On Tuesday, the 14th of November, 2023 the 8th major update to Satisfactory arrived in Early Access, after spending months in the Experimental branch to shake out the worst of the bugs… most of them, anyway. We have a few things to talk about with “U8” but today we’re going to focus primarily on the new engine’s support for something called “Lumen” and how that makes an already-pretty game even prettier.

The main caveat right out of the gate is, obviously, whether your graphics processing power is chonky enough to even bother enabling the “Global Illumination” settings. (There are two levels, “Medium” and “High.” I noticed no visual or performance difference between them, which might be a problem with me rather than with the game, of course.) Your mileage may vary, test under safe conditions, etc.

Immediately, of course, enabling Lumen creates a very particular problem: The insides of most factories become super duper dark. You never needed extra lighting because the ambient level of visibility was usually enough for most situations and you could just break out the flashlight in special cases. Now, however, lighting has become something of a necessity (unless you want to leave your flashlight on at all times while indoors) and that means coming up with new, Lumen-friendly light fixtures.

If you were previously aware of the game you may be thinking, “Wait, didn’t Satisfactory already have lighting?” And yes, it did. Kind of. Way back in Update 4 they introduced light fixtures, but for various reasons they’ve always been kind of a kludge. They don’t really add illumination sources in the 3D space of the game, they simply create boxes of… let’s say “lighted-ness.” Compare these two images:

That’s the classic overhead light block at full-brightness white lighting. It very clearly lights up everything below it, and even casts shadows as you’d expect. That light doesn’t go anywhere else, though. The game engine doesn’t see the fixture as an actual illumination source.

Meanwhile, these overhead light fixtures I threw together in the Blueprint Designer use a couple sizes of display signs with the settings configured to just blast white light as brightly as they can. They’re nowhere near as illuminating as the previous light fixture but the light they generate can bounce and scatter throughout the immediate environment.

“Immediate,” you ask? Well. It’s time to discuss some limitations of the new system.

First off, while signs generate “useful” lighting and don’t require power, this also means they can’t be controlled by power switches and timers. Night-only light fixtures were one of the few actual benefits of the Update 4 lighting system, as those wall, ceiling, and outdoor lights could be wired to a lighting-specific power grid if you wanted to program controls for them. One of the control options is, “Only switch on at night.” Handy for outdoor floodlights and street lamps, among other things.

(The old-school light fixtures also create performance issues in certain circumstances. Again: Kludge. Then again, signs can have their own problems, though Coffee Stain Studios claims to have wrangled most of those at this point.)

The other notable limitation concerns that “immediate environment” thing. Take this scene at my iron works, standing in front of two storage bins. Back behind them one can (just barely) see a horizontal row of lighting signs attached where the wall meets the ceiling.

So, why aren’t they lighting up anything else if they’re so bright? Let’s get a bit closer and see what happens:

Still, almost nothing. There’s some reflection off the ceiling but not much else. Okay, what if we move to just past the backs of the storage bins?

Oh hello there, Lumen.

And it’s like that wherever you go. The engine doesn’t “kick in” the fancy lighting effects until you’re within about 40 meters. You can even watch it start “painting” the light onto the foundation tiles if you move just right.

That’s not to say the “Global Illumination” feature is a terrible failure. It is most assuredly not! Just, once again Satisfactory has introduced a lighting system that doesn’t work the way you expect light to behave based on real-world experience.

It’s still awfully pretty, though. Prior to Update 8 landing in the Early Access branch I genuinely expected that I’d switch the option on just to take a few screenshots, then switch it back off again to save performance and get back to factory building. Now? I can’t imagine wanting to go back to the old way.