YMMV / Satisfactory

• Catharsis Factor: Once you get things rolling, it's often a good feeling as you sit back and watch this massive factory working hard to process all the materials you fed into it, produce items for you, and store stuff that you like. All that hard work you put into it pays off and makes you feel satisfactory.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: North of the Spire Coast and Rocky Desert biomes, there is a very large area of ocean that is completely empty while staying on the map. For this reason, it makes a popular choice for a place to build a huge factory. While the Spire Coast was overhauled in Update 6, a large chunk of open ocean remains.
• Demonic Spiders: All alpha creatures will remain threatening foes for the whole game:
  • Alpha Fluffy-Tailed Hogs can be a nightmare to newer players. They are even faster than their lesser brethen, hit hard, may chain their hits, and their knockback is massive, so expect to be launched into further trouble. If you do not have a ranged weapon, it is difficult to hit them more than once before being Punched Across the Room, making their already high health pool feel even bigger.
  • Cliff Hogs and especially Nuclear Hogs make Alpha Hogs look like lizard doggos. Not only are they even faster and FAR more aggressive in their attacks, but they can easily chain their hits for massive damage. They also pack a ranged attack that can catch you unaware if you planned on pelting them from a distance, and have even more health than Alpha Hogs. Nuclear Hogs add even more hit points and a radiation AoE to the mix, which is hard to counter if you aren't very advanced in the game (especially since they tend to be found around small uranium deposits). Grabbing what they're defending and running for dear life is definitely a favored strategy with them.
  • Alpha Spitters aren't too bad alone, since they are vulnerable at close range, but a group of them is a whole other kettle of fish. With a variety of attacks including a big ball causing a shockwave, a splitting ball (which can One-Hit Kill you if you're really unlucky with where it splits) and a rapid fire, several shooting at you at once cause the game to become a Bullet Hell pretty quickly. At least, they aren't Friendly Fireproof so using one of them as a meat shield for the others is a viable solution.
  • Elite Stingers (the green ones). Take those terrifying Giant Spider creatures that ambush you at night, and give it the ability to cast poison gas and a lunge attack that can demolish one-third of your whole health bar. Thankfully, they're only found in the high level biomes like the Red Jungle and the Swamp.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • Heavy Modular Frames are infamous in that, no matter the recipe you choose, they require a lot of materials as well as a lot of space for processing, far more than anything prior in the game. You will probably need a factory bigger than any you've made before to manufacture them, and even then only in very small amounts. Heavy Modular Frames are also likely the first part you'll automate with a Manufacturer, since they're required to build the Manufacturers themselves. The Manufacturer is almost twice as big as the Assembler, has 4 input ports, and Heavy Modular Frame production uses all of them, so it's a major step up in beltwork complexity from the Assembler with its 2 inputs.
  • After all of the Acceptable Breaks from Reality and Easy Logistics in every other kind of production, aluminum processing features a massive complexity boost that reflects how hard it is to do in real life. For comparison, to obtain iron, copper or caterium ingots, you just need to smelt their respective ores. For steel ingots, just smelt coal with the iron ore. Aluminum? First refine bauxite with water into alumina and silica, then refine that alumina with coal into aluminum scrap, which also leaves behind water that you need to take care of (preferably by feeding it back into your bauxite refineries), then smelt that scrap with the silica from your bauxite refinement, plus some additional silica processed from a quartz deposit, into aluminum ingots. While there is an alternate recipe that lets you produce alumina with no silica byproduct, and another one that lets you smelt scrap without silica into (slightly less) ingots, it's still a major complexity spike. This overshoots to the point that it's a lot more involved than, for example, nuclear power. The developers have promised to dial it back a bit in the fourth major patch after observing that a lot of players stall out trying to get it running.
  • As it turns out, dialing back means "swapping petroleum coke for coal". In other words, the alt recipe and main recipe switched places. The difference being that coal is far easier to get. That aside, building an aluminum factory is no less daunting as before as the other 4 stages remains unchanged. They also fixed the "more complex than nuclear power" thing by increasing the complexity of nuclear power.
  • In addition to increase in complexity, nuclear power update 4 hits nuclear power with collateral damage from other changes. Prior to the update, power generators only produced exactly as much power as was needed by your factory, thus saving on resource consumption. For most fuel sources, there was no point to that as they were infinite anyway. The change made it better for oil production as now you can have reliable output of useful byproducts from your fuel production. For the nuclear power however, constant consumption is only one side of the coin, with the other being production of nuclear waste, which you cannot easily get rid of. The only way to deal with it besides making a giant storage facility that will now fill up inevitably and pretty quickly is to refine it into plutonium fuel rods which you can sell in the Awesome Sink. But of course, that means building a whole new complex (and radioactive) production chain that uses Particle Accelerators, the biggest and most expensive machine in the game.
