What makes for a good starting location in Satisfactory?
Determining what makes for a good starting location is largely subjective. If you punch “best starting location Satisfactory” into your search engine of choice, you’re going to find someone repping every biome in the game, and someone explaining to them why that location is, in fact, the worst.
Our focus here is to pick locations that allow you to get a factory line up and running with relative ease, while minimizing the danger that comes from impassable terrain, natural hazards, and hostile creatures. These are generally aimed at beginners and near-beginners, rather than experienced Ficsit employees who are familiar with the terrain and know the game’s mechanics inside and out.
The ideal spot has a variety of resources and will give you room to build without having to fight the landscape–or too many hostile creatures. Finally, there’s one more thing to remember: there’s only one Satisfactory map, which means that no matter which starting area you pick from the four available when you start a new game, you can migrate to any other if you don’t like the look, the terrain, or how the hostile creatures look at you.
How to Search for A Hot Spot (The Easy Way)
If you want to avoid simply looking at maps online, you can always use the Resource Scanner to ping your surrounding area for nodes of different resources. But the nodes you can search for are locked behind progression through tiers and MAM (Molecular Analysis Machine), meaning that you’ll be picking your starting location based on very limited information. Which is a perfectly valid way to approach a game like this, to be clear.
If you want to peek ahead a little, though, there are great resources online. To get a look at the world from above, load up the Satisfactory Interactive Map at Satisfactory Calculator. There, you can look for just resource nodes, and even filter to show only Pure resource nodes if you want to plan for efficiency.
As you explore that map, the name of the area will appear in the lower right. With that, you can head to the Biome section of the Satisfactory Wiki’s Worlds page. Here, each biome is listed with a brief description and ratings for biomass amount (how much foliage you’ll have access to), terrain difficulty, and Hostility (density of hostile creatures). Biomass amount is useful for early game when you’ll be running off of biomass power before switching to coal. You’ll want to avoid areas with high terrain difficulty at least until you unlock foundations–or if you tend to space out while exploring and are prone to falling off long drops.
Starting Locations Ranked for Beginners
The starting locations suggested by the game are all good places to start, though some are better for beginners. We’re listing them here from easiest to most difficult. And while Coffee Stain Studios did a good job of suggesting useful places to start, we’re going to point you in the right direction once you land and dismantle your Ficsit drop pod.
Grass Plains
Grassy Plains isn’t a particularly interesting place to start, and has its share of limitations, but it’s a great spot for true beginners. First and foremost, there’s an absolute ton of space to experiment, and all the early-game resources are right there for the taking. There are a fair number of hogs around, but they’re not terribly threatening compared to things like Spitters and Stingers you’ll encounter later. However, later game resources can be quite far away from this biome, meaning that you’ll end up with some very long conveyor belts, a serious train system, or trucks moving everything around just to keep different locations stocked up.
Best starting location: North or East edges of the biome
Rocky Desert
While the Grass Plains are ostensibly the best start location for a true beginning, we’d argue the Rocky Desert is even better. Like the Grass Plains, this location is among the four defined starting locations. There’s a bit more variety in elevation, a minor increase in hostile creatures, but better distribution of resources. There are a multitude of normal nodes nearby, along with a fair number of pure ones. Oil nodes are just to the south. There are a few nodes for later-game materials, as well. You’ll have to expand out for the endgame stuff, but again–this is a starting location.
Best starting location: Southwest corner of the biome
Dune Desert
The Dune Desert is last on the list of starting locations, but is still a great starter location. The thing that’ll trip you up is that there just isn’t a lot of biomass here, which can make the Biomass Burner stage of your power advancement pretty difficult. That’s especially so because directly south is the Swamp, one of the more dangerous locations in the game. To get biomass with somewhat lower risk, head southwest to find the Northern Forest, and gather materials there. In terms of resources and terrain, though, this is a strong area, especially once you get access to Foundations. There are long sightlines, too, making sure that you can gaze upon your mighty works.
Best starting location: The waterfall on the west end of the biome.
Northern Forest
The Northern Forest might just be the best place to start–especially so if you’ve played Satisfactory before. At the northwestern corner of this biome, you’ll find a spot with six pure Iron nodes, one pure Copper node, and one pure Limestone node. And then to the southeast of that, less than a kilometer away, you have access to three pure coal nodes and two additional pure Copper nodes, more pure Limestone and Iron, and a pure raw Quartz node. South and southwest, you’ll find four pure crude Oil stations. You won’t have to move away from here for a long time. This area has a higher frequency of hostile creatures, but isn’t anything like the truly dangerous parts of the map.
Best starting location: Northwest corner of the biome
Places to avoid early on
These locations are listed in rough order from “probably avoid it” ranging to “Pioneers don’t come back from here.” We’re not going to worry about suggesting where specifically to go, because you’ll want to avoid the whole biome early on.
Abyss Cliffs
Abyss Cliffs isn’t the most dangerous place on the map by any stretch, but it’s one of the most annoying. The enemy hostility is overall pretty low here, but the land itself is brutal, with stone pillars and cliffs everywhere. It’s almost impossible to navigate early in the game–wait until you have the jetpack.
Blue Crater
The Blue Crater can be a rough spot to start unless you’re looking for a real challenge. Aside from an elevated risk from creatures, this is just a tough place to build due to the weird topography and the fact that so much of it is water. With that said, if you’re on the east side of the map, it can be a great place to start an Oil production facility. There are a bunch of pure Oil wells in the southeast corner, as well as a few normal ones. There’s also a bunch of Nitrogen and a handful of pure Geysers. If you put a geothermal generator on top of those Geysers, it’s one source of power you don’t need to maintain at all.
Red Bamboo Fields
The Red Bamboo Fields don’t appear too bad at first–the terrain isn’t terribly complex and there’s tons of biomass for the taking. However, this area is also filled with indestructible trees that will get in the way of your builds, and it’s absolutely crawling with Spitters and Stingers.
Red Jungle
It’s red like the bamboo fields, but even more dangerous–appropriate for a jungle. This area is absolutely crawling with hostile creatures. But there are also pure Caterium, Bauxite, and Quartz nodes.
Titan Forest
The Titan Forest biome is one of the coolest looking places on the Satisfactory map, but building here is a real challenge. It’s right there in the name, as this biome is full of gigantic (like, gigantic) indestructible trees, which limit both the space you can build in and how much foliage you’ll have access to. The forest is also crawling with dangerous creatures. An elevated factory build here would look awesome, but be prepared for a few challenges along the way.
Swamp
The Swamp biome is a rough one. There isn’t much land to build on–it is a swamp, after all–and what land you will find is infested with Elite Stingers and Alpha Spitters, some of the toughest creatures in the game. The entire biome is dotted with gas pillars, and resource-wise, there just isn’t much here that you can’t find with ease elsewhere on the map.
