This has been a hard review to write. Not because I don’t know what to say, but because every time I dip back into Satisfactory to look up an item name or confirm some detail, I find myself checking in on the state of my workshop, just for a moment, and then several hours have suddenly flown by. That’s the magic of this seemingly benign, inexplicably alluring factory simulator. Whether I’m pulling my hair out trying to troubleshoot a problem on the factory floor or running away from very disrespectful fireball-spitting aliens, every moment spent in this beautifully complex simulator has been worthwhile. Combining the creativity and exploration of Minecraft with the spreadsheet-inducing planning and optimization of Factorio, Satisfactory is not only the best game I’ve played this year, but my favorite automation game of all time – and that’s without even having reached its final engineering challenges after going hard on a fresh world in its 1.0 build for more than 90 hours. Unless the final stretch of leveling up my factory takes an unexpectedly nightmarish turn for the worse, so far Satisfactory has been an unbelievably good time.

Satisfactory is an immediately compelling factory simulator where you and up to three friends are dropped on an alien planet and told you need to establish a base and produce increasingly complicated materials and launch them into outer space to appease your boss. In order to do so, you’ll need to harvest natural resources, develop new technologies, and become a master of conveyor belts, pipelines, and eventually even locomotive operations as you triumphantly grow your tiny headquarters into a planet-encompassing labyrinth of moving parts. More and more is asked of you as you go, and what starts out as a simple process of gathering leaves and mining iron to make basic tools quickly spirals into a convoluted whirlwind of refineries, manufacturing plants, and nuclear power grids, where you’re producing everything from computer chips to rocket fuel.

Each breakthrough moment organically leads to the next mountain to climb. If you’re wondering how in the heck assembly line optimization could possibly be fun, I understand your confusion. But in the same way that something like No Man’s Sky gives you a ton of creative freedom while providing irresistible goals to chase along the way, Satisfactory never stops giving you exciting new reasons to keep playing I cannot fathom the number of times I promised myself I’d log off after I tweaked just one more thing only to find myself still tinkering away hours later. Each breakthrough moment, like figuring out how oil refineries work and starting the production of plastic, organically leads to the next mountain to climb, like crafting a rifle and producing ammo with the byproducts of said refineries. Before you know it, you hear those alarming morning chirps from birds outside your window and realize you’ve made a mistake.

Managing ever more complex factories can be pretty daunting at times, but Satisfactory does an absolutely stellar job of nudging you to take small, manageable steps with its checklist of projects to tackle, and in no time at all you and your friends are managing sprawling operations that would have seemed unfathomable at the start. The earliest factory I built began as a few buildings scattered about the untainted wilderness, which quickly spiraled into a horrendous and disorderly web of nonsensically crisscrossing conveyor belts that looked like a bowl of wet noodles (naturally, I dubbed the settlement Spaghettysburg). That amateurish anarchy might be unintuitive and less than optimal, but hey, it gets the job done, and I victoriously delivered my eminent Spaghettysburg address to my co-op partners as we launched the fruits of our labor into space amid the mess of mechanical pasta.

The real fun is in watching your mini society evolve. Later on, my crew’s creations became more structured and efficient, like our coastal oil refinery dubbed Gas Town or our railway system, which we suspended in the air for maximum orderliness. The real fun is in watching your mini society evolve as you solve progressively more difficult engineering challenges, such as optimizing and expanding your power grid to fuel more facilities so you can produce more complicated parts, or running the math on the ideal ore output of a mining rig to figure out the most efficient way to smelt it into ingots. And you don’t have to be a spreadsheet geek like me or dive deep into third-party wikis to simply see a conveyor belt full of unused materials backing up and feel the irresistible urge to do something about it.

