to quickly construct massive production lines. Click and drag 8 smelters, 8 mergers, 8 splitters and have them all automatically lay down belts is insane quality of life. I miss that a lot.

I opted to build a main bus line to get me through this phase, which is both the best idea and worst idea. The best is that it is extremely scalable, easy to follow, and beautiful. The worst in that it causes absolutely massive sprawl with belts that seem to go on for infinity which will make your PC melt. It works, and is what allows me to maintain sanity when I have a fleet of 50 smelters working to feed a beast to make 1 space elevator part.

One item that has helped with sanity is the Dimensional Depot. I’m able to store 2 stacks of items on top of my regular inventory, and the visual aid shows when I’m about to run out. I’d love to automate adding items to the depot, but I need like 20 Mercer Spheres for that step. Oh, and I have Somersloops boosting a handful of production buildings – the space parts are always boosted when running. The setup is a right pain, but the truth of it is that I can simply let it run, and very easily scale it to my needs.

In short, Phase 3 is really where the proper game begins. You need to use more of the map, more material types, have major logistical hurdles, and truly need to manage scalable production chains. To paraphrase, you need to math the sh*t out of this. (Quick tip: press N, and you can use that as a calculator.)