Satisfactory (2024)

There is nothing more satisfying than clearing out a checklist to me. And with that, I’ll try to leave the “Satisfying” pun alone when talking about Satisfactory. Sure the name kinda is a bit too tongue in cheek for me, but it does fit well with what the game actually is. So the premise is you are an unnamed worker for a  space company called Fixit, and tasked with landing on an uninhabited planet and mining its resources. Once the resources are mined, they get shot back off into space through a huge space elevator.

I’ve been following Satisfactory since its Early Access release in 2019, and immediately dumped in around 20+ hours within just a few days. I knew this game was going to be fun, but I didn’t realize how fun the simple task of exploring and building pipelines really was going to be. Over the years, I’d check back in and end up restarting my game world every time. I quickly found the best spots for all the mines and resource hubs, and B-lined it to them to get through the first couple of phases. After a few times of dumping 20+ hours into each update, I made a decision that I’d just wait til the 1.0 release date to play it again. I didn’t want to wear the game out and get bored.

Then, finally, the announcement of the 1.0 release date was announced, and wouldn’t you know it, it was September 10th 2024, my Birthday! So I waited and was so excited to finally load up the game in 1.0 and start fresh.

Nothing really was different from the last time I played, other than a few resource mines that were no longer there. Which in actuality wasn’t bad, it helped me explore a lot more, but it also hindered my early progress somewhat.

I ended up building my “space elevator”, the machine that collects the large resources I end up building later in the game, in a spot that kinda wasn’t really smart. Traveling back and forth from resource hubs was kinda a pain until I watched another streamer build a “HyperTube Cannon”. Which shot me out high and across the map. It made traveling far distances a much easier experience.

The exploration and building of the game really created a zen-like state where I ended up playing it a lot after work. And I lost hours instantly after I loaded it up. It was something that captivated my attention to the nth degree. It was an obsession to see if I could just mine just a bit more to finish up a check list item. I tried streaming it and sadly the gameplay doesn’t have a lot of action or variety to keep it very interesting for long stretches of time. It wasn’t until I played it with a new VR mod that I was able to get a few new people to join into the stream.

Satisfactory is an experience unlike any other. I spent the majority of the time just running around and managing my factories. Trying to create bigger, nicer looking factories, similar to the ones I’d see on YouTube, but I’d quickly lose interest. I didn’t want to spend 50 hours just making a fully functioning factory with multiple drones and trucks and trains, when I could just run it myself. In the end, I would have rather spent the time, but I also have so many other games to play, and it's just not my playstyle to sit on a game for several months on end.

In the end, the enjoyment from Satisfactory comes from how much you value checking off lists. For myself, it's something I enjoy in real life and having that in a video game, where I am constantly improving routes and assembly lines to create better and faster items… It's really cool. It was also a great game at a time when I needed something to chill out with after the stress of our moving from one house to a new one. I value the down time where I could just relax and spend a few hours watching item numbers compile and be converted into new items. I’ll always smile when I think of Satisfactory, and jumping into it with a VR mod was worth the wait as well.