How Coffee Stain Studios is building Satisfactory’s long-awaited 1.0 update
7.22.2024
By Julian Benson, Contributor
Released on the Epic Games Store back in 2019, for the past five years, developer Coffee Stain Studios has expanded its factory-building game with huge updates, adding game-changing content such as pipes and trains, endless optimizations, and even shifting the whole thing into the new Unreal Engine. From the outside, it’s easy to assume it was always meant to be made this way, but that wasn’t the case.
“The decision to go to Early Access was actually pretty late,” Satisfactory Community Manager Snutt Treptow says. In 2019, the team had already worked on the game for close to three years and had a version in mind that would be feature-complete at launch. However, they also had ideas for a larger game, one that would have been too big an investment for a small studio, particularly when they had no idea if players wanted a first-person factory-building game.
The team decided to try Early Access and “see how it goes.” As Treptow recalls: “It was quite scary. We weren't sure how people would take [the game].” If it were a success, then they would be able to spend more time on development, bringing it closer to their larger vision. If it were a failure, then it would be much harder to justify continuing production.
Within three months of launching in the Epic Games Store, Satisfactory sold more than 500,000 copies. “We were surprised by how many people bought the game,” Treptow says. “It made it possible for us to explore more avenues of what we could do.”
Best-laid plans
“Before we launched, we did have a roadmap,” Treptow says. Created solely for internal use, it detailed the steps that the studio would take over the next few years to get to a full launch version of Satisfactory.
“We had much grander ideas for combat,” Treptow says, recalling the dev's original vision. You can even see evidence of their plans in Satisfactory’s reveal trailer—there's a giant crab boss battle around the two-minute mark—but the Coffee Stain team saw that kind of thing didn’t match up to how people were playing the early versions of the game. “Most people just want to build factories,” Treptow says, so the team focused “on making as chill of a factory game as possible.”
While players didn’t want combat, what they did want was altogether more challenging, at least from Coffee Stain’s point of view: pipes.
“It became a meme in our community,” Treptow says. The team had considered pipes, but couldn’t really see what they would add to the game. At launch, all of the resources you collected and items you constructed traveled between your machines on conveyor belts. When you had your factory up and running, you could look out and see an endless march of iron ore rubble piles, steel plate stacks, and copper wire coils winding their way between machines on a maze of belts. Even liquid resources, such as oil, would travel in this way, only they would be pre-packaged into metal and plastic drums.
However, in Satisfactory’s nearest competitor, Factorio, liquids travel between facilities via pipes. Players wanted the same from Coffee Stain’s game.
“We were like, ‘alright, screw it, well, we'll add pipes, and we'll have to change everything with the game because it will completely change all the recipes that are in there currently,'” Treptow says.
In answering the community’s demands, Coffee Stain discovered loads of new mechanics in working out a way to make pipes a meaningful part of Satisfactory. For liquids to travel in pipes, there needs to be enough pressure in the line, which makes transporting fluids vertically, up cliffs, or into machines at the top of tall factories a significant challenge for players.
“Ever since then, we always kept the mindset that we should react to what people want to see and what makes sense at the time instead of trying to think one or two years ahead,” Treptow says.
Coffee Stain did eventually flesh out Satisfactory's combat, but even then, “[the team] realized [they] weren't going to get much out of working on this stuff,” Treptow says. “It's more important we work on content the players [want] than trying to touch up systems to make the game as broad as possible.”
The feedback from Satisfactory’s Early Access has reshaped the game Coffee Stain Studios planned to make, but it’s provided more than just player input. It’s also been a motivator to keep going.
“We've seen the more we put into the game, the more people get out of it,” Treptow says. “When we launched the game, we thought, ‘Is anybody going to make anything cool with this?’ Then people made these amazing factory builds, more impressive than anything we've ever built. They push the game further than we thought was possible, and every time we optimize the game, they manage to push it further.”
When he looks back on the team’s original plan to complete the game behind closed doors and release it feature-complete, Treptow's conclusion is clear: “[It] would have been soul-crushing. The fact we were taking this journey with our community and getting their reactions has benefitted us a lot. It's one of the beautiful things with this model; it really shaped the game to be what it is today.”
Preparing for launch
As fruitful as Early Access has been, Coffee Stain hasn’t lost sight of the end goal. In fact, the preparation for Satisfactory's 1.0 launch began over two years ago.
After the release of Update 5 in 2022, Coffee Stain split development into two separate tracks. One track focused on Early Access updates, bug fixes, and optimizations; the other was features being kept aside for 1.0.
“Some features we were working on took longer than the time between updates, and we couldn't half-ass those things,” Treptow explains. For instance, Satisfactory’s narrative mode will be added in 1.0 because the team “didn't want people to experience a half-finished story.”
The challenge of this two-track development is it left the team’s “attention a bit divided,” Treptow says. With the release of Update 8, the team is now working wholly towards the 1.0 release. “It's significantly easier [now]. It's been hard to keep track of everything, but I'm so glad we're all working on the same thing.”
In some respects, holding back some features until 1.0 has given the team space to work out what’s appropriate for the final version of Satisfactory. “[Our] vision of what the story would be has changed drastically throughout Early Access,” Treptow says. The team always wanted a narrative and an end goal for the sandbox campaign, but they “had grander ambitions back in the day.” As with combat, the more Coffee Stain learned what players looked for, the less they wanted to add anything that “took away from the factory building aspect."
Life after 1.0
Coffee Stain Studios “will keep working on Satisfactory,” Treptow says, but the team won’t decide on the scope and extent of that until they get past the final hurdle.
The team has plenty of ideas it could still implement. Coffee Stain even put out a video recently detailing what wouldn’t be in the game at launch, implying some of those features may come after release. But, as Treptow puts it: “[While] we could work on this game forever—we could make this into a live service game—I don't think that's something we want to do at all.”
Even now, the team isn’t rushing or announcing a release date. “We want that room for us to adjust and take our time with our decisions,” Treptow explains. “We only know that we are shooting for this year, but when this year is undecided still. A couple of weeks ago, we reached the full content complete version of the game. Our focus is to fix it up so we can have a closed beta with a bunch of players, and then, based on that feedback, we'll determine when we think we can launch the game.
“It will be super nice to finally get the last pieces into the game and to be able to call it finished. That’s a huge thing. We've worked on this game for so long that I have a hard time accepting that it's actually happening.”
Look out for the final release of Satisfactory later this year. It's available on the Epic Games Store.