When Coffee Stain Studios set out to build Core Values, the upcoming expansion to the factory automation game Satisfactory, they faced a problem that might sound simple but turned out to be anything but: how do you make a cave the right size? The studio’s designers have spent countless hours testing factory layouts across every corner of the game’s new underground biomes, wrestling with the tension between giving players room to build and keeping the claustrophobic, tunnel-filled atmosphere that defines the expansion.
For anyone who has played Satisfactory, the base game offers vast, open alien worlds where factories can sprawl in any direction, stack skyward, or spread in a combination of both. Space is virtually unlimited, and the level designers carefully place coal, iron, and copper deposits so that early-game players can reach them before unlocking the technology to transport materials efficiently. But Core Values pulls the entire experience underground, and that shift fundamentally changes the rules of the game.
A factory that must fit in a box
The core challenge of the expansion is that your factories now need to fit inside a confined space. Where the base game rewards players with boundless room to expand, the cave environment imposes hard constraints. This is not just a hurdle for players, but a design puzzle for the developers, who must anticipate exactly how much space a factory will consume before they can finalize the shape of each cave.
Game director Emmet Burke explained the delicate balance the team is trying to strike. “We want to be very careful how much space we allow for different players, because you still want to have the cave feeling,” he said. “You want to have the little tunnels to explore, but you want to make sure there’s always enough areas that if people want to unleash their creativity, they have the space to do that, but then you don’t want to just give them a big box where they can build whatever they want. Level design was enormous here.”
“I always see it like a triangle. We have the cave environment and the size and shape, but we also have the amount of factories you need, how expensive the recipes are, and the size of the buildings.”
Torsten Gunst, Art Director
Reading the triangle
Unlike the base game, which uses fixed maps that remain consistent across playthroughs, Core Values requires the developers to predict player behavior. They must understand how people will arrange their factories to exploit the resources within each cave, then work backward to determine how much space will eventually be needed. This means testing factory layers across the entire biome while factoring in the technologies players will have unlocked, the resources available in various quantities, and the different styles of factory that might emerge.
Art director Torsten Gunst described the approach as managing a three-sided relationship between the environment, the factory requirements, and the buildings themselves. By constantly monitoring these factors and making adjustments as needed, the team can arrive at a unique cave shape capable of containing the optimized factory that best exploits the resources found within it.
New tools and unexpected players
The expansion introduces new logistics tools to connect factory buildings, and conveyor belts, while not entirely gone, will be far less central than in the base game. The developers declined to reveal specifics about these tools, but producer Julio Mendez hinted that the constrictive nature of the cave will push players toward them. “I don’t want to spoil anything out right, but there will be challenges that come from the specific new environment that we have,” he said.
Even with all this careful planning, Coffee Stain acknowledges that Satisfactory players are notoriously inventive. Burke noted that the team cannot test every possible combination. “People will find recipes that we didn’t even think of,” he said. “We have a vision of how this is going to be balanced and then… We can’t test every single combination.”
For players who may not have mastered the intricate art of optimizing factory flow rates, the team has a simple solution. Burke said the developers add roughly 25% extra cave space to accommodate those who want to build larger or who struggle to think inside the box—a concession that acknowledges the wide range of skill levels among the game’s dedicated community.
Looking ahead
After months of meticulous planning, the developers have worked to ensure that Core Values’ caves are both varied and practical, large enough to contain the factories players need but small enough to preserve the challenge and atmosphere that make the expansion distinct. As the release date approaches, fans will be eager to see how the studio’s carefully calibrated caves hold up against the creativity of the community that has long defined Satisfactory.
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