How to Keep Your Factory Organized

Back in the early days of Satisfactory I made a video about how to organize your factories, which basically boiled down to shoving all your spaghetti into the basement. But since I made that video, there have been so many great quality of life updates to Satisfactory that it’s easier than ever to be organized. So in this post, I’m going to cover the tools you can use as well as a few of my favorite specific methods for keeping organized.

WATCH THE VIDEO VERSION HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDjHePAqS8k

Snapping

Nothing makes your factory feel like a mess more than spaghetti belts. And especially when starting a new game, it can be difficult to avoid. But, with all of the snapping and special building mode features in the game these days, it’s easier than ever to be organized and clean right from the start.

Straight build mode for belts and pipes is the first solution. This allows you to make perfect right angles with your belts even if you’re just building on the ground.

Next is align to grid. This is used firstly to place foundations on the world grid. Holding CTRL while placing a foundation will snap it this invisible grid, meaning all of your factories can be on the same grid and able to connect to each other, easily.

But it also partially functions even without foundations. When placing something like a constructor on the ground, you can’t place it on the grid. But once you place the first one down, you can hold CTRL while placing additional buildings, and they will snap. You’ll see a guide line, and feel the building be almost magnetized along it. You can also use this when placing additional buildings along the production line, or putting down splitters and mergers. You’ll see a guide line connecting the inputs and outputs. This method means that even before you can start placing down foundations, you can have an organized factory free of spaghetti. It does still work on foundations as well, and it’s super useful for aligning things properly.

Create Dedicated Factories

Once you start expanding, you can clean up your factory layout by building a specific factory for different parts, in what people might call outpost factories, satellite factors, or modular factories. In one area, you produce a ton of concrete. In another, you build plastic and rubber near oil nodes. This is in contrast to belting every raw material into your main base. Ideally, you do this all the way up the chain as well as possible. For example, I chose to make my computer factory in the desert. It makes computers, supercomputers, and a few advanced space elevator parts that require those items. Mostly I need iron and copper, and those items are found plentifully in the desert. But I also need plastic and rubber. However, there aren’t any oil nodes in the desert itself, though there are some nearby. So, I use a train to bring in plastic and rubber, which are produced elsewhere on the map. But, that’s the only thing that really has to be imported, and I’m able to be pretty efficient with how far I’m transporting materials otherwise. This computer factory is otherwise pretty self-contained and doesn’t intermix with my main base at all. Since I’m building space elevator parts here, I also put down the space elevator on this factory, so it’s even more self-contained. I don’t actually have to export anything from this factory, but if I did it would probably only be one or two end products that go into something more advanced that makes more sense to place elsewhere. Putting a ton of smaller systems like this can keep you organized by reducing the amount of belts or vehicles that have to go back and forth and cross over each other. However, building a single central base with everything in it is cool, so you can totally still do that. Just know that it will be more difficult to keep clean.

To-Do List

The game has a built-in notepad that can be used for keeping track of notes. Sure, you can use pen and paper or a notes app on your PC but it’s nice to not have to tab out of the game. This note-taking functionality is built into the to-do list feature, which you can use by going to the build menu and clicking the plus sign on an item to add it. The To-Do list will show how many materials you need to make everything that you added, and how many of those materials you have in your inventory, represented with orange, and in the dimensional depot, represented with purple.

Otherwise, you can access the notes by opening any dialogue box or menu in the game and moving your mouse to the right side of the screen. You’ll see a small shadow animation appear, and clicking on this will open up it. Now you can type whatever notes you need, like making a checklist of the next few things you want to do. It also supports some formatting, including bolded text and checkboxes. There are two sections for notes, one that is Public and one that is Private. Public notes are shown to and editable by everyone in the server, while Private will only show up for you, meaning you can have server-wide projects as well as personal projects, and keep them separated.

Dimensional Depot

I’m sure at this point most people are using the Dimensional Depot, plus I have a dedicated video about it, so I’ll keep this section brief. The Dimensional Depot is your own personal cloud storage for every item in the game. You can use Mercer Spheres to build storage containers that can have items belted into them, and then they will upload to the dimensional storage. You can also drag and drop items directly from your inventory into an uploaded built into the inventory system. Those items will be accessible by any player in the game and you can toggle whether you want building to draw from your inventory or the depot first, but either way, it makes exploration and building in the game so much easier, and solves the pain point of running back and forth between your storage and a new project when you run out of materials. Upload speed and stack size are both pretty low when you start, but you can use Mercer Spheres to upgrade both in the MAM research.

