In the next major update, Update 8, the first-person factory builder Satisfactory will switch from its current Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5. Before, Coffee Stain Studios said that a teaser for Update 8 would be coming soon, but it was put off.
Satisfactory is going to upgrade to Unreal Engine 5.1.1. The 5.2 version, which was just announced, isn’t out yet, but the developers have told about some of the new features we can expect (as reported by Gamermatters.com) –
- Optional global illumination (utilizing Lumen)
- The game won’t be designed to fully be lit with global illumination, but it will be available as an option
- Nanite utilization for rocks and cliffs
- Reduced stutters thanks to utilizing World Partition System instead of the current tile/chunk loading
- TSR (temporal super-resolution) anti-aliasing – similar to Nvidia DLSS/ AMD FSR
- Vehicle physics changed to Chaos physics system- expected improved vehicle controls
- Trucks are heavier
- Explorers are zippier, easy to oversteer
- Tractors (Sugarcubes) are faster
- Factory carts are less prone to flipping over
- Janky bumping/bouncing while driving over flat foundations should be gone
- Handbrakes improved
- Won’t affect most automated self-driving routes
- Air control improved
- No change to trains
- Improved vehicle audio
The engine change will start on the Experimental path, and this will be a real experiment. If the experimental build doesn’t work, players should back up their save files and go back to the main Early Access branch.
The update won’t necessarily make the game run better, but the features that come with the UE5 upgrade will help the player and the developers of this Early Access game, which came out for the first time in 2019.
Do you know that Mortal Kombat 12 won’t be using Unreal Engine 5? There have been rumors that the next Mortal Kombat game will be a showcase for Unreal’s new game engine, but recent events have made that unlikely:
Because of this, the minimum system requirements for Satisfactory will go up. The minimum GPU will change from an Nvidia GeForce GTX 770, which doesn’t have drivers anymore, to a GeForce GTX 1650. Since UE5 Nanite needs fast writing speeds, you may need an SSD, but this is not set in stone yet. When Update 8 comes out in full, we’ll probably find out how much the minimum specs have been raised.
If you want to know more about why Satisfactory is changing the engine, you should watch the full video, which has a perfectly cursed thumbnail of an engine block with the head of Epic Games head Tim Sweeny mounted on the front and going super saiyan –
Early Access for Satisfactory is now available on PC (Steam, Epic Games Store). The release date for Update 8 has not been set yet. Update 7 is now out in the wild.