Video Game / Satisfactory

Attention, pioneers!

Satisfactory is a first-person Factory-Building Game released into early access by Coffee Stain Studios in March 2019 via the Epic Games Store. Heavily inspired by Factorio, players take the role of a “Pioneer”, an employee of the FicSit Corporation dropped onto an alien world to gather resources and manufacture materials for the as-yet mysterious "Project Assembly". To do so, they'll need to mine ore, smelt ingots, and construct and assemble ever more complex machine components, gradually building a massive factory (or a group of multiple factories) to automate the process and sending ever-increasing quantities of items up a Space Elevator to the waiting FicSit facilities in orbit.

The game can be played solo or in online co-op; there's no hard-coded limit to the number of co-op players, but the developers only seriously tested up to 4 players at a time. Being an early access game, there are still a fair amount of bugs and yet-to-be-added content. The game currently exists in two versions: 'Early Access', which contains the most stable updates, and the 'Experimental Branch', which is used for testing updates before they get pushed into the main game. The developers are aiming for the game's full version release later in 2024.

As of June 8, 2020, the game's Early Access version is also available on Steam, with Experimental following suit shortly after.

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Satisfactory contains examples of:

Tropes A-B

• Action Girl: Although the pioneer is pretty much a blank slate, their character model is quite feminine in appearance despite their bulky suit, and the developers have confirmed that all player-character pioneers are women. Having been dropped on a planet crawling with hostile wildlife, fighting for her survival is a daily occurrence.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Much like its inspiration Factorio, Satisfactory omits some annoying realities of manufacturing for the sake of fun:
  • Conveyors, vehicles, and machinery do not require any maintenance, and conveyors do not require power.
  • Mining, smelting, drilling and/or processing raw materials does not produce unusable waste products - everything produced in Satisfactory has some use, with the notable exception of spent nuclear fuel (see Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay below). Plus, resource nodes are limitless.
  • On a related note, most manufacturing processes are significantly simplified to fit the mechanics of the game - the same smelter will produce iron ingots as well as copper ingots, for example, using only the raw ore as an input. Even late-game processes such as aluminum and nuclear fuel production, while significantly more complex than early-game processes, are mere distillations of their notoriously complicated processes in real life.
  • Unlike Factorio, the pollution produced by your machinery has no effect on the environment and the wildlife is unable to damage your buildings.
  • Radiation exposure simply causes you damage that can be healed by taking medicine or eating food, rather than the long-term degradation it would inflict upon you in reality.
  • The Space Elevator is made from only first tier basic materials and also requires no power, despite the ridiculous leap in technology it represents. Then again, the player is only building a giant clamp to hold the actual space elevator which descends from space.
• After the End: Some details hint that there used to be some kind of civilization on the planet before you came in, such as the fact that some of the arches in the game are visibly decayed, and their internal structure is a clearly non-natural metallic hexagonal framework. Some places also show strange patterns in the ground, of unclear meaning. There are also these alien artifacts you find, never in random places...
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Discussed in the A.I. Limiter part, which is usually used on computer-like electronics; its item description says its purpose is "to control A.I.s and keep them from evolving in malicious ways".
• Alien Sky: The planet you're on, MASSAGE-2(A-B)b, orbits a binary star system and has three moons, one of which is bright enough to provide Hollywood Darkness at night while the other two are much darker despite being several times larger. An alternative interpretation would be that the latter are actually planets, which would make the sky even more alien. In any event, Scenery Porn galore.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Update 3 added inventory shortcuts which show up when looking at an interface requiring items, avoiding the need to pick out the required item from the inventory itself.
  • The June 2020 update makes multiple quickbars available to the player, making it no longer necessary to keep altering the quickbar depending on the what the player is currently doing. Additionally, the manual make times of several items were tweaked to be shorter to reduce frustration. Lastly, CSS were aware of the non-threaded save mechanism causing frustration to players and implemented a ten-second autosave warning so the player will expect the pause and adjust accordingly^note although it's not as bad as the anti-poop-socking issue that appeared last year, it's still annoying as large factories can cause the game to stall for several seconds when saving, causing players to be thrown off their rhythm when fighting or using their jetpack.
  • The initial HUB upgrade phase is a bit of a tedium due to its lack of automation and fairly limited tech tree. Fortunately, there's an option during campaign setup that allows you to skip it entirely and jump straight into unlocking Tier 1 instead since Update 3.
  • The hover pack, being powered solely by your power grid, will stop functioning immediately as soon as you fly too far away from any power poles or powered rails. To prevent Falling Damage, the hover pack stores a tiny amount of power allowing you to slow your fall and safely land on the ground.
  • Zoop build mode, which allows building tileable things such as foundations and walls several at a time in a line, was added to the game in Update 5 solely because the devs themselves have come to realize how tiresome building walls and foundations piece-by-piece are.
  • Miners, conveyor belts, and power poles can be directly upgraded without having to deconstruct the older version, and the older version's materials will be automatically returned to the inventory.
  • Using the chainsaw to cut down a plant will usually also affect other nearby plants, but nut and berry plants are protected from this effect and can only be chainsawed if the player targets them specifically, making it much less likely that you'll accidentally destroy your sources of healing.
• Anti Poop-Socking: Starting with a minor update deployed on July 24th, 2019, the game will display a notification suggesting players to take a break after being played for 2 hours straight and every subsequent 2 hours. This option can be turned off if the player is so inclined, though.
• The Alleged Car:
  • The Cyber Wagon, a joke vehicle modeled on the horrifically ugly Tesla Cybertruck (complete with broken windows). It may be indestructible (though the driver in some cases isn't), so a partial subversion, but good luck getting anywhere quickly on square wheels. Also, its inventory only has a single slot, and can only be accessed from the underside of the vehicle. It does, however, have interesting physics when launched into the air that was sadly patched out in late 2020.
  • Not a joke vehicle, but the Ficsit factory cart certainly fits the bill. It comes in a mini-packed crate that fits in your inventory, and upon being deployed unfolds itself into... a dinky box-car which isn't even as tall as you, and has a frame barely long enough or wide enough to fit your character sitting in a cramped fetal position inside of it. One of its windows is stuck hanging open and flapping about in the wind, and the only thing it has in the way of a horn is a stick-on siren that must be manually attached to - and detached from - the roof of the cart. To its credit, it has incredible acceleration, a good top speed, and can stop on a dime, plus has very responsive turning perfect for winding through cramped FICSIT brand factories... as long as you're on something manufactured, like a foundation or walkway. Once it touches terrain it has the grip of an AE86 on solid ice with worn slick tires. Although to be fair, it's a factory cart. You're not supposed to drive it anywhere other than on paved factory grounds. That's what the dune buggy is for.
