Satisfactory still makes me want to play Factorio. 

I worry that some diehard Satisfactory fans will take offence to this video because I'm so negative despite making a relatively short way into the game, so I wanted to pin a comment just to say it's totally fine for us to disagree and I don't necessarily mean to say the game is 'bad' per se. Just not currently for me. Also this video is a bit weird and experimental, it was bound to start happening soon enough because I'm a bit of a weird and experimental guy.

The best way I've ever heard someone describe satisfactory is 'An automation game, made by people who don't like automation games, for people who don't like automation games.' The game is less about building a factory to build a bigger, more complex factory ad infinitum and solving logistical problems/puzzles along the way and more about exploring a pretty looking region while completely retooling your factory every few hours to meet ever more complex goalposts in a reasonable timeframe. The actual factory building aspect of the game suffers greatly due to it being 3d, and allowing clipping of belts, meaning there isn't ever really any sort of meaningful logistical puzzle to solve and the lack of a continuous threat to your progress, even a minor one like biters means there's no incentive beyond your own impatience to make a quick and elegant solution.

I'll admit that when I fired up satisfactory, I found quite a few things that I really liked about the game. The 3d aspect is neat and exploring an alien world is very cool. I also really appreciated the vertical aspect of the conveyor belt routing puzzles. The discoverable alternate recipes are a pretty cool idea too. The game has some *huge* problems though. Stopping where you did, I don't think you even know the half of it. As the game progresses, the scaling gets more and more borked. The interface has serious fundamental issues with trying to line things up and, while you sorta get used to the quirks after a while, these problems get compounded more and more as your builds start to get bigger and bigger. This is where I gave the game up - Got into the early late game and wanted to build a somewhat plain but tidy mining and smelting facility to supply some real production. Wanted smelting in a basic enclosed building with a few basic amenities like lights and whatever. Needed it to ship out resources via a train. On site I had 3 pure iron nodes, 3 pure copper nodes, and 1 normal caterium node, and water. With pure ore processing recipes that works out to 248 refineries. Smelting array had to be multi-story so that it fits. I spread these among 4 stories. 1 for caterium, 1 for iron, 2 for copper. In factorio land, this is relatively simple to do (except the multistory part) because of the nice blueprinting tools and bots. In satisfactory? Oh god... It's a nightmare. That's 7 belts + 8 pipes in and 15 belts out, all of which must be completely manually routed. You're working a lot in the vertical which means a crapload of temporary scaffolding to get the job done. Just the permanent walls and floors alone required over a dozen truckloads of materials that you gotta haul to the site, and don't even get me started on trying to cleanly route monorails. Even with some somewhat cheaty 3rd party tools out there to assist in lining stuff up and placing things more in bulk it took me like a week to build this thing and it's *just* a basic smelting facility. And then, when I was done, I had to go build a bit more than a hundred coal power plants to run the thing and that was a big chore too. Oh, and those power plants needed me to get them some more coal and water too... Doing all that was an intense 2 week tedious slog just to get to the point that I could go build something a bit more interesting. When I finally got the power plant up to snuff and fired up my shiny new smelting site, it was something to watch. That being said, as I was sitting there watching it go, and trying to enjoy the fruits of my labors, I couldn't help but think - "This wasn't worth the time it took to do. I would have been better off just playing factorio. I could have done some pretty cool things in two weeks of factorio."

Fun to explore, tedious to build anything beyond a starter factory. I'll return to it for one more playthrough once the game is final; I feel little incentive to do so before then unless developers implement even rudimentary blueprints to not make larger factories such a boring chore.

There's no better description of Satisfactory than this.

i just realised why I love these games. When you said "it's probably the hum of industry thats relaxing you". I never really thought about it, but I grew up with my grandparents, and would go to work everyday with my grandfather, who had built a building products company complete with factory after coming here to america. The sound of giant machines whirring, pounding, braking, cutting - it's the loud noise that I grew up with my whole life. Suspending from school for a week? Looks like I'm spending every hour I would've been in school in the factory with my grandfather (no video games for me lol). I also got really into industrial and techno, going to rave parties at abandoned factories here in detroit through the 2000s. It all kinda makes perfect sense lol

Other than the moaning sounds, I liked the buttons and knobs section. I would to be my own judge of whether a sound of a click is satisfactory or not. The moans hinders the ASMR aspect of the click and rachets.

