Over the last decade, a cloud has formed over the green and pleasant pastures of puzzle gaming. Acrid-smelling and oily-black, it billows across the horizon from an entirely different genre. Follow the plume to its source, and you’d be greeted by a shocking sight – an endless, whirring mass of mining drills and iron smelters, assembly machines and steam engines, all linked by a spaghetti-like network of conveyor belts. Those intrepid enough to visit this place rarely return, and its infernal sprawl creeps closer and closer to your door every day.
I’m referring, of course, to factory-building games, which task players with constructing an interconnected, ever-expanding web of production lines in pursuit of some lofty goal. An offshoot of the management sim genre, what separates these games from the likes of Planet Coaster and Two Point Hospital is their hard logical core. Instead of managing people, you oversee a complex system of machines, building it and priming it to be as efficient as possible. This also makes them uniquely challenging puzzle games, able to sternly test the logical part of your brain in a manner far more open-ended than most puzzlers.
Although the genre has been around for a while, 2024 has been a particularly notable year for factory-builders. In September, Coffee Stain Studios released the final version of Satisfactory onto PC, garnering rave reviews. A month later, Wube Software released its long-anticipated expansion to Factorio – Space Age, a vast and transformative addition to the original factory-building experience.
Both titles are among the highest-rated games of the year, praised for their scope, depth, challenge and ambition. In this article, I’ll explain precisely what makes these games such compelling conundrum generators, what distinguishes these more recent entries to the genre, and where to get started if you’re thinking of opening a factory of your own.
Factorio and Satisfactory share similarly grand premises. In Factorio (at least, the base version) you’re trying to build a rocket to escape the planet that you’re stranded on. Satisfactory, meanwhile, tasks you with building and maintaining a space elevator, which you use to ferry goods to your orbiting corporate overlords. In both cases, these projects require an enormous amount of resources and components to complete, far more than you can create by hand. As such, you must find a way to expedite the process. And so, the factory is born.
Initially, these games play more like survival simulators, with you mining rocks and collecting resources to construct an assortment of structures. Yet instead of building wooden shacks or firepits, you build mechanical drills and smelting furnaces. Respectively, these are used to mine larger quantities of basic resources like iron or copper, and to turn them into more useful products, like iron plate or copper wire.
These are the first tumbling rocks that unleash an avalanche of automation. Any item you craft in Factorio or Satisfactory can be ferried elsewhere on conveyor belts, while you can use machines called assemblers to combine resources and craft other items automatically. Indeed, virtually any item that can be crafted in these games can also have its crafting process automated, provided you can get the appropriate resources for the appropriate assembly machine.
Taken in isolation, there’s immense satisfaction to be had in building neat and tidy assembly lines, and learning how to arrange the belts and machines for producing each new resource is a puzzle in and of itself, especially when you’re trying to maximise efficiency. A crucial element of these games is that different resources are often produced at different rates. As a simple example, a basic smelter in Satisfactory produces 30 iron ingots a minute, while a Constructor (a simple assembler with only one input) set up to convert those ingots into iron rods will produce 15 rods per minute at a 1:1 ratio. Hence, you can set up one smelter to feed ingots into two Constructors, maximising your production of iron rods and ensuring the belt flows smoothly.
The real challenge, though, emerges at the macro level, when you have dozens, if not hundreds of assembly lines all interconnecting, each pulling multiple items from elsewhere in your factory that themselves are assembled from numerous resources. Adding a new assembly line into this system may require you to bolster production in several other lines multiple layers back, or rework a section of your factory to fit this new process in. The later stages of these games involve dealing with whole new systems of production like oil refining, and new methods of conveyance like railways for large-scale resource transportation. Establishing some of these systems will give your grey matter a thorough massage, such as setting up fully efficient oil cracking in Factorio,
Essentially, these games are a thousand nested logic puzzles contained within a creative superstructure, pressing all those different buttons in your brain to similar degrees. The sense of payoff this can provide is enormous. Key progression points like planting Satisfactory’s space elevator into the ground are hugely gratifying. But there are also those more emergent moments when you pause after a dozen hours of play, and simply marvel at how much your factory has grown.
