Getting started in Satisfactory can seem a little overwhelming at first. There's a large list of items to build and although the game does ease you into it with more complex machinery and equipment unlocked through milestones, it can still be a bit overwhelming.
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Throw on top of that the often intense crafting recipes alongside the various plants and animals primed to kill you and Satisfactory can seem like quite the difficult game to start off fresh in. But, there are a few things worth keeping in mind if you're a beginner that can make getting started a little easier and smoother. Ensuring that you hit the ground running when your drop pod lands on the planet's surface.
Updated March 3, 2022 by Matthew Mckeown
Satisfactory has been quietly ticking away for the last few months. Updates have landed that added new gear and machines, there was the regular Christmas seasonal event and the devs have continued to hint at further additions, including possibly weather effects.
In the meantime, the amount of information new players need to onboard has only gotten bigger as the need to maximize the potential of your machines from the first moment in Satisfactory becomes ever more important. So to make those first forays into the industrialization of an alien world a little easier, here are some more Satisfactory tips.
15 Aim To Be Self-Sufficient Quickly
Automation is the game in Satisfactory and being able to get things up and running without too much meddling in-between is ideal. For the first few hours of the game, you’re going to be stuck using bio burners that you’ll need to regularly fill up by hand to keep the lights on.
The best thing you can do is to aim to get coal or fuel-based power as quickly as possible. This is the first step to self-sufficiency as the fewer things you need to stop and refill the better. The longer a supply chain to your foundry goes uninterrupted, the more efficient you become as resources climb, allowing you to focus on other projects, scouting new areas, or unlocking better machines.
14 Keep Your Supply Lines Upgraded
One of the simplest Satisfactory beginner tips you can get is to remember to keep your supply lines upgraded. When your factory grounds start to outgrow your initial site, and you have miles upon miles of pipes and conveyor belts stretching everywhere, the quicker you can get items to your machines, the better.
For example, if you stick more machines onto a supply line or fire in some Overclockers to increase production, but the lines aren’t upgraded, the machines will burn through the resources quicker than they can get to them. Which in turn causes production to stop or worse, create havoc with multiple machines if they’re linked together to create complex items. So always make sure to check that your pipes and conveyors are at the highest possible upgrade level when you start tinkering with your machines.
13 Don't Fight, Just Run
There are a lot of nasty critters in Satisfactory that can tear you apart in seconds, light you up like a matchstick, or punt you off a cliff like a screaming human football. Whilst you can murder most of them fairly easily, you're better off running away in most cases.
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Fighting them can be dangerous if you’re not prepared and the drops from aliens, whilst good for biomass burners or for making Medicinal Inhalers later on, aren't worth the hassle. You'll rarely find yourself in need of their organs, and a fight could lead to either death or being knocked off an edge. So if you see something big and ugly running at you, just head the other way.
12 Don’t Stay In One Spot
Probably one of the most important Satisfactory tips is to not stay in one spot for too long. Whilst you can spend hours upon hours setting up a mega-factory in one particular area, it helps to expand your influence over other parts of the map.
As time goes on the types of machines you’ll be making will require more and more resources that local nodes just won’t be able to keep up with, so you’ll have to start shipping more in from further afield. Building up other sites and then linking them together with trains, or Tractors if you’re still really early game is a necessity that you can’t overlook. So start thinking about expanding that supply chain once you get those big machines on the go.
11 Get The Jetpack ASAP
Satisfactory’s map is big, it really cannot be stressed how absolutely, mind-numbingly gigantic it is. All of it is tricky to navigate and filled to the brim with hostile critters guardian exotic resource nodes. Being able to circumvent this easily should be another goal of yours when you’re starting out.
Using foundations to build essentially a sky pavement is an easy workaround, but it leaves the landscape looking ugly. The best fix for this is the Jetpack. Fuel-based, it allows for jump jet style movement that can get you up some fairly tricky slopes, save you from falls and allow for a faster escape from fireball tossing aliens or chittering spider hordes. Whilst the Runners Legs do provide a boost to jump height and speed, the practicality of having a Jetpack safety net on hand will always win out. It’s unlocked at Tier Six so rush the research to get it as quick as you can.
10 Crafting By Hand Is Often Quicker
Although the whole point of Satisfactory is to have row upon row of machines churning out items from crafting recipes, quite often it's quicker to build your gear and items by yourself.
Even though you definitely should have automation by the later stages of the game, early on it's far easier to put the parts you need in your Inventory Build List, pick up their base ores and just churn them out with a Crafting Table. The first tiers of the game can all be unlocked manually this way, so it makes getting into those later milestones and more interesting bits of tech that bit quicker.
9 The HUB Biomass Burners Can Handle A Lot
One of the biggest headaches you will have in Satisfactory, especially early on, is having a stable power supply. Whilst you can't reach fully automated power with coal plants until a much later stage, when you're just starting off you're going to be spending a lot of time with Biomass Burners.
