They said it couldn’t be done. They said it shouldn’t> be done. But finally, Satisfactory‘s pipes are finally out of the, well, pipeline. After months of pretending otherwise (and a short period on the game’s experimental branch), the 3D factory builder’s long-awaited fluid system has finally arrived, letting you pump all sorts of liquidy nonsense around your contraption without splashing them inefficiently over conveyor belts.

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Satisfactory

is a factory-building game. Which means that, by its nature, it has been fighting an uphill battle. Why? Because Factorio exists.

And yet you have to congratulate Coffee Stain on what they’ve accomplished against these odds. They’ve put together a surprisingly robust and extremely fun factory-builder in a 3D environment, which in itself is enough to prove wrong my predictions when I first heard about the game. But more than that: they’ve given us a factory-builder where the overwhelming feeling is one of possibility and hope, rather than – in Factorio’s case – bleak and uninviting.

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From an early age, humans know that if they want to be taken seriously, they must learn how to deliver a convincing car noise. Vrrrrummm, they might say. Or perhaps: brrrrrr-bp-brrr. These are the nascent efforts of the budding speed freak, and they must be respected. But once again the realm of videogames encroaches upon the germinal life of the human with pitiless velocity. Car games put a stop to make-believe noise, and introduce fully realised cars on a screen, ready for the racing, shiny bonnets and vrrrrummm noises included. Thus, the imagination dies, and these, the 10 best cars in PC games, are born. Beep beep.

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Satisfactory’s Update 3 is one of gaming’s great bait and switches. For months, developer Coffee Stain had been denying that its first-person factory-building game would ever have pipes. Why would they? You could already transport liquids on conveyors, so what was the point? And then in February, the studio presented a magnificently overblown trailer which confirmed the opposite of what they’d been claiming for all this time. Pipes were coming>. The chat went wild.

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There it is, the trans-planetary pipeline. One long tube of metal scarring a rural alien planet. It brings coal and water to my power stations, and electricity to my factories. It has taken a day of planning, construction and pumping. Now, the pipeline stands before me, a snaking behemoth of energy consumption. Suddenly, a thought comes. Why didn’t I just build coal stations next to the vein? I could have stretched a cheap wire across the planet, instead of a kilometre-long death pipe.

This is Satisfactory, a cracking first-person factory-builder that’s been in early access on Epic for a while. It’s coming to Steam today, so RPS management dispatched me to inspect the game’s machinery and ruin the extraterrestrial idyll with smog and incompetence. They sent the right person.

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Giant automated industry builder Satisfactory has been on the assembly line for a while already, first debuting on the Epic Games Store last year. The Factorio-but-3D builder has churned out new additions to its early access version since then, including giant trains and guns and vertical conveyors. The mammoth machines are reaching another milestone when Satisfactory launches on Steam—still in early access—on Monday, June 8th.

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Brill as environment-despoiling industrialist sim Satisfactory is, it felt like it was missing something. With today’s addition of big automated freight trains to the early access sandbox, I realise what Coffee Stain hadn’t yet cribbed from Factorio. Today’s update also adds some lush new biomes to explore, and a way to completely screw it all up. Nuclear power plants produce tons of power (great for trains), but churn out deadly nuclear waste (less great), which needs disposing of (by train?). Below, a dev video featuring all the above and some oddly sexy pizza.

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Today, Coffee Stain rolled out their first major early access update for Satisfactory, their 3D Factorio-like space-industrial sandbox. While shockingly good even in its first release, it still felt like the game had some gaps to fill. Today’s update adds new vertical conveyor belts, an exploration vehicle with springy suspension, demolition charges and firearms which go a long way to filling out those blanks. Below, a straight-to-the-point developer update video, made significantly more amusing by hair-dye interfering with their chroma key effects, or the full patch notes here.

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The Factorio-esque delights of building machines to build machines until a pretty alien planet is converted into a vast machine building one really big machine today enters a first-person perspective with the early access of launch of Satisfactory. Made by Coffee Stain Studios, the mob behind Goat Simulator and–more relevantly–Sanctum, it is unashamedly Factorio in 3D but that intimate perspective does make a difference when you’re racing around in buggies or building up into the heavens.

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Satisfactory, the Factorio-style automated building game from Coffee Stain, is going to be huge. It’s going to be huge because there are going to be so many videos of huge things built within it, and we’re all going to look at those and think “now I> want to make something huge.”

The overriding question here was always whether or not Satisfactory could successfully transpose the spaghetti junction of autonomous conveyor belts and heavy machinery traditionally beheld from a top-down, third-person perspective into shiny first-person 3D. How can one possibly manage these thumping, churning cat’s cradles when even a small fraction of one fills the screen entirely?

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