• April Fools' Day:
  • For 2021, Coffee Stain Studios slipped several pranks into a seemingly innocuous Update in Experimental- firstly, the players are given a big head. Next, Lizard Doggos are scaled up to be humongous and randomly will have a pioneer helmet on. Then, they scaled down the Curious Creatures to be around the size of a lizard doggo. Lastly, they replaced the hogs with the Walkers from Sanctum. And as icing on the cake, they purposedly reintroduced the typo "error" trolling attempt they made sometime in Update 3. In true April Fools fashion, this backfired on them when unaware players flooded their QA site with bug reports on the above changes.
  • For April Fools 2024, Coffee Stain went with a video that is a Take That! at Nintendo and their Nintendo Direct videos: they had Snutt Treptow speak in mock Swedish (despite Snutt being a native Swedish speaker) overlaid with an English translator copying the Nintendo Direct videos, announcing that the game is coming to the Nintendo Switch, and then showcasing the game running on the Switch... running at a sorry 7 frames per second. The video ends with the hands of a frustrated dev (or tester) flushing the Switch down the toilet.
• Artifact of Attraction: Somersloops and Mercer Spheres periodically emit sound bites implied to be hallucinations encouraging you to take them, such as by affirming that multiple other Ficsit personas are coming to take it, saying that your contract compels you to take it, or that one of your parents has fallen ill to a disease that can only be cured by it. After staying close to an artifact long enough, the sound bites grow impatient and start telling you to "Harvest. It." and to "Comply."
• Artificial Brilliance:
  • Flying Crabs have a pretty devious attack pattern. When triggered, one charges straight at you while another flies a confusing zigzag course and the third circles around you to attack from behind. Good luck keeping track of them all if you stumble into their trap. Thankfully, running away right after triggering their chrysalis sets the swarm on patrol mode where they can be engaged individually, making them much easier to deal with. Also, Coffee Stain has noted that the AI, while surprisingly good, is not in line with what they had envisioned, and thus the patterns will be simplified with Update 6. Instead, the chrysalis will be redone so they won’t be destroyed upon the crabs hatching and will continue spawning flying crabs until they’re destroyed.
  • Stingers behave like ambush predators; the only noise they make is their skittering legs, they'll try to hide behind the scenery until the player passes them, and they prioritize attacking the player in their blindspots. Multiple Stingers will work together to try bringing players down.
• Artificial Stupidity: Lizard doggos sometimes bring you nuclear waste. And as of late their AI seems to have been dumbed down some more so they don't run and hide if you're in danger, instead they often come between you and the hostile you're fighting, and they'll hate you if they're hit by splash damage from being in the line of fire of the fire spitters (ie no fault of your own)- in older versions of the game, they won't hate you if they got hit by enemy damage and will even run and hide if you're engaging hostile fauna, only coming out once the coast is clear.
• Ascended Meme: For a long time, pipes were considered a meme among the community, with every update video containing comments requesting pipes and the game's Discord server bot programmed to respond to any mention of the word 'pipe' with an emoji of a pipe with a red X over it. This meme even spread over to the Factorio developers, who made reference to Satisfactory Pipes in a dev blog about their office file servers. And then Update 3 came along adding pipes out of nowhere.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Nuclear power. The reactors generate a crazy huge amount of power. But they also generate waste that you cannot get rid of. You’re better off sticking with fuel or even coal. Averted with Update 4, which introduces nuclear waste recycling and provides players with an option of either disposing of the recycled waste, or use the recycled product which results in even power but also more potent waste that cannot be recycled.
  • Some alternate recipes look excellent on paper, but in practice have major caveats. One such recipe is the supercomputer alternate "OC supercomputer". While it is the fastest of all three recipes, and only requires a cheap assembler instead of an expensive manufacturer, it is also incredibly wasteful, requiring ludicrous amounts of rare aluminum as well as nitrogen, making its Weighted Point score (a measurement of how much a recipe depletes the map's resources) more than twice as high than the other two.
  • Liquid Biofuel. On paper it is the ultimate form of Biofuel, indeed it has the highest energy per unit and energy per Biomass and in fact equals the energy of Fuel refined from oil. Unfortunately it combines the downsides of both Biomass and liquid fuels. Being a Biomass product you can't automate the collection of its raw material, and being a liquid means it must be packaged - which costs Plastic to make Empty Canisters that are not refunded when the fuel is consumed - to be used in vehicles or Biomass Burners. To add insult to injury despite its higher energy per unit the smaller stack size means more frequent refueling is necessary compared to Solid Biofuel when used in vehicles or Biomass Burners. Liquid Biofuel also cannot power the Chainsaw or Jetpack or used to make Turbofuel. It can be used unpackaged in Fuel Generators but the energy gain compared to burning the required Solid Biofuel in Biomass Burners is so small it's probably not worth the extra expense.^note It takes 90 Solid Biofuel per minute in a Refinery to make 60 cubic meters of Liquid Biofuel per minute. The Solid Biofuel can sustain 22.5 Biomass Burners generating a total of 675 MW. The Liquid Biofuel can sustain 5 Fuel Generators generating a total of 750 MW, a gain of only 75 MW. Then you have to subtract the 30 MW required by the Refinery bringing the net gain down to only 45 MW, and then subtract the energy for the Water Extractor and any Constructors making Solid Biofuel. On top of that Fuel Generators are FAR more expensive to build than Biomass Burners. That said, it does have another use as it's a very efficient jetpack fuel, beating even turbofuel for air time and vertical distance.
  • Some Alternate Recipe seem like a great deal, but are actually worse than it seems. One such is the OC Supercomputer. Being able to make such a complex resource relatively quickly with an Assembler proves Too Good to Be True as this hides that the recipe is horribly inefficient, needing huge amounts of aluminum among other resources. Overall, it depletes the map's resources more than twice as much as the base recipe.
• Beef Gate: The main routes between biomes are almost universally guarded by aggressive wildlife. While basic spitters or a hog or two are manageable with melee weapons, Alpha creatures are virtually impossible to defeat without ranged weaponry, making these routes unavailable until well into the midgame. That said, you can usually build your own roads around the beasts, but since the areas behind them tend to be crawling with similarly dangerous critters, it often won't get you very far anyway^note the only exception is building a road from one starting area to another i.e. from the Rocky Desert to the Northern Forest and/or Grass Fields with the intention of building a second/third factory.
• Big Electric Switch:
  • The Power Switch has one, both on the object itself and in the UI for activating/deactivating it.
  • Another one appears in the UI for Power Poles connected to a power grid that has tripped, and is used to reset the power.
  • The Space Elevator UI also has one, used for launching payloads up the elevator.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Early to mid-game, coal power plants. They generate only a little over two and the half times the power of your starting biomass/biofuel generator. But even when fully overclocked, they're still really frugal when it comes to coal consumption. You can have a set of 4 fully overclocked burners and still have enough coal left over to share with some forges. You can theoretically run 9 fully overclocked coal burners on a stock mark 3 miner over a pure coal vein node, one redditor has 40 coal burners running stock off one fully overclocked Mk.3 miner on a pure coal vein node. Comparatively, fuel generators burn through fuel really quickly when fully overclocked. However, they become viable late-game with the introduction of turbo fuel, although that causes another issue in the terms of getting compressed coal - which is made of sulfur and coal - to the necessary location to be processed. Geothermal generators, while capable of producing four times the power of the starting biomass power supply, cannot be overclocked and there's only so many hot water geysers on the world map. Nuclear generators may sound like a good idea at first, but then you end up having radioactive waste which cannot be disposed of in-game.
