OK BUILDER

SATISFACTORY is the new titan in building and crafting games

- Jon Bolding

I’m knee-deep in a swamp doing the math for aluminum production: three miners pulling ore means I’ll need six pumps for water, pushing out about 420 cubic meters of alumina solution per minute, which needs a big holding tank—so I slap one down and climb up on it. Now above the treeline I can see the sheer scale of what I’ve organized and built in the last 50-or-so hours.

I can see the towering field of nuclear reactor cooling towers about a mile off pumping up gentle white clouds. Past that there’s the cliffside facility, tiny at this distance, that I set up 20 hours ago as my first aluminum plant. And above it all I can see the top of my main factory complex, peeking over a jungle-covered ridge some three miles away. At the center of it all is a massive space elevator, its cable stretching upward to the megaproject in the heavens. It’s an exhilarating feeling knowing you planned, built and executed all of it. True to its name, this is a factory building game that’s simply satisfying.

Dumped onto an unexplored alien world, your job as a pioneer for FICSIT Inc is to use advanced technology to build up an industrial base capable of sending various parts skyward to complete the mysterious Project Assembly. Your work is all overseen by detached artificial intelligence ADA—who says it’s for the survival of the human race, but seems more interested in mysterious alien artifacts than saving lives.

Satisfactory takes the basic trappings and openworld setting of the first-person survival genre and blends it with the flow of factory building and automation. You will always need a few hundred or a few thousand of some finished product and you’ll need to build and connect chains of resource gathering, processing, and finishing machines to get there. To build those you’ll first need to scout out the terrain, evading or battling hostile wildlife for those resources and the optimal space to place those machines.