Hey, look! It's a Space Giraffe Tick Penguin Thing, stuck in a walkway! This guy kept walking onto my factory floor and getting trapped in weird places. I turned my back for one second and somehow he got his head stuck between my walkways! Dude... I had to remove the walkways so he could get back on all fours and move on.

Satisfactory is my #1 most played game on Steam, with 741.5 hours as of this post. I know, rookie numbers, right? But I have a library of over 3,500 games, so dedicating this much time to any single game is a major feat of accomplishment in my book.

Although I don't think it really counts, because I've definitely just left the game running 24/7 for like a week or two just to build up resources in the background. 😅

In my early gaming sessions, I didn't care to explore. I was too busy trying to get a centralized factory hub working, so I tried to build everything off my initial hub. When I needed resources that weren't nearby, I would track them down, then build spaghetti lines of conveyor belts back to my main factory so I could continue building in one location. This screenshot above is just a hint of the nightmare that was my original messy build.

I've since learned that exploring is key in this game, and getting multiple factories producing resources off many nodes around the map will significantly improve production times. I can't wait to unlock trains so I can migrate mass quantities of resources between my multiple factories.

Satisfactory has been in early release for several years now, but they just officially released 18 days ago, and the full game has been quite enjoyable! I love that there's a background story now and not just "we dropped you on an alien planet, start harvesting resources." I started over with a fresh new factory, and thanks to a bunch of tips from YouTubers (primarily TotalXclipse), I've made significant improvements to the way I build.

Also, my wife was finally curious enough to check it out, so she's working on her own factory build now! My wife isn't an avid gamer like me, but she enjoys playing a few co-op games with me and my friends, so it's fun when she gets interested in a game I'm playing.

I enjoy factory-building games like this, but Satisfactory, with its first-person view, really feels like you're in the world actually creating something. It's definitely my favorite of the genre. I've struggled get into other factory games that didn't put me right into the action. Like Factorio. Same general concept, but the overhead view of everything makes it harder for me to feel like I'm a part of the world I'm building.

Plus, I hate defending against swarms of aliens in Factorio. Just let me build in peace! Satisfactory has some aggressive alien creatures, but only if you disturb them in their home location, and they only attack you directly while you're in the area. They don't follow you far, and/or attack your factories and mess up your production.