Satisfactory can scratch some of the same itches as Factorio. The differences:

• Factorio looks like Age of Empires 2 with a 3 pack a day habit, which you cover an already dismal looking landscape with smoky dieselpunk factories. Satisfactory is a rather pretty Unreal engine game in which you cover gorgeous landscapes with tonka truck looking factories.

• Factorio is 2D so everything sits on the ground. Satisfactory is the most 3D game ever, verticality is a major mechanic in the game. A major part of the experience is building buildings to put your factories in.

• In Factorio, you unlock new technologies in the tech tree by researching them in labs, the labs are fueled by science bottle things that you make out of production parts. In Satisfactory, you unlock new technologies by putting specific numbers of production parts into the HUB, the MAM, or through sacrificing basically anything into the AWESOME sink. This isn’t really automatable.

• Factorio has a major combat/wave defense mechanic with the bugs, the bugs hate your pollution cloud and want to destroy your factory and kill you for it. In Satisfactory, your buildings are indestructable (you can remove them and be refunded the materials that went into them but if you put down a wall nothing but you can break it), there is no wave defense, there are alien organisms that are basically wild animals that will try to hurt you if you get nearby so there’s some first person shooter elements.

• Factorio’s world is functionally infinite, you can find an edge but it is extremely large, and procedurally generated. Satisfactory takes place on one handcrafted map, I think there is a tiny amount of procedural generation in that some minor resource rocks I think are randomly placed, like those occasional “here’s 25 limestone in the middle of nowhere” rocks, I think some of those are random.

• Factorio has large patches of ore on the ground that you put lots of miners on, and you’ll eventually pull them empty and have to move on to find a new patch. Satisfactory has ore nodes on which one miner is placed. They never run out of ore, but they are limited in the production rate, so as the game asks you to build bigger and more complicated things, you have to expand to get more resources per minute.

• The belt systems are different; Factorio has two-lane belts and there are nuances to how you put things onto the belts, like iron and coal on the same belt for furnaces. Satisfactory has single lane belts and the puzzle is more about how to accomodate all the belts you need in 3D space.