    • The difficulty of using coal generators was upped in Update 3 as they now require a constant supply of water to work. Of course, it helps that almost all coal nodes are found near a lake or seaside. The big issue is unlocking the pump technology, and while the burners burn coal slowly, water is an entirely different matter, and getting the coal generators to work reliably (instead of just working and then falling flat when demand for power is pushed just a little) now involves a complex ratio of water pumps to generators^note two fully-overclocked water pumps across two pipes can deliver enough water to twelve generators running at stock. If you factor in fully overclocked generators, it's one fully overclocked pump per to two fully overclocked generators with and some spare change. Also, geothermal has been made unreliable (the power they generate now fluctuate). Likewise, while fuel generators burn quickly when overclocked, the requirement of having a ton of fuel refineries is offset by the usefulness of the waste product, which is useful for rubber and plastic production.
    • Nuclear power has been made more palatable in Update 4. There are now two kinds of rods- Uranium and Plutonium. Uranium waste, i.e. the type that comes out of the nuclear reactors if you give it uranium rods, as well as the type Lizard Doggos bring you, can now be refined into Plutonium rods- and you can sink plutonium rods. On the other hand, Uranium rods generate just a fraction of the power of Plutonium rods, but using the refined Plutonium rods results in Plutonium waste, which is far more potent than Uranium waste and cannot be sunk or refined further. Coffee Stain has upfront said that this design is intentional, and the goal is to let players choose if they want to just get rid of nuclear waste after just using it once at the cost of not being able to run their nuclear plant at full capacity, or if they want absolute power at the cost of permanent radioactive pollution.
  • Even after you get access to liquid fuels Coal remains a practical fuel for your automated vehicles. Unlike liquid fuels, Coal doesn't require packaging and therefore Plastic. And unlike Biomass, Coal can be fully automated. And Coal is the simplest fuel that fits both these criteria. While a stack of Coal doesn't last as long as other higher grade fuels that is a non-issue so long as adequate arrangements are made for automatic refueling. This is subverted because using Coal this way is very inefficient and you would get much more energy out of it by crafting it into Compacted Coal and especially Turbofuel.
  • Foundations. They're just plain building blocks with a square footprint, but if you're planning to set up factories with any degree of style and order, foundations are pretty much mandatory since they provide you with a neat grid pattern on which you can align your machines. They also come in all shapes, types and sizes to give you nearly limitless options for organizing belts and pipes, like running them through the floor beneath your assembly lines, which is impossible to do when you build on natural ground. They're also invaluable for safely bridging wide gaps and ascending vertical spaces while exploring.
  • Belts. Unlocked during the game's tutorial, require no power, can't be destroyed by wildlife, have excellent throughput (especially at the higher tiers), and can be built across almost any terrain. While it's possible to build freight vehicles that require no roads, it's often more efficient to just build a belt all the way back to your base than to set up trucks or trains (and the latter require infrastructure anyway).
  • The tractor, the first available vehicle in the game. It doesn't look like much, but it has a decent speed, a reasonably large trunk and a craft bench at the back, allowing the player to do some on-the-fly material creation.
  • Dune Desert is arguably the least visually impressive biome compared to the Scenery Porn everywhere else, being just a giant expanse of sand dunes with a few rocks here and there. But its vast, almost obstruction-free open space is perfect for building big endgame factories in.
  • Some alternate recipes qualify. One good example is "Steel Rotors", which replaces iron rods and screws in the recipe by steel pipes and wire. While this makes it more expensive, requiring you to spend some coal, it has the enormous advantage of being the same ingredients as stators, hence making you able to manufacture rotors and stators on the same chain. Even better, both steel rotors and base stators have the same output amount, allowing you to feed the output directly into an assembler producing motors.
  • Similarly, "Steel Rods" and "Steel Screws" switch iron for steel but give off a large quantity of output out of relatively few machines.
• Bottomless Pit: Any part of the map that isn't bordered by water drops into the Void, an abyss of unfathomable depth that eventually disappears in the mist far below. The entire south and southeast of the map are subject to this, plus a small part far to the northeast.
• Bubblegloop Swamp: The Swamp is a biome that can be found at the east of the map. It is a dangerous area with many Stingers and Poison Pillars, but it is an important resource-rich location nonetheless. It used to have several oil nodes, befitting its tar aesthetics, however later patch retooled it to have large amounts of bauxite instead, as well a hidden uranium node.

Tropes C-F

• Calling a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Dynamite charges are called Nobelisks in the game.
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": Those rhino/bull-like animals that charge you on sight are called "Fluffy-Tailed Hogs".
• Cap:
  • A Mk.3 miner on a pure resource node can extract up to 1200 ore/minute when overclocked, but the fastest belt (Mk. 5) can only draw 780 ore/minute from it, meaning it's currently impossible to make full use of Mk. 3 miners, potentially limiting your production to some degree. This will most likely cease to be a problem if and when Mk.6 belts get added, or Mk.3 miners get equipped with a second output port.
  • Unreal Engine, which Satisfactory runs on, has a cap on the number of objects that can be loaded in the world, which when exceeded will cause the game to crash. The cap is quite high - just over 2 million objects - so it's unlikely to be a problem unless you're attempting to build a map-spanning gigantic base with mile-long conveyors everywhere and maxing out every single resource node.
• Cats Are Mean: Turning on the Arachnophobia mode in the game options causes the previously giant spiders to have corrupted cat heads, invoking this trope as they still try to kill you regardless.
• Cave Behind the Falls: One of such can be found in the Swamp. It contains one of the rare uranium nodes.
• Chainsaw Good: Both played straight and subverted. You can get a chainsaw once you unlock both the tool and biofuel after completing Hub Level 5 (i.e. complete Tier 0). Chainsaws are a godsend against large trees that could not be removed bare-handed, allowing one to properly clear out an area to set up a proper base (and harvest wood and leaves, and even gain some limestone and mycelia, while at it). Subverted in that they cannot be used as a weapon and do zero damage against hostile wildlife.
• Continuing is Painful: Respawning only restores 30% of your health and deprives you of everything in your inventory including weapons and ammo. All the stuff you were carrying when you died remains there and can be picked up (it even gets a map marker), but it can still be a pain in the ass, especially since whatever killed you will still be in the area when you return. Healing items are also few and far between, so you first need to scrounge up some of those before you can even consider facing your killer. And to rub salt on your wound, if you had a doggo with you, it'd be either dead or if it survived the encounter, the doggo will forget you due to what is likely a glitch. You're usually better off just reloading your last autosave.
