This forces players to make early choices with these constraints carefully in mind, because there is a linear (and generally large) time cost associated with rebuilding a production line. Every machine and foundation is placed by hand.
Unlike Factorio, Satisfactory never automates factory construction. The knowledge that this loop is coming pushes players to lay out new factories, and adopt general strategies, which facilitate observation, expansion, and refactoring. Improving production rates is the foundation of a key gameplay loop: observing current behavior, expanding production lines to create more, and redesigning or reconnecting lines in new ways. Once automated, we want higher production rates in order to build more sophisticated things, fulfill required power production, or satisfy whatever goals we set for ourselves. We automate things because building them by hand is time consuming. The desire to save time creates new goals: Satisfactory isn’t a game about factories–it is a game about building factories. (I claim, having played this game for more than two hundred hours). The time constraint is critical, though: as players, we want to spend our time well. These constraints shape what kind of structures and strategies we use in factory design.
The tech tree is self-explanatory: solutions to problems can only use buildings and tools which we have researched. Instead of viewing Satisfactory in these terms, I think of the game in terms of three main constraints: Resources can be transported arbitrarily long distances without loss or power, via belts. Space constraints are mainly enforced through aesthetic preferences: it is always possible to escape the limitations of local terrain, trees, rocks, etc by building a suitably large flat plane above them. Factories generally require little supervision or active control. Waiting long enough guarantees you’ll have enough parts. The game has no time limits, no quotas other than what you accept for yourself, and what consumables one needs (fuel, ammunition, filters) are readily fulfilled by small production lines. Many of the constraints one would assume shape the design of a real factory, or even other factory sims, are absent or muted in Satisfactory. This is only one possible language for Satisfactory-if you’ve played the game for a while, you’ve undoubtedly started to create your own.
#Satisfactory layout series
Using these patterns together helps generate a series of buildings which work together. The patterns are described in relationship to each other: each helps to organize, to refine, or to flesh out, others. Each of the patterns identifies forces present in a particular context, and resolves them by describing a particular kind of place, in which an arrangement of structures can resolve those forces. This is a pattern language: a grammar which generates buildings.
#Satisfactory layout license
COVID-19 has given me license to spend FAR too much time playing it, and I’d like to share a few thoughts that I hope might prove useful, or at least interesting. Satisfactory is a first-person factory construction game. With apologies, as usual, to Christopher Alexander.
#Satisfactory layout update
Update : Owen Jacobson has written a lovely companion to this piece which covers new dynamics in update 5.
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