Following a long five and a half years in early access, part automation and part survival game Satisfactory has finally released into 1.0. Having players control a space explorer to mine, gather resources, and create facilities on an alien planet, players were building this game at the same time as developers Coffee Stain Studios were. It is the tried and true product of listening to and implementing community feedback to ensure the game is the best it can be, only tenfold with its dozens of updates and tweaks over that period. Quite simply, Satisfactory is the best of the best. It’s the final frontier of automation games.

You are a highly disposable employee of the intergalactic FICSIT organisation. Crash landing on this alien planet, you are to risk life and limb to mine the planet’s resources and come toe to toe with its wildlife, all serving the greater purpose of building a gigantic space elevator to effectively and permanently transport resources to and from the planet. Just how quickly you will reach this far-away goal is determined by how efficient you are in setting up resource pipelines and automation systems to craft that one resource to then be made into another to then be made into a building or machine. I just pray you have the patience for complex logistics.

Satisfactory is by nerds and for nerds. Your start on the game’s alien planet is very granular, equipped with only a taser and a mineral scanning device that can only ping the most basic of materials. You can mine some of the veins you’ll locate in your immediate vicinity, albeit very slowly with a literal chisel. Your first big thing to craft is your HUB, an area where players can faff about it and also where you’ll be delivering a lot of resources to complete a given project milestone that will then unlock more crafting recipes, the next milestone and so on. It stands out from your more basic crafting games as everything requires a lot of thought. You’re not thinking about the next step in your project, but the next fifteen. This kind of demand isn’t new, especially for those who have dabbled in automation games like Factorio or Dwarf Fortress, or even its simpler counterparts. Though there’s been nothing on this scale in that immersive first-person perspective.

This scale is completely incredible. Satisfactory lets you go the mile with its systems. If you’re smart about it, no square inch of land is wasted. Your labyrinth of conveyor belts will be impressive no matter how ugly it looks. In function alone, even the ugliest of setups is worth it. It’ll do feats such as carrying copper to that crafter while the iron is travelling to another, only for both outputs to come together later in an Assembler to make one rarer item to then be ready for your project. Any task that can be automated by one of the countless machines in Satisfactory is, eventually, less work for you and more time freed up to get other jobs going.

Every milestone or new project to learn in-game is incredibly useful and channels into what feels like a million other facets. Broken down into eight tiers made up of several milestones within each, you’re going from being able to define how different materials can be channelled on a conveyor belt to vehicular transport such as trucks to what feels like pipedream goals in nuclear power. A research bench adds additional means of finding new recipes and uses for items, as you bring rarer goods to both improve minute stats such as machine efficiency or discover how to make cloth, and then parachutes, to save you in nasty falls. I’m a sucker for a game where every little thing feeds into one another. Satisfactory is but the pinnacle of that.

Where Satisfactory feels cut from a different cloth is in how much more approachable, joyous, and clear everything is. No ill will towards the aforementioned giants of the genre who use an isometric viewpoint, of course, but my dabbling in those titles had me a bit more lost, squinting at my screen and struggling to keep track of everything. Here, I can walk the length of a conveyor belt, reminding myself in the process what it is transporting and what product is being made at the other end. Similarly, crafting menus and HUD is always incredibly clear. At all times I can see what I need for a recipe, and how many I can craft with it with my current resources on hand and so on.

Everything just works and makes sense. A lot of automation games often get lost in the weeds of the complex logistics mechanics and while those are certainly there to experiment with and better your craft in (especially in late game) to optimise your time, they’re not always the most needed. Though the main objective is to build the space elevator, I truly think my endgame for Satisfactory will just be tidying everything up and making it one big planet-wide moving machine. I appreciate that I don’t need to be there yet. If you jump into the game and feel self-conscious about your production lines and how neat and well-oiled they are, just remember: if it works, just do it. The rest will come later.