• Cool Car: The Explorer is a fast and nimble dune buggy that can climb almost any incline, allowing you to travel across the map quickly and safely. It also has a decently sized storage compartment that comes in handy when you're about to set up a new outpost far away.
• Cool Sword: The Xeno Basher is an electrified, partially collapsible melee weapon that upgrades the Xeno Zapper, which is just a glorified cattle prod.
• Cool Train: With the 'end of June' update, you unlock the ability to build electric trains and stations between your factories once Project Assembly Phase 3 is completed and research tiers 6 and 7 are unlocked.
• Crazy Cat Lady: Yes, Doggo hoarding is a plausible mechanic with benefits. Hence the Doggo farms that effectively turn players into this.
• Crippling Overspecialization: The factory cart is reasonably fast, its tiny size allows it to squeeze through all but the smallest openings, and its ability to turn on a dime makes it even better at navigating tight spaces. In short, it's perfectly suited for zipping around factories; as in "large arrays of machines standing on concrete foundations" factories. If even one of its wheels so much as smells the proximity of ground that isn't concrete, you might as well be driving on wet soap.
• Cute Machines: The deployment animation of portable miners is quite adorable to behold.
  • As of Update 4, we have drones that resemble cute robotic moths.
• Cycle of Hurting: Fluffy-tailed hogs' ram attacks have a powerful knockback effect that can send you flying a considerable distance, and with the hog chasing after you while you're airborne, it's painfully common to suffer another hit the moment you touch the ground.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: As of Update 6, sign settings are automatically saved when exiting the configuration interface, instead of via a "Save Settings" button as before. Said button has now been renamed and instead reverts the settings you've made. Cue many a re-configuration having to be made after clicking that button out of habit.
• Deadly Gas: Serves as an environmental hazard in numerous areas, either spawned by plants, weird stone formations, or from no discernable source at all. The former can be removed with explosives, but the latter two are impossible to get rid of so far.
  • As of Update 8, the weird stone formations can be removed with explosives as well.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • A meta example on the developer's part. The first iteration of the anti poop-socking function was pushed out in an out-of-band update, ostensibly due to pressure from Epic and their parent Tencent, to ensure that the game can be sold in China where this feature is mandatory for all games released in the country. It was poorly thought out to say the least, as when it popped up, it could potentially kill the player due to locking up their controls until they closed a notification that they had been playing for too long. It was rectified a week later.
  • A player's factory will inadvertently become this if the player only thinks in the short term and didn't consider long-term factory design before building. Cue factories with No OSHA Compliance and conveyor belts criss-crossing all over the place. This can even occur to players who plan long-term due to new features and recipes being added to the game from time to time, as well as changes to existing recipes between major updates and in an extreme case with the beacon, removal of a set of recipes.
  • In-universe, Ficsit's anti-waste program awards Pioneers for using it, which incentivizes them to produce items for the sole purpose of throwing them out.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • Setting up drone ports requires a lot of expensive late-game items, and the drones themselves require a steady stream of batteries, which will require you to balance your precious supplies of sulfur and aluminum between batteries and everything else; you'll also have to dedicate a drone to deliver batteries to your other ports. Once you do, you'll find that drones can cover vast expanses of the map without any additional infrastructure, and despite their limited carrying capacity their speed lets them move more material than you'd expect. This makes them perfect for moving low-volume, late-game items such as Turbomotors and nuclear fuel cells between factories.
  • Wasteless nuclear power since Update 4 is extremely complex, requiring massive and expensive assembly lines that are also nuclear and including all kinds of buildings in the game, accelerators included. However, if you use all the uranium you can as efficiently as possible, then you can get enough power from it to literally process the whole map and then some, without ever worrying about waste buildup if built correctly.
  • Turbofuel isn't as complicated as Nuclear power but still a step up from regular Fuel. On top of the normal Fuel refining process you will need to bring Compacted Coal, which itself is made from Coal and Sulfur in Assemblers, to your Fuel plant in order to make Turbofuel. Your reward is more than double the power output from your fuel, in fact more power than if you had instead used the Coal or Compacted Coal in Coal Generators rather than as ingredients for Turbofuel.
  • Geothermal power is found at the end of the Caterium chain and is very resource-expensive to setup as it requires supercomputers. It's also fluctuating over time. This is the price to pay for the boon of getting an energy source that requires no maintenance of any sort whatsoever.
  • "Pure Recipes" are a class of alternate recipes for most resources that allow you to use a refinery with water instead of a smelter or constructor for extra processed items per raw resources. Refineries are energy and space-intensive, but given that water is essentially infinite if you build close to the sea, then it becomes appealing in the late game to pay the price to get more bangs from your bucks out of your ores, up to 2,5x more for copper.
  • "Recycled Rubber" and "Recycled Plastic" are two recipes that are difficult to set up, requiring a complex feedback loop on top of having to wrestle with oil in general, but they are by far the most efficient ways to make rubber and plastic resource-wise when combined with "Diluted Fuel".
• Dogs Are Dumb: The Lizard Doggos do try to help the player once they're tamed, but they're not particularly smart. They can easily fall to their deaths if they walk off cliffs, they can outright forget that you've tamed them (though that is likely a glitch), and their most infamous trick is fetching lethally radioactive waste and bringing it to their master.
• Double Unlock: Prior to Update 3, rewards from scanning objects at the M.A.M. would not be made immediately available, but once you chose your reward (in the case of a hard drive) or are told what your reward is, you will still need to send up the requested items through the Hub Terminal to fully unlock them. Update 3 changes this so that objects are immediately available upon research completion at the M.A.M.
• Dungeon Bypass: Need to get somewhere but can't find an accessible natural path? Just grab a ton of concrete and build your own road with foundations and similar building blocks. Caves are the only places you can't reach this way, at least not without glitching through the terrain, and that comes with its own host of problems.
• Easy Logistics: Mostly played straight.
  • Ore can be found in two forms: small nodes that must be mined by hand and eventually deplete; and large, flat deposits (usually with one of the aforementioned nodes on top) that never run out. Automated miners can only use the latter (after breaking the node on top). Furthermore, processing and smelting ores doesn't produce waste byproducts such as red mud and slag like they would in real life.
  • As with Factorio, conveyor belts and portable miners do not need power to operate. Larger machines do, but rarely is a lack of power generation a serious concern once you've left behind the biomass burner stage.
• Easter Egg:
  • Hidden in a random difficult-to-access cave can be found a enemy unit from Coffee Stain's earlier game, Sanctum.
  • Hidden under the Electric Locomotive is a sticker with the face of Swedish sportscaster Leif “Loket” Olsson on it, giving more context to the description (which claimed that the train was nicknamed ”Leif” for its reliability). “Loket” means “The Locomotive” in Swedish.
  • Product Placement: If you put one FICSIT Coupon into the Resource Sink, it unlocks the Tesla Cybertruck in the Awesome Shop.
  • The toilet contains a vandalized poster advertising/mocking the Free-to-play game The Cycle.
