Satisfactory 1.2 is finally here, and you're going to want to redesign your entire base

Satisfactory 1.2 has arrived, and that matters whether you’re a long-term builder, a creative mode junkie, or someone starting out on their first adventure through the factory-crafting sandbox game. Coffee Stain Studios has spent months packing all manner of new quality-of-life features, additional tools, and aesthetic touches into its latest Satisfactory update. Several more months of testing later, and it’s ready for everyone – and the changes are big enough that you’re going to want to think about a complete rebuild.

It’s difficult to pick the lead feature of Satisfactory update 1.2. There are too many strong candidates. For me, it’s daisy chaining. Once researched, you can make two power connections per building, allowing you to link them directly to one another, rather than using a series of poles linked to each individual structure. I’ll be rewiring my base on day one. For other people, the introduction of fluid stations and fluid trucks is the big draw, making it easier than ever to get the likes of water, oil, and fuel across long distances with ease.

To help enable this, automated vehicle paths have been completely reworked. Your old layouts should still do the job, but you can now just slap down a path without needing to manually record it. They’re smart enough to wait for each other at crossroads and intersections, so you shouldn’t have too many crashes or traffic issues unless you’re really pushing the roads to their capacity limit. Manual driving has also been polished with new suspension.

There are new buildables: the Pipeline T-Junction, and the Cross Beam. Head into the options menu (note that the pause menu now actually pauses the game in single-player) and you can adjust how rotations work on the Build Gun. Set the orientation they spawn in, and whether they rotate parallel to your character, or perpendicular. Also, “after several years of seeing you all use signs as lights and building thousands of them,” Coffee Stain has caved to peer pressure and allowed you to ‘zoop’ signs (the rapid-spawn click and drag setting).

Sick of awkward runbacks when something goes wrong? Plop down the new SPWN Toilet, and you can set a respawn point at an exact location of your choosing. Then, sit and enjoy the return of a full suite of rain and weather effects, which now behave much more as you’d expect. If you’re a controller user, you’ll be pleased to know that buttons can now be freely rebound, and a new ‘dynamic gamepad swap’ option allows you to flip instantly back and forth between pad and keyboard/mouse without opening the menu every time.

Creative mode gets an upgrade, too. You can add modifiers to raise or lower the cost of recipe parts, your rate of power consumption, and the requirements for the space elevator (this one goes all the way up to 100x, if you’re feeling ambitious). Think you know Satisfactory a bit too well? Randomize the resource nodes, and their typical level of purity, to shake up your next playthrough. If you find a strong layout, share it with your friend using a world seed.

Satisfactory 1.2 is out now. Rounding out the update are a few upgrades for photo mode – you can now take selfies, there’s a fresh color filter and effect filter, and an additional set of variant poses used if your character is wearing a hoverpack. Get out there and snap some shots of your beautiful new builds with the neatest wiring layout you’ve ever created.