Satisfactory Beginner Tips and Tricks

The following is a list of general tips that can help both the beginner and veteran in their factory development.

Note: I may expand this in the future. The goal is to give general tips and tricks without getting into walk-through territory.

Beginner Tips and Tricks

1. Take your time. Do not rush progress. Learn how the different production processes work. Late game production can be quite complex.
2. Build up! Take advantage that you can build vertically.
3. From sea level, you can build appx 800m up before hitting the death ceiling. You can also build appx 200m down into the void.
4. The void is the common name for the endless pit you see on the edges of the map, and a few areas in the middle.
5. Your bottlenecks in the game are belts and pipes.
6. Belts are rated by items moved per minute, the tiers are 60 / 120 / 270 / 480 / 780 items per minute.
7. Pipes have a maximum flow rate of 300m3 a minute. There are no higher tiers at this time.
8. Pipes are effected by gravity. A machine such as a water extractor has a 10m headlift.
9. Headlift is how much a machine can push liquids vertically.
10. Pumps can be used to help with headlift. A single pump can add 20m headlift.
11. Pumps also act as one-way valves.
12. If you route your pipes downhill, you can get around headlift altogether up to where the pipe begins to go downhill.
13. The simplest way to construct chains of machines is by use of the manifold system.
14. A manifold is a set of machines in a single, straight line. With the use of splitters, mergers, or pipe junctions, simply take one belt or pipe and branch it off in series. The only downside is that it can take a while for the system to become 100% efficient. This is because each machine in the line needs to fill its internal storage. This system is also commonly known as overflow. This allows easy expansion.
15. Overflow splitter mode, found in smart and programmable splitters can be used to siphon off excess resources to another production chain, or an AWESOME Sink.
16. You can also balance your factories using a more traditional balancer, the only downside is that you have to figure out the balance ratio and it can use more room. Its also hard to expand.
17. Exploration is quite important. You will want to find crash sites and power slugs.
18. Crash sites give you a hard drive. In your M.A.M, you can research that hard drive an discover an alternate recipe. You get 3 random choices per hard drove and you may select one at once. There are currently more hard drives on the map than alternate recipes.
19. Power slugs can be processed into power shards, which allow you to overclock your buildings.
20. Do not be afraid to dismantle and try again!
21. How do i get out of being stuck in between 2 things? It depends on what your stuck on. Machine you built? Dismantle it. A tree or foliage? chainsaw. If all else fails, press C to crouch, should dislodge you.

Coal Power: Burn Rates and What You Can Burn

To understand coal power, we first must break down the numbers.

Coal Generator Basics

Physical connections

• 1 pipe input
• 1 belt input

Requirements

• 15 coal a minute
• 45m3 water a minute
• produces 75 MW of power at 100%

Coal is not the only item you cab burn in a coal generator. In total there are three resources that can be used in a coal generator:

• Coal
• Compacted Coal
• Petroleum Coke

These resources have different burn times, how much is consumed per minute.

Resource	Burn Rate
Coal	15
Compacted Coal	7.14
Petroleum Coke	25

Coal

Coal is easily found through resource nodes on the map. Depending on the node quality and miner tier, you will get different rates per minute.

Compacted Coal

Compacted coal is a alternate recipe you can unlock randomly by researching hard drives at the M.A.M.

The recipe takes per minute:

• 25 sulfur IN
• 25 coal IN
• 25 compacted coal OUT

Petroleum Coke

Petroleum Coke is a byproduct from oil processing. You get it from converting your heavy oil residue into petroleum coke in a refinery.

The recipe for petroleum coke is:

• 40m3 heavy oil residue IN
• 120 petroleum coke OUT

Coal Plant Water Setups

Water is probably the most complicated part of coal power, here I will show you some examples of how to setup your water.

The Basics

This is all based off 100% clock speed.

• 45m3 per minute water is needed for each coal generator
• each water extractor will pump 120m3 water
• each pipe can have a flow rate of 300m3 fluid maximum

Different Water Setups

One Water Extractor

This setup will produce 120m3 water at 100% clock speed, and can support 2.66 coal generators on its own. For simplicity sake, this will be reduced to two coal generators.

Three Water Extractors

This setup has all 3 water extractors under-clocked to 75% each. This will produce a total of 270m3 water a minute, enough for 6 coal generators.

Three Water Extractors to 8 Coal Generators

This method is the most efficient, but the most complicated. With 3 water extractors at 100%, you will make 360m3 water a minute. But, a pipe can only move 300m3 fluid per minute max, how does this work? As shown below, the third water extractor is added late into the pipe, thus providing its 120m3 water after previous coal generators have consumed some, thus balancing out the system.

Coal Power Tables

Fuel Consumption Charts

Mk1 Belt, 60 a minute

Fuel Source	Coal Gens Supported	Total Power Capacity	Total Water Required	Total Water Pipes Required
Coal	4	300 MW	180m3	1
Compacted Coal	8.4	630 MW	378m3	2
Petroleum Coke	2.4	180 MW	108m3	1

Mk2 Belt, 120 a minute

Fuel Source	Coal Gens Supported	Total Power Capacity	Total Water Required	Total Water Pipes Required
Coal	8	600 MW	360m3	2
Compacted Coal	16.8	1260 MW	756m3	3
Petroleum Coke	4.8	360 MW	216m3	1

Mk3 Belt, 270 a minute

Fuel Source	Coal Gens Supported	Total Power Capacity	Total Water Required	Total Water Pipes Required
Coal	18	1350 MW	810m3	3
Compacted Coal	37.81	2835.75 MW	1702m3	6
Petroleum Coke	10.8	810 MW	486m3	2

Mk4 Belt, 480 a minute

Fuel Source	Coal Gens Supported	Total Power Capacity	Total Water Required	Total Water Pipes Required
Coal	32	2400 MW	1440m3	5
Compacted Coal	67.22	5041.5 MW	3025m3	11
Petroleum Coke	19.2	1440 MW	864m3	3

Mk5 Belt, 780 a minute

Fuel Source	Coal Gens Supported	Total Power Capacity	Total Water Required	Total Water Pipes Required
Coal	52	3900 MW	2340m3	8
Compacted Coal	109.24	8193 MW	4915.8m3	17
Petroleum Coke	31.2	2340 MW	1404m3	5

Power Production Disclaimer

Automated power do not always produce 100% of their power.

Example

You have 8 coal generators, which will at maximum produce 600MW power.
Your base is only consuming 300MW power to operate

In this scenario, your power generators will not need to operate at 100% efficiency, so they throttle themselves down automatically.

Why is this relevant?

If you over build your power plant, and consume enough power to hit your capacity limit, your power will over time fail due to lack of resources. For this, you should always build power plants based off 100% resource requirement, even if you will not use all that power for a long time.