  • Phase 4 Project Assembly requirements are absolutely massive. Setting up a production chain for just one of its four components will dwarf everything that you built up to that point. Should Phase 5 be comparable, resource exhaustion and Unity item-limit might become a real issue.
• Fan Community Nicknames: Pioneers, which is also a Meaningful Name given that players are basically paying for what amounts to accessing the beta version of the game. Engineers is also used to a lesser extent.
• Fandom Rivalry: With Factorio - to wit, a handful of Factorio players who got on Satisfactory and now want aggressive enemies to seek out and attack the players' factories, and perimeter defenses like turrets and cannons. Needless to say, not all Satisfactory players are okay with that, particularly those who just want to focus on building megafactories in peace while taking in the Scenery Porn. There are even mods that add Factorio items, as well as Factorio game mechanics such as item inserters (crane claws that grab an item and place it on a conveyor or a building).
• Fan Nickname:
  • The gas fields are nicknamed “fart fields” by the fandom.
  • A lot of the native fauna's Fan Nicknames are deliberately made of Buffy Speak; Space Whale-giraffe-penguin-tick-thing (the fandom's name for the Curious Creature) and the weird-flying-ray-thing are the most prominent examples.
  • Messy builds with conveyor belts all over the place are known among the community as "spaghetti".
• Fridge Horror: The AI Limiter item is designed to prevent A.I. Is a Crapshoot scenarios. One of the things you use them for is the production of nuclear control rods. Think about the history that had to lead to that design decision for a moment...
• Friendly Fandoms: Also with the Factorio community, as both games are built (heh) on the same premise of creating, managing, and expanding a factory. Strengthened further when the developer admitted Satisfactory to be a love letter to Factorio.
• Goddamned Bats: The fluffy-tailed hogs are only a threat in numbers at the very beginning of the game, and barely a speedbump once you have better weapons and movement upgrades. They still appear almost everywhere, and have a distressing affinity for charging out of the undergrowth when you're distracted or near a ledge.
• Good Bad Bugs: Update 5 kicked off with the swirling energy effect present around Mercer Spheres and Somersloops becoming stringy and polygonal, likely due to a glitch. Players liked the look of that glitched effect, and so far it hasn't been fixed.
  • The Hypertube Cannon, a popular mechanism for gaining massive speed boosts by being launched through successive hypertube entrances, is technically the result of a specific few interactions in Unreal Engine 4 (which is why it's very unreliable and dependent on computer specifications, among other things). CSS have made clear they have no intention of fixing it, and with the recent announcement of an upgrade to Unreal Engine 5, they've said they're trying to make sure they can preserve it.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Heavy Modular Frames ^explanation An extremely important item past the midgame which is also the first real complexity spike in the game, requiring a large and complex factory to be automated. As a result, it's common to post pictures of huge factories that output only a tiny amount of HMF per minute.
• Porting Disaster: A very minor one: The Steam version does not allow parallel installation of both Early Access and Experimental concurrently side-by-side, although this is largely due the downside of Steam's more refined way of handling beta access^note the ability to install both concurrently on Epic is due to Epic's lack of version management. Both Early Access and Experimental are offered as separate titles on Epic as a workaround, which provides the coincidental benefit of being able to install both versions side-by-side and having two separate cloud storage quotas for both games. While Steam does allow for the Epic style (Valve themselves do this for Dota 2), for some reason they consider it bad practice and won't let Coffee Stain do the same.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The first iteration of the Anti Poop-Socking mechanism was very hated in Early Access, as it takes away control from the player when displaying the notification (as a prompt) and requires the player to click on the OK button to continue. This has caused players to lose control of their jetpack and plummet to their deaths, fall off cliffs, die carrying radioactive waste, suffocate due to stalling in gas fields, or getting killed while in the heat of battle with a group of beasts. A much refined version of the notification which does not take control away from the player and goes away on its own was pushed out a few days later to the Experimental branch, and was released into Early Access alongside various small improvements on 31st July 2019.
