Satisfactory finally exits early access after four years

After more than four years, the base-building, resource management sim Satisfactory got a surprise release date announcement on Friday, along with the reveal of an important feature: flushable toilets.

The short trailer shows a character having to go to the bathroom. They run and jump over obstacles before rushing into a toilet while another character stares at the camera. The release date for Satisfactory 1.0 is unveiled at the end: September 10.

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“The HUB’s once-trivial toilet has been updated with an advanced flushing mechanism, providing an extra luxurious worker experience for pioneers,” a post on Steam reads. As a fan of flushable or interactable toilets in video games, this seems like a top, extremely important feature.

The PC game is also getting a ton of updates for the 1.0 release. First up, the map has gotten many new resource nodes (places throughout the world where you can use extractors to mine for resources), along with balance tweaks on the distribution of caterium, sulfur, quartz, iron, copper, limestone, coal, and water geysers. Secondly, the dedicated servers will receive more support, including advanced settings like auto save.

There are a ton of balance updates in general, with many aimedat helping players in the early and midgame. For example, some recipe costs have been changed to make it easier to reach higher tiers, like heavy modular frames and screws for computers. Moving between tiers has also been smoothed out, with a more gradual transition for research trees.

Of course, 1.0 will introduce more optimizations for game performance. As you play through Satisfactory and build out your factory, you’ll gather a lot of assets and moving parts, which can really strain your PC. This is a common problem with city builders and base builders like Cities Skylines, and the developers at Coffee Stain have worked to reduce performance issues.

The developers say more changes are incoming as well, so fans should be on the lookout for updates.

Satisfactory has hit it big on PC since it came out in June 2020 — just a few months into COVID-19 lockdowns. It sold over a 1 million copies in the month after launch, and 5.5 million as of February 2024.

Part of the reason for its four-year-long early access concerns a switch to Unreal Engine 5, which bumped up the minimum system requirements. There have also been long development times as the developers integrated certain features and ideas, like the priority power switch to help with power issues, according to an interview in PCGamesN.