“We want to make the game we feel our community deserves” Satisfactory interview with Snutt Treptow – Part 3
Here is the final part of our Satisfactory interview with Snutt Treptow, Community Manager at Coffee Stain Studios. In this section we discuss what Snutt enjoys doing the most these days when he fires up Satisfactory himself. We also discuss that five year long early access period that the game is famous for, as well as how the community has shaped what Satisfactory has become during that time. Let’s do this.
Satisfactory Interview with Snutt Treptow – Part 3
“It’s been a little of a reimagining now for me”
After talking shop about the specific updates of Satisfactory and its community, it felt time to get to know Snutt a bit more. So I was keen to understand what his favourite part of the game was, and what he enjoy spending his time doing in this conveyor-friendly sim.
“I go back and forth, because when you’re playing a game for a long time, you get really worn out of the grind stuff. So I really like the new additions that we have in this update in particular, it just makes the main building aspect of the game easier if that makes sense.”
“Whenever we make these kinds of small improvements,, I feel it just makes the game easier to play. And recently I’ve tried to get into using blueprints more because that’s something that I kind of stayed away from because I enjoy the fact that I’m building everything. But I also realised recently that it makes sense to try and figure out the modular stuff.”
“So it’s been a little of a reimagining now for me where now I’m trying to figure out blueprints and what kind of blueprints do I want to make modular blueprints in the sense that I make entire factory parts in blueprints. Or do I just want to use them (like I mentioned before), where I just want to be able to quickly put down, conveyor belts or (whatever), and try to figure that stuff out.”
“And that’s, that’s sort of a nice to me, that’s sort of a bit new (figuring out) where it makes sense to use that, where it doesn’t make sense to. I recently restarted my save file and I always try to put some kind of limitation on myself and this time I decided never use trains for some reason. So I have huge busses running and I’m trying to think of ways to set it up so it’s easy to keep expanding your base without having to go back and forth all the time. I set up these depot settings with moving parts and using splitters and smart splitters and mergers so that I get a good distribution of items. Yeah, that’s pretty fun.”
“And before then I did a thing where I would only allow myself to build within a five-by-five radius. So all my factories had to fit within this five-by-five tower. I just kept building up in the sky. And that’s something that a community came up with. It’s called a five-by-five challenge. That was a lot of fun, too.”
For those uninitiated in Satisfactory, a five-by-five grid is ruddy tiny, and would mean so much stacking, and creation of floors on top of each, My mind boggled at how that was even possible. It would make your factories insanely high, to which Snutt confirmed, he actually ended up reaching the kill box at the very top of the map, which is waaaaay up high in this game.
“One thing that we’ve always said is story”
It would be remiss of me in an interview with Snutt about Satisfactory to not ask the big question. So I asked him how come Satsifactory is still in Early Access after five years, and at what point will the team at Coffee Stain Studios finally feel confident to say “We’re going to launch.”
*Note this interview was conducted shortly before the announcement that Satisfactory will be launching at hit 1.0 later in 2024.
“I think that’s something that we really struggle with figuring out because, I feel we could work on this game forever. We could work on this for five more years and you could still add more things. Yeah, it’s just one of those games where you get to keep going.
“And I think, I think at the end of the day we just have to realise that the game is finished when we, stop working on it essentially. And we just need to figure out “Okay, what are we missing right now that that would make it so that Satisfactory it’s finished?””.
“And one thing that we’ve always said is story. For instance, we have a little bit of a story element to the game that we didn’t want to add until the finished product because we didn’t want people to experience a half-finished story. And that’s something we’ve been working on for a long time. So that is one major thing.”
“There’s a couple of other things such as the quality of it we want to improve. For instance, the multiplayer experience, we want that to be better. We want the dedicated server support to be there fully because right now it’s been as of Update Five, when we launched dedicated servers, it’s always been a bit iffy, the functionality of dedicated service. That’s something we also want to kind of wrap up and finish and make it better quality.”
“Yeah, but a lot of people say that “Oh, your game is pretty much finished, just release it.” And I think we agree to some degree. I think we sort of need to decide at some point, yeah, this is what this is what we should settle with. It’s really hard for us, though, because we have so many ideas ever since we launched in early access.”
“This game wasn’t supposed to be all access originally. Early access, the decision to go to it was quite a late one because we just had so many more ideas and we wanted to expand the game so much more. Yeah, and being in early access, sort of gave us that opportunity. It’s been very beneficial for us.”
“We want to make the game we feel our community deserves”
I then turn the conversation to the community again and how their ideas or highlighting of problems over the early access period of Satsifactory has helped shape how the game has changed over the year.
“I think we have a pretty good understanding of what works and what doesn’t work for the game. Yeah. We’ve had this huge backlog of ideas and it’s kind of cool to see the community chip in and give their take on things. Especially the mod creators because a lot of times we’ve had ideas that we weren’t 100% sure that it was a good idea or not.
“And then we see someone make a mod for it and then we’re like, “Oh, that’s kind of confirms that this was necessary”. Or sometimes we see a mod that we were like, This is not really what we wanted to do with the game and a mod has created for it. And we’re like, “Oh, cool, that kind of confirmed that that didn’t work, but it’s cool that there’s a mod for it.”
“There’s a lot of that. And we decided to pursue finishing the game back for Update Five which was like 2022. So it’s taken us still two years even though we’ve said we’re focusing on finishing the game, we’re still like not really there. Yeah, it’s a huge endeavor, but at the same time, we just need to get there at some point. Famous last words.”
I try not to do too much gushing to Snutt about my love for the game. But it’s clear when you play it that it is a labour of love from the team, something their proud of and eternally grateful for the reception and community that has formed since it landed in Early Access. Snutt quietly lets me gush, and then replies.
“Yeah, I think a big part of that is the fact that our community has been so great. We’ve had so much good engagement from people and like so many good bits of advice here and there. It kind of becomes the thing that we really want to make the game that we feel our community deserves. And that takes time.”
It seems like a fitting moment to end the interview with Snutt underlining the importance of the community and the team’s desire to give them an experience they will thoroughly enjoy. I thank Snutt for his time, and leave with my head full of what to do next when I fire up Satisfactory next.
And that concludes our Satisfactory Interview with Snutt Treptow. If you want to check out the previous two parts of our Satisfactory Interview with Snutt, you can click on the links below.
