Flexibility and complexity are a matter of perspective. Buying toothpaste is the best example. They all do the same thing, but have different boxes and sales pitches. I just buy whatever is on sale.

Satisfactory has a similar bit, and a whole subsystem of exploration that digs into it – alternate recipes. Strewn about the map are broken cargo containers. Each has a set of requirements (either power or specific material) which when provided gives a hard drive. You then use these hard drives to unlock alternate recipes. Each unlock takes 10 minutes to complete (you can “store” research mind you in 1.0) and provides an random recipe based on what tier of research you’re at. You can’t get Oil alternatives when in Tier 1, so you are generally incentivized to use them earlier than later.

There are 118 sites, and 113 uses for them (96%), which pretty much means you need to collect them all. Forgot to mention most of these are in difficult to reach places, where a jetpack is all but required. I will say that the first time I found them, I found it quite a fun exploration challenge. It took time, time that allows my production lines to complete their jobs. Then I needed to re-build my production lines with the new recipes (which is feasible when small). The 4th time I tried this though, I was frustrated. My 1.0 playthrough has opted to unlock all alternate recipes from the start. I build BIG factories, and resetting them for alternate options without mass construction tools is not fun.

Right, so that’s the method of unlocking recipes. The value of a recipe is the real kicker. Prior to 1.0 there were really only a handful of critical alternate recipes. Anything that removed screws from production chains was amazing. Solid Steel ingot is life. And the golden alternate remains Diluted Fuel – which alone doubles your power output. With over 100 uses, quite a few recipes were poorly balanced and to a point where you would only use them in emergencies.

For example – any alternate that uses Petroleum Coke is a bad recipe, because you should never have Petroleum Coke produced. That’s 7 “useless” recipes. There are plenty more. But there are some where you just need to get it done, or you have an excess of something and can afford to burn it.

Some recipes require a complete rethink of complex chains, which shows wonders in Aluminum production. The basic process (2:3 ratio) has weird mixes of Bauxite, Water, Coal and Quartz, and if not done correctly will stall production. Sloppy Alumina changes the math and layouts to sanity levels, and improves the ratio to 3:5. If for some reason you have excess Sulfur, you can add Electrode Scrap and even further increase the ratio to 21:40. No matter what alternate you use, it will require a complete rebuild of the factory chains.

My favorite alternate recipe examples are the “pure” items made in a Refinery. For things like Iron, there are ample nodes and this isn’t all that useful. For all the others, you are likely going to want to use them – Copper in particular. The basic recipe is a 1:1 ratio, and only uses Smelters. Simple, straightforward, and available at the start of the game. Pure Copper is a 2:5 ratio, which is a 250% boost. However, it requires a decent amount of water (simple enough) and twice as many Refineries as Smelters. That’s 15x the power requirements, so it’s not going to be even remotely viable as an option until you have nuclear power available. But it’s also the only viable path to Copper Dust, the core ingredient in late game Nuclear Pasta. You need 600 copper/minute to make enough Copper Dust to make 1 pasta/minute (for a total of 1262 copper/minute!)

Having flexibility in Satisfactory is a good thing. The node placement means that you’re not often going to have ideal circumstances for production chains, and your challenges will vary over time. As you unlock more things, and finally get a decent amount of Nuclear power going, the problems will just boil down to throughput.

With limits on mining (you cannot get more than 36,900 copper ore/minute), you will have ceilings to manage. Alternate recipes allow you to effectively fudge the math and increase copper output to 92,250/minute. Knowing which ones are worth it… well that’s a tougher sell. There are maybe a quarter that are amazing, half that are ok, and the last quarter that really should be used as a desperate last resort.

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.)