Satisfactory Beginner’s Guide
Satisfactory should be a boring game because, at its core, it’s really about logistics. You’ll manage power usage, conveyor belt and production speeds, rail stops, and more. But instead, it’s a compelling, tactile game that, yes, asks you to do all of that, but puts you in the middle of the factory in a first-person perspective. Once you build a factory line, you can walk along and see every step of it close up, and even grab a piece off of the production lines.
The game’s title is just about perfect. Satisfactory is a game about making a Satisfying Factory. It can be a complex game, though, and we’re here to help you get through some of the most frustrating early moments of the game. Here are some of our essential Satisfactory beginner tips.
Start out in the Rocky Desert biome
Sure, it’s not as idyllic as the Grass Fields, but the Rocky Desert is still friendly for beginners while offering more geographic variety and, most importantly, a wider variety of resources. All four biomes are on the same hand-crafted map, so you don’t have to worry about missing out on anything. Just don’t start on the Dune Desert, as that biome has fewer resources, less water, and more danger.
Explore a Little!
You’ll need access to a few important resources to get started–coal, iron, and copper–so take the time you need to explore a little and figure out where those are before you put down your base, giving yourself a nice starting point to work from.
Learn your Hotkeys
Despite being available on consoles, Satisfactory is a game best played with mouse and keyboard. There are so many things you can do in the game, and the controller just isn’t very well suited to handling them all. To that point, there are a bunch of keyboard commands that are worth learning that will help you build more efficiently.
- Tab – Your inventory
- Ctrl – Build on the World Grid
- Q – Build
- F – Demolish
- V – Flashlight Toggle
- C – Resource Scanner (hold to select a resource)
- X – Schematics and Inbox
- Z – World Map
- Space – Use this at your work bench to craft individual items without also giving yourself a repetitive stress injury from holding the mouse down for too long.
Build on the World Grid
Among those shortcuts, we listed Ctrl as the key for building on the world grid. To be completely clear, you don’t have to build on the world grid by any means. If the chaos goblin inside of you wants to have stuff at all different kinds of angles, you can certainly do that. But building on the world grid will ensure that all of your machines are squared up, and that means they can easily line up with things like conveyor belt ports and storage units, as well as other machines. This becomes especially useful when you set out to build a secondary base on top of a new, distant resource node and want to make sure the conveyor belt is going to line up correctly.
Use the Satisfactory Calculator (and get comfortable with Maths)
Satisfactory fans are very serious about efficiency. “Hours in Satisfactory” should be a valid line on a resume to a logistics or manufacturing company. You’re managing active versus total available power, making sure there aren’t any bottlenecks in your manufacturing line, and eventually keeping track of things like liquid flow. This ramps up slowly, but eventually you’ll be feeding dozens of machines into each other, splitting one machine out into several, managing resources from multiple substations, and more. As such, there is an independent website, outside of the game, meant to help you figure out how to get what you want out of the game: Satisfactory Calculator.
For example, if you know you need to start manufacturing Modular Frames, it can help you figure that out. Hit up the Planner and select Modular Frames under “Outputs,” and set the number you want to manufacture per minute. The calculator will lay out on different tabs a list of the resources you’ll need in total, which buildings you’ll need, and how much power it’ll take. There’s even a tab that shows you a visual graph of what layout with those buildings will get you the yield you need. Once you pass a certain threshold of complexity, this tool becomes invaluable.
In general, excelling in Satisfactory means that you should get comfortable with doing some math to make everything work. With that said, I should note that I have a very rocky relationship with numbers and equations, so don’t think you need to have taken Advanced Calculus II to make it in Satisfactory; you’ll just have to do some algebra sometimes.
You can put multiple portable miners on a single resource node
Resource nodes are really big. In the early game, you’ll be able to speed up your progress by putting multiple portable miners on top of a single node, immediately doubling or tripling your output, which is crucial in those early hours.
Use your Bare Hands
Especially early on, when you’re unlocking all kinds of new items, it’s just fine to use your bare hands to create certain items. For example, if an item requires 3 Modular Frames but you don’t have a production line setup for those yet, it makes more sense to just hammer those out yourself at your HUB. Thankfully, the team at Coffee Stain Studios has taken mercy on us, as you don’t have to hold down a button to build multiple items. Just tap the spacebar and it’ll build items until you say stop.
