About two months ago my son asked if we could start another Satisfactory game. Since our last completed run back in late 2024, Satisfactory has hit version 1.2 and I had also built a homelab capable of running a dedicated server. I apparently didn’t need much encouragement because within a day we were back in the game. My son bailed after 16 hours of playtime, I don’t blame him, he’s a senior in high school and tremendously busy. But eight weeks and 150 hours later, I beat the game along with finally getting all the achievements.
I started playing Satisfactory in January 2021 during the game’s early access period (pipes had just been introduced!) and instantly became hooked. I returned to the game every few months to see what had changed and by early 2023 my family owned three copies of the game so we could all play together. While it felt like we played a lot, it wasn’t until the full 1.0 release in September 2024 that the game truly consumed us.
After 400 hours of total playtime, I am confident in saying that Satisfactory was the best game of 2024 and one of my favorite games ever. Let’s go to work.
On its surface, Satisfactory appears to be a 3D take on Factorio, but it is far more than that. Along with factory building, Satisfactory features a huge world to explore, combat (that I disabled on this run), and items scattered around the world to discover. It also has the single best movement in a 3D game ever. It’s like if Titanfall 2’s movement tech was transposed into a world not focused on fighting but instead managing supply chains: dash slide on a conveyor belt to launch yourself and then flutter tap your jetpack to soar across the map. Satisfactory is an absolute joy to control and it honestly didn’t need to go this hard.
As far as the factory building goes, I’ve played both Factorio and Dyson Sphere Factory, and I simply find Satisfactory’s more engaging and fun to play. There’s a simplicity to its design with easily readable requirements on the inputs and outputs along with conveyor belts going directly into machines. Belts themselves typically only contain one specific item type and resource nodes are unlimited. There are no tower defense aspects, your one job is to focus on factory expansion and efficiency.
In the early game you’ll be hunting for resources, stringing along some conveyor belts, and trying to fulfill the basic milestones. I love this part of the game for its straightforward goals: build your first mini factories and try to keep the power on. You can handcraft some items but eventually you will be faced with automating major pieces for the space elevator requirements. During this part of the game anything feels possible and you’re able to keep everything in your head as your factory grows.
I would say the mid-game begins when you’re transitioning from coal to oil power. Now you’re forced to explore the world looking for oil and also have to deal with much more complicated supply chains and resource management. Oil processing requires dealing with byproducts and combining both item and power management in the same factory. It’s a fun challenge and forces you to upgrade your approach in building factories, considering logistics and transportation of items across the map. You can build trains! I love getting my first jetpack and exploring the map during this phase, not to mention building absolute units of factories for handling plastics.
The endgame for me is clearly nuclear power and the final phase of the space elevator. It’s pretty easy to get to this point with just oil-based power and some supplemental geothermal; but to fulfill the massive power requirements for the final space elevator components you’ll either have to greatly expand your oil refineries or explore nuclear. At the 1.0 release I ended up building six nuclear power plants to help us limp across the finish line, I also just dumped the nuclear waste byproduct into storage containers. This time around though I built 29 nuclear power plants overclocked at 250% power to produce way more power than I would ever need. I also decided to dispose of the waste properly.
Handling nuclear waste in Satisfactory is basically another game in itself. I had to build over 200 buildings to convert the uranium waste into plutonium fuel rods that I could sink. This took over a week to design and develop, and while incredibly challenging and rewarding, I don’t think I ever want to do that again. I could have built multiple rocket fuel plants during that time and progressed with the final phase a lot quicker. It started to become a bit frustrating because I was so close to the finish line but made the somewhat poor decision to way overdevelop nuclear. I probably didn’t need to consume 600 uranium per minute.
But with nuclear done, the final items needed for the space elevator felt like a victory lap. I love the spectacular production buildings at the end of Satisfactory for being so weird. There’s particle accelerators that spit out dark matter and quantum encoders that create excited photonic matter out of nothing. It’s strange and wonderful and if you’re not concerned about power at all then it’s kind of a breeze. All that work I put into supply chains for nuclear did not go to waste.
The 1.0 of Satisfactory release introduced a slew of quality of life features that refocused the mid- and endgames into less about inventory management and more about overall resource management. The dimension depot allows you to upload and download items to essentially the cloud, eliminating the need to fill your inventory with building materials and frequent returns to base. It’s maybe the greatest QoL feature I’ve ever seen in a video game while also adding additional depth as you need to find Mercer Spheres around the world to build the depots. It’s a stunningly elegant solution to a tough problem.
I joked with my son that he tricked me into putting another 150 hours into Satisfactory over the last two months, but I’m definitely not actually upset that I played it again. Every aspect of this game just works so beautifully (except maybe fluids…), and the way the systems and game design interact with each other just puts this above any other game like it. Plus there’s nothing like looking over your creation as the sun sets, and then rocketing off to build more.
I hope Coffee Stain Studios is able to continue expanding on Satisfactory, whether it’s minor updates, paid DLC, or even a full sequel (in space?!). But for now, I’m happy to take another break from the best game of 2024, but I will be back someday: the factory must grow.
