Satisfactory 1.2 just transformed vehicle pathing and power lines forever, with respawn toilets for good measure

Satisfactory 1.2 is here on the experimental branch, and that’s great news for several reasons. Firstly, it means some incredible new features and quality-of-life upgrades for one of the best building games on PC. Secondly, it lets us delight in yet another skit-filled patch video from the Coffee Stain Studios team. It’s been a full nine months now since 1.1 arrived, and this new Satisfactory update packs in plenty of excuses to get excited, from daisy-chaining power connections to buildable vehicle paths, and toilets that set custom respawn points.

That’s right, if you’re sick of ending back at your Satisfactory HUB every time you make a fatal error of judgment, the new ‘SPWN’ toilets will allow you to set down a series of custom-made checkpoints across the map. When things go wrong, you’ll reappear at the one closest to your current location. The long-teased Fluid Stations and accompanying Fluid Trucks are here too, and perfect for transporting all manner of liquids across long distances. They’re unlocked in tier five.

Vehicles are getting some much-needed love on a wider scale, with both improvements to manual driving and a complete rework for path automation. While you can still lean on the old, automated vehicle routes, you’re able to set custom paths and assign your fleet to them as you wish. The building tool has advanced settings to accommodate the specific turning circles of various vehicles, and you can assign individual colors to help keep track of what’s what.

Weather is back, after being long absent due to clashes with other systems, and it’s had some enhancements of its own. You’ll need to watch out for rain, wind, fog, and thunder, although the rainfall will now be blocked by “most buildables, foundations, and walls,” affecting both the visuals and sound. You’re free to adjust or turn off weather effects through the world settings if you want.

Unlock the transformative new ‘daisy-chaining’ feature and you’re free to make two power connections to a single building, allowing power to flow directly between them, rather than having to individually wire each one to the main line. There are two more buildables on offer as well: the tier-three Pipeline T-Junction, and the Cross Beam, which can be found as part of the Awesome Shop’s ‘Beam Expansion Pack.’

The old ‘advanced game settings’ menu has been reworked into Creative Mode. Alongside this comes the ability to turn on specific cost multipliers and world-randomization features when starting a new game, which will not disable achievements the way that Creative Mode does. You can adjust the cost of the space elevator, recipe parts, and power consumption, along with choosing how much you want to shuffle the resource node locations and purity.

When in single player, bringing up the ‘pause’ menu will now actually freeze the game in place, making it more useful if you need to step away. Photo Mode also gets a little upgrade, with the integration of a dedicated selfie camera angle, new color filter and effect, and fresh pose variants that are enabled when you’re using a hover pack. Elsewhere in the patch, you’ll find the likes of custom controller keybinds, and options to change the behavior of buildgun holograms. You can even ‘zoop’ signs at long last (that’s the mode where you click and drag to put a whole series of them down in a row).

Satisfactory 1.2 is out now on the experimental branch. You can access it by going to the game’s properties menu in your Steam library and looking under the ‘Game Versions and Betas’ tab. Coffee Stain Studios reminds you to back up your existing saves before you switch, “just in case there’s anything unexpected.” You’ll find those in your local app data folder in Windows, under ‘FactoryGame > Saved > SaveGames.’