Wes Fenlon:
Satisfactory
is a different game for me depending on the week.
Recently I found myself in the thick of the jungle on the far side of the map from the friendly green plains I’d first started building in; I had to go a long way to find iron deposits rich enough to let me build a towering, multi-floor factory dedicated to modular frames. They’re just boring metal cubes, but for a week I obsessively arranged a perfectly balanced system of inputs and outputs for each individual component—the iron rods, the iron plates, the steel pipes—until the sum total of all that effort amounted to 21 frames per minute and a glass penthouse overlooking a waterfall at the edge of the world.
Did I need to build a skyscraper? Was it the most efficient use of my time to thread power towers across multiple biomes so I could zipline my way to the outer reaches? I stopped asking myself those kinds of questions hundreds of hours ago, long before Satisfactory left Early Access this year. This game is ostensibly about efficiency and optimization, but the real joy comes when you stop building to complete the objectives and start creating for the sake of it. Making parts is the point, but it also barely matters at all. I’ve since moved on from my frame factory to crisscrossing the map with train lines. It’ll keep me busy for a few months.
LETTING ME JUMP AND ZIPLINE AROUND THE PLANET