It’s a lot like factorio, you do spend most of your time growing and optimizing your factory, but since it’s 3D, you get to build cool buildings to house everything in too.

It’s cool that it’s in first personview, but it’s a lot more difficult than Factorio given that you don’t get a topdown view and will struggle to understand factory layout once it gets to the more complicated recipes.

There’s also a LOT of running around looking for resource nodes or trying to diagnose inevitable power issues.

A big difference is that Satisfactory wants you to kind of explore the world more and connect factories between them. Also the nodes have infinite resources compared to Factorio which has limited and wants you to expand.

Satisfactory is slightly slower paced than Factorio is.

Factorio procedurally generates the terrain, so the layout is never the same twice. Satisfactory takes place in a hand-crafted and fixed world with no procedural generation whatsoever. Instead of patches of ore that you mine with a lot of machines that eventually run out, Satisfactory has a finite number of “nodes” that never run out.

Satisfactory has a significant architectural system; in Factorio you just build your factory right on the ground, if you’re really hoighty toighty you’ll put concrete under them. Satisfactory has, and pretty much needs, floors, walls, staircases, windows, roofs etc.

In Factorio, there’s water and cliffs, both of which can be removed with craftables. Satisfactory’s world is very rugged and almost completely immutable; most but not all of the ground clutter can be bombed as can the fuggin fart rocks now, but you cannot change the map geometry. You can build foundations over water…or hovering 50 feet in mid-air, who cares? In fact you likely will end up doing this because the terrain is so rugged you kinda have to build factories of any size a little elevated.

In Factorio, you are basically constantly playing wave defense, hoardes of increasingly tough enemies keep attacking your buildings and you have to build and arm turrets etc. to defend you. In Satisfactory, it’s more like “See this forest? There’s iron, limestone, copper and coal in this forest. And five tigers.” There is no base defense system, in fact there is no health system for buildings. Fauna ranges from friendly to hostile, and once you’ve built power infrastructure into territory, hostile creatures will stop spawning there. Satisfactory does not have pollution as a game mechanic; many buildings emit smoke as a visual effect but it doesn’t factor into anything. The hogs and the pyroceratops and the arachnobominations just hate your face and want to hurt you on sight is all.

There isn’t a “craft thing in inventory” and keep running around while you are your own little factory like in Factorio. In Satisfactory, to hand craft you have to stand in front of a workbench while a hammer ding sound plays. Offsetting this, you don’t craft assembling machines and have a stack of assembling machines in your inventory; you have some iron plates and steel pipes and copper wire and circuit boards in your inventory, and your build gun creates a Manufacturer or whatever.

In Factorio, the basic natural resources are wood, water, crude oil, iron, copper, stone, coal and uranium.

In Satisfactory, the basic natural resources are wood, leaves, flowers, water, crude oil, iron, copper, coal, limestone, sulfur, quartz, caterium, mycelia, bauxite, nitrogen gas, various alien creature body parts, uranium, and a material that isn’t used in-game yet called SAM Ore.

In Satisfactory, unlocking new recipes is only semi-automated: Major progress is made by building special project parts for the space elevator, minor progress is made by putting ordinary parts into the HUB, and incidental buildings like ladders and such can be purchased in the AWESOME shop.

That’s it. Now get to work and be effective.