Satisfactory Achievements: What Blocks Them and What Does Not

The rules here are the opposite of what most games train you to expect, and getting them wrong costs you a save’s worth of progress toward a hundred percent.

The one thing that disables achievements

Creative Mode. That is it.

Using Creative Mode — which was called Advanced Game Settings before 1.2 renamed it — disables the ability for all achievements to be awarded on that save. The game makes you confirm a warning before enabling it, and the mode cannot be switched off again on that save.

The things that do not

This is where it gets counterintuitive.

Mods do not disable achievements. Neither do save editors. The official wiki states this plainly, and it is confirmed by developer comments. The game has no detection for modification, and no policy of punishing it.

That is the reverse of nearly every other game with achievements, and it means the common advice “turn off your mods before achievement hunting” is simply wrong here.

Multiplayer does not disable them. Achievements are awarded to individual players in a shared session.

Console and PC both have them. They are not a PC-exclusive feature.

Game Modes do not disable them either. Cost multipliers, world randomization and the creature settings all leave achievements intact. Only Creative Mode does not.

So the practical rule is short: avoid Creative Mode on the save you care about, and do whatever else you like.

Playing offline loses them

A separate gotcha, and one that catches people on unstable connections.

Achievements earned while playing offline are not awarded when you go back online. They do not queue up and arrive later.

Two shades to this. Achievements triggered by a specific action can simply be triggered again once you are online. But progression achievements are lost unless you reload the last online save, because the condition already happened and will not happen twice.

This applies on both Steam and Epic. If you are playing a stretch offline and a hundred percent matters to you, the safe move is to reload an online save before doing anything that unlocks a one-time progression achievement.

Achievements arrived with 1.0, and there is no retroactive progress

Two related facts that explain a common confusion.

Achievements were introduced in Patch 1.0. Before that there were none, by deliberate design — the developers said repeatedly through the Early Access years that they would wait until the game was finished in design and balance rather than risk achievements being trivially exploitable through bugs.

And crucially: there is no retroactive progression. A save carried over from Early Access does not receive credit for what you already built. The counters start from when achievements existed, not from when you did the thing.

This is why a long-running save sometimes shows nothing unlocked despite obviously having met the conditions. The factory is there; the tracking was not.

The fix, if you care, is to do the thing again in the current version, or start a fresh save.

Planning a clean run

If a hundred percent matters to you, the arrangement that works is straightforward and costs almost nothing.

Keep two saves. One played normally for achievements, one for experiments with Creative Mode enabled. There is no limit on saves, and creating a world takes a minute.

Do not enable Creative Mode “just to look”. The flag is permanent for that save, and turning individual options back off does not restore eligibility.

Do not worry about mods if you use them. They cost you nothing here.

Assume no retroactive credit. If an achievement’s condition was met on an older version, it may need doing again.

The achievements themselves

They span the obvious progression markers and a set of deliberately silly ones. A sample of the kinds of thing involved:

• Progression: unlock all milestones, complete each Space Elevator phase
• Construction: build your first Manufacturer, build 5 km of pipelines
• Destruction: destroy a thousand pieces of foliage
• Novelty: move faster than 140 km/h — achievable by riding a train down a long enough slope, among other methods
• Slapstick: get run over by your own vehicle, which in multiplayer can be arranged by a helpful friend

The novelty ones are worth reading through before the endgame, because several are easier to arrange incidentally than to set up deliberately later.

Missable achievements

Nothing in the list is permanently missable through normal play in the way some games have one-shot story choices. The constraints are the ones above — Creative Mode, and the absence of retroactive tracking — rather than moments you can walk past.

The practical consequence is that a hundred percent run does not require a guide open beside you from hour one. It requires not enabling Creative Mode, and eventually going back to tick off the silly ones.

Why the rules are this way

Worth a paragraph, because understanding the reasoning makes the rules easier to remember.

Coffee Stain held achievements back through the whole Early Access period deliberately. The stated reason was that an unfinished game has bugs and unbalanced systems, and achievements awarded under those conditions would mean very little — you would be certifying progress against a moving target.

That same thinking explains the Creative Mode rule. Creative Mode removes the production constraint entirely, so an achievement earned with it enabled is not measuring the thing the achievement is about.

And it explains why mods are treated differently. A mod does not necessarily remove the challenge; it usually changes or extends it. Rather than build detection for something with no clear line, the developers left mods alone. That is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight.

If you are starting fresh for achievements

A few practical notes for a dedicated run.

Play normally. The list rewards ordinary progression far more than it rewards optimisation, so a run aimed at achievements looks much like a run aimed at finishing.

Pick up the novelty ones opportunistically. Riding a train downhill for the speed achievement is a two-minute detour if a suitable slope exists on a line you already built, and a construction project if you leave it until last.

Do not rush the phases. Several achievements are downstream of progression, so a thorough playthrough collects most of them without any specific effort.

Multiplayer helps with a couple of them. Anything involving being knocked over is easier with a co-operative friend than alone, and since achievements are awarded per player rather than per save, both of you get credit for the same session.

Common mistakes

Turning off mods before achievement hunting. Unnecessary. Mods do not block them.

Enabling Creative Mode to test something. Permanent for that save.

Expecting credit for pre-1.0 progress. There is no retroactive progression.

Assuming a shared session splits achievements. Each player earns their own.

Playing a long stretch offline. Progression achievements earned offline are lost, not queued.

Leaving the novelty achievements to the end. Several are easier to catch in passing than to stage deliberately.