In just over 2 weeks, what has been an 8-year long development process and 5-year journey through Early Access will end, and Satisfactory 1.0 will finally launch on September 10th. While this date does not mark the definitive end for the game’s development, it is certainly a colossal milestone for our team as much as for our community, and one worth celebrating fondly. Today, we want to dive into a few more details about what exactly it is we’ll be celebrating, so without further ado: helmets on, Pioneers (as if you have a choice).
PHASE 5 AND TIER 9
If you skipped physics back in school, now is the time to catch up. The main attraction of 1.0 will be the endgame, and we’re thrilled to finally be able to share that it comes in the form of a brand new fifth phase and ninth tier with a heavy focus on Quantum Technology! While many parts from earlier tiers will be relevant in progressing through phase 5, a bunch of new items are being added on top, almost all of them as complex to craft as their names are hard to articulate. With all these new toys available to you, your goal will be to give the Space Elevator one last run for its money and finish Project Assembly once and for all.
While we won’t share the juiciest details with you just yet, phase 5 is aimed to feel like a natural progression path continuing from phase 4, in terms of gameplay and advancements in technology. We’re also intending for it to add to the narrative beats coming in 1.0 (more on that very soon…), through many of the phase’s ongoing visuals and the logic behind how some of the machines operate. And as the icing on an ever more power consuming cake, we’ve also addressed some recurring feedback regarding a few things in the game. Perhaps the Mk.3 Miner was never the issue?
Finally, it is worth noting that with phase 5 introduced to the game, the no-longer-final phase 4 will have its requirements for completion relaxed. The previous requirements were placeholder and intentionally tuned to absurd numbers to deter people from completing it during Early Access, and that worked about as well as you’d expect considering the players we’re dealing with. The new requirements will be as follows: 500 Assembly Director Systems, 500 Magnetic Field Generators, 250 Thermal Propulsion Rockets and 100 Nuclear Pasta. FICSIT is expecting pristine performance, Pioneer.
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NARRATIVE
In fact, more on that right now! The narrative of Satisfactory has been cooking in the oven for a long time. After receiving the initial wave of feedback from our first playtests, it was clear that players wanted a purpose as to why they were building all their factories and committing industrial takeover. Over the course of Early Access, however, we’ve chosen to not include a work-in-progress story in the game at all, to not show our hand early and reveal spoiler-y elements of the world before they are fully complete. Keeping the story under wraps has also allowed us to rethink how we approach it whenever it grew too big or ambitious, and to reiterate on it whenever we felt like a different style of storytelling in Satisfactory made sense.
So, let’s talk about what does make sense: the goal of the implementation of Satisfactory’s narrative is for it to be non-disruptive to the core gameplay loop, while leaving the world people have already gotten familiar with unchanged. Satisfactory is first and foremost a factory building game, and this narrative must fit that vision. Thus, there will not be any campaign mode to access from the main menu, nor a marked “main scenario” route to follow on your map etc., like players may expect from many other titles. There also won’t be any cutscenes that outright stop player movement or agency. There will be an ending to the game to work towards, but it won’t halt your building momentum or stop you from further progressing your factories in your session or save file - all gameplay elements will remain undisturbed.
Being this secretive about Satisfactory’s story for so many years has, naturally, also led to things changing about the narrative itself since its original conception. In fact, almost every detail we’ve teased about story specifics on various Socials has been changed. The broad strokes remain the same - Planet Massage-2(A-B) is still the same world you’ve come to know, and you’re still a Pioneer working for FICSIT. FICSIT itself has changed a lot, however, and characters such as Caterina Parks and Steve are no longer part of the game. Really, the only familiar aspect of FICSIT remaining is ADA, Vocaloid and all, because we’re not interested in finding out how fast our office will be torn to shreds (rightfully) by you all if ADA is ever removed.
Finally, Mercer Spheres and Somersloops, which we’ve labeled as story-related work-in-progress items in the past, will still have some connection to the narrative but their main purpose has been changed to also be related to factory building.
