While I had played an older version of Satisfactory with my gaming group , we recently replayed it so that we could experience 1.2 and also see some of the story bits they added since 1.0.

Quality of Life Improvements

Some of the QoL improvements absolutely made the game more fun and removed some of the annoyances from our earlier playthrough.

The dimensional depot was probably the biggest improvement, especially for any time we were far away from base. While there were a few times on long railroad building sessions or other large projects where we might have to wait for concrete to fill up again, or ask for someone to manually send a few items, this removed such a huge frustration. Making it a MAM upgrade also worked well, in that you had to suffer a little of the annoyances running back to base in the early game, which made the utility of it feel so much nicer when you finally unlocked it.

Daisy chain was another update that we appreciated. Previously, we never found it particularly hard to route power, but this helped make things a lot tidier. It would have been nice to unlock a bit earlier, but I can also understand how this would reduce the need for the other power pole options.

When we played pre 1.0, riding hypertube had a high likely hood of crashing either the client or the server. At some point this was fixed, and we had enormous fun setting up hypertube launch stations and then gliding over the map with the jetpack to help us aim and land safely. This probably also resulted in us rarely using vehicles. While the portal transportation was cool, it was at the last part of the game, so did not get as much use by our group.

Things that Still Bugged Me

While there is almost certainly zero chance this would be fixed at this point, the odd sizing of things still bugged me. It’s not purely that some of the buildings like refineries or rail stations are huge, but more that many things did not cleanly fit on the grids implied by the foundation pieces. I still found myself often wanting buildings to fit on cleaner multiples of the foundation pieces, while knowing it will likely never happen.

Vehicle pathing was much improved from the previous system, but I still found myself holding out for trains instead of using them. The complexity of pathing for vehicles was fairly close to the complexity of pathing for rails, and rails was likely easier and more scalable in the end. In our playthrough we never ended up using other vehicals for anything more than joking around a bit.

Logistics also continued to be more annoying than similar bits of factorio . The design of the game seems to push towards sinking items to control for overflow more than being able to tweak specific ratios, especially when it came to any recipe requiring balancing liquid inputs. Our group also wished for some kind of in-game stats or alter system. We had several times where something like our aluminum factory would stop because something was backed up or lacking and it would take a while to realize it and then unstick things.

Summary

While the story bits were not very deep (and our group went in expecting they wouldn’t be so deep) we all generally had fun with the playthrough, despite some of the bugs (blueprints and invisible buildings was kinda frustrating). While I do not have any future playthroughs currently planned, I could see myself doing another playthrough again in the future. Building various sub-factories (I did our uranium processing and nuclear power for our group this time) was a lot of fun. After using some simple rail blueprints, I also think next time I would do a bit more pre-planning for some of the rail stuff to allow us to scale it up even more.

Though one disadvantage of wrapping up Satisfactory, is that now I’m tempted to play through Factorio again, especially seeing there’s a 2.1 release in testing . . .