Part of the Satisfactory beginner walkthrough. Series overview.
While the MAM’s research timer ticks away in the background, it’s a good moment to knock out a few upgrades that make getting around a base, and across the broken terrain outside it, a lot easier. It starts with the AWESOME Sink, which earns the coupons for the rest, then the Factory Ladder and the Double Ramp Set. None of it waits on the MAM research we’re working through; you can pick it all up right now.
Clearing a Tier 2 Milestone: the Resource Sink
The first is the Resource Sink Bonus Program (400 Concrete, 500 Wire, 200 Iron Rods, 200 Iron Plates), which unlocks the AWESOME Sink and the AWESOME Shop, along with the Build Gun Customizer and a starter FICSIT Coupon.
Built and placed, the Sink is one of the larger machines you’ll have put down so far.
The Sink gives surplus parts somewhere to go: feed it anything you’re overproducing and it converts the parts into points. Open it up and you can watch the rate tick over (up to 240 points a minute once it’s fed steadily), see how many points are left until the next coupon, and print your FICSIT Coupons once they’re ready.
You spend those coupons in the AWESOME Shop on bonus rewards (including the New Shop Products the Caterium nodes keep unlocking), so between the two it’s a tidy fix for the belts that back up when a factory isn’t perfectly balanced. That leaves just one Tier 2 milestone left on my list, Jump Pads, a mobility upgrade.
Vertical Mobility: Ladders and Double Ramps
Once the Sink and Shop are running, a few crafted items fed into the Sink earns enough coupons for two upgrades for getting up and down. Both cost 3 Coupons and are available almost immediately. First is the Factory Ladder, in the Shop’s Architecture tab, 3 Coupons to unlock. It snaps to Walls and Foundations and defaults to 2m but extends to whatever height you need as you place it.
Ladders are how you get around a factory once it grows upward into multiple floors, and they’re just as useful out in the field for scaling the steep stuff, the cliffs and floating-island edges that ramps can’t climb.
The Double Ramp Set is the companion buy, another 3 Coupons over in Foundations. It lays ramps two at a time (an 8m by 2m diagonal), snaps to Foundations, and makes it easier to climb onto them, with buildings placed on top snapping to the grid. Between the two, you’ve got smooth ramps where they fit and ladders where they don’t.
There’s a third upgrade in the same category, the Jump Pads milestone, which unlocks the Jump Pad and the U-Jelly Landing Pad for bouncing yourself around the base and cushioning your landings. It’s the one here I usually leave on the shelf for now, though. I don’t tend to touch the jump-pad system until much later, when the U-Jelly Landing Pad becomes handy as a landing spot for the Tube Cannon. Take the milestone anyway; the gear is easy to ignore until you need it.
The walkthrough overview has the rest of the series in order.
Keep going: the walkthrough overview lists every part of the series in order.