Satisfactory update 1.1 is on the way, and there’s lots to look forward to. Already beloved during its early access period, the open-world building game solidified its place alongside the likes of Factorio, Terraria, and Minecraft as one of the best sandbox games on PC with its 1.0 launch in September 2024. Now, Coffee Stain Studios community manager Mikael Niazi talks us through what we can expect from its first major free update, which lands on the experimental branch very soon.
The latest video is just a first overview of Satisfactory 1.1, but there are some very exciting additions for lovers of the sandbox game to look forward to. New three-way junctions have been introduced for hypertubes – when travelling through them you can switch between paths seamlessly with the press of a key. Also coming are branches, which work similarly but have a more restrictive shape that means they can only be accessed through the hypertube’s longer segment, making them ideal to filter one tube into another.
Vertical splitters and mergers have finally arrived. Among the most-requested additions to the building game, these new devices can be placed “virtually anywhere” on your lifts to divide or combine your conveyors as desired. Furthermore, ‘priority mergers’ have been added. These allow you to set the importance of the three inputs so that the merger knows what’s most important to you if there’s an overload.
Ever since the tremendously useful ‘straight build’ toggle was introduced to make conveyor belts tidier, we’ve clamored for the tool to come to pipes, and now it has. In addition, ‘curved build’ mode is its new, rounded counterpart, designed to give you beautiful, smooth bends for your belts and pipes alike. To give you another easy way to get around, personnel elevators can be placed with a range of customizable stops.
In fantastic news for anyone who loves appreciating the specific efficiency of their designs (that’s all Satisfactory players, then), new throughput visual displays will count the number of items passing along a conveyor belt per minute. Also arriving in 1.1 is a massive overhaul to the Satisfactory photo mode. Better camera movement options, depth of field settings, filters, poses, and more will allow you to create some really beautiful showcases of your builds.
You can expect plenty more building pieces in Satisfactory 1.1: beams, cables, vents, fans, garage doors, and stackable shelves. Railway buffer stops give you a nice way to automatically bring any train to a halt when it reaches the end of its track. Beyond that, other quality-of-life improvements include crash-site dismantling, conveyor wall holes, left-handed rail signals, better sign sampling and drone pathing, and a cheat allowing you to turn off fuel requirements.
The 1.1 update will also introduce controller support, but it unfortunately won’t see the return of rain. Niazi says this “will require yet another upgrade of Unreal Engine,” something there isn’t currently time for as the studio works on polishing up 1.1 and also continues developing the promised console launch of Satisfactory. A bigger deep dive into the new patch will be coming in the future, but you can test it out as soon as this coming week.
Satisfactory 1.1 launches onto the experimental branch on Tuesday April 1. “No really, we promise,” the developer notes (in reference to the build landing on April Fools’ day). The full release date is yet to be set.
Be sure to take a look through the best Satisfactory mods in 2025 to see how you can take your factory even further, and browse the best crafting games on PC for even more ways to build something special.
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