In a vicious, focused assault on my free time, automation recreation Satisfactory is getting into full launch as we speak, a full five-and-a-half years after it launched in early entry in 2019. In that point it is added a number of tiers of more and more advanced manufacturing line aims and the elements and instruments wanted to construct them. It’s added vans, trains, nuclear energy, particle accelerators, devoted servers, blueprints so you’ll be able to copy and paste whole elaborate builds, and maybe most significantly of all, zooping. You have not lived until you’ve got zooped, man.
The quick model is there’s means extra to do in Satisfactory than there was to start with, there are far more methods to do these issues, and there additionally far more instruments to dial up the effectivity of the way you’re placing collectively your factories. You’ll nonetheless begin a brand new recreation by slowly hand-assembling iron plates and rods, however earlier than lengthy you may unlock blueprints that allow you to reduce down on the repetition of laying down row upon row of producing, to focus extra on the enjoyable massive image stuff. Or you’ll be able to ignore these blueprints and lay down every bit one after the other. I’m not right here to police your enjoyable.
What I’m right here to do is lay out how Satisfactory has modified in 1.0, particularly since its most up-to-date replace. Most of the issues I discussed within the first paragraph have been within the recreation for years, at this level. So what’s, like, new new in as we speak’s full launch? Here’s a fast overview of the essential stuff.
Performance enhancements and optimizations
Satisfactory is a heavy recreation, a minimum of in sure cases—while you’re standing in the course of a large manufacturing facility with 1000’s of buildings and objects throughout you, or apparently while you’re driving in automobiles, which required some main hit detection processing round foliage and different obstacles. 1.0 consists of some important optimizations that needs to be a blessing on low-end and high-end {hardware}, and even devoted servers, as highlighted on this video:
- DLSS are each up to date to their newest variations
- Satisfactory is now on Unreal 5.3, which provides some efficiency enhancements by itself
- Saving and loading are actually a lot sooner because of the means the sport’s information has been reorganized
- Improvements to texture sizes and plenty of small changes have added as much as decrease VRAM necessities
- Vehicles now not destroy small foliage, which helps decrease traversal stuttering and on devoted servers can decrease RAM utilization from 12+ gigabytes on a save file to a extra modest 5-6 gigs.
- Conveyor belts are “considerably” optimized, pooling collectively whole runs of conveyor belts versus them being divided into sections
Some small (however important) high quality of life options
Getting buildings completely aligned in Satisfactory has all the time been fairly good, however with sufficient little points right here and there to essentially sluggish you down or set off the OCD. Coffee Stain has centered on making issues snap collectively only a bit higher throughout the board. Here are some particular enhancements detailed on this video:
- Conveyor belts have a brand new “straight” construct mode which provides them good 90 diploma corners, they usually look fabulous
- You now not must purpose proper on the enter/output spot on a constructing to connect a conveyor to it; so long as you are aimed on the constructing, your development ought to snap to the logical enter or output.
- When you maintain Control in your keyboard buildings will now snap to foundations or to different buildings, with visible strains indicating what they’re aligning to. These are color-coded to point out enter/output or heart of mass of what is being aligned to.
There’s lastly a use for Somersloops and Mercer Spheres
These two mysterious, magical artifacts tie into the sunshine narrative of Satisfactory. You’ll discover them scattered the world over as you go exploring, and discovering them now triggers some transient voiceovers to tease at a bigger thriller. I have not performed sufficient of 1.0 to understand how a lot “story” there actually is in accumulating tons of them. But extra essential is that they now can be utilized to analysis new tech timber within the MAM (aka the Molecular Analysis Machine). They unlock some fairly tantalizing new tech that I do not actually need to spoil!
The house elevator now expands as you progress
This is a very cool visible contact. Your overarching goal in Satisfactory is to construct some significantly advanced elements that you simply ship off into an area elevator, which visually hangs within the sky above the planet. Now with every new wave of elements you ship off, you’ll be able to see the elevator platform faintly by the ambiance getting greater and greater. There’s simply usually extra of a way of “development” within the 1.0 launch that wasn’t there earlier than. Not having it by no means actually felt like a dealbreaker to me, as a result of Satisfactory is de facto extra about optimization and designing no matter overly bold monstrosity you’ll be able to think about than “ending” or “going to mattress on time.” But it is nonetheless good to have the reward for a job properly achieved, and I think about that’ll be significantly gratifying for people who actually solely need to play by all the development tiers as soon as and really feel like they’ve overwhelmed a marketing campaign.
Player customization is in
Satisfactory has all the time solid you as a anonymous employee bee wearing an orange jumpsuit and opaque-visored helmet, however now not! Now you could be a anonymous employee bee wearing a unique coloured jumpsuit, and select from a number of opaque-visored helmets! There are additionally extra constructing beauty elements and paint choices.
More useful resource nodes throughout the map
Satisfactory’s builders have added extra useful resource nodes to the map, supplying you with extra choices for the place to construct—or the place to mine sources after which ship them again to a centrally situated base with vans, trains, drones, or extraordinarily lengthy conveyor belts. Here’s a picture supplied by Coffee Stain displaying all the brand new node additions:
The variety of new coal nodes and quartz nodes specifically stand out to me, however the quartz additions are literally principally balanced out by a ton of quartz nodes the builders have eliminated. Here are the nodes which can be gone, as of this replace:
There are some new gas varieties particularly helpful for jetpacks and drones
Satisfactory has lengthy had a fabric known as turbo gas. That gas sort can now be transformed into two new higher-end fuels, rocket gas and ionized gas. If you utilize these to energy a jetpack, they provide completely different benefits: the rocket gas helps you to go larger, whereas the ionized gas helps you to go sooner whereas comparatively sipping fuel.
Drones can now use gas along with batteries, they usually’ll additionally carry out otherwise relying on the gas sort.
Tier 9’s Quantum Tech provides new challenges
Watch On
Something tells me developing time crystals goes to tie into Satisfactory’s new story, someway. And you are positively going to wish some huge energy output to have the ability to deal with this tier of development.
