Satisfactory: The Joy of Colonization

Simulated space saves our souls. It's all we got.

It’s easy to fantasize about escapism during an election year. One of the ways I dream of this is through the lens of science fiction. Speculative stories from Bradbury or Asimov have been part of the collective consciousness for my entire life. They kept hope alive for the future during otherwise bleak times, but not for any personal aspirations. I’m talking about hope for humanity among the stars. While fiction will always be intangible, technology isn’t.

That feeling has evaporated rapidly recently, as nonfiction has crept into these Rocket Summers. How can I marvel at the glory of advancements in space exploration when those heralding our new space age are the likes of Elon Musk? The practical answer is you can’t. Kelly and Zach Wienersmith’s book A City on Mars takes a lot of shots at his companies as it explores the practicality of space colonization or lack thereof. The politics of space is not, in fact, an empty plain prime for founding settlements like those Manifest Destiny bastards. There are years upon years of international treaties governing space exploration. And yet, Starlink inserts a clause into their EULA to assert their authority over it. How fantastical.

The easily drawn implication of A City on Mars is in our lifetimes, living in space will always be fiction. We should accept that fiction is our only accessible lived reality of space. And with that, we can understand what it means to be an explorer.

Satisfactory, a space colonization game from Coffee Stain Studios, was released out of Early Access last month. It’s one of many in a tradition of base-building games like Factorio and Rimworld, but the major shift is in perspective. Satisfactory’s first-person camera is a clear breakaway from the blueprint-esque GUI of its counterparts. Instead of feeling like an architect, a somewhat omnipotent figure sketching lines across a theoretical space, you feel like a pioneer roaming unexplored terrain. The game’s done a phenomenal job of extracting, refining, synthesizing, and assembling the fun of planetary conquest.

I’m 90 hours deep and have colonized maybe 6 sq km of the map with my giant space elevator and 5 forward operating bases. I’m spending 5,000Kw to extract over a dozen elements and compounds out of (planet name), depending on your definition of a resource. It’s a game, after all. Everything’s infinite. Unlike reality, there is no concern for depletion or fear of the unknown. Space is welcoming and safety is guaranteed.

And yet, I can’t escape this malevolent feeling. The word “colonization” is inescapable, and even though there is no sapient life, there is nature. The Weinersmiths defer to the term settlement, and give some reverence to Asimov’s preferred term "spome”. The problem is internal, outside of my vocabulary. The ecology is beautiful in that way you immediately recognize the skyscape’s color saturation. Some quadrupeds try to kill you, beehives that also try to kill you, and poisonous spires that don’t try so much as exist to kill you. Perhaps what I’m doing to this land is destructive?

Maybe not, if colonization and logistics can be the same thing. Satisfactory is a game of menus(although it has the schmoovement of FPS games like Apex Legends): you’ll spend most of your time looking at numbers and opening up machines to optimize their throughput to keep your conveyor belts flowing. The setting, while beautiful, is an abstraction of an abstraction; code rendered into polygons shown as pixels on a screen. Without piercing the veil my virtual actions can only be as natural as the world around me. Until SAM comes in. The SAM will save us.

Your companion for the game’s duration is ADA, an AI representative of the FICSIT corporation and by my estimation, a slightly overwritten GladOS homage. The quips about your mission to colonize MASSAGE-2(AB)b focus on your minuscule contribution to the grand cosmic design that is humanity. The player is there to do a job. Much like all space dystopias, this one is a corporate structure with zero regard for you. But upon picking up artifacts littered along the map, you’ll be visited by an intelligent entity. It speaks to you, in a form of English I can only describe as beautiful.

I’m in love with the writing for SAM, the alien force that speaks to you whenever a Mercer Sphere or Somersloop is acquired. They remind me of my humanity. I think the dialogue is so poetic in a way that feels structured and linguistic. English and alien in equal parts. To quote it would take away the power, as the knowledge structure is still so perplexing.

The interplay between ADA and SAM crescendo to a mutual understanding. They speak to each other through the player as a conduit, but also about the player’s insignificance. FICSIT and the planet have reached a level of mutual understanding that peels away the irony-soaked dialogue. The curiosity on display from this interdimensional being awakens something in me. Something as unknowable as an infinite resource.

Video games are systems: theoretical in structure but real for practical interactive purposes. In this space, is there an inherent evil in consumption? Perhaps in the flesh. But there is joy in subjugation and education. This is not a parasitic exchange wherein one absorbs another. The SAM, the “other”, is above us. Divine?

I’m putting a lot of stock into a detail that John Carmack once called “expected to be there, but not important”. While an absurd quote, it does have slight truth here. There is zero need to ever engage with the story of Satisfactory, and I might be the only person outside of the dev team putting this much meaning behind it. All I’m saying is, come for the conveyor belt spaghetti and shooting mutant spiders, stay for the existential dread of being alone in space with nothing but the eternal cosmos speaking to a sentient AI that owns your existence!

You are alone on your mission, after all. The planet you’re from is inhospitable. As the Weinersmiths conclude, your task is inconceivable by science. But virtual isolation is and always has been the ultimate comfort. It’s apolitical. It’s the goal for a lot of twisted business ideals. But, like space and video games, it’s also not real. At least there’s multiplayer.