Best Satisfactory 1.0 starting locations and factory layouts

After putting a few hours into a Satisfactory world, it’s easy to completely customize your factory’s layout and transform the area surrounding your base into something more suitable for automation. Those first few hours can be rough, though, so choosing the best Satisfactory starting location is super important.

Satisfactory presents you with a handful of starting locations when you create a new save file, and each of them has their own advantages and disadvantages. Even then, there are different spots in each starting region that are better suited to beginner factories.

Best starting locations in Satisfactory

When starting a new Satisfactory save, you have four options to choose for your starting location.

Grass Fields

For most people, Grass Fields is the best starting location in Satisfactory. Not only is it the recommended choice for beginners, but it’s also filled with scenic vistas and wide open plains that make it perfect for your first factory.

The only issue with the Grass Fields region is an abundance of impure ore nodes in the starting area, which makes early-game resource harvesting much slower. You can avoid this by traveling a while before settling down, however, and you still have plentiful deposits of Iron, Copper, and other basic resources no matter where you end up. Plus, you’re only a short trip away from valuable resources like Oil as well.

Rocky Desert

The Rocky Desert is the second starting area choice on the list, but it’s not recommended for new Satisfactory players. Unlike the Grass Fields, the Rocky Desert has large stretches of barren land. To compensate for that, there are rich pockets of valuable resources like Coal and Oil if you know where to look.

If you choose the Rocky Desert as your starting area, we recommend heading west to the coast where you can find a ton of ore nodes to get started. Then, move north to collect some easy Coal nodes that you can use to progress into mid-game manufacturing.

Dune Desert

Despite having a similar name, Dune Desert could not be more different from its Rocky counterpart. In contrast to the Rocky Desert’s sporadic oasis-style spreading of resources, the Dune Desert has an even spread of ore nodes throughout. You never have shortages of any ore in the Dune Desert region since you can’t go more than a few feet without finding a new node to harvest.

If you choose Dune Desert as your starting location, you can start constructing your factory just about anywhere since the resources are spread evenly throughout the entire region. Once you’ve got a decent setup going, you can move outward to collect more advanced materials like Coal. It can be a bit harder to get Oil in the Dune Desert since Oil nodes are pretty far from the starting point, but by the time you need Oil, you should be advanced enough that traveling won’t be an issue.

Northern Forest

The fourth and final choice for your Satisfactory starting area, the Northern Forest features one of the best quick-start spawn points in the entire game. If you choose to start in the Northern Forest, you are dumped right on top of multiple pure ore nodes so you never have to worry about basic resources like Iron and Limestone.

The only problem with the Northern Forest is that there aren’t many ore nodes outside of that starting cluster. You will have to travel quite a bit to collect other resources to progress through the game’s technology tree. It’s an interesting tradeoff, but the Northern Forest provides an easy early-game boost for Satisfactory veterans.

Best starter factory layouts in Satisfactory

This is the best starting factory layout in Satisfactory. It’s nothing fancy, but it will get you started with Smelters that don’t need babysitting. You can add onto it with more splitters and you can even stack this design on top of itself to create a multi-level facility.

This will let you smelt Iron and Copper at the early stages of the game so you can craft the necessary parts to build new items and upgrades. It’s a modular design, too, so you can snap on Constructors and other things as needed.