I’m coming up on three hundred hours into my current solo Satisfactory save with a couple factory builds yet to complete before I can “save humanity” or whatever.

But only a couple. I’m surprisingly close to done. Now that I’m most of the way through the “new” phase of the game (from an Early Access player’s perspective) I can consider how well the developers balanced the need to introduce further complications with each new milestone versus the need to not overwhelm the average player.

(Am I “the average player”? Good question.)

I can’t judge the success of the Phase 5 game content based on time spent because shortly after reaching “endgame” I promptly stopped down for an entire month to build a nuclear power plant and a bunch of satellite factories it needed for operation. I also lost most of a month in a bit of a burnout slump, a mental fugue state during which most of my accomplishments involved connecting different parts of the map-wide rail network together. All in all, my initial dubious reaction to Phase 5 only having one tier of Milestones has been tempered by the sheer amount of work I still needed to accomplish to reach the actual endgame.

I think it unfair to judge Phase 5’s success based on an ever-increasing level of complexity or challenge, because there’s a point past which you start losing players. “Here’s a whole new machine, and it takes six inputs!” Nobody wants that. Four inputs per machine really is the maximum I’d want to manage belting & piping on. The game introduces a new four-input machine, the Quantum Encoder, which takes one pipe and three belts of possible input instead of four belts (the Manufacturer). The other major new manufacturing machine is the Converter, which only has a couple each of inputs and outputs. In both cases the challenge is more lateral in nature: “You did okay with those, now see how you get along with these.” And that’s fine, since the new machines only make new stuff you need for the new milestones and space elevator shipment requirements.

Where Phase 5 succeeds isn’t in creating newer and more difficult bespoke challenges but in forcing the player to reconsider the scale of their operation. Nowhere is this more true than in the realm of power supply. I built a 20-generator nuclear power plant precisely because I know from talking to other people who have completed the game that Phase 5’s production machinery will absolutely devour electricity. Like, if you can get into the 100GW range, you’re probably doing okay. Probably. Might want to build some battery racks anyway, just to be safe.

Side note: I try not to think about the fact that we’re coming up on the 2nd anniversary of Satisfactory hitting 1.0 and in all the time since that release date I’ve yet to send up the final parts shipment. What kind of lame-assed fan of this game am I, anyway? Ugh.

It’s not just electricity, though. The requirements of some of the new parts, especially those being sent up the elevator, are such that for some items already in production you need to:

1. Have built up so much production in the first four Phases that your existing factories can already take on the additional burden,
2. Build 2nd (or 3rd) copies of existing factories, or,
3. Try to upgrade existing factories in-place.

The answer is, of course, usually “some or all of the above.” I got lucky on a couple of items but did stop down to make a 2nd Crystal Oscillators factory (with even higher output than the 1st) last month. Boy, replicating work you’ve done before sure is rewarding, ain’t it? Ahem.

So that’s all kind of a mixed bag but until you’ve been through this part of the game (or unless you read the wiki and/or watch a lot of YouTube videos about the game) you can’t really know where your weak spots are until you trip over them. And that’s fine! The game is a learning experience. Weirdly enough, that actually is part of the fun. (Most of the time.)

(With that said: Fused Modular Frames. Holy crap, if you think you’re making enough already, you are not. Trust me on this. My approach to the entire Tier 8 Products array will change in subsequent saves but especially my FMF production.)

There’s also the matter of whether or not you’ve already used all the “best spots.” Your cozy section of planet MASSAGE-2(A-B)b contains a lot of iron and copper and limestone… but not at unlimited supply rates, and only at a few dozen spots each around the map. More esoteric resources are even harder to source. And if you need, as previously noted, to double up your production of a thing… where? How? There’s your real challenge, Pioneer: Dealing with the reduced availability of top-tier build sites.

That’ll catch you whether you’re a “ship the ore to a few big factories” or a “build everything on-site and ship only finished products” player, by the way. There’s no escaping the crunch. It’s hardly insurmountable, of course. It’s just a new wrinkle that you need to deal with.

Which loops me back around to… is Phase 5 a good progression from Phase 4? It will surprise absolutely nobody for me to say it, but: Yes. Yes, it is. The new bits are complex enough to provide novelty and some new challenges, but the real progression is in how you manage the whole regional project. Is everything getting where it needs to go? Is there enough of item A to support products X, Y, and Z? Where are we building the brand new product Q when we’ve already got factory 3 parked at the ideal spot to do so?

And to sweeten the deal, Phase 5 comes with some fun unlocks. I mean, yes, the Mk 6 belts go brrrrr but they’re also pretty and they glow. You can, if you want to put the resources into it (and who wouldn’t?), build a whole new way to render Hypertubes obsolete. You can unlock the Mk3 Blueprint Designer, and I’m absolutely certain that ADA will have something snarky to say about it when I do that myself here soon.

I love that the developers simultaneously gave the playerbase what they clamored for, which is to say “a larger Blueprint Designer,” while also (through “ADA”) venting their frustration at all the complaints they received over the years about the size of the Early Access version of the Blueprint Designer (available in the current game as the Mk1 model). Now that’s efficiency, Pioneers!

As I close in on the end of this save’s “main plot” or whatever, I’m already making plans (and preliminary blueprints) for the next run. I’ll go into more about that in a future installment. For now, though, it’s back to the factory building for me.

I love this game. (Obviously.)