How the fuck do you only have 4k subs?!! Ive binged all of your vids and every single one of them is its own distinct gem. Your gonna blow up soon my guy, thanks for the awesome content :)

I mean, watching a man press clicky buttons and spin spinny dials while making caveman noises would have also been a pretty successful review format

When handcrafting, you can hold spacebar to do the job. Also, while holding down spacebar to craft, left click the three dots to either side of the handcraft symbol. It should just automatically run then.

I stumbled upon this video having the opposite experience. Satisfactory has me addicted like no other game I've ever known. But every time I try to get into Factorio, I get frustrated with it [relatively] early on, and I end up just not wanting to come back to it. There are a few specifics I can name, all of which really come down to personal preference. With the every looming threat of enemies and base defense, I feel like it's necessary to prioritize weapons above all else, which feels like it takes away from the focus on my factories. Depletable resources also makes it feel like everything is inevitably temporary. This factory works until the iron is gone, and then it doesn't work anymore. And finally, when I see gameplay videos from later in the game, it often just looks like an excessive amount of copy/paste/blueprints. Just make an optimal factory once, and it's infinitely scalable, never design another factory again, just focus on your trains to keep your resource lines filled up. And that just seems boring to me. A lot of my Satisfactory goals are logistical, how to get items and resources from one factory to the next. It's not necessarily challenging all the time, but it makes me think it a way that makes my brain chemicals go. This may be misplaced, but a lot of Factorio goals appear to be matters of scaling, infinitely expanding the needs of your factory to accommodate the infinitely available but individually depletable resources you have available. And personally, I can't wrap my head around how that's an enjoyable experience and not a tedious one.

Man pulled out the encoder and just let the tism take over. 10/10

I found myself tearing down and rebuilding a lot more than I do in factorio, and that always agitated me. Because mines are so limited theres no real reason or way to attach multiple things to one mine, so every mine upgrade or crafter upgrade it was "welp time to tear down the pipe factory for the 3rd time." My friend said it best during my 3rd remake of our reinforced frame machine while he was redoing the slap job steel beams. "I ask myself: am I having fun? And I dont really think I can say yes..." Hes one of those "top down games are scary" folk so I havent convinced him to play factorio yet

I bought satisfactory and tried to force myself to enjoy it, I just couldn't get into it. I tried factorio and put more hours into it the first day than I've put into Satisfactory all together. Hopefully once it's fully released it will be more enjoyable, but I doubt it.

While listening to the video away from my phone, I had to double check that it hadn't somehow switched to a minecraft video with some villagers around! Great explanation that puts into words why I like factorio over satisfactory

I know im a bit late to this party, but... Satisfactory is a fun game with friends for a few hours. It has some nice exploration aspects and the building can be fun at times. But the scale of things between exploration and building gets tedious quickly. Then there is the speed of production. In Factorio its quite easy to build any factory bigger after a certain point to make production of products quicker. But In Satisfactory production of anything takes a lot of time even with the power of power slugs. Sometimes it was just AFK central while waiting for stuff to be produced(such as items for the space elevator). Not to mention the Wack-a-mole of production in Satisfactory is just a pain in the ass. The lack power is a major issue all the time and i never got to nuclear due to how big the moles i had to wack by that point were. Even trains were a pain to do anything with due to the tracks being a pain to deal with. Factorio is Fun to me because of how easy it is to play. Im not going around the map looking for stupid research to get the possibility to get the crafting recipe I want. There is no issue of power just completely shutting down everything in my base with next to no warning. and I can semi-automate building of my factory using drones. final note. Both games are good but Factorio works better in my opinion and Satisfactory has a major balance issue when it comes to the gameplay.

last time i played satisfactory i got pretty far into oil / fuel power, and constructed this massive (and i mean massive, a couple hundred fuel generators) power generating grid before i stopped. recently. coffee stain added some game modifier settings and you can play the game without power. i had a lot more fun without this restriction and made it much further. its still a huge game atm, but they are nearing a 1.0 release i also highly reccomend not starting in the green hills biome. there are paradoxically few resources and they are spread apart, as well as very limited water for coal power

Resources are handled differently in both games, in Satisfactory you can set and forget a lot of equipment. I still have my hands full as certain production lines stop functioning if I don't periodically flush the pipes. Factorio has me in a continuous building and destruction loop, you're kept busy as resources continuously run dry forcing relocation or re-design

All Coal Nodes in the area you started at are pure nodes, producing 120 coal per minute with a Miner Mk. 1 and without overclocking. As each burner takes 15 coal per minute, you can supply 8 coal power plants with them. Once you unlock Logistics Mk. 3, you can either overclock or upgrade the miners to extract 270 coal per minute, fueling 18 coal generators. Thats over 1300 MW of power. Think of power as the biters in factorio. It's the big balancing part that slows you down and that you have to balance against. How much coal do I burn and how much do I turn into steel? How much iron do I craft into ammunition for my turret wall? In Satisfactory, biters are easy. In Factorio, power is easy. It's been 2 months since this video released. Why don't you give it another try, maybe in a different region?

