6 days Ago By Kevin Purdy
Satisfactory starts out as a game you play, then becomes a way you think . The only way I have been able to keep the ridiculous factory simulation from eating an even-more-unhealthy amount of my time was the game's keyboard-and-mouse dependency. But the work, it has found me—on my couch, on a trip, wherever one might game, really.
In a 1.1 release on Satisfactory 's Experimental branch, there are lots of new things , but the biggest new thing is a controller scheme. Xbox and DualSense are officially supported, though anyone playing on Steam can likely tweak their way to something that works on other pads.
With this, the game becomes far more playable for those playing on a couch, on a portable gaming PC like the Steam Deck, or over household or remote streaming. It also paves the way for the game's console release, which is currently slated for sometime in 2025. Satisfactory seems like an unlikely candidate for controller support, let alone consoles.
It's a game where you do a lot of three-dimensional thinking, putting machines and conveyer belts and power lines in just the right places, either because you need to or it just feels proper. How would it feel to select, rotate, place, and connect everything using a controller? Have I just forgotten that Minecraft, and first-person games as a whole, probably seemed similarly desk-bound at one time? I grabbed an Xbox Wireless controller, strapped on my biofuel-powered jetpack, and gave a reduced number of inputs a shot. The biggest hurdle to get past, for me, is not jumping in place when I wanted to do something, though it's not unique to this game.
In most games that have some kind of building or planning through a controller, the bottom-right button ("A" on Xbox, "X" on PlayStation DualSense) is often the do/interact/confirm button. In Satisfactory, and some other games where I switch between keyboard/mouse and controller, A/X is jump. Satisfactory wants you to primarily use the triggers and bumpers to select, build, and dismantle things, which feels okay when you've got the hang of things.
But even after an hour or so, I still found my pioneer unexpectedly jumping, as if he needed to get the zoomies out before placing a storage container. Wherever you go, there your blueprints are What Satisfactory has going in its favor is its relatively forgiving nature when it comes to objects clipping through each other, and the perfect amount of snappiness when combining buildings and logistics. I managed to build out my new-to-me remote oil production facility (oil into rubber and plastic, residue into fuel for generators, excess material into the Awesome Sink) using only a controller.
I might switch back to keyboard and mouse if I knew I were going to be building a big project, the kind you sketch out on paper, or an online calculator. But I'm otherwise impressed at what the developers have pulled off here, having only reached for my mouse once or twice for what was seemingly a missing option (in the crafting bench). You'll want to build out your item selection wheels if you have not previously.
They make on-the-spot building far faster to get through than clicking the left shoulder for a build menu, then pacing through the categories and options, merely to get to a power line or foundation. You will also want to give the order of your hand-held items more consideration than normal, as you can only move through them in one direction with a controller. Discovering this while in the midst of conflict with a native creature is ill-advised.
Generally, I'm very impressed with the controls as implemented (by Fishlabs ). There is a common language to each panel and situation that slowly seeps into your fingers, like moving between panels with the right stick, and holding the left trigger while clicking brings up a kind of right-click contextual actions menu. If you started the game with a controller—presumably something the developers hope lots of people will do on consoles—you would never know to miss your Q, F, and V keys.
I will be both glad and somewhat concerned that I can now take my exploitative space factory into more relaxing spaces than the same desk where I do my full-time job. There is no excuse now for the conveyor spaghetti, the inefficient truck paths, the missing alternative recipes I could be scavenging from hard drives. What else was I doing, really?.
