Someone on Discord gave me a great piece of advice for starting a new Satisfactory save. After I mentioned wanting to wait until after the FICSMAS event ended to kick off my new session, they said: Start now in order to grab the “advent calendar” goodies from the Hub, because some of those are required to open a few of the crashed drop pods strewn around the map.

And so, last Sunday, I did.

I’m a week into my new save (titled “New Clear Plan”) with fewer than 9 hours of in-game time so far. To show for it I have sent up the Phase 1 space elevator shipment, transitioned from biofuel to coal power, and unlocked steel production. I can attribute part of this (relatively) speedy progress to having three previous solo and several co-op games’ worth of practice time under my belt. Also, I credit some decisions and techniques specifically chosen in order to streamline parts of the process. Please allow me to elucidate.

Monster Hunter This Ain’t – Recent updates to the game introduced some controls regarding the aggressive fauna you find in the world. First there’s the main behavior toggle. In the classic “Default” mode, hostile-type creatures (Stingers, Hogs, Spitters) will attack on sight. There’s now a “Passive” option (behaves as you’d expect from the name) in addition to “Retaliate,” a sort of “if you don’t start nothin’ there won’t be nothin’” option. I selected the latter, figuring that if I accidentally tag a creature then I’ve given it the right to tag me right back. It’s only sporting.

The other fauna control option, however, is vastly more important to my overall enjoyment of the game: In the “Advanced Game Controls” you can now turn off the spider-like Stingers entirely. Gone. Kaboosh. They simply do not spawn into the game world at all, aggressively or otherwise. This goes well beyond the long-standing “Arachnophobia Mode,” which simply replaces the Stinger’s 3D models with static pictures of cats. (Somehow that mode manages to be even creepier.) Now there are no more scuttling, nightmare-inducing Stingers to deal with at all. Huge sigh of relief from me, so I thank you, Coffee Stain Studios!

Removing the creature combat as you enter (and later revisit) every new piece of the map saves a fair chunk of time better spent building stuff. (NOTE: The “flying-crab hatchers” seem not to care about any of the behavior options, so you should still arm yourself in order to clear those out. I recommend the Xeno-Basher upgrade at least. Also, at some point you may want to “process” hostile-creature remains for research purposes. It’s up to you.)

Build Somewhere Cheap – This one’s a kind of “mileage may vary” note. After spending the last few saves running to the best collection of iron and copper nodes I could find right at the start of a new game, I have realized that all I’ve done each time is make a mess that I have to tear down almost immediately, right at the best location to build something genuinely good. But since I can’t build “genuinely good” until a bunch of Milestones are reached, I am forced to lose a bunch of time (and, temporarily, valuable production capacity) ripping things out and redoing them when the means become available. It’s that or finding somewhere else to start fresh, and since I’ve already chosen one of the best spots on the map I’m probably going to have to travel some distance to find that next really good option.

This time? I started in the “newbie” landing zone for the first time. It’s chock full of iron nodes… almost all of them of the lowest output capacity (“Impure”). I don’t care! None of what I’ve built at the start is meant to last! I can simply walk away from it the minute I’m ready to build bigger, better, elsewhere.

Also? The grasslands are rather pretty. My endgame goal, the reason I’m starting this new save, is to have a very nice Phase 4 space elevator shipment factory. I figured, why not site it somewhere with a nice view?

Keep It Super Simple – Yes, that’s not the original meaning of the “KISS” acronym but this version’s nicer. Deal with it.

It can be tempting to automate as much as possible as soon as possible. Nobody wants to stand at the crafting bench for hours on end, so it’s a valid impulse. I suggest that you resist this temptation, though.

As of this writing I only have one Constructor or Assembler each making just one type of product. Slow going? Sure, but I also got away with just a few extra Biomass Burners for power beyond the two stuck onto the Hub. And that’s with only running three Miners (one each for limestone, iron, copper) on impure nodes! In the early game, the amount of production you need is smaller than you think, and time spent building a “proper” factory is balanced by the need for more power, more power poles and lines, more belts, more, more, more. It’s way too early, in the first Phase or so, to get caught up in building “big.”

And remember, what seems like “slow going” wasn’t all that slow if I’m already past building a coal power plant and unlocking steel products in under nine hours of play time.

Note that you still want to automate turning leaves and wood into solid biofuel as soon as you unlock that ability. That burns the longest, saving you time you’d otherwise have to waste on scrounging plant matter. (It never gets any more fun, but that’s why we’re expediting all of this, isn’t it? To put a rapid end to the need!)

Eyes On The Prize – Stick with just the Milestones you know you really need. Mostly this means avoiding the Jump Pads and Vehicular Transport until you have sufficient power and the other infrastructure required to make the benefits of those Milestones actually useful. (You can send up the Smart Plates for the Phase 1 shipment without completing all of the Tier 1 & 2 Milestones.) More than anything else you want coal power ASAP, and after that you want to unlock steel. Past that, anything goes. In the meantime, don’t waste your limited supply of materials unlocking stuff you can’t really use effectively. Those options will still be there when you’re ready to go back for them, and by then you’ll almost certainly have the materials on hand.

There’s other stuff to mention, like “harvest hard drives if you are lucky enough to be able to open any nearby crashed drop pods” and “find some Caterium ASAP because that research tree is godly” but honestly, everything else boils down to “get out there and have fun.”

So I hope you do. Have fun, that is.