Get the full Satisfactory experience from the start!
Get the full Satisfactory experience from the start!
Image courtesy of Steam.
It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a year since the full release of Satisfactory 1.0! Long before we had a phase 5, or blueprints, or hypertubes, people have been playing Satisfactory to its fullest. For the last several years, even before the devs were able to consider it a full game, tons of people have joined this thriving community. This is so delightfully common in the world on indie games on Steam.
So what is Satisfactory? Satisfactory is a factory building and automation sim developed by Coffee Stain Studios. You take control as a pioneer and employee of the potentially nefarious spacefaring mega-corporation, FICSIT.
In such a vast open world with an infinite number of choices to be made, the idea of starting seems a bit daunting. So much of Satisfactory hinges on your decisions as a player, and the things you do dictate how your place is going to go from start to finish. So, here are a few tips that will give you a great start to any Satisfactory play through!
Right at the start of the game, before you even loaded into the tutorial, you are met with one super important set of options: what starting location do I pick?
Satisfactory gives you four default starting locations, and these are
Each of these has different benefits and challenges, and there are certain locations recommended for beginners. Let’s look at each major area.
The grass fields are the classic starting location of Satisfactory. They have pretty much anything you could ever need in very close proximity. They also have a ton of the more recognizable Satisfactory landmarks, such as the bottomless pit.
The grass fields are also situated in a very central location of the map. They’re close enough to the world border that you have some pretty easy coastal water access, but also close enough to the map’s center for you to access the rest of the incredible world of Satisfactory.
This is the other beginner-friendly starting location. The resources of the area aren’t quite the same as the grass fields, but working in the rocky desert might make a late day a little easier, but, by then, you’ll have all the vehicles and resources you need to expand throughout the whole map, so that’s up to you.
The Rocky desert is also home to the mountain that leads to the tallest peak on the map. Again, this is pretty late in the game, but up on the top of that mountain is a huge uranium deposit. Even that far into the progression of Satisfactory, it could be good to have your main power supply be so close to your homebase in case something can go wrong, and, in the case of uranium, something will go wrong. Often.
If you’re looking for more of a challenge while starting your game, the northern forest is a great place for that. This is a dense, impenetrable forest, full of great resources and tough enemies. The ground is also fairly uneven throughout, which makes building difficult. Still, if you’re a returning player looking for a challenge, or a new player who just likes to live on the wild side, the northern forest could be good for you.
Little to no wildlife, sparse resources, and almost no water, make the dune desert the most difficult starting location by far. Plus, most of the resources in the immediate area of the desert are super low level, so you couldn’t have your entire base of operations there if you tried. In general, if you’re a new player, you should not be starting here unless you really want to throw yourself into the highest difficulty Satisfactory has to offer right off the bat. Those of you brave, or stupid, enough to try that, good luck.
Satisfactory is gorgeous and complicated, which are two great ways to make your computer catch fire. Satisfactory has plenty of great graphics presets and a super in-depth menu of graphic settings. Then you can mess with your heart’s content.
The landscape of Satisfactory will still look great on a lower graphics setting, and your factories will look pretty much exactly the same. Feel like your frame rate isn’t high enough for the performance of your PC? Try changing your Vsync setting. Hey, maybe the spider enemies are a little too much for your arachnophobia to handle. Maybe go to the gameplay settings and turn on arachnophobia mode, which turns all of the spiders into (maybe equally scary) holograms of cats.
I know this point is fairly obvious in a game classified as an “automation sim,” but it really holds true in Satisfactory. At the very start of the game, you won’t be able to fully automate anything. Everything is powered by biomass, which is famously ineffective.
If you want a good steady power supply that isn’t needy, make sure you invest in coal power as soon as possible. You first unlock the coal power generator and the ability to mine coal in tier 3. Make sure that, as soon as you can, you tap into that resource, and, as your progression continues, you keep upgrading your power supply when possible.
Let’s face it, some of the modes of transportation in Satisfactory aren’t great. Explorers are good for one thing: exploring. Trucks certainly have some use, but their abilities for human transportation are highly limited. Trains are a little too late game for us to be thinking about right now. What you want to do is have your sites set on a hypertube system.
Hypertubes are made almost entirely out of copper, so it’s good to invest in a lot of that early. They’re small, sleek, and send the player a long distance quickly. They require only a small amount of power to run, and they don’t need to be constantly fueled like many of the other vehicles in this game. It may seem a bit expensive to begin with, but, as you start to build infrastructure further and further out, you’ll be thanking yourself later for creating the basis of a tube network.
Go out and conquer this beautiful world. Show FICSIT your loyalty to their brand and make your shareholders proud. Maybe you’ll even uncover a few secrets along the way… Good luck out there, Pioneer!
