{"id":21857,"date":"2026-06-10T17:07:48","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T17:07:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xgamingserver.com\/blog\/satisfactory-beginners-guide\/"},"modified":"2026-06-10T17:07:48","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T17:07:48","slug":"satisfactory-beginners-guide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xgamingserver.com\/blog\/satisfactory-beginners-guide\/","title":{"rendered":"Satisfactory Beginner Guide: Your First Few Hours"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your drop-pod hits the surface, ADA starts talking, and suddenly you are alone on an alien planet with a handful of tools and a vague mandate to build a factory. Satisfactory’s opening hours can feel overwhelming, but the early game follows a clear rhythm: complete a few starter objectives, hand-craft your first parts, then hand the boring work over to machines. This guide walks through what to do in your first few hours, the early milestones that matter, and the beginner mistakes that quietly slow everyone down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your First Objectives: ADA, the HUB, and Onboarding<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

After the drop-pod lands, ADA walks you through a short Onboarding tutorial that teaches the core loop. Your very first job is to build The HUB<\/strong> (the Habitat and Utility Base), which costs 20 Iron Ore to construct. The HUB starts as little more than a Craft Bench and a terminal, and everything in the opening tier flows through it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The HUB upgrades are Tier 0 Milestones<\/strong>, and unlike later tiers they must be completed in sequential order. Each upgrade asks you to deliver parts to the HUB terminal and unlocks new buildings in return. Early upgrades hand you the Portable Miner, the Smelter and your first Biomass Burner, then the Constructor and Power Poles. Completing all of Tier 0 unlocks Tiers 1 and 2 at once, which is your real entry into automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To gather those first parts you will mine ore by hand. Equip a Portable Miner<\/strong> on a resource node (it produces 20, 40, or 80 items per minute on impure, normal, and pure nodes respectively) or simply pick ore up by hand to get started, then feed it into the HUB or a Smelter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From Hand-Crafting to Automation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

At the start you craft everything yourself at the Craft Bench by holding the craft button (you can tap Space to keep it held so you are not clicking endlessly). The Equipment Workshop<\/strong> handles manually-crafted gear, ammunition and consumables, including the Xeno-Zapper you start with and the Portable Miner unlocked at the first HUB upgrade. Hand-crafting is fine for the very first parts, but it does not scale, and that is the whole point of the game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The transition you are aiming for is: Miner to Smelter to Constructor to storage<\/strong>, connected by conveyor belts so the machines run while you do something else. A Miner Mk.1 on a normal-purity node extracts 60 Iron Ore per minute (30 on impure, 120 on pure nodes); a Smelter consumes 30 Iron Ore per minute and outputs 30 Iron Ingots per minute, so one Miner on a normal node can feed two Smelters. Pipe those ingots into a Constructor and you have your first automated production line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Constructor turns one part into another and draws 4 MW of power. The base recipes you will lean on constantly are below, all verified against the official wiki:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Constructor recipe<\/th>Input<\/th>Output<\/th>Output rate<\/th><\/tr><\/thead>
Iron Plate<\/td>3 Iron Ingot<\/td>2 Iron Plate<\/td>20 \/ min<\/td><\/tr>
Iron Rod<\/td>1 Iron Ingot<\/td>1 Iron Rod<\/td>15 \/ min<\/td><\/tr>
Screws<\/td>1 Iron Rod<\/td>4 Screws<\/td>40 \/ min<\/td><\/tr>
Wire<\/td>1 Copper Ingot<\/td>2 Wire<\/td>30 \/ min<\/td><\/tr>
Cable<\/td>2 Wire<\/td>1 Cable<\/td>30 \/ min<\/td><\/tr>
Concrete<\/td>3 Limestone<\/td>1 Concrete<\/td>15 \/ min<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Note the rate mismatches. One Smelter making 30 ingots per minute over-feeds an Iron Plate Constructor (which wants 30 ingots to run at 20 plates\/min) but starves two of them. Belts matter too: the Conveyor Belt Mk.1<\/strong> only moves 60 items per minute, so a single belt comfortably carries the output of one Smelter or one early Constructor. Do not expect a Mk.1 belt to handle a fully overclocked machine later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Powering the Early Game with Biomass<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Your first machines need power, and in Tier 0 through Tier 2 that means Biomass Burners<\/strong>. The HUB gains two small attached burners (from HUB Upgrades 2 and 5) that each produce 20 MW, but burn fuel about 1.5 times more slowly than a standalone burner, so they are just as fuel-efficient. A standalone Biomass Burner produces 30 MW at 100% clock speed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Burners must be fed manually with leaves, wood, or refined Biomass and Solid Biofuel, which is tedious. The standard advice is to convert raw foliage into Biomass and then Solid Biofuel (which packs far more energy per item), and to rush Coal Power<\/strong> at Tier 3 so you can stop babysitting fuel entirely. Until then, keep a stack of biofuel on hand so your factory does not stall when you wander off to explore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Common Beginner Mistakes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n