The middle part felt like an "adult movie" :-D

thank god im not the only one, i like the game for being what it is but my first game was factorio and that is what i base other games of the genre on.

I believe many players that don't like Satisfactory are those that first played Factorio. In my case, I first played Satisfactory and now since two days ago started to get into Factorio. I liked Satisfactory quite a lot. They recently also added "small" blueprints feature. I think Factorio players might like that. I believe you shouldn't be comparing the two games. I see them as completely different games even though the concept of "building a factory" is the same. Each have their pros and cons based on what kind of player you are. In Satisfactory you will have much more freedom as in how you actually build your factory. And that's probably the strong point about the game. What I do realize is that it is harder to come back into Satisfactory after you haven't played for some time. Where in Factorio it is a bit easier to remember/lookup what you where working on. I can understand that if you come from Factorio it seems all a lot more work to achieve something "simple" in Satisfactory. Things are just much easier from the bird eye view in Factorio compared to Satisfactory. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing. It can be extremely satisfying to accomplish or build something that you had in mind in Satisfactory. Definitely give that game a try if you can.

Kinda agree, even if it's a year old review. I found Satisfactory to be great in early game, okay when you reach steel, and awful when you get to oil. The game design with each tier gets progressively worse into the "frustrating" territory, unlike Factorio which is completely solid throughout the whole game experience. 1. Early game is fun because everything is reachable with walking and building a belt to it, which are the most well designed and put together thing in the game. They looks nice when arranged into neat systems of delivering items in your factory, lifts look amazing and so on. Zero frustration with them, because they are intuitive to use and hard to fuck up. Splitters and mergers being a three way thing by default are an amazing idea. Only downside is power that needs to be interacted with manually, but you have the prospects of some kind of automation dangling in your brain that you don't care much. 2. When you reach steel you get introduced to fluid mechanics and vehicle logistics. These are immediately worse than belts. For one, fluid mechanics are still buggy enough there are no pipes with throughput greater than 600 (and one might say you really don't need more, but at that point I'd say what is the point of playing the game itself since you really don't need to), for which there are mods dedicated either to overhauling the way it works or removing fluid component outright which is quite sad. Then we have vehicles - they are kneecapped by the same thing power generation is: lack of fuel automation at that point besides coal. So you have two competing things: either you power your coal generators for more power, or you power your logistics. Lack of more involved customization of vehicle behavior only exacerbates the problem. It's clunky and does not feel satisfying. Even so, if one does not want to use these, you can always slap conveyor line in main bus system thanks to stackable poles. 3. When you get to oil, you are introduced to a resource that is the furthest away you have ever been, most likely, and to reach which a train would be nice. Unfortunately, it's locked behind tier 6 milestone, that needs a lot of oil derived resources. However, at that point vehicles are still a viable way to deliver goods, but you need to pack it into oil derived containers for transport. You won't be running pipes with crude oil to your base, if you are sane, because of headlift requirements. Thankfully, oil unlocks fuel, and your immediate concerns for fueling vehicles on this path are solved. So all in all you get more mucking around with fluid system here, and then you get to rails - holy fuck. This one is the most frustrating parts of the game for me - you supposedly reach the holy grail of distance based transportation, and you get... that. For one, you cannot have train stations accepting both fluid and solid cargo. Only one or the other. For two, space requirements for station objects are immense. For three, building rails is so unlike building other objects like belts and pipes in terms of smoothness. It feels really bad and full of strange glitches and logic that does not work. Unless you plan to spend an hour at each intersection, turn, incline or something, your rail lines will look like absolute garbage that doesn't deserve to live, made worse by the terrain that is intentionally made to separate areas and make building logistic lines more involved, which is great but not with the building system of rails. They do not have built in supports like pipes and belts do, making it necessary to create a blueprint for rail supports if you ever want to make it above ground so train wouldn't clip into terrain, and even when you do, placing the rail on these supports is just tedious. People resort to workarounds and tricks that shouldn't be used when you build an object that is supposed to run for kilometers. Additionally, blueprint designing is kind of meh, but it can be worked around. However, I don't get why they haven't made an option to snap blueprint to world grid like one can with foundations. Even with the limitations of things not actually connecting and having to connect them all by your hand between blueprinted factory, it's a time saver and feels good to use when you need to expand a lot. In the end, I never reached nuclear power because of abandoning playthroughs when frustration reached peak during rail building phase, while I played a ton of factorio even with frustrating mods like angels and bobs. It goes from solid to all over the place in the span of your playthrough, and the worst part is that you don't find putting in the effort to make things look good even worth it because of the scale you need to build on and how many little tweaks you'll have to do throughout. Really regrettable, because the game itself really looks good.