As you’re required to make dozens of different components and juggle a large number of demanding processes in order to complete the Milestone deliveries that make up Satisfactory’s larger progression, you’re constantly switching to wherever your attention is needed most, solving problems and using the new technology you create along the way to make your life easier. For example, early on, I built comically long conveyor belts to move resources from other parts of the world to my main factory, but after unlocking new technologies and manufacturing more advanced parts, I was able to automatically transport resources with trucks, trains, and even flying drones, making things faster, cleaner, and frankly, less chaotic in the process. Going from an unwashed, melee-swinging, conveyor belt-abusing troglodyte to a jetpacking, gun-toting man of tomorrow is immensely satisfying, and makes each hard-fought battle of electrical wiring well worth the trouble.

When you’re not juggling the hundreds of things to do with your factory operations, you’ll take to the vast open world to explore the map, battle beasties, evade poison gas and irradiated zones, find hidden treasures, and befriend gross-looking lizard doggos to serve as your loyal companions. Opting for a single, hand-crafted world instead of the more common procedurally generated areas found in some of its peers, Satisfactory’s map has a diverse set of regions with their own vibes and valuable resources to plunder that are awesome to explore and even better to colonize with your hungry machines. As you gain access to new tools, you’ll get better equipment to take out into exploration, which then gives you access to even more areas. For example, crafting a gas mask lets you navigate zones overrun with poisonous clouds, unlocking the jetpack allows you scale cliffs that would otherwise be difficult to reach, and researching explosives allows you to blast through troublesome rocks so you can delve into caves and other blocked off areas. Each of these developments completely changes what’s possible while out in the world, which in turn allows you to acquire better materials to bring back to your base, creating a loop of building and exploration that just doesn’t quit.

It goes from great to downright amazing once you add friends. Of course, it wouldn’t be much of an alien planet if there weren’t hostile creatures everywhere who are quite interested in seeing your violent demise. You’ll unlock a few melee weapons and some basic guns and ammo, but combat isn’t anything special as it clearly isn’t the intended focus of Satisfactory. It only took me a few hours before I realized I’d seen just about everything combat had to offer, and while it’s not actively bad, it’s just a bit forgettable when the building and exploration are so great. The alien wildlife mostly seems to be there to provide a touch of danger whenever I go looking for new resources, but it’s still a bit disappointing that there only seem to be four types of creatures to encounter, each with a few different variations that make them more deadly but not any more interesting.

Playing Satisfactory alone can be a lot of fun, but once you add friends to the mix it goes from great to downright amazing. Not only does building with friends allow you to get more done quicker and bounce ideas off one another, but you can each take off to a different part of the map and still work towards shared goals by building infrastructure to transport goods and players from place-to-place. One especially cool aspect is that, once you unlock supernatural alien technology that defies the laws of physics (which happens surprisingly early rather than being wasted on the endgame alone), you can begin sharing resources with one another remotely by uploading your bounty to the Dimensional Depot, which anyone can pull items directly into their inventory from at any time. This creates a really cool dynamic, where a player you haven’t seen in the world for several hours can pipe up to ask for help with something, and you can virtually hand them the resources they need to solve their problem.

If there’s one real issue with Satisfactory, it’s that sometimes its ambition exceeds its grasp, leading to a pretty steady stream of performance issues and bugs (at least on the pre-release 1.0 build I had access to for this review). Crashes were a regular occurrence for my crew, especially for those joining my world for multiplayer, and as your factory grows to an absurd size and complexity, you’ll start to see pop-in, weird textures, and framerate dips with increasing frequency. I played on three separate PCs of varying levels of power, and though each could run Satisfactory fine at the outset, by the end only my Ryzen 9 7950X3D/RTX 4090 could run it without at least moderate issues. You’ll likely need a fairly powerful rig to run this one with consistency, but even when it struggled a bit on two of my PCs, those problems were only ever an annoyance rather than anything so severe that they made me want to stop playing.

I’ve played over 90 hours of Satisfactory’s 1.0 release, and I already have a pretty good idea of where I stand with it at this point, but I’ve still got a final round of uber-challenging endgame tasks to complete before I’ve seen it all and can confidently deliver my verdict. For now, I can tell you that there’s a whole heckuva lot to enjoy. Now, if you don’t mind, I really should get back to it – these production pipelines aren’t going to optimize themselves!