Now you’ve got your top hat, your braces and your cigar to chomp like an old-timey industrialist, which factory should you open first? Well, that depends. Of the two games, Satisfactory is the glossier, more accessible experience, effectively streamlining many of the ideas Factorio pioneered. To give a few examples, resource deposits in Satisfactory are infinite, meaning you don’t have to regularly seek out and tap new veins of iron, copper to keep your factory running like in Factorio. Conveyor belts are generally easier to set up, while the game’s production ratios are simplified, making efficiency easier to achieve. Also, its alien fauna isn’t quite as hostile to your presence, so you don’t need to build extensive defensive systems to keep your factory safe.
Outside of being slightly simpler, Satisfactory’s first-person 3D perspective puts you among the massive machinery of your factory, providing a more palpable sense of scale. The 3D world also means you can build your factory vertically as well as horizontally, enabling you to do things like stack items and easily thread conveyor belts between one another. Satisfactory is also more narratively colourful than Factorio, although I personally dislike its tired attempt at corporate satire, with the game’s repeated jokes about how disposable you are failing to land.
By comparison, Factorio is a more complex, challenging experience. While its 2D presentation makes factories easier to comprehend at-a-glance, it makes interweaving assembly lines more difficult in the mid-to-late game, thus requiring more forward planning. In addition, Factorio folds in a tower defence element, where the pollution produced by your factory causes nearby creators to periodically attack your base. This means you need to defend your factory by building walls and weapons, the latter of which range from basic automated turrets to railway cannons and even nuclear bombs. It’s worth noting that you can switch off enemy attacks if you wish via “peaceful” mode, although even here you’ll have to fight enemies occasionally to access new resources deposits.
This may make Satisfactory sound like the safer bet, but the situation is complicated by the recent release of Factorio’s Space Age expansion. This massive addition completely blows out the scale of the game, turning the rocket that was originally the literal end product of your factory into a delivery system for a new factory you build in space. This Space Platform, which collects asteroids via wonderfully silly mechanical arms, is used to research new technologies that facilitate interplanetary travel.
Once kitted out with thrusters, your Space Platform can transport you to four brand new planets, each of which differs radically from your starting planet in ways that will force you to rethink how to build a factory. On the fiery planet Vulcanis, for example, you must figure out how to forge metals from vast lakes of lava, and generate power from swamps of sulfuric acid. The planet Fulgora, meanwhile, is a giant scrapyard wracked by lightning storms where you build a factory focussed on sustainability, sorting through its veins of junk with recycling machines, and using lightning rods to harness the planet’s violent, yet boundless energy.
It’s a dazzling, wildly imaginative creation, a contender for the best expansion ever made. And its addition comfortably makes Factorio the definitive factory-building experience. Satisfactory may still be the best choice for players completely new to these games, but if you’re prepared to be challenged to have your mind completely blown, Factorio: Space Age will do that.
One penultimate point worth mentioning. Although Satisfactory and Factorio are the most comprehensive factory games currently available, they’re also not the only games in the genre worth your attention. I’d like to spotlight two other games that cater to slightly more specific tastes:
- Dyson Sphere Program is a lighter, more accessible version of Factorio: Space Age, requiring you to build factories on multiple planets to construct a giant, energy-absorbing Dyson Sphere around your planetary system’s central star. Although still in Steam early access, DSP already feels like a fully-fledged experience, and provides a similar sense of scale as Space Age, but at a lower barrier to entry. It’s also a lot cheaper than either Factorio or Satisfactory, if budget is a factor.
- Shapez 2 is a factory-builder that focuses more squarely on the puzzling element, tasking you with assembling and painting LEGO-like studs in different ways and feeding them into a massive, swirling vortex (which seems like a waste of LEGO, to be honest, that stuff’s expensive). As the vortex demands different shapes, you have to adjust your assembly lines to compensate, slicing circles into semicircles, painting green squares red, etc. It’s a fun abstraction of the core concepts of factory building, and a good alternative if you just want to build and solve puzzles without any exploration or conflict.
Ultimately, both Satisfactory and Factorio are well worth the (significant) time investment they demand, rich, invigorating, and generous experiences that stimulate your brain in all manner of ways. They represent the most significant step forward in management games since the advent of The Sims, and in terms of raw scale, are probably the most ambitious puzzle games that you can buy today.
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