The very simple way that Satisfactory keeps up this feeling of wonder in its exploration is in its hand-crafted nature. Cave structures are deliberately dotted around the map and also designed in certain ways to encourage exciting ‘water-cooler talk’ style moments of gameplay. Barely scraping through a mob of hostile animals and approaching the end of a cavern, you’ll be rewarded with rarer alien resources. such as a ‘Somersloop’ or a glowing purple ‘Mercer’ sphere. These emit alien voices and messages when you near them or collect them, providing eerie piecemeal storytelling to just paint how bizarre this world you’re on really is. Maybe now you’ll consider whether you should even be here.

This is only the beginning of the game’s stellar tones and atmosphere. Satisfactory does the well-treaded but effective trope of commentary on futuristic capitalism, namely space capitalism. We’ve seen this in games in the past like The Outer Worlds. Though I’d argue it’s done better here. FICSIT is a ruthless company that doesn’t value your life and only cares about your productivity. They make this apparent when periodically the GLaDOS-style A.I. voice representing FICSIT will communicate with you when you’ve unlocked a new recipe. These are often humourous recordings that genuinely make you laugh, noting you’ve unlocked a new machine to make work easier but in the same breath reminding you to not get comfortable with this or slack off. I’d expect nothing less than quality and genuinely surprisingly funny writing from the same studio that also brought you the Goat Simulator franchise. You can even buy into this messed up currency and capital that FICSIT seemingly runs by later crafting and using a shop to more efficiently get resources with a currency known as ‘FICSIT coupons.’ Cruelly but fittingly, these are highly expensive and you put in more than you get out of it.

Satisfactory’s world is breathtaking, coming with many a foreign vista and alien biomes to explore and simply take in. There are curious alien creatures to fawn over, including a friendly reptilian guy you can tame known simply as a ‘Lizard Doggo’ or a gigantic giraffe-like tick animal that has a bouncy back you can hump on, handy for platforming. At night time, the sky is bursting with stars and milky ways, even picturesque views of nearby planets. The colour palette is full of rich purples in more mystical areas and deep blues in its beach biomes. You feel so guilty for just breaking it all down and putting factory floors over it all. There’s a skit from the old BAFTA-winning comedy show That Mitchell and Webb Look that depicts two Waffen-SS soldiers asking each other if ‘they’re the baddies.’ I’m reminded of it vividly as I colonise this lush alien planet.

Coffee Stain Studios very easily could have made this a survival game, and I’m incredibly relieved it didn’t. Though the bones of it are already there in hostile enemies that can stomp you if you’re not careful, they’ll never rush up on your encampments. They’re only on off-beaten paths and near valuable resources. They’re never too hard and especially more trivial once you get better weapons in stun guns and the like. Hunger and sleep are never a concern and you’re not desperately building a shelter. Satisfactory knows exactly what it wants to be and is just that: a kickass and vivid automation game.

It’s in its brevity that I’m so constantly floored by the game. This is a title at the top of its game and it’s only occasionally let down by small factors and obstacles that some will thrive working to topple while others will find a little bit too harsh. Every so often crucial resources are a little too hard to reach early. High up on the top of rock caverns might await a resource such as coal, crucial relatively early on. Only… you may very well unlock and rely on coal-based recipes before you’re able to come even near crafting a jetpack or jumping pad to reach some heights for instance. Similarly, grass and biofuel (resources made from one another) are used for fuelling processors that power just about everything. This resource is relied on for a little too long before you can unlock other methods of power.

One or two things arbitrarily require power while others don’t. A portable miner for example can be placed and can happily chip away on its own, while a jump pad that you probably want to craft in the spur of the moment while out exploring does need power. Are you going to stop everything and build a power pole and set that thing up just for that one jump? Not really.

Considering this, I give you my final recommendation. For all the impatient people out there, I beg you to play this game in co-op! It’s night and day the progress that can be made and makes the more strenuous and painful tasks such as gathering sticks and leaves for biofuel (the chore I have the biggest gripe with doing) all the more palatable. Sharing a vision for how you want your factory flooring to work and seeing that come to fruition, exploring curious caves full of wonders… this is some of the best co-operative play I’ve had with my significant other in a long time. Namely, because we find joy in alternating responsibilities and tasks. Together, we’ve been slowly building a freakish intergalactic factory empire. I wouldn’t have it any other way.