I’ve adored what I’ve played of Satisfactory, but I’ve held off on delving too deeply into Coffee Stain’s extraordinary automation extravaganza. See, I know that it’s going to obliterate my social life for at least a month, because that’s what factory sims do. Hence, it only seems fair that I bring my partner on that glorious adventure of social self-destruction. Yet our only other PC in the house is a Steam Deck, and up until now handheld Satisfactory has been a suboptimal experience due to its mouse-heavy control scheme.
As of Satisfactory’s recent 1.1 update, however, this has now changed. The update adds an array of new features to the game’s sprawling tangle of conveyor belts, including an overhauled photo mode and a buildable personnel elevator. But the most exciting addition for me is proper controller support, which also applies to Valve’s handheld PC.
I took the update for a brief spin on my Steam Deck, and the difference is immediately apparent. Menus are now easily navigable with the analogue stick, no longer requiring you to faff around with the trackpad. Moreover, placing construction units like assemblers and drawing out conveyor belts seems far more intuitive than it was.
I should note that Satisfactory still doesn’t feel like a game designed with Steam Deck in mind. Mainly, you still need to squint a bit to read the menu and HUD text, likely why Satisfactory isn’t Deck verified yet. But “playable” is a much more accurate description now, and I can see myself having a good time building my dream industrial complex while slouched on my sofa or curled up in bed.
(Image credit: Coffee Stain)
This is far from the only change the update makes, though. As mentioned, Coffee Stain has wiped the lens of its photo mode, adding numerous extra filters, effects, poses and so forth, as well as a “dolly mode” that lets players create “small transitions and videos or anything your creativity allows” as Coffee Stain explains in a recent Steam post.
Elsewhere, debris from crash sites can be dismantled for extra resources, while trains now need a buffer placed at the end of the line to stop them from flying off the tracks. There’s a litany of new features for resource transportation, such as “priority mergers” which let you prioritise which active inputs should feed out onto the belt first, as well as a throughput monitor that tracks the number of resources rolling along a belt per-minute. Oh, and pipelines now have specific “straight” and “curved” build modes, helping you organise your pipework.
Finally, there’s that personnel elevator you can construct for speedy vertical transportation. This apparently enables players to create as many floor stops as they desire, customising the name of each floor as they go. I look forward to the community testing this to its limits, and attempting to build a personnel elevator to rival Satisfactory’s space elevator.
Alongside these key additions, the update brings several visual updates, quality-of-life improvements, and bugfixes. “It’s no exaggeration to say this update includes more than a year’s worth of work,” Coffee Stain writes. Some of this work is in preparation for the game’s console launch, which is due later this year. But you can enjoy the 1.1 update on PC (and Steam Deck) right now.
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I know I’m literally saying this to the Satisfactory community, but I’m curious if anyone else feels the same - this is a game I’ve come back to time and time again for a couple of years now. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I always start a new save every time, and get though most of the tech teirs before slowly playing it less and less (around aluminum production seems to be where it happens).
So, in other words, I guess I’m reinstalling this again. I’m sure my next factory will be perfect on the first try this time. Updates to splitter and merger snaps for belts and elevators might be the next linear conveyor-level QoL I needed.
What helped me was two things:
Also, I leaned pretty heavily on https://www.satisfactorytools.com/ to help me wrap my head around the complicated builds and flows. Donated money to them since it was so helpful.
Of course, that’s just my experience. Hope you make it though! It felt really satisfying to get to the end. I really appreciated their progression system.
My first play through I got to oil production and restarted because I could see the complexity scale up fast and figured a clean slate would be easiest. I then got to the 1st stage of nuclear stuff and promptly stopped. I have yet to play again because I was waiting for the first patch a few months ago, and then heard they were working on controller support. I have a couple games I’m going to finish up and then start round 3 to see if I can increase efficiency to make it a smoother transition into nuclear. I had a massive bottleneck with building computer components that made it really tough to begin the nuclear options.
I honestly wouldn’t mind replaying over and over and just stopping at aluminum/nuclear just because it gets a bit overwhelming.
FWIW, it seems like nuclear is optional. I didn’t bother since I had a large rocket fuel energy plant which was only half done when I finished project assembly.
That said, build it if you want! But if you don’t like it, you don’t need to.
My very first save file, I got to coal power…I had started at the way south of the grass fields, there are two coal patches down there, neither of them are near water, and I wasn’t really ready to travel as far as the snaketree grotto yet. So I gave that up, started in the Northern Forest at the cliff, back when it was THE obvious start point, and I went all the way to the last elevator launch (that was in Update 5).