  • If you click on the graph that shows on power pole several times in rapid succession, you get an Orange Screen of Death on the graph window admonishing you for abusing FICSIT property and threatening you with disciplinary action. Apparently, the rapid clicking is in-game representation for Percussive Maintenance to the equipment...
• Eternal Engine: What you'll eventually end up with. And a literal one at that, since your machines need no maintenance and your resources never run out.
• Excuse Plot: The current Early Access plot consists of little more than "a MegaCorp found a world with plentiful resources and dropped you onto it to exploit them. Now go and and build badass factories to make it happen. And mind the wildlife."
• Fall Damage: Present but rarely a problem. You can fall quite a distance without taking damage at all, but even if you pass this threshold, it's usually nothing critical unless you were almost dead to begin with. The Blade Runners equipment upgrade makes fall damage even less of a hassle, and once you have the jetpack you can jump down from pretty much anywhere (assuming the jetpack is fueled).
  • As an Anti Frustration Feature, if you are at full health, you can fall any distance without dying. You'll be almost dead, but so long as you make sure to consume some healing items before trying a risky bit of platforming, you can fall a hundred feet or a thousand and walk away.
• Featureless Protagonist: The Player Character is simply known as "the Pioneer", their helmet always hides their face, and they never make as much as a peep. All one can glean from their appearance is that there's probably a woman under that suit, judging by the body shape.
• Flower Mouth: Non-Flying Birds are small, harmless birds that can be seen waddling around in many biomes. Periodically, they stop and their beak splits into four while they gaze upwards. It seems to also be a literal case of this trope, since they are mimicking flowers for insects to try to land on in this state.
• Forced Tutorial: Averted as of Update 3. Unlike Factorio, which forces you to start at the very bottom of the Tech Tree, Satisfactory allows you to skip the six HUB upgrade phases that serve as this game's tutorial, letting you jump straight into automated production. All it takes is checking a box during campaign setup. Needless to say, this is particularly appealing to experienced players. This was only added with Update 3 however, so prior to this the trope is played straight.
• Fungus Humongous: The Blue Crater biome's flora consists almost entirely of fungi of various sizes, some of which are large enough to serve as tree analogues.
• Fun with Acronyms: All over the place.
  • The heart of your factory is the HUB (Habitat and Utility Base).
  • Research is done in the MAM (Molecular Analysis Machine).
  • A lot of building components are only available through the AWESOME (Anti-Waste Effort for Stress-Testing of Materials on Exoplanets) Program.
• Funny Background Event: The robotic arm that (un)packages fluids in a Packager will occasionally get stuck, causing a bulge to form in the hose behind it before violently coming loose soon after, spilling fluid all over. Fortunately, this doesn't affect the gameplay - no actual fluid is lost and production isn't interrupted.

Tropes G-O

• Gentle Giant: The largest creatures on the planet, like the Curious Creature and that weird flying ray-thing, are universally docile.
• Giant Flyer: Your op zone is home to a handful of gigantic manta ray-like creatures that slowly cruise through the sky, accompanied by a shoal of smaller animals. They're completely harmless, but unlike other world objects at their height they're actually physical objects, so of course players found a way to get up there for some sky ray riding.
• Giant Spider: One type of enemy, usually found in caves. Since Spiders Are Scary, the game has an "Arachnophobe" setting in the menu that turns them into killer kittens instead. Given how nightmarish these critters are designed, even non-arachnophobes might feel tempted to check this option^note However, turning on "Arachnophobe" setting will invoke the Cats Are Mean trope instead.
• Green Hill Zone: The Grasslands are the recommended starter biome for new players thanks to abundant biomass, large open areas ideal for inefficient newbie factory layouts, and low levels of hostile creatures. However, most resource nodes are impure, there's only one coal deposit (although that at least is pure) and barely any water, making coal power challenging to set up without exploring neighboring biomes.
• Hammerspace: The pioneer's inventory is explicitly referred to as a pocket dimension whose size can be "inflated" to allow for more stuff to be carried around.
• Holiday Mode: The game basically celebrates two holidays: Christmas, and April Fool's:
  • The December 2020 update introduce the Ficsmas event, which requires the player to farm for presents to build holiday themed decorations and unlock a new holiday Tech Tree, and ultimately, unlock a special Christmas tree constructor that spews out presents. Additionally, your power poles will now be decorated with Christmas ornaments and your lizard doggos will all have reindeer antlers and a red shiny nose. The 2021 update extended the Ficsmas event slightly further to introduce three different varieties of fireworks^note Snutt later revealed that the purpose for fireworks was to test a new interface for selecting ammo type. The interface was then extended to the rebar gun, rifle and detonator in Update 6.
  • As mentioned above, the April 1st 2021 update would see the introduction of the April Fool's Day holiday mode. No new holiday content was added for April 1st, 2022.
• Hypocritical Humor: 'Ficsit Does Not Waste!' is the company motto, but their Anti-Waste Effort for Stress-Testing of Materials on Exoplanets, or AWESOME, Program incentivizes waste. Players are rewarded for throwing items into the AWESOME Sink with coupons that allow them to unlock new schematics, with more-refined or complex items being worth more 'points' and every ticket requiring more points than the previous one. This means many players eventually set up entire manufacturing complexes dedicated to producing extremely complex machinery just to throw it into a giant industrial grinder for rewards from the anti-waste program.
• If You Can Read This: The game has many small print text on the boilerplate of the machinery in the configuration screen that is barely legible^note For example, the print on the boilerplate of the power generators and power poles read “Oh snap! You’ve Got The Power!”. Also, many of the model numbers printed on the machinery are puns related to their functionality, in leet speak.
• Improvised Weapon:
  • Unlike the game's actual weapons like the Xeno Zapper, the Xeno Basher and the Rifle, the Rebar Gun is essentially an industrial stapler pressed into the role of an impromptu one-handed crossbow. It needs to be manually reloaded and drawn after every shot and shoots Painfully Slow Projectiles that suffer from heavy projectile drop, making it difficult to line up shots on targets that aren't charging straight at you. And don't even try hitting anything at mid-range or beyond.
  • The Nobelisk is meant for clearing boulders and dangerous flora, but players often use it quite effectively as grenades/sticky bombs against critters.
• Inconveniently-Placed Conveyor Belt: As your factory grows in size and complexity, traversing it will probably start to feel like running an obstacle course made of conveyor belts unless you did a fair bit of planning beforehand. Eventually mitigated by the ability to build elevated walkways, and later, overhead conveyor belt systems and a jetpack.
• An Interior Designer Is You: The AWESOME Shop provides various decoratives such as walls, windows, catwalks, stairs, etc. allowing you to build something that resembles an actual factory rather than a bunch of machines connected together by conveyor belts. Update 5 makes the interior designer's life even easier by getting rid of the color gun and allowing you to recolor things without dependence on ammo, vastly improving the clearance mechanics - no longer preventing you from placing things within a machine's personal space anymore - as well as introducing structural beams, signage, and many more wall and floor variants.
