Satisfactory

What’s a nerd without a factory game fascination?

Satisfactory is a game about destroying the ecosystem of a pristine world, for profit. You are put in the shoes of a faceless corporate drone, given tools with rapidly increasing agency for extract and exploiting natural resources, and situated within an incentive structure that rewards you for doing so as efficiently as possible.

It’s great fun.

• A More Satisfactory Way of Building.

  In 2020, Aphyr wrote A Satisfactory Way of Building, exploring the the idea of pattern languages through the forces and consequences imposed by Satisfactory. In the intervening two years, the developers have released two major updates to the game, adding entirely new systems, adding new ways of responding to the forces and tensions in the game, and tweaking (or in some cases, completely reworking) the existing systems and tools.

  Changing contexts and forces lead to changing solutions, and while much of Building remains good advice today, some of it deserves revision. Those changes also create new forces, which give rise to new patterns not contemplated in Aphyr’s original piece.