If you plan on experiencing the story together with others in multiplayer, it’s important to know that expository advancements that happen by completing milestones, phases or research are session wide. However, there are triggers in the world that also provide nearby Pioneers with exposition, and these will only be experienced by players in close enough proximity to these triggers when they are… well, triggered. If you’re not in the vicinity of these points when someone else approaches them, you will not experience that piece of narrative until you trigger that same element yourself, so go get exploring!
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ACHIEVEMENTS
Long requested, long awaited, long time coming, achievements will finally be a thing in Satisfactory as of 1.0! The list includes a healthy mix of achievements related to progression or milestones, with a nice chunk of exploratory ones and even a couple of memes thrown in as well. Make FICSIT raise their eyebrows - it may just be worth your time.
A common question we’ve received is if achievements will retroactively unlock on your current saves. The short answer is that they will unfortunately not. The long answer is that since 1.0 adds or changes something in almost every progression stage in the game, it’d quite frankly be very clunky and weird to attempt to spot where players have met the criteria for certain achievements, and if those criteria can be considered equal between Early Access and 1.0. On top of everything else that 1.0 alters in the game from its earliest stage, achievements could be yet another reason to make a replay of the game worth it!
ALT. RECIPES AND HARD DRIVES
We’ve changed how the acquisition of alt. recipes works in 1.0. Before 1.0, the system was disruptive to gameplay by how the MAM was essentially blocked while you had recipes pending to choose from. It was also quite unintuitive for newer players who might not know what alt. recipes they should’ve been going after and annoying for veteran players with its random factors.
In 1.0, there will be a separate tab in the MAM for hard drive research, where all drives you’ve acquired are listed. You can click between them as you’ve finished researching them, and thus freely hop between drives to inspect available alt. recipes without one drive blocking the next. On a certain drive, you’ll now have two recipes available instead of three, however you’ll be able to reroll the recipes shown to you once per drive, if neither of the initial recipes is a lucrative option. Rerolling a hard drive does render the first two recipes shown unavailable on that drive, however, so think carefully before hitting that button (at least I think it’s a button, it could be a lever)!
Furthermore, all recipes shown when researching or rerolling a hard drive will be recipes relevant to your current progression - you will only be able to see recipes that you can utilize. The reward pool will thus increase as you work further through tiers and phases. The number of hard drives in the world will also still be bigger than the amount of alt. recipes in the game, so it will be possible to unlock every alt. recipe there is! Have fun hunting!
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AND MORE YET TO COME…
Do believe this simple Coffee Stainer when they say there’s still more to come. In fact, some beans won’t be spilled at all until the game is well in your own hands, but some processes just work best that way.
A question was recently asked within the office - “if you could go back to the start of development and relive it all, what would you do differently?” Putting aside the one guy who would’ve escaped everything to move to the mountains with only a fishing pole in hand, the most compelling answer was “well, nothing, really.” While the development of Satisfactory has been fun, challenging and at times turbulent, it has more than anything been an incredible learning process. We’ve been immensely proud of the game since its earliest stages, and we’ve trudged on with the deepest appreciation at how you all have received it. The rewards of this journey lie both in our personal growth and the fantastic people that have cared for our game along the way.
The trust in our process since the beginning allowed the game’s core to form. The application of lessons learned have shaped its shell going forward. And throwing the ball to you all’s court, and having it thrown back with added feedback, passion, critique, jokes and memes has allowed this game to come truly alive. Thus, I personally don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that revisiting the development process is not worth it in any scenario, first and foremost because of the risk of losing the genuinely fantastic Community that has flourished in and around Satisfactory thanks to the exchanges we’ve had with y’all with every iteration, misstep, goof and success we’ve experienced together.
So again, truly, thank you all. If there’s one thing you should take away from this spiel, here you go: 1.0 is our accomplishment.