These fume-belching brutes crush up biomass and turn it into power and whilst your initial reaction would be to put lots of them down at once, the two that come with your HUB are usually all you need for quite a long time. These two burners at the back of your spawn point can churn out 20MW each, but if you Overclock them you can stack quite a lot of the early machines onto their power grid.
8 Store Things You Don't Need At The Moment
Dying in Satisfactory is fairly easy, there are a lot of nasty critters, plants and other hazards that can kill you, and dying with an inventory full of items is pretty commonplace. Luckily when your Pioneer bites it you don't lose all your gear.
Instead, any items that you have in your inventory are stored inside a crate that you need to go pick up. This box doesn't despawn, but it can be a massive step backward for your progress, especially through some of the grind-filled stages of the game. So if there's anything you don't need right at that moment, try to leave it in a storage box in a safe spot in your factory.
7 The Xeno-Zapper Is Your Best Friend
Venturing out into the Wilds of Satisfactory is a dangerous affair and often the unprepared Pioneer can find themselves on the end of some nasty creatures' jaws, choked by poison gas or doused with radiation.
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To keep yourself alive out there you need the proper tools and one solid piece of tech that's going to be your best buddy for a large portion of the early game is the Xeno-Zapper. This heavy cattleprod-looking object is exactly what it seems, it's a massive taser that delivers 5 points of electric damage to any alien that comes close. It's also your only form of melee attack as without one your Pioneer is literally defenseless. So always have one handy.
6 Exploration Is A Must
The playground on which you get to explore in Satisfactory is absolutely gigantic. There are plenty of biomes, tunnels, and caves to explore with each housing its own unique resources and rewards to help you expand your factory.
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Getting out and exploring the world of Satisfactory right at the start is an absolute must, whilst it may seem safer to start right where your pod drops you, often you can find more suitable locations by wandering off a little. Also, a lot of late-game resources like Nitrogen, Uranium, and Crude Oil are often tucked away in far-off areas of the map, so getting out to scout your surroundings often early on is always encouraged.
5 Bring Along A Friend
It can take quite a lot of time to get anything done in Satisfactory, often crafting recipes can contain some pretty complicated components, and having another pair of hands to help out is always a good idea especially when you're just starting out.
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Thankfully Satisfactory has co-op play enabled servers, so you can bring in some of your friends to help you get started when it comes to gathering resources, expanding your base, or clearing out forests. The game supports up to four players per server, although there is no official limit, and fans in the Community are hopeful high player number servers are going to be possible.
4 Overclocking Isn't Always A Good Idea
Just how Overclockers are great for improving a PC's performance, they're also one of the best items in Satisfactory, even though they are incredibly hard to come by. These little gadgets are made from Power Slugs and they increase any machine's output up to a factor of three.
The majority of machines in the game can accept an Overclocker but sticking one inside isn't always the best idea. Having an increased output means the power requirements also skyrocket, so if you're going on a spree with Overclockers you could accidentally trip your power grid. So try to find a good balance between a higher clock speed for your equipment and a stable power drain.
3 Conveyor Belts Don't Need To Be Rewired
One of the most satisfying things in Satisfactory is having line after line of Conveyor Belts neatly stacked and arranged with all the items they're carrying going where they're needed. When you first start off you're given MK.1 Belts and whilst you get better ones later, the process of rewiring and upgrading your Conveyor lines can be a complete chore.
One feature most players don't seem to pick up on is that instead of deleting the old belts and putting in a higher grade Mk.2 or Mk.3 Belts, the entire line can just be upgraded at once. To do this select the belt tier you would like then hover the indicator over the belt you want to upgrade, once it highlights the entire belt simply press build and it will upgrade the selected line for you without all those extra steps.
2 You Can Never Have Too Many Fluid Pumps
Although not a major concern for most of the early game, eventually you're going to have to wade into the confusing pipework of fluid management. Whether that's water and fuel for Generators or Crude Oil for Refinery's, keeping a constant flow of liquids is essential in Satisfactory.
You can keep those precious fluids flowing by fitting your pipes with pumps at various stages. Although one is usually enough to cover a substantial chunk of a network sometimes even the smallest dip in the geometry of the game can cause odd drops in flow rates. So a general rule of thumb, try to put at least one pump every hundred feet to ensure a high rate of flow through the entire system.
1 Diversify Your Power Grid
When you start to get into automation in Satisfactory it may seem easy to just connect everything up to one big pile of generators since wattage collectively stacks. But doing so can be a big mistake as having everything on one grid means if just one machine trips a circuit the entire factory is going to go dark.
Try to separate your power requirements into different grids. Have machines with a more intense drain on their own supply and if possible have redundancies in place with the power storage or additional generators ready to go at a moment's notice.
NEXT: Satisfactory: Tips For Getting Started With Particle Accelerators
