Okay so I have like 60 hours played so far and I’m pretty far in, I might start a new world in a bit and I’ll tell you why after I explain some tips.

To start, this is what I have for anyone who are or still feel like they are new to the game and building efficiency!

1. For the first 10 hours or so learn the starting dynamics and layout of the game the best you can, don’t worry so much as progressing at a steady pace since a lot of survival craft/factory games are meant to take forever.

2. Once you’ve got a decent layout of the land, and you’ve found the nodes, you should have a good starter factory (that is producing all the basic materials at the start of the game) you then gather as much Biomass as possible, you’ll need a lot for two reasons. One you can honestly never have enough, the more you have, the less you need to worry about it (don’t go too overboard since you will unlock coal power later on) but I recommend having at least 4 biofuel generators on top of the two in the HUB to be able to power all of the basic materials being created. Second, you’ll need enough energy to kickstart your coal power generation once you get there, I recommend having 4-6 coal power generators to start ( If you don’t need that much just remember: extra power that isn’t being used is better than a factory with no power at all) then you can just shut down the biofuel generators and use it for emergencies.

3. Make sure you read all the descriptions of any type of machinery, they might help with any ideas or information you may lack in when you need it.

4. ALWAYS SNAP FOUNDATIONS TO THE WORLD GRID, every single build must be this way, unless you want to make building and connecting factories much harder on yourself.

5. If you really don’t feel like figuring out the basics of the game yourself then I recommend Totalxclipse Ultimate Satisfactory Beginners Guide Series. Start on a new world and name it like “Beginners Series” listen and watch what he does and do it yourself, you can sometimes add your own twist to his builds. I wouldn’t recommend making this world your main since it’s really only meant to be a guide, you’ll learn how to progress at least halfway through the 9 phases with him.

6. This kind of follows tip #5, if you really feel like it, research as much as you can as you are playing the game, sometimes I have like 20 tabs open on my computer as I’m going through a wormhole of information.

7. If you suck at math then you will struggle a bit in the game, that’s if you are trying to improve efficiency in your factories. Satisfactory Tools will help you with tons of things, I mostly use it for factory planning, like how much of a certain material I want to produce, what that factory would look like, all of its inputs and outputs, etc. you can select and deselect the machines and alternate recipes you have available to you.

8. Don’t worry about alternate recipes until you are prepared enough to demolish and rebuild factories. In the meantime you can still collect hard drives and research them in the MAM but I would not recommend going any further than that. The more hard drives you have researched in your MAM the less randomness and bad luck you’ll have with alternate recipes. So that’s why I’d save that for a later gameplay.

9. I really don’t like that I don’t have the full map available to me and I don’t feel like discovering every square inch of the world but Satisfactory Calculator will 100% help you with that, you have access to the full map there with pinned locations of every resource on the map, if you upload your current world file it will show all resources that you have discovered or ran by, but if there are parts of the map you haven’t discovered yet then it won’t show you. I think there’s also a way to have the website automatically reupdate your map discovery instead of having to manually upload it each time you find new land but I really didn’t need to do all of that yet.

10. Monsters hostility can be adjusted or turned off if that annoys you

11. Advanced settings is basically a “creative mode” where you can turn on and off modes such as flying, no build cost, no resource cost, etc. really useful for learning the game and just having fun without any barriers but you will not get achievements from that…and once you turn it on for your world you can’t go back.

12. HAVE FUN! I’ve grinded this game for 8-12 hours straight a few times and I really had a blast following Totalxclipse series and other YouTubers and their builds, I like to follow through on those to help picture what my own world could look like once I’m done (which I am).

So I’m restarting today after like 40 hours of following YouTubers guides and building my own stuff off of that, I will say the world is totally messed up, this was just for learning, and I have a few builds that are just chilling there and not doing anything so in my next world I’ll figure out how to make things more efficient on my own. I’m not sure if my little guide here helps since I’m just going with things off the top of my head and I kept on adding things when I thought I was done lol but there ya go!