• Jet Pack: One of the pieces of personal equipment available in later tech tiers.
• Kill It with Fire: Used against the player; several hostile creatures attack players by spitting fireballs.
• King Mook: Most wildlife species have an Alpha variant that is larger, deals much more damage, has additional attack patterns and is mostly immune to the usual tricks and tactics you can use against their lesser kin.
• Last Chance Hit Point: Fall damage is capped at 97 out of 100 HP. Therefore, if you forgot to implement OSHA compliance in your factory and end up falling from a 600 meter tall platform, you will not die — but you'd better get your health back to 100 HP if you intend to survive another fall. And of course, this limit does not apply to environment, creature or industrial accident damage.
• Lighter and Softer: When compared to its inspiration Factorio. Your goal is the same - exploit the natural resources of a beautiful planet for some obscure industrial purpose - but Satisfactory factories don't produce actual pollution, resources are limitless, the wildlife only consists of scattered creatures that attack on sight instead of organized swarms that actively seek you out, your structures can't be damaged at all, and with a bit of planning and effort you can make your factories both efficient and very pleasant to look at without destroying too much of the gorgeous environment. Of course, with the game still being in Early Access, it remains to be seen how much of this will change over time.
• Mad Libs Dialogue: Hanging out near a Mercer Sphere or a Somersloop will eventually trigger a parody dialogue from ADA, which comes across as a botched attempt from FICSIT to manipulate the Pioneer's feelings:
  Relaying message: "Hello, this is {% MATERNAL_FIGURE %}. I have taken ill and need your help to find a cure. Doctors say that the only remedy is alien artifacts."
• Mascot Mook: The adorable Lizard Doggo became an instant hit with fans the moment it appeared for barely a second in an early trailer, and has more or less become the game's official mascot since then.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Massage's critters combine traits of numerous terrestrial animals in them, most notably the aptly-named Lizard Doggo (a Spaniel-sized dog with scaly reddish plating) and the Curious Creature with its avian head on what looks like the body of a whale, walking around on four extremely thin and pointy legs that look vaguely insectoid or crustacean.
• Money Sink: Update 3 introduces a money sink of sorts called the AWESOME Sink^note Anti-Waste Effort for Stress-Testing of Materials on Exoplanets to let you get rid of excess materials in exchange for tickets that can be redeemed for items ranging from trinkets of little to no use to items crucial for keeping the factory tidy. Nuclear waste and plutonium waste cannot be disposed that way, but the former may be transformed into plutonium fuel rods, which can be sunk.
• Mook Maker: As of Update 6, Flying Crab Hatchers continuously spawn Flying Crabs when approached until you destroy them. Previously, they would just explode into three Flying Crabs.
• Mundane Made Awesome: The Update 3 announcement trailer somehow manages to make pipes feel like the most awesome thing in the history of mankind, partly by making them seem like a divine gift from heaven, followed by examples of all the cool stuff you can build with them.
  • Done again with the first Update 5 teaser, using orchestral music and dynamic camera shots to reveal a highly requested feature: ramp railings!
• No "Arc" in "Archery": Averted. The Rebar Gun (basically an improvised crossbow) shoots spiked rebar in a very pronounced ballistic arc. It's ill-advised to use it against anything that isn't standing still or charging straight at the shooter.
• No OSHA Compliance:
  • You can potentially build your factory as death traps, with conveyor belts snaking all over the place, stairs that do not have handrails, random holes on the floor, and not have any walls, that players can easily just fall out.
  • Crossing over into Too Dumb to Live, Nobelisk consists of a large explosive mining charge carried in the right hand and its detonator carried in the left. So, what does the Pioneer do with both their hands full after throwing a charge? They whack the detonator with another hunk of high-ex material. Then again, high explosives are supposed to be absolutely safe and completely impossible to detonate if they are not armed and ready.
• Notice This: All ore nodes periodically shine, which may help finding them. Uranium nodes and veins additionally glow in the dark.
• Not the Intended Use:
  • The Jihaddi Tractor tactic (which takes a page out of the Battlefield 1942 trolling playbook) weaponizes the Tractor in a very creative and explosive way, when on its own the Tractor is harmless (and in fact, not meant to be used in that way at all).
  • Pipes without indicators can make for some really nice-looking cylindrical support pillars.
  • Blank signs with a white (or colored) background can be used as light strips and Tron Lines. As of Update 8, which upgraded the game to Unreal Engine 5, signs and billboards now also illuminate their surroundings thanks to the Lumen global illumination system. In fact, they provide enough illumination to rival actual light fixtures, which become Awesome, but Impractical in comparison - unlike lights, signs don't require any power and are much slimmer and easier to integrate into the surrounding architecture.
  • Want a cheap way to get rid of excess water clogging up your aluminum refineries? Pipe it to a limestone node and turn it into concrete using the "Wet Concrete" alternate recipe, then destroy the concrete in an AWESOME Sink.
  • Turbomotors and supercomputers are late-game products required in a number of highly complex recipes, but most players end up using them primarily to feed them into their AWESOME Sinks for tickets due to these items' very high point value.
  • It was discovered that Hypertubes not only increase the player's velocity when they enter the tube, they also preserve the player's existing velocity. This led to the invention of the aptly-named Hypertube Cannon, a device that uses short segments of tube chained together (so exiting the first tube immediately fires you into the second, and so on) to launch the player at whatever speed and angle is desired^note The direction is controlled by where the last tube in the chain is pointing; speed control can be achieved by entering further up or down the chain. Just be prepared for a bit of Save Scumming if your first launch goes wrong (which it almost certainly will), and remember to bring a jetpack or build a landing pad at the other end if you intend to survive the trip. A related concept is the Hypertube Cyclotron, where the player is fed into a series of cannons over and over by a loop until they move so quickly that they glitch out of the pipe at ludicrous speed into an "exit" hypertube that brings them to their destination (although due to the high speeds involved, these typically need to be built all the way). Such a device can allow you to go from one corner of the map to another in seconds.
  • Mk.4 and especially Mk.5 conveyor belts are effective people movers - running on a Mk.5 belt wearing Blade Runners allows you to reach a speed of roughly 104 km/h, and jumping off one in a jetpack is an effective, cheap medium-distance alternative to the Hypertube cannon mentioned above, since the jetpack maintains your momentum.
  • Another unintended use for Hypertubes: In order for players traveling through Hypertubes to pass through Hypertube Wall and Floor Holes, which can be placed anywhere on a wall/floor, player collision detection is disabled while in a Hypertube. Entirely. Which means Hypertube-traveling players will clip through not only walls and floors, but anything - rocks, trees, mountainsides, ground, everything. This can be heavily exploited; shove a Hypertube into a mountainside and enter it - you'll pop out "inside" the mountain and, if you're not unlucky and fall into the void and die, essentially be behind the terrain. Which opens up for all sorts of shenanigans such as finding and getting into secret caves easily, completely bypassing any boulders blocking the entrance. More importantly, you can build here, hiding whatever you build from the outside. Tired of those hideous power poles and power lines criss-crossing all over the map? Bury them underground! Or go all the way and build your entire factory underground, accessed through Hypertubes popping out of the ground Mario style.
