Satisfactory – Useful Tips for New Players

New Player Advice

• Don’t rush. You could build nothing and not die… well so long as you are careful. Take your time doing things, don’t be impatient or you WILL regret it.
• Before you start decide if you want to rely just on your own wits or learn from others.
• If you choose to learn from others, watch some of the “starting locations” youtubes BEFORE you launch the game, or you might need to do a lot of hiking to get to your chosen starting place. And in this scenario use the interactive map to get your bearings. (Satisfactory-Calculator.com) If you choose to rely on your wits pick what feels better.
• Your first step, either walking to your pre-chosen location or exploring to find a good spot is simply to walk and collect useful stuff.

While exploring, make notes of mineral deposits you find and other interesting things. Also, you want to collect a lot of the following:

• Leaves, wood, any vegetation you can collect, animal carcasses (after killing them), You will probably not stop collecting vegetation for quite a while, as it has other uses later.
• Hard drives (from wrecks). Some might be hard to obtain early game.
• All mineral “rock” on top of any deposit. You might even want to hand-mine at least a stack of each ore you come across. It will come in handy sooner or later. Also, note where they are. Later you will unlock the abilikty to mark their locations on the “map” or by placing beacons.

Once you find your initial spot place your hub and follow its goals, completing each level.

It is probably best to progress one tier at a time. Do the items in that tier in the order you prefer though.

As early as you possibly can, setup an Awesome Sink and start producing coupons. They are critical to unlock a bunch of things.

• Make a temporary 2nd Concrete line to start feeding it and upgrade to feeding it better stuff as you progress and your storage fills up with good items. Quartz, Quickwire, Reinforced Concrete, Rotors are items to keep an early eye out for to sink. Also, if you are NOT limited by power, keep in mind that all Sinks are linked. You only need one at base near your shop, to get the coupons, but you can sink them as early as the production factories by the mines. The same goes if you setup a storage buffer, it does not need to be right next to your main storage. Buffer early or buffer late, it does not make much difference (at least early on).
• Early unlocks are Concrete Walls and Foundations, maybe glass (not sure if you can use it without steel though, so be cautious), half-foundations, walls with doors, walls with belt holes, ladders, signs (Somebody help me out here, I know I am missing several critical early unlocks). And yes… you can set your walls and foundations to default to concrete, they look a LOT better.
• At this stage your goal is to do simple automated production for iron, copper, reinforced iron plate and rotors. Maybe a constructor per item. You will want to have the materials flow into chests as early as possible. DO NOT be tempted by the youtube tutorials for various production lines UNTIL you have coal power (600MW is a good start but I’d go for 1200MW if you have the materials), or you will hate how much time you spend feeding the Biofuel generator.
• As to the Biofuel generator DO NOT feed it raw leaves or wood, instead craft biomass manually and feed it that. As soon as you can, setup a tiny line to produce biomass. Once you unlock Solid Fuel extend the line and feed it that, but keep your biomass container too.
• You also want to build the MaM as early as possible and reasearch everything in it that you can. Your exploration will help. Most of its items can be manually crafted,

Building the space elevator and sending its first shipment is also quite important early one, although I can’t remember why.

Now that you have one constructor and container for each thing, let them fill… while you explore and collect good stuff:

• Hard Drives. These will unlock recipes at the MaM, but not get just any recipe. Look at youtubes and google to find out which recipes are truly good and which aren’t. Also, the sooner you unlock the better as you might lose the ability to unlock some critical recipes later on.
• Slugs.
• Animal carcasses.
• Items from wrecks.
• Find deposits for every ore that is nearby.

You will have some ore deposits really close. At this stage you are better off building production lines where the deposits are. Remember about taking your time and enjoying yourself without rushing? These on-site production sites are an excellent opportunity to learn to build without cluttering wherever you will build your main base. Learn about false floors and false walls to hide your belts and make your base neat and clean.

Once you setup your 1200MW power plant it is time to think about your INITIAL MAIN BASE. But pause and think. Assume the following:

• By this point you might have unlocked Priority Splitters. They are very important but you will definitely need a good source of Quartz for AI Limiters.
• You will likely need 10 times the space that you are thinking.
• Logistics (how the materials flow, through belts) is the hardest part to plan. If you don’t plan it first, you will end up with a spaghetti mess or a spawling disorganized disaster and get frustrated, tear it all down and rebuild… over and over.
• Logistical sources and destinations to think about:
• Mines/remote factories, where items are produced.
• Train and truck stations bringing in items.
• A storage dump chest, where you dump items you bring back and will need to be sorted, distributed and stored as needed.
• Main storage for personal “hand use”.
• Space elevator.
• Factory floor.
• Trains and truck stations to send items out to other factories.
• Overflow (materials the above are unable to consume). This can be sunk or allowed to back up. Low value items might not be worth the power consumption needed to sink them.
• To move things to/from all of those places you will likely need one or more belt busses. At least one to handle the above distribution, some to bring materials from nearby mines/factories, a road and train network to transport materials long distances.
• And finally you can setup your production lines to take you to at least level 4. If you watch youtubes keep in mind that most of those use very spread out layouts to make it easy to understand. Make sure to build in a way that makes you happy, if that means “make it pretty”, then do so! At a minimum you might want to avoid an unruly mess.

If your head isn’t spihning by now, read it again. I hope that was useful and helps new players avoid the many pitfals.