There are plenty of ways to use the Depot, but here is my preferred way. It expands on the storage room concept, which involves creating an easy-to-access room of storage containers that have any producible item in the game that you might want to use. Usually I tend to have just one building making each item, and they inevitably back up until I take some out. Although, items like concrete and whatever belt material you need for your current tier are good candidates to have multiple machines working on. But then, I just build a Dimensional Depot on top of each of these storage containers and have the containers empty into them. I very rarely need to access the storage room since they are passively filling at all times. The storage room concept is still useful though, as you can easily switch out which materials are being stored and you don’t have to run around the whole map to find out where you’re uploading something from. Some centralization can still be helpful, and depots let you have the best of both worlds.

Blueprints

If you haven’t used blueprints, just know that they are a game-changer. It speeds up your building, especially when making tedious and repetitive factories. It can be a cure for your own laziness, even. The more tedium you have to trudge through, the more likely you are to skip the parts that keep the factory organized and clean. So blueprinting something like a stack of conveyor poles, or a clean row of constructors, or even a pre-made roadway can help you speed up the boring parts. If you’re like me and you’re not really sure what you need, I highly recommend paying attention to the content creators you watch and seeing if they offer blueprints as part of supporting them on Twitch, or YouTube or Patreon. Most content creators probably play this game more than a lot of us, so they’ve encountered many helpful situations where blueprints have saved them a lot of time, so I highly recommend seeing what some of them have put together.

You can also use blueprint build mode to seamlessly attach blueprints to each other and to existing infrastructure, whether it’s belts, pipes, or railroad tracks. This will help you stay super organized and speed up building, since you can essentially extend your builds out super cleanly. This is especially useful for long belt highways or train bridges!

Power Lines

Power lines are probably one of the most difficult things to keep clean in Satisfactory. It doesn’t take much to have a mess of cables clipping through walls and going every which way. So here are my tips for keeping power lines organized.

My easiest and most basic tip is to try to designate a central “conduit” block for your power. So in your factory, the main power line follows this conduit and then smaller production lines get their power from off of this main line. Then once I build a production line, I like to put a power pole between each building and bring power all the way down the line, then assign one power pole to each building. I even try to attach it from an angle that makes sense with the power connectors, so the lines actually look good.

The next tier of this is to ceiling-mount your power. Essentially you’ll want to discreetly bring a power line up to the ceiling then you can use ceiling-mounted power connectors to run the power along the roof and then straight down to your machines. This will look messy in its own way since you’ll have power lines coming down from above, but the ground will be free from clutter. It also makes it easier to add lights, since you already need to run power to the ceiling.

The super next level of this for a clean look is to bury power lines under factory buildings within the floors or the walls, bringing in power lines discreetly from below. This method can look the cleanest, but it becomes super hard to diagnose problems and to connect buildings to power, since you need to somehow access both sides of the floor or wall, and potentially deconstruct foundations.

Priority Power Switch

So that’s how to keep your power lines themselves organized, but the Priority Power Switch lets you organize your power grid in a different way. You can place down a priority power switch between two power lines, and the B-side will create a new separate power grid section that you can name. From any priority power switch in the world (even one not connected to power) you can drag each of the sections you’ve made into different priority categories. If your power production is too low to satisfy demand, the priority power switch will turn off sections starting with Priority Group 8, until the grid can sustain itself again. So you’ll want to put power production sections in Group 1, and less important outposts lower down. You can also manually toggle a section or a group to turn off and on the power to those sections. Having this representation of your power grid can be helpful during power failures, and for decommissioning unneeded factories without going to visit them. Get in the habit of creating these sections to separate power plants and satellite factories. Just make sure you have a good understanding of which sections make what - you don’t want to leave your nuclear plant on only to realize that the factory that makes the fuel rods was on a lower priority and turned itself off!

Create Walkable Factories

The last tip for this post is a small one, and it’s to make walkable factories. Maybe walkable isn’t the right word though. With items like the hover pack, so few people actually walk on the ground in this game once they reach the mid-game, so you should aim for your factories to at least be traversable in whatever way you prefer. I personally think walkways look cool, and I try to incorporate them into my factories. But my number one tip for making traversable factories is to always build bigger than you think you need. Make the space wider and taller than you need, so you can leave room for walkways or at least enough open space to fly through. Leave doors or passageways that lead to other rooms in the factory, and when possible make it obvious where the entrances and exits are. If you’ve created an extra-large factory, you can create a hypertube network to move you between important locations without you having to think too much about it. If you’re going vertical, an elevator is the perfect tool to base your navigation off of. Create simple and easy hallways that lead to elevator doors, and label the floors, and you’ll be able to find what you’re looking for every time.

Conclusion

Hopefully now you’re feeling a bit better about your messy factory. Don’t be embarrassed by it, though. We’ve all been there. It takes time and practice to create those flawless clean designs you see in screenshots. But with these tips and tools in your arsenal, the only limiting factor is your own desire to be clean. If you want to know how to use simple techniques to spice up your boring box factories, check out this video.