Forget AAA: this year, I only wanted to optimize my conveyor belts Satisfactorily

I’m lost in the treadmills again. There are dozens of them heading off in all directions, carrying pieces of concrete, steel, and copper to other parts of my growing empire. I’m in the depths of my first factory at Satisfactory, trying to optimize a production line in hopes of finally getting my hands on a jetpack.

Satisfying starts like every other survival game. You land on a planet, decide to exploit it ruthlessly, and start extracting resources from the ground. Then it takes a different direction. A industrial direction. You see, even though you can technically make just about everything in Satisfactory with your own hands, making things yourself is ridiculous. Real engineers build machines to do all this assembly for them.

It sounds intimidating, but Satisfactory’s integration is among the best on the market. From your first miner to installing power lines, creating a drone factory or even going straight to nuclear power, Satisfactory slowly guides you through the process.

Thinking with pulleys

(Image credit: Coffee Stain Studios)

Fundamental experiences

(Image credit: Kalypso Media)

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20 hours after landing, I install six huge batteries as off-site backup power in case the wrong wire gets cut and my power goes out. These batteries will give me 30 minutes of battery life in an emergency. After that, I will start making AI limiters, after which I will need to replenish my stock of Nobelisk explosive charges.

There’s always something important to do in Satisfactory, and since I’m a pretty chaotic person, my work is imperfect, ready to be tweaked, refined, and optimized over and over again. Aside from the horrifying spiders, the scariest enemy you’ll encounter in this factory build is an empty stretch of conveyor belt or an efficiency meter floating around the 50% mark.

This is the real meat of Satisfactory, and in addition to the dozens of hours I’ve spent pushing and pulling on conveyor belts and production lines, I’ve spent more hours than I can shake a stick at relying on scribbling factory designs on waste paper in hope. to finally achieve the perfect factory design. I haven’t solved it yet, so often when something goes wrong I venture out onto the treadmills to see what’s wrong.

But that’s not why Satisfactory is my favorite game this year, in a year filled with explosive AAA games, the hit Helldivers 2, and even interesting indie shooters like I Am Your Beast, Echo Point Nova, and Straftat . No, the reason Satisfactory is my favorite game is the joy that is infused into every part of the game. Even just moving is wonderful: the movement feels like Apex Legends, except you bounce around the factory that you and your friends built.

The perfect example of this is the slide: there is no reason for Satisfactory to have a slide that feels so good to the touch, and despite the fact that there is no mechanical purpose, you can feel the craftsmanship . Behind this slide are people who have thought a lot about first-person kinesthetics. This makes you slightly faster if you time it correctly, but the best part is that if you build your conveyor belts to the normal height, when you slide, you’ll pass cleanly underneath.

(Image credit: Coffee Stain Studios)

Later, emboldened by Blade Runners – a new pair of shoes that increase your running speed by 50% and double your jump height (while mitigating a lot of fall damage) – I began to think of my factory as a space 3D rather than like a 3D space. series of buildings. A door here, a wall-mounted treadmill there and suddenly I could walk through my factory from one end to the other without touching the ground. Later abilities allowed me to fly my power lines like a zipline, and you can even build lame little transport tubes like in Futurama to get around, but there’s an elegance to the moves that means I still have wanted to go there manually – whether for work. the watchtowers chained to scale a nearby cliff, or the giant gel-filled cushion I built to protect myself when I fell from the nearby mountain.

As technology advances, stomping around instead of using technological shortcuts to get around looks more and more like a hipster annoying people at parties by patiently but intensely explaining why vinyl is better than listening to people on Spotify. But I don’t care.

Of course, even though JRR Tolkien once suggested that not all who wander are lost, there is an important caveat: those who wander long enough are sure to be at least a little confused about their whereabouts. That’s how I ended up here. Ostensibly I’m trying to solve an efficiency problem, but in reality I’m just along for the ride. Since I like clear structures and defined goals, this seems to be Satisfactory’s greatest achievement. If I were Coffee Stain, I’d rename the game Exceptional – puns be damned.

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