  • The best use for color cartridges, normally employed in decoration? They are the third best non-radioactive vehicle fuel, and unlike the top two (batteries and packaged turbofuel) it is available from Tier 2 and easy to craft: you'll likely have collected enough petals to fill the vehicle while getting materials for biomass. Nerfed in Update 6, as flowers can no longer be collected for petals.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: The AWESOME Shop, constructed by the planet's only known inhabitants (or inhabitant if you're not playing a network game), is covered in screens boasting it's 'the best store on the planet!'

Tropes P-Z

• Patchwork Map: The map is divided into over 20 very distinct biomes that exist right next to each other with little in terms of transition. Don't be surprised to step out of a lush forest straight into a Thirsty Desert.
• Pet the Dog: How one befriends Lizard Doggos: Drop a paleberry in front of the doggo and back off. Then wait for the doggo to come forward to eat the berry. Then you may approach slowly ^note do not run towards it! and pet the doggo to claim it as your pet. As a pet, the doggo will occasionally bring you gifts- sometimes very rare items like purple slugs.
• Pipe Maze: Working with late-game recipes involving multiple fluids being pumped back and forth between refineries and blenders can very easily result in this if you don't plan the layout beforehand.
• Player Nudge: Automation isn't instantly unlocked; you have to feed your first machines by hand and craft some parts. This helps the player understand how important it is to have a passive income of parts rather than crafting everything. The last piece of automation that stays missing is power. As your factory grows, you'll need to feed ever more biomass burners by hand, until you finally unlock coal power, which can be set up and forgotten.
• Plunger Detonator: The Nobelisk Detonator is one of these, despite the fact that the Nobelisks themselves are futuristic wireless explosives. The detonator has to be equipped to place the Nobelisks, and multiple can be placed to set off simultaneously by "reloading" the detonator. If the player hits detonate immediately after a reload, the Pioneer will mash down the detonator with the Nobelisk in her hand... good thing Nobelisks don't arm until thrown.
• Portable Hole: Of sorts. There are floor holes for conveyor lifts to pass through, as well as floor and wall holes for pipes and Hypertubes, which can be built on any floor or wall just like any other object, and dismantling one leaves the floor/wall intact. The conveyor lift floor hole in particular even appears as a solid black hole that items disappear into/pop out of.
• Power at a Price: While plutonium fuel rods can be sunk to permanently destroy the uranium waste they are created with, they may also be used in another round of nuclear power plants. Plutonium burns twice as long as uranium, but the caveat is that it produces plutonium waste instead, which is twenty times more radioactive than uranium waste and cannot be processed nor sunk in any way. As a result it will inevitably build up, hopefully in a storage far from anything important.
• Power Source: Update 2 made nuclear reactors available as a power source. Reactors produce the most power of all the power generators available, but you’ll be hard pressed to deal with all the (potentially damaging) radioactive waste they produce (25 barrels every 5 minutes).
  • As of Update 4, it's now possible to process the Uranium Waste into a form that is safely disposable in the AWESOME Sink (Plutonium Rods), making nuclear power more tenable. That said, you can throw those rods back into the reactor to maximize your power output, though the waste produced by doing that is even more dangerous and cannot be disposed of at all.
• Punny Name: Nobelisks are compact explosives with a cylindrical casing. Alfred Nobel's most famous invention was dynamite, a compact explosive with cylindrical casing.
• Ramming Always Works: The "fluffy-tailed hog" attacks players by ramming them. Be careful near cliffs.
  • Sadly, does not work to your advantage, because ramming does zero damage to creatures. Even if you've got them stuck under your vehicle's wheels for the last mile or so, they'll get up as if nothing happened. It sure helps stun-lock them, though. Ramming with a tractor rigged with nobelisks, on the other hand...
• Random Number God:
  • The three rewards you get for scanning a salvaged hard drive are determined at random the moment you insert the hard drive and hit the scan button. This makes Save Scumming extremely tempting since if you get three rewards you don’t like, you can always reload the save from before you insert the hard drive to try to change the three rewards.
  • A tamed Lizard Doggo will randomly 'generate' items in its inventory slot. A lot of the time they pick up things like ore and food, but if you're lucky they can find a power slug... and if you're unlucky, they'll happily find you some nuclear waste.
• Refining Resources: The main point of the game is building machines to do this for you.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: The Lizard Doggo (yes, that's actually what it's called). It's the only tameable lifeform on the planet, and it basically is a reptilian dog with big floppy ears.
• Ridiculously Fast Construction: Hand-crafting materials is far faster than automating the process—but of course you can only craft one type of item at a time, and you've got other things to do. Also, your build tool can construct everything from a storage container to the Space Elevator's base station in just a few seconds.
• Rollercoaster Mine: Given how hilly and mountainous much of the map is, your railway network may very well end up resembling this. Unless you build it high up in the sky with no inclines whatsoever.
• Save Scumming: A very viable strategy in the game, mainly to beat the Random Number God issue mentioned above, but also so that if you engage in any risky activity (like going up against a pack of firespitters) and fail, you can get back everything quicker.
• Scenery Porn: Every biome of the planet you're on is gorgeous.
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: Plasma Spitters don't care if there's something in their line of fire before shooting their plasma balls, and said plasma balls can hit other creatures. Careful movement makes you able to exploit this to use nearby enemies as meat shields for you.
• Shaped Like Itself:
  • The official wiki describes the Lake Forest biome as "a forest with a big lake in the middle".
  • The tooltip for water reads "It's water."
• Shock and Awe: Both available melee weapons are electricity-based. Sadly, they don't stun targets they hit.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Blader Runner is of course a reference to the movie of the same name.
  • A secret addition in Update 3 was Elon Musk's cybercar, complete with smashed window.
  • The toilet contains a poster advertising/mocking the free-to-play game The Cycle.
  • The description for the snowman during the Ficsmas event is a hilariously cynical one to Frozen.
  Do you wanna build it? You will finally have a friend!
  Disclaimer: Is not actually your friend.
  • You get one of five random quotes when opening the Ficsmas gifts, including but not limited to "Merry Christmas, ya filthy animal".
• Sickly Green Glow: Uranium and plutonium products are green, and glow in the dark.
• Sigil Spam: The FICSIT logo is on almost everything you build. Also expect to see the logo printed somewhere on almost every part you produce that's more advanced than an ingot or plate. It even extends to the UI - the stylised checkmark in the FICSIT logo is used for regular checkmarks in UI elements such as checkboxes and OK buttons. And if you still think there aren't enough FICSIT logos in your factory, as of Update 5 you can plaster them all over it using signs, which include both the full logo and the checkmark as selectable icons and backgrounds.
