Best Starting Location in Satisfactory 1.0

Nearly five years after its Early Access release, Satisfactory has finally reached its official 1.0 release. Whether you’re a long-term player returning for the full release, or a beginner just starting your factory-building adventure, you’re going to want to pick the best place to start building your factory. Here is the best starting location in Satisfactory 1.0 to give you the strongest advantages to building your factory.

Best place to start in Satisfactory 1.0

The best starting location in Satisfactory 1.0 is the Rocky Desert. When you first create a new world in Satisfactory, you may notice it recommends the Grass Fields as an easy starting location. However, this is a bit misleading if you’re looking for the actual best location. While the Grass Fields is a decent starting spot if you’re new to the game due to having a lot of ore nodes in a wide open area, most of the nodes in the Grass Fields are actually Impure or Normal quality nodes, which aren’t ideal.

Meanwhile, the Rocky Desert was considered one of the best starting locations all throughout Early Access and was actually made even better with the Satisfactory 1.0 release due to the addition of four new Coal Nodes northwest of the starting area. With these easy-to-access Coal Nodes, you can get your coal power production up even quicker and more easily and can utilize the previously existing coal nodes to the east and northeast to ramp up your Steel Production.

Also, most of the nodes found throughout the Rocky Desert are quality Pure Nodes, and the space around them is flat and vast giving you plenty of opportunity to build sprawling factories as you climb through the tiers.

All Satisfactory 1.0 starting locations ranked

In case there’s some reason you just don’t want to start in the Rocky Desert, or are simply trying to decide the best alternative starting location for your Satisfactory 1.0 run, we’ve ranked all four of the potential starting locations based on their overall potential. Here are all four Satisfactory 1.0 starting locations ranked:

1. Rocky Desert
2. Northern Forest
3. Dune Desert
4. Grass Fields

The Northern Forest is a solid backup option to the Rocky Desert, but both the Dune Desert and Grass Fields are overall less effective starting locations. If you want a challenge or simply enjoy the scenery they offer, you can of course still play through Satisfactory without issue at these starting locations. But in terms of overall best options, you’ll want to stick with Rocky Desert or even Northern Forest.