I think like too many of us, I’ll get the pull from Minecraft to open it up once in a while. However, like many of you, I also stop playing after a few hours because I’ve been playing it for years. I’ve been playing other games in that time, but if you’re going to talk about games that defined the 2010s, Minecraft is in the top ten. In fact, it is probably in the top 5 and likely the top three. The top three things of the last decade are survival-crafting, Souls-like gameplay, and skinning animals like it’s Far Cry 3 all over again.

Every now and then you want something a bit different, something outside of the trends and fads. How about Minecraft, but automated? Well, that’s Factorio, and Factorio is a very good game that some people are very, very good at. I’m not one of them. How about automated Minecraft but 3D and relaxing? Satisfactory, that’s the ticket! I’ve been playing quite a bit of it the last couple of weeks, in a relaxed setting.

I played a bit of it early last year before launch, but for the better part of the year, I wanted to let it grain itself in with some more development. It was not a bad game but did lack any idea of optimization. Even now my PC yelps like you’ve stood on its tail.

I wanted it to grow a bit, let the devs get a bit more feedback, and generally get a feel for itself through development. Still, in Early Access, the game has grown in places, shifted some parts around, moved on to Steam, and the best of all, added mods. I’ve never claimed to be the cleverest man on the planet, nor the most feeble-minded, but modding is a mystery to me without a mod launcher or easy way of doing them.

You might be thinking, “But, mods are just ancillary things that add a Doctor Who tea cozy to the nipples of animals.” Before you ask why that’s important, I want to point out that they also do other things, like make games better. I love Satisfactory to death already, but I think hostile mobs are just the worst possible thing on the planet of Raxacoricofallapatorius or whatever the planet is called. Luckily, there is a mod called “Passive Mode.” This just gets rid of the hostiles and it seems the gas from those creepy flower things that open up in forests.

This is why I like Satisfactory. It doesn’t hold your hand and tell you about the world in text or a voice-over. You explore environments, only to find the danger of an angry floppy-eared dog that spits pure fire. As the white English kids of the 00s would say, “innit blood!” Alternately, you’ll find the very angry mini-elephants that will drop kick you off of the map when you’re looking off into the distance changing your podcast.

I’d rather just get rid of all of that nonsense and enjoy the game while I listen to my Doctor Who audio dramas. That is what Satisfactory is, a relaxing experience of slowly building a factory on MASSAGE-2(A-B)b in the Akycha star system.

If you want to, you can pick up flecks of the story hinted at in the game but most of it is told through gameplay, which is how I like it. You are the engineer, in charge of terraforming and polluting the planet in the name of automation and factory expansion. From there on, you just keep going, making an ever-larger factory that requires coal, biomass burners, and nuclear power just to run the train service on time. Yes, I did make the comparison of it just being 3D Factorio, but there is a bit more to it than that.

You see, Factorio is (of course) top-down, which disconnects you from the world. The dark and dank alien world leaves no emotion of your actions, hence the onslaught of monsters you have to beat off with a stick or a big gun. With Satisfactory you are in the world, you can see the beautiful vistas and serene landscapes. Having passive alien beasts roam around the world of beautiful alien panoramic views, lends a sense of guilt. You are ruining this picturesque scene with a Big Yellow Taxi. It is an apt comparison, but there is more to the game than “just 3D Factorio.”

Yes, both have the tertiary loop of crawling through the tech tree to make bigger and better things, to then further get through the tree. However, there is more aesthetic to the gameplay of Satisfactory, none more evident than the coffee cup. As part of the A.W.E.S.O.M.E. Sink & Shop system, a way of recycling useless crap you’ve made and don’t need, you can get tickets for aesthetic rewards and components. You are quite right. I was picking up the coffee cup, just so I could act like a real foreman and do nothing but drink coffee.

With a slight focus on aesthetics, there is also a bit of rudimentary building: So you can level out your factory. If you’ve played Fallout 4, you know what that is. It is just clicking about the place making a new metal/concrete composite meaning to terraforming. It leaves much to be desired — fences are god awful on the ramps and I would probably like a smaller foundation to fill in gaps where lifts sit. These, of course, are minor gripes fix by modding. Which brings me to a story:

As you may have noticed, even in this article, I like a bit of Doctor Who. It is no surprise that the second mod I installed was the TARDIS mod, a mod that broke either because of me or itself. Visually the TARDIS itself works, it is a nice little box I’ll look over and smile at because I’m a massive nerd. Yet, opening it, closing it, and materializing is all a bit of a faff along with the wonky looking Sonic Screwdriver. With that in mind, I opened the doors to go on a bit of a travel, after I cried for a minute hearing that creek of the doors. The problem is, I can’t open or close the doors while inside.

Closing doors is important as it seals the TARDIS, thus closing off the time within and outside the box, meaning time travel can happen. I’ve played enough games that I know I could probably clip it if I got the right pixel, but nothing worked.

So after igniting the Eye of Harmony (a collapsing star that fuels the TARDIS), bashing the wonky screwdriver off the door a couple of times, taking the batteries out and rubbing them on the multicolored scarf, and stepping outside to look around, finally it wanted to de-materialize. There was just one problem, I wasn’t in it. So I made a second one, the situation looked the same. Sometime later, the first one came back. The problem there was, I was in the second one.

I don’t know the Gallifreyan rules of owning two TARDIS’ (TARDISi?), but I think one of them says you shouldn’t materialize one TARDIS inside another. It is something about physics as we know it having a bit of a cry, or something like that. I never read the manual. Nonetheless, I’ve put both of them in a box at the bottom of a river, along with the Sonic Screwdriver that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. Bloody things must have been deadlock sealed.

To get back to the game, that is the thing I think works best about Satisfactory. 30+ hours in and I’m hardly hitting oil and plastic production. I’m distracted by my own petard. I’ll focus on making one thing towards my in-game progression for about 20-minutes, notice I can make a TARDIS now, and run off to do that. As most of the work is automated, you’re left fiddling about with making things slightly more efficient, sipping coffee in-game as you slurp coffee in real-life, or any other manner of distractions.

Now I hate the phrase addiction or addicting around games. Others can and will use it incorrectly, but to me, an actual game isn’t addicting. It will be the microtransactions or whatever form of money-grabbing that is “addictive.” However, you can lose yourself in a game, finding out that it has been three weeks since you last saw anything other than some pixels. The reason I’ve lost 40+ hours total in Satisfactory is not because of a Doctor Who mod that is shaky, but because I get lost in the world for 6-hours at a time.

Satisfactory has grown greatly in the last year. It might be slow for some, however, as something to open once in a while, it is developing along at just a nice rate. I can’t recommend Satisfactory enough. If you need something to play while listening to podcasts, watching TV, a distraction from light work, or even just something to play in silence outside of the game, Satisfactory is just right. Though, if you are on a lower end PC that is nearly a decade out of date, I could see why you might want to hold off. Optimization has improved, though. If possible, it could do with a touch more.

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