• Space Elevator: An integral part of the game's Excuse Plot. All milestones past Tier 2 are tied to you sending more and more complex industrial products into orbit in service to Ficsit, which in turn unlocks more blueprints for you to construct even more advanced stuff.
• Sprint Shoes: One of the pieces of personal equipment you can unlock and build is the Blade Runner (clearly named after Blade Runner), which increases movement speed, jump height, and reduces fall damage.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Why the Nobelisk exists. Technically it's used to clear out rocks in the game, but can stack, it does damage enemies with Splash Damage, and is a Sticky Bomb- there's nothing stopping you from peppering a trapped enemy with them and then setting them off, or covering a tractor from top to bottom with them and then sending it headfirst into an enemy, and setting them off on contact.
• Super-Persistent Predator: It's unclear if fluffy-tailed hogs are actually predators, but they're both relentlessly aggressive and impossible to escape from on foot once they have you in their sights. Sprinting away from a hog only makes it easier for it to punch your spine out through your chest. The real predators like spitters are even worse thanks to their ranged attacks. Animals will eventually break off pursuit, but the distance you need to put between you and them is so long that only an off-road vehicle gives you a chance of making it out alive.
• Super Spit: Spitters attack by spitting fireballs at you from afar. Alpha Spitters launch an entire barrage of explosive fireballs with every attack.
• Technology Porn: The whole point of the game is to turn the game world into this, with vast arrays of lovingly animated machines going about their business, supplied through an intricate network of conveyor belts, pipelines and autonomous vehicles. Most animations are reduced past a certain distance to keep the frame rate from dying, but the rendering distance is long enough to provide some spectacular views of automated factories, assuming you're good enough to get them set up first. The patch 4 teaser is entirely this, consisting of close-ups of the new Blender building and its many mechanical arms in intricate operation.
• Tech Tree: Tiers contain milestones, and each milestone unlocks new things to build. Higher tiers are unlocked by sending materials up the Space Elevator to complete phases of Project Assembly.
  • Update 3 converted the existing research process (involving performing research at the research station and then unlocking it at the HUB) into a new series of tech trees in and of itself.
• Title Drop: The awards unlockable in the Awesome Shop come in three tiers of increasingly less disparaging descriptions of your work, with the highest being "Satisfactory".
• Top-Heavy Guy: The Curious Creature concentrates about 90% of its body mass in its upper half, with the lower half consisting of four spindly legs that shouldn't be able to support its weight; even less so on Massage, a world with slightly stronger gravity than Earth.
• Tube Travel: The aptly-named Hyper Tubes, which are a late-game invention that allows the player to zoom around through a plastic tube at high speed without fear of angering the wildlife, making it useful for very large or spread-out facilities.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay:
  • Nuclear power plants generate nuclear waste – which, like the raw materials and fuel itself, is very deadly to be around. Before update 4 there was no official way to get rid of it; you could only stash it away in a very faraway place, just like in Real Life. Update 4 added a loophole to get rid of it by reprocessing it into plutonium fuel rods that can be fed to nuclear plants or disintegrated in the AWESOME sink, but not without caveats: it's a very expensive process that requires lots of parts, many different materials and a particle accelerator, which is the most expensive machine in the entire game, and if you dare use plutonium fuel to power your nuclear plants, you're going to have to deal with even more dangerous, actually for real undestroyable plutonium waste.
  • Update 3 and pipes brought a little bit more reality, as coal generators and nuclear power plants now require constant supplies of water to work, oil refineries produce waste byproducts, and pipes themselves require pumps in order to transport liquid uphill.
• Unobtainium
  • Massage doesn't have gold on the surface, however it has Caterium, a gold-like metal with similar properties such as a high conductivity for electric currents and heat.
  • SAM (Strange Alien Metal) ore can be found accross the map. It's a glossy black metal with veins of changing colors. It is currently useless, but will be used in the full release of the game.
• Unstoppable Force Meets Immovable Object: The Pressure Conversion Cube component is designed to act as an Immovable Object to the Unstoppable Forces of unstable matter, by converting the outgoing force into internal pressure, thus containing the immense energy to be utilized in a safe and controlled manner. They're mainly used to contain the extremely dense Nuclear Pasta, but also to contain dangerously high concentrations of other matter, such as nitrogen gas in high-performance Turbo Pressure Motors and plutonium in Plutonium Fuel Units.
• Utility Belt: Averted; a common request from players in the game's early life was a way to quick-swap handheld equipment instead of having to open the inventory screen. Instead, the hotbar at the bottom of the HUD is used for selecting buildings/machines to construct with the build tool.
  • Played Straight as of the 'end of April' update. The game now allows up to 5 hand slots when fully upgraded and swapped using the mouse wheel.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Even harmless creatures will react to being damaged by the player, and can be killed. You Monster!.
  • Currently the advice among doggo owners is to fence their doggo(s) in a compound. The reason being the game may sometimes forget that the doggo has been tamed and will make it run away if you don’t. Fencing them in makes it easier to re-tame a doggo that has gone stray. However, to a casual bystander, it looks like you’re being cruel to your doggo. Some cross the line twice with Doggo Farms: Where you build cells just to keep the doggos you've gathered. There are even mods that automates doggo farming for you! Most people do it so they can easily corner and milk their doggos for their gifts. Others do it just because they like collecting doggos.
• Video Game Delegation Penalty: Machines craft things at a much slower pace than the player character can do by hand. However, you have more important things to do than handcrafting screws and plates, and setting up multiple factories across the gameworld will pay off in the long run. Further subverting this trope is that later in the game (project assembly parts, then anything made at a refinery, blender or accelerator) you come across recipes that you have no choice but to automate, as they cannot be crafted by hand. And as you start increasing the scale of your factory, you'll soon be automatically crafting dozens of times faster than you'd be able to do by hand.
• You Nuke 'Em: Nuke Nobelisks are exactly what you think: nobelisks that explode in a massive, insanely damaging explosion, and crafted from nuclear fuel.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: The game currently has no plot to speak of, with goals and milestones being merely a vehicle for unlocking new technologies and parts to produce (and unlock more goals with). The players are free to take whichever spot of the beautiful setting they like for their base and build as large as they wish.
• A Winner Is You: The reward for spending hundreds of hours exploring resources, bashing tons of hostile alien animals, weaving a massive network of conveyor spaghetti, building a massive factory capable of cranking out thousands of extremely complex parts, building nuclear reactors capable of providing the gigawatts needed to power all that, building even more machines to deal with radioactive pollution, setting up complex production lines, carefully optimizing them, and eventually getting to the point where you can finally make 4000 Assembly Directors, 4000 Magnetic Field Generators, 1000 Nuclear Pastas and 1000 Thermal Propulsion Rockets... is the exclusive FICSIT Employee of the Month golden cup. Zigged-zagged in that this is not the final prize of the game; it's merely to keep players busy while the studio is working on the final two tiers and the last few updates before the game is pushed into final release.

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