Since they added clipping as an officially supported feature, it's made building feel a lot more fluid and interesting. I find myself being less focused on all the automation and just letting my creativity work with the factory aspect. Def agree the early game grind is nonsense. Coal power needs to be much earlier.

I think you might prefer Factorio for the reasons I don't. I found Factorio to be an overly dry experience, all work and numbers. Satisfactory is in the same vein of game, but simpler and more freeform in the building, which combined with moving around a 3d environment is enough to feed serotonin into my monkey brain. I can guarantee I'd love playing Factorio with friends, it's just not quite something that can hook me alone.

I quite enjoy Satisfactory, but generally only because I either use Cheat Engine to accelerate the early game, or mod it to be a more streamlined and interesting game to play. Sometimes both.

came for the review, stayed for the sounds

I just so desperately wish there was a first-person factory building game with the mechanics of factorio.

Honestly the clicking asmr is sweet

Why did the buttons and knobs sections do things to my under carriage? What have you done to me?! I guess it's time to go play 2000 hours of factorio... again.

I play satisfactory when I want a chill time, I play Factorio when I want all out warfare.

The gf walked out right as the knobs section started. Now she knows my secret

Satisfactory is such hot garbage they should have stay an epic exclusive. Factorio will always be the superior game. In my opinion the reason isn't even the biters which, I don't know why anyone would want to play without them, it's the belts. Having two-sided belts is what every other factory game lacks. I think that alone is why people go back to Factorio and they don't even realize it.

I bought Satisfactory and while watching geniuses like Let's Game It Out play the f*ck out of it, my experiences weren't nearly as fun. Instead, it was a constant stress causer and I can't really be bothered.

Disclaimer: contrary to what you see at 3:48, sane people do play this game

3:48 im dying you sound like mr bean

*cough* dyson sphere program *cough*

You've summed up why I could never really get into satisfactory. I think its just super unfinished and in need of good paint. The fact that you can't change the world around you outside of building a factory is also kinda of problematic as you could just pave over the terrain in factorio which meant you could forever change the landscape even if it was minor. The performance issues of satisfactory also bugged me a ton coupled with that it seems like a lot of things are just unity store assests bought and put into the game like most of the enemies. I get its not finished but when you work on dancing animations over having a good looking item and interactibles it just seems shallow and soulless. Like they saw how good Factorio did on the steam charts and thought they could do the same. Add in that it first released on Epic is also a huge death sentence as that's where games go to be branded bad if that is where they are released on first. I know a lot of other epic exclusives have sort of just died out right. All in all, a lot of my friends prefer satisfactory over factorio but its usually because factorio overwhelms them where as satisfactory doesn't give you any reason to progress outside of your own desire to get something and when most of it is meaning less why get it?

It did get rather silly there...

this game has not deserved the name satisfactory. the ratios, production times und useless production lines afther the stage is done are extremly bothering and grind my gears like nothing else

i would watch you playing around with buttons and nobs, would be a satisfing video

Mmmm. I am just like you but I don't seek help; I just seek better rotary encoders.

you can hold space for manual crafting, also wtf if 8:42? You do understand you can use vehicles in this game for transportation right?

Talks tall about factorio. Then no videos on the channel. Bruh

i keep trying to like satisfactory but the glaring problem of being a 3d game with no basic physics or collision is just too immersion breaking. factorio can get away with it because it's 2d. satisfactory's clipping is too permissive. when i build a factory there is a sense of accomplishment in thwarting constraints imposed on problems to nonetheless come up with solutions. this is called engineering. it is a deeply rewarding activity. but with permissive clipping, no physics, no collision.. i can prety much do anything i want. oh you built a factory that produces x and y? wow such an accomplishment /sarcasm

Also, a coal miner can feed only 4 coal Generators? What? I have a MK2 Miner on a pure node, 200% overclocked feeding 32 Coal Generators! Supplying enough water for the lot is another matter. You must've had a Mk1 miner on an normal node to only be able to feed 4 generators?

I love the "do not recommend" feature sooner or later I'll get less trash

more like dislike bcs its not about factorio

ofcourse because Factorio is better game. Satisfactory is garbage...