Satisfactory has announced its 1.0 release date last week. The complete 1.0 release of Satisfactory will be on September 10th, 2024. There are quite a few changes and tweaks happening for 1.0. The developers are keeping a lot of the changes secret for now, but what they have detailed, we will go over in this article.
The Early Days
Satisfactory is an automation and resource management game at its core that heavily features logistics and exploration as well. It was originally released into early access on March 19th, 2019 to immediate success and praise, selling over 500,000 copies in 3 months. Its success has only gotten stronger since then.
On July 5th, developers Coffee Stain Studios made an announcement that you can check out here, detailing some of the features and the release date. It seems like any actual new content is being kept secret. The developers say the closed beta in which they are testing certain features is going very well, which is a good sign.
What we Know
Of the changes they do disclose, most are simple tweaks of existing features, balance changes, or optimizations. Many resource nodes on the map are changing. They are adding more, removing some, and evening out the spread. Specifically, they are trying to encourage players to expand out of the northern forest if they chose that area to start in, while increasing the basic resources across the map to help with placing factories in more locations.
They are also working to improve the transition between tech tiers and phases in the game by tweaking recipes and research. This should help progression feel smoother, instead of being hit by an immediate and large increase in complexity when entering a new tier. To this end, they are also making early-game power easier to automate, allowing conveyor belts to feed into biomass burners. I am personally excited about this one, as I have been wanting this since the game first came out! Some tools like the jetpack and gas mask are going to be made available sooner to encourage exploration, which is very nice. I think pushing exploration earlier in the progression is great, as once you unlock most of the resource gathering tech and make more permanent bases, exploration starts to become less important.
Optimization is also a big part of 1.0, as it should be. Since the game’s transition to Unreal Engine 5, there has been a bit of turbulence. In the announcement, they say that given the amount of time since the game transitioned to UE5, the game has adapted nicely and tons of optimizations are being made for this engine. They also detail certain processing optimizations which will help TPS on both servers and locally hosted games. This includes things like disabling collisions for plant matter, disabling most data and interaction for decorative buildables, and optimizing conveyor processing. This hopefully will provide a large boost in performance both for CPU and RAM usage.
There is also a section just for dedicated server improvements, which I am very happy about for obvious reasons. The install size of dedicated servers will go way down, which means faster server creation for Akliz servers, and faster backup times! You will also be able to change more settings in the game’s server UI rather than manually in config files, which will be a nice and much needed change. They also say many of the dedicated server-related bugs are being squashed, which I am happy about, as many of those have plagued me for years, not just as an Akliz employee. There are more changes to dedicated servers that I won’t go over specifically here, but you can read all about them in the original announcement post.
At the end of the announcement, they go over their closed beta and say the feedback they’ve received has been very positive. There are many more changes, some of which are “quite wild”. We can’t say for sure what new features they’re hiding in that private beta, but I’m very excited to find out once 1.0 rolls around.
A Satisfying Factory
We’ve gone over the facts, now I want to tell you why I’m excited about the 1.0 release. I have been playing Satisfactory since just about the time it first released into early access. I am a huge fan of the game. It has a perfect blend of game mechanics that make for an extremely relaxing experience. It’s similar to both modded minecraft (at least the tech side) and Factorio, but doesn’t serve the same purpose as either. Factorio goes way more in-depth with the automation and optimizing of your systems, minecraft’s automation is often a means to an end and the scope of the gameplay is much much wider than just automation. Satisfactory, at least to me, is about the automation itself. The fact that it’s in 3d gives it a lot of room to be messy, unoptimized, (the systems, not the game) and it must fit in the hilly, danger-filled natural environments of the world you’re in.
Those limitations make the game interesting, and a lot of the mechanics in the game are meant to deal with those limitations. Since the world is not procedurally generated, and is hand-crafted, the facilities you create integrate seamlessly into the environment, which is beautiful by the way, making for a great progression of environmental problem solving.
The difficulty in the game isn’t from a lack of resources, difficulty finding or integrating new resources into your system, or even the combat. The game isn’t really that difficult at all, unless you want it to be. The difficulty comes from how much you want to optimize and automate your systems. If you just wanted to get a taste of the mechanics and beat the game, you can do so just by laying out all your automation on the dirt and only making what you need. You can easily get to the end of the game that way. Or you can spend incredible effort to hyper-optimize everything and mass produce even the most complex crafting jobs in the game. Creating efficient megafactories is some of the most fun I’ve had in this game, especially ones connected by automated vehicles that bring materials between different facilities.
Multiplayer is also a big part of this game, at least for me. There are so many things to do, from exploration to resource gathering to main factory automation; having multiple people each with their own role makes it very easy to focus and excel at your own.
I’ve been waiting for the 1.0 release for a long time. This is one of my favorite games of all time, and I can’t wait to see what features they reveal for 1.0. The most exciting thing for me is the dedicated server improvements. I love playing with my friends, but dedicated servers, it seems, have been on the backburner for the developers until now. This brings me to my next point.
Unsatisfactory
While this is one of my favorite games of all time, it has been a rough ride to 1.0 so far, at least concerning multiplayer. The game runs flawlessly in single player. Even last year, I was getting 144fps consistently, and the tick rate rarely dropped below max, even on endgame builds. Crashes were few and far between. However, both co-op multiplayer and dedicated servers have significant issues when it comes to performance, networking, and general bugs. By default, the server’s network transfer speed is limited to a very small value. Increasing that to the maximum allowed value helps greatly, but does not fix everything. There are numerous bugs, mostly with vehicles and other modes of transportation like tubes, that can be detrimental to normal gameplay. You can get kicked from the server while traveling too fast in a vehicle, which duplicates your character and your entire inventory gets stuck in the clone that is stuck in the vehicle, rendering the vehicle useless and unbreakable. You can get stuck in tubes with no way out other than reconnecting, or someone else deleting the piece of tube you’re stuck in. Trucks, buggies, and tractors that are automated and unmanned often teleport around, sometimes off of the road, and are very difficult to ride on. Launching yourself across the map via tubes or launch pads can get so fast that the map fails to load or the server crashes.
The list goes on, but these are some of the worst bugs that plague multiplayer right now and in the recent past. None of these things affect single player, or at least none of them have for me. I’m not here just to complain about random bugs, but to show that, in general, the developers are prioritizing single player. This isn’t a bad move, and I can’t be upset about that. It is in early access, after all. But it has defined most of my experience with the game as buggy and hard to play, as I have almost never played alone since the initial release. I will be very happy once the multiplayer side of things is cleaned up and runs as smoothly as single player.
With the promise of dedicated server improvements in 1.0, I am very excited to see which of these (hopefully all) are fixed. I also hope to see default network transfer rate values increase as well. My favorite part of the game is the long-distance logistics that trains, tractors, trucks, and buggies offer, so having those polished out is going to make the game quite satisfactory.
1.0 will be the best time to spin up a server and play with your friends, especially with all those server optimizations coming. You can get started very quickly with a satisfactory server here! As always, we’ll be playing the 1.0 release on a regular Friday Game Night in the Akliz Discord server, which you can join here.