Satisfactory Game Modes and Advanced Game Settings

These are official, built-in options, not mods or cheats. 1.2 reorganised them into a Game Modes menu and added a few genuinely new ones. The important distinction is between settings you can change any time and settings fixed when the world is created.

Set at world creation, cannot be changed later

World randomization. Shuffles resource node placement across the map. Every guide, every interactive map and every planned build assumes the standard layout, so turning this on deliberately invalidates all of it. It is off by default.

Cost multipliers. Scale what buildings and recipes cost. Useful if you want a faster or a harsher run.

If either of these appeals, you have to decide before you start. There is no way to apply them to a world already in progress, and this is the single most common source of disappointment with the feature — people update, hear about randomization, and find it is not available in their save.

Changeable at any time

Most of the rest can be toggled mid-save from the Game Modes menu.

Creature settings. Including turning hostile creatures off entirely. If you find combat an unwelcome interruption to a factory game, this is the supported way to remove it rather than a workaround.

Arachnophobia Mode. Replaces spiders with a less alarming placeholder. It has been in the game a long time and it is genuinely effective — worth knowing about before deciding the game is unplayable for you.

Resource node purity and depletion behaviour, along with other world rules that were previously buried in advanced settings.

Creative Mode. This is what Advanced Game Settings was renamed to in 1.2 — the same feature, a new name. It carries the cheat-style options (free build, no power, unlock all tiers) plus a Give sub-menu for spawning items.

The achievement cost, and what does not cost you anything

Only Creative Mode disables achievements. This is worth stating flatly because it is routinely misread, including by players who then avoid settings that cost them nothing.

Cost multipliers and world randomization do not disable achievements. Neither do the creature settings. You can run a randomized world at a modified cost multiplier and still earn everything. The Game Modes menu and Creative Mode sit near each other in the interface, which is where the confusion comes from.

Three things worth being precise about:

• It affects that save only. Another world with it untouched earns achievements normally.
• Creative Mode cannot be switched off again on that save. Individual options toggle from the Esc menu, but the flag itself is permanent. The game makes you confirm a warning saying so before enabling it.
• Mods and save editors do not disable achievements. Only Creative Mode does. This is the opposite of most games, and it is stated explicitly by the official wiki.

So if achievements matter to you, keep a clean save for them and use a separate world for experimenting. This is a common and entirely reasonable way to play.

Weather settings

1.2 brought rain back, and put its controls here rather than in the graphics menu.

Presets available: Default, Dry, The Great MASSAGE-2 (AB)b, Clear, Raining Kittens and Puppies, and Extreme. The Extreme preset was rebalanced in 1.2.1.0 after launch feedback, so it is milder now than its early reputation suggests.

Separately, a fog density slider sits in Options → Video → Advanced. This is the one to adjust if weather effects are hurting visibility inside your factory rather than just outside it. 1.2.1.0 added the same slider to Photo Mode.

What these settings do not do

Worth stating because expectations run ahead of the feature:

• They do not enable mods. Mods are a separate, PC-only ecosystem — and notably, using mods does not cost you achievements the way Creative Mode does.
• They do not change platform limits. Crossplay boundaries and dedicated server availability are unaffected.
• They do not rebalance production. Recipes, rates and power figures are the same regardless of which mode you are in. A Constructor makes the same thing at the same speed.

Console commands

Console commands exist and are an official part of the game, not a third-party tool. They are more limited than players coming from other games expect — most of what people want from a console is now covered by Game Modes and Creative Mode, which are better supported and easier to reason about.

If your goal is spawning items or building freely, Creative Mode is the intended route and does not require remembering command syntax.

Choosing settings for a first playthrough

The honest recommendation for someone starting out: change nothing.

The default experience is well tuned, the resource layout is the one every piece of community advice assumes, and achievements stay available. The settings above are much more interesting on a second world, when you know what you would want to change and why.

The two exceptions worth making immediately:

• Arachnophobia Mode, if spiders are a genuine problem for you. There is no reason to endure that.
• Hostile creatures off, if you know from other games that combat interruptions will sour the experience. Satisfactory’s combat is not the point of the game, and removing it costs you very little.

Both are supported options, and using them is not playing the game wrong.

Cost multipliers in practice

The multiplier scales build and recipe costs, and the two directions serve very different players.

Lowering costs turns the game into a builder. If what you enjoy is designing factory layouts rather than grinding the materials for them, this removes the part you do not want without removing the part you do. It is the closest thing to a sandbox that still keeps the production logic intact.

Raising costs stretches the early and mid game considerably. The effect compounds: everything costs more, so everything takes longer, so you spend far more time on each tier. Worth trying only if you found the default pacing too fast, and worth trying at a modest multiplier first rather than jumping to an extreme.

Neither changes production rates. A Constructor still makes the same number of items per minute; only what it cost to build changes.

World randomization: what actually moves

Node positions shuffle. What does not change is the map geometry itself, the biomes, the terrain, or the total quantity of nodes in the world.

The consequence is that the map stays familiar while every plan you had for it stops being useful. Known starting areas may end up resource-poor or unusually rich. The copper you always relied on near the grass fields may not be there.

This is the point of the option, so it is not a complaint — but it is worth being clear that it is meant for a second or third playthrough, by someone who wants the exploration and planning phase to feel new again. On a first run it removes the ability to follow any advice at all, which is a lot to give up.

A reasonable second-world setup

If you have finished a standard playthrough and want the next one to feel different without being unrecognisable, a setup that works well:

• World randomization on. This is the change that actually makes planning fresh.
• Cost multiplier at default. Randomization alone gives you plenty to solve.
• Creature settings unchanged, unless you already know combat annoys you.

That combination keeps every mechanic intact while making the map itself the puzzle again, which is where the replay value in this game actually lives.

Common mistakes