  • There's a sizeable portion of players that detest the relentlessly aggressive lifeforms in the game world. The critters add nothing of value to the game, and combat in general isn't exactly entertaining, which turns the whole thing into a constant distraction from what the game is about - building awesome factories. That creeps respawn every three in-game days unless you have numerous active buildings (or at very least, active power lines) near their countless spawn points only makes it worse. Unsurprisingly, mods that remove hostile animals altogether are quite popular, as is the ideology of laying down power lines that ends nowhere solely to prevent hostiles from respawning.
    • As of update 7, there's a game option to make the animals only attack when you attack them first, or even make them completely passive. Which is fortunate, because power lines seemingly no longer prevent them from respawning.
  • A lot of very useful building parts can only be obtained through the AWESOME program, forcing you destroy large amounts of your resources for the tickets you need to purchase access to parts that should be available by default or through research, like certain types of foundations, walkways or simple wall pylons for pipes and belts. Worse, AWESOME stands for Anti-Waste Effort, but you won't be producing actual waste products until you unlock oil refining well into the mid-game, so if you want to build efficiently from the beginning, you'll... have to waste tons of resources for no good reason.
  • The fact the hard drives you can recover from crashed drop pods only offer one of three random alternate recipes or upgrades isn't terribly popular, especially if you're after a particular alternate recipe. If you're looking for a particular recipe, chances are you'll have to recover hard drive after hard drive in increasingly dangerous areas with increasingly pricey repair requirements, or Save Scum until you get what you want - and no matter what you do, you'll have to wait 10 minutes at a time for the MAM to finish scanning each hard drive, although this may be mitigated by carrying enough to make a MAM with you to quickly install it, start the scan, and uninstall it. (This was mitigated a little in Update 6, where the Compacted Coal and Turbofuel recipes — which are basically mandatory to exploit your oil fields' energy potential — were moved instead to the research tree, unlockable with a hard drive and some resources).
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Some players like using extra rules of what can or cannot be done. In particular:
  • The 5x5 challenges imposes that all your production facilities (except your miners and pumps) must be encased within a tower with a base of 5x5 foundations. Variants exist, with some rules including needing to have all your power plants within the tower as well, or within a separate one.
  • The No Dismantle challenge, as the name implies, forces you to play the whole game without disassembling anything. One single mistake is all it takes to create a lot of conveyor spaghetti.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: Since Update 5 and the broadening options for building, it's not uncommon for some players to forsake the "build a factory" part of the game entirely in favor of creating massive structures.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: Like most games of its genre, Satisfactory takes a while to get into gear; even more so if you didn't disable the HUB upgrade phase (Tier 0) during campaign setup. Power generation is the most prevalent hurdle in the early game - you only have manually fed biomass burners that run on non-respawning fuel sources, forcing you to be conservative with your power consumption or range ever farther to find leaves, wood or animal carcasses to burn. It isn't until you unlock the fully automated and (relatively) unlimited coal power that the game really opens up.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • Every machine has an animation that plays while working - turbines spinning, pistons moving, robotic arms assembling parts, etc. As soon as production stops, this animation freezes until production resumes, which makes sense. The Blender's animation, however, ends with a robotic arm tossing the product into a chute. If the Blender stops working at that moment, the product will freeze just like the rest of the machinery, and hang there in mid-air until the Blender starts up again.
  • Speaking of Blenders (which handle both solids and fluids), the robotic arms happily assemble solid items and toss them into the chute even if no solid items are actually being produced, or no solids are involved at all.
• That One Level:
  • The Swamp is absolutely packed with alpha enemies, has water about everywhere to limit your movements, and it is loaded with poison pillars, making any exploration very difficult as your visibility will be limited by the gas mask. Hope you brought a lot of medicinal inhalers and a lot of Nobelisk to destroy any danger!
  • The Red Jungle and Red Bamboo Fields are packed with powerful enemies, poison, and more than their shares of radioactivity sources. It's also where most of the aluminum in the game can be found, so you cannot stall your exploration forever.
• That One Sidequest: While the fourth Project Assembly package would probably qualify as a whole, one of the four requirements stands out as particularly ludicrous: the Assembly Director Systems. It's bad enough to be crafted from Adaptive Control Units (which require computers and Heavy Modular Frames) and supercomputers, but the elevator requires four thousands of them. This also means that you'll need no less than sixty thousands Automated Wirings to make the Control Units, which is more than all other part requirements in all steps of Project Assembly combined. Thermal Propulsion Rockets are also nasty since they are crafted from Turbo Motors, but at least you require "only" one thousand.
• Ugly Cute: The Lizard Doggo, depending on the player's personal taste.