Instead of viewing Satisfactory in these terms, I think of the game in terms of three main constraints: Resources can be transported arbitrarily long distances without loss or power, via belts. Space constraints are mainly enforced through aesthetic preferences: it is always possible to escape the limitations of local terrain, trees, rocks, etc by building a suitably large flat plane above them. Factories generally require little supervision or active control. Waiting long enough guarantees you’ll have enough parts. The game has no time limits, no quotas other than what you accept for yourself, and what consumables one needs (fuel, ammunition, filters) are readily fulfilled by small production lines. Many of the constraints one would assume shape the design of a real factory, or even other factory sims, are absent or muted in Satisfactory. This is only one possible language for Satisfactory-if you’ve played the game for a while, you’ve undoubtedly started to create your own. Using these patterns together helps generate a series of buildings which work together. The patterns are described in relationship to each other: each helps to organize, to refine, or to flesh out, others. Each of the patterns identifies forces present in a particular context, and resolves them by describing a particular kind of place, in which an arrangement of structures can resolve those forces. This is a pattern language: a grammar which generates buildings. COVID-19 has given me license to spend FAR too much time playing it, and I’d like to share a few thoughts that I hope might prove useful, or at least interesting. Satisfactory is a first-person factory construction game. With apologies, as usual, to Christopher Alexander. Update : Owen Jacobson has written a lovely companion to this piece which covers new dynamics in update 5.
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