Unlock the Map
You don’t have a map to start with, but you can unlock it once you’re in Tier 1, as part of the Field Research milestone. Once unlocked, you’ll have access to a map with some pretty extensive markup capabilities. If you make good use of this map, you’ll always be able to find your way back to that resource node, that cave full of horrifying spiders that you definitely ran away from, and whatever else. Also, Satisfactory Calculator has a great interactive map that you can use if you don’t want to explore the more dangerous areas yourself.
Don’t Sleep on Blade Runners
There are tons of ways to get around in Satisfactory, including trains, trucks, ziplines, and more. The most flexible and fun way to get around, though, is the tool called Blade Runners. Much like in the film Blade Runner, there aren’t really any blades involved, though this tool does allow for lots of running. With Blade Runners, you’ll move 50% faster on foot and jump double the height, as well as dampening fall damage.
To unlock Blade Runners, you’ll need to do the following:
- Unlock Tier 1 – This is the first official tier out of the tutorial.
- Build a MAM
- Mine a bunch of Raw Quartz (these are pink-purple stones you’ll see around the map). About 72x Raw Quartz should work.
- Research the Quartz tab in the MAM. You’ll also need 15x Reinforced Iron Plate, and 60x Iron Rod for the Modular Frames, and 75x Screws and 15x Iron Rods for Rotors.
Once you equip the Blade Runners, you’ll want to get the hang of skiing–basically, jumping and sliding in rhythm to maximize your speed. Other methods become safer and more efficient for moving between nodes later, but Blade Runners require no additional infrastructure and will stay useful from your first days until you complete the Space Elevator.
Don’t be afraid to run away
Speaking of running, don’t be afraid to run away from fights you can’t win. There are some pretty gnarly beasts and hazards in Satisfactory, such as the spider-like Stinger, which is so upsetting to look at that the game features an arachnophobia mode that replaces them with sprites of cat faces. Don’t be afraid to book it if you aren’t sure you’ll be able to finish a fight or are particularly far from home.
Label EVERYTHING
This is something I wish I’d learned earlier in my Satisfactory career. Label everything. Label storage. Label machines. Every Assembler looks the same. You’ll unlock display panels early on, and these provide a variety of signage options. You can make a panel that has an item icon, text, or both on it. You’re playing this game in first-person, so these labels will become crucial for quickly navigating your production lines.
You got the power
There are a bunch of power sources in Satisfactory, starting with the Biomass Burner and going all the way up to nuclear plants. In the early game, Biomass Burners will be your friend, but you’ll want to migrate to coal as soon as possible. Coal, Oil, Geothermal, and Nuclear power are all infinite resources, the same way that all other resource nodes are; you’re just constrained by how much power you can pull from them at once. Biomass Burners, though, are constrained by the leaves and wood you collect early on. As such, you should grab as much grass and wood as you can. You can grab grass while running, and you’ll eventually get a chainsaw that lets you cut down entire groves at once. You’ll start out by dumping wood and grass right into the burners, but you’ll want to move past that quickly.
My personal method is to build storage containers for your leaves and wood, run those into constructors to create Solid Biofuel, and then run those into a bunch of Biomass Burners. This still isn’t nearly as efficient or simple as coal, but it does streamline the process, and Solid Biofuel is significantly more efficient than handfuls of grass and sticks. This will keep you going for a surprisingly long time as long as you keep grabbing more resources while exploring.
Once you build your first array of coal plants, though, you’ll step into a whole new level of production in your factory.
You can upgrade conveyor belts in-place
Conveyor belts are everything in Satisfactory, but the original Mk.1 belts are painfully slow, maxing out at 60 items per second. The Mk.6 ones, meanwhile, are 20x faster, moving 1200 items per second. As such, you’ll be upgrading many of your belts multiple times. It’s not immediately obvious unless you happen to mouse over it, but you can, rather than re-building your belts each time, upgrade them in place. Instead of dismantling a belt, select the next tier of belt and mouse-over the existing one. You can upgrade an entire segment of belt at once this way. You can even make those segments longer with a technique called Belt Welding.
Watch YouTube
The Satisfactory community on YouTube is vibrant and obsessed with helping everyone claw their way to the highest tiers of production. And they are legion. My favorite is Gaming with Doc, a retired grandfather who has made teaching Satisfactory one of his Grandpa Hobbies (you know, building model trains, reading about tallships, etc.), and has hours of great tutorials. There are others, too, like TotalXclipse, DrawingXaos, as well as more general streamers like CohhCarnage, all of whom have videos and YouTube Shorts with tips and tutorials to get the most out of Satisfactory.
