After five years of early access, Satisfactory has finally been released. Here's what's New in 1.0

Satisfactory, the automation game, is now available in full release, five and a half years after its launch in early access. In that time, it has added multiple tiers and increasingly complex production line goals and the tools and parts needed to build them. It has added trucks, trains and nuclear power. It also includes particle accelerators and dedicated servers. You can copy and paste entire elaborate build blueprints. Man, you haven't really lived until you've tried zooping.

There's a lot more things to do than there were at the beginning. There are also a lot more tools that you can use to increase the efficiency of your factories. You will still begin the game by manually assembling iron rods and plates, but you'll soon unlock blueprints which allow you to reduce the repetitiveness of laying out row after row of manufacturing. This allows you to focus on the fun, big-picture stuff. You can also ignore the blueprints and place each piece one by one. I'm not here for you to have fun.

I'm here to explain how Satisfactory 1.0 has changed, specifically since the most recent update. The majority of the things that I mentioned in my first paragraph have been present in the game for many years. What's new in the full release today? Here's a quick summary of the important stuff.

Performance optimization and improvements

The game is heavy, at least when you are standing in a huge factory with thousands of items and buildings all around you. Or, apparently, when you are driving in vehicles and need to do some serious hit detection around foliage and other obstructions. As shown in this video, 1.0 has some significant optimizations which should benefit both high-end and low-end hardware.

• Both DLSS and DLSS have been updated to the latest versions
• Unreal 5.3 now offers performance improvements.
• The reorganized data of the game has made saving and loading much faster.
• The VRAM requirements have been reduced by reducing the texture size and making other small adjustments.
• Vehicles no longer destroy foliage, which reduces the stuttering of traversal. On dedicated servers, RAM usage can be reduced from 12+ gigabytes to 5-6 gigabytes.
• Conveyor belts can be "significantly" optimized by pooling entire runs of belts together, rather than dividing them into sections.

There are some small but significant features that can improve the quality of life.

Getting buildings perfectly centered in Satisfactory was pretty easy . However, there were enough small issues to slow you down and set off OCD. Coffee Stain focuses on making everything snap together a little bit better. Here are some of the specific improvements that were detailed in this video.

• Conveyor belts now have a "straight" construction mode that gives them perfect 90-degree corners and they look fantastic
• If you aim at the building and are pointing at the input/output, the conveyor should snap to that spot.
• Holding Control on your keyboard will align buildings to foundations, or other buildings. Visual lines indicate what they are aligning to. These are color-coded for input/output and center of mass.

Finally, there's a use for Somersloops & Mercer Spheres

These two magical, mysterious artifacts are tied into the light story of Satisfactory. You'll find these scattered around the world while exploring. Finding them triggers a few voiceovers that tease a larger mystery. I haven't played 1.0 enough to know how many "stories" there are in collecting tons. They can now be used to research the new tech trees within the MAM (aka Molecular Analysis Machine). They unlock some very tantalizing new technology that I don't want to spoil.

The space elevator expands as you move forward

This is a cool visual touch. In Satisfactory, your main objective is to build some complex parts and send them off into a space lift that visually hangs above the planet. With each new wave of parts that you send off, the elevator platform is becoming larger and larger through the atmosphere. The 1.0 release has a greater sense of "progress" than the previous versions. It never felt like I was missing out on anything, since Satisfactory is more about optimizing and designing the most ambitious monsters you can imagine rather than "finishing" a game or "going to sleep on time." It's nice to be rewarded for a job done. I imagine this will be especially satisfying for those who only want to play all the construction levels once.

Customizing the game is possible.

Satisfactory used to cast you as an anonymous worker bee wearing an orange jumpsuit with a helmet with opaque-visored. But no more! You can now be a nameless bee in a different colored suit and choose from a variety of opaque-visored masks! There are more options for building cosmetics and paint.

More resource nodes on the map

The developers of Satisfactory have added more nodes on the map. This gives you more options as to where to build, or where to mine and then send resources back to a centrally-located base using trucks, trains drones or extremely long conveyors belts. Here's a screenshot provided by Coffee Stain that shows all the new resource nodes:

The developers have removed a lot of quartz nodes, which has made the number of quartz nodes increase. Here are all the nodes that have been removed as of this latest update:

New fuel types are available that are especially useful for drones and jetpacks

Satisfactory's material is called turbo fuel. This fuel can be converted into rocket fuel and ionized gas. These fuels have different benefits when used to power a jetpack: the rocket fuel allows you to go higher while the ionized gas allows you to go faster and consume less fuel.

Drones will now be able to use fuel instead of batteries and perform differently depending on what type of fuel they are using.

Quantum Tech, a new challenge in Tier 9, adds to the challenges.

I have a feeling that building time crystals will somehow be tied into Satisfactory’s new story. You're going to need a lot of power to be able handle this level of construction.