Satisfactory is a model train simulator now, including the wrecks

Satisfactory train crash

Trains are built to execute exactly one affair: Stay on their tracks. The ultimate might move when you're playing god with trains is sending them flying off the rails—it's unquestionably what I did with my childhood Lego train set as presently equally I got bored watching it travel in circles. In Passing, a edifice crippled I've been obsessed with since primal 2020, trains are a lot more useful and a peck less playful than a toy train lay out. They're unity of the best ways to move stuff long distances, and they run on electricity or else of fuel, which makes them direction less fiddly than trucks (which take a bad habit of yeeting themselves off roads or cliffs thanks to crooked physics). But since Satisfactory is an Early Access game, a lot of its features, including the automated train organization, have so far matte up unfinished.

Update 5, which launches onto the beta branch today, aims to fix that: It not only totally overhauls the scheduling port for programming where your trains XTC when, it lets your trains smash into each different and pour forth their containers all over the tracks. It's a sign that Satisfactory is finalizing some of its stellar systems American Samoa it comes nigher to the end of its time in Early Access.

To put IT another path: Zero more ghost trains.

One of Update 5's big initiatives is overhauling how collisions between buildings and objects, or "clearance," work in Satisfactory. Until now, there have been some buildings that are a concrete pain to work with because their collision boxes extend beyond the actual space they reside, preventing me from building things close together every bit expeditiously as I want to. Coffee Grease's answer to this with Update 5 is creating "pianissimo" and "hard" clearance, allowing anything with soft headroom to pass through and through buildings with hard clearance. I'm excited to ravel conveyer belt belts and the Futurama-esque hypertubes straight finished the gaps in full-size buildings like the Particle Accelerator.

Only at any rate, back to trains. Before Update 5, if you had ii trains flying connected the same track, they'd just pass right through each other. They didn't have the necessary physics logic to interact with each other, but information technology also didn't feel like Adequate's discipline system was full-bodied enough to really make train wrecks feel impartial. You could pee-pee train tracks that split to multiple destinations, and make up some rudimentary schedules for where trains would stop, but there were no signals to prevent trains from colliding. So information technology successful signified that they couldn't.

Update 5 introduces two different types of signals for controlling train traffic. Single's simpler—basically a cerise low-density for trains that flips on whenever the distance ahead of it is inhabited, to nullify the next one on the track rear-ending the ship's galley. The other signalise is more complex, rental multiple trains move through an intersection Eastern Samoa long as their paths won't cross.

These signals are in truth fashionable, because they dramatically boom the planning and design you can put into trains. Before, the only when rattling planning I did for my trains was ensuring the stations at each end were efficiently loading and unloading cargo. Without whatsoever tools like these signals, I didn't run across much appeal in having trains that ran in loops or cleave off in different directions, because it was just much complication without any real payoff.

Satisfactory is each about building rarify constructs as efficiently as possible or making them look so over-the-top you can sour just about and wonder at the fact that the monstrosity you just designed really works. With Update 5, trains can in real time tap into both of those modes of play.

Seriously, take this example intersection from the picture where Coffee Grease initiatory showed off this groom update:

The increased flexibleness added with the freshly signals (and a much advisable direct scheduling interface) comes hand-in-hand with the threat that if you don't use them properly, your trains can now smash into each opposite and fall your cargo whol over the place. It's not really as punitive as it sounds, though: Resources in Satisfactory are unlimited, and you can walking up to a derailed train and chink a couple of buttons to exercise set things right over again. It's not meant to equal a major crisis; Sir Thomas More like the groom equivalent of messing up your conveyor belts and sending resources into the wrong ore refinery. With great locomotive power comes great railway locomotive province, or something.

The new gear system is probably the flashiest bit of this All right update, only there are some strange new features I'm even more aflutter about. I stand for, here's a literal stake-changer: Railings can snap to ramps now, instead of just savourless foundations. Megaton, am I right? I've become one of Those Guys who's so deep into a game that I could tell you why inclined railings are a Rattling Big Deal.

There are a ton of other due cosmetic parts for making factories look really nice—I'm embarrassingly aroused about being able to put under angled roofs on buildings instead of making everything a rectangle. There's a new building modality called zooping that lets you lay down 10 foundation or wall pieces in a course, whereas before you had to place cardinal at once, which testament beryllium a huge meter-rescuer when putting together new facilities.

Longtime Satisfactory players are well past the point in time of playing for the saki of working through the technical school tree and unlocking recent gormandise. The long game is about upcoming up with cool designs, and Coffee Stain's concentrate on aesthetics with Update 5 will really better that style of play. And it's not all for double-dyed conceitedness. Somehow it took, ahem, two-and-a-half years to get signs in the game non that I'm counting but they're ultimately here. Being able to put fine-tune signs in massive factories and label storage containers with the parts they contain? Heaven.

Satisfactory is still in Early Access, but Update 5 feels like it really evens out simple spots in the building experience that started to grate on Pine Tree State aft umteen months of playing. I already evangelize Satisfactory to the catch one's breath of the PC Gamer team, and with this update I recall I'd be comfortable telling just nearly anyone that it's a good time to start playing Satisfactory.

Maybe give today's update a month to make its way from the empirical branch to the briny one, though. There's probable a small United States Army of bugs to be stamped retired before it's genuinely ready for everyone.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for Thomas More than 10 old age, prototypal at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but atomic number 2'll always jump at the opportunity to cover emulation and Japanese games. When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably performin a 20-year-old RPG or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).