Automation builder Satisfactory is now Steam Deck Verified, becoming one of the most dangerous additions to Valve's handheld ever

Satisfactory developer Coffee Stain Studios is back at work after its holiday break, and it's already deployed a long-awaited patch for the factory building game that upgrades it to the Steam Deck Verified rating. The developer also has a new experimental build with "major changes" on the technical side as it works on establishing a solid foundation for its upcoming Satisfactory 1.2 update.

"We are finally back in the office now, once again working on Satisfactory at full speed, and good stuff is coming," community manager Mikael Niazi says. "We are finally fully verified on the Steam Deck, and the game should work easily out of the box." I'm terrified at the prospect; I can already see myself booting it up to 'just sort one thing' while I have a couple of minutes free and then snapping out of a conveyor belt-induced haze four hours later when the battery warning appears.

If it's your first time running Satisfactory on Steam Deck, your settings will be automatically tailored to fit. If you've toyed around with it on the platform before, Niazi notes that you'll want to head into your game settings and manually reset everything to default. This will implement Coffee Stain's recommended setup, which includes the ability to switch between quality and performance presets. There's also an official button layout now available through Steam's controller settings menu.

Moving away from the handheld version specifically, a new Satisfactory experimental build has been deployed that you can access through Steam's 'game versions and betas' menu. This won't have any new content "unless someone has majorly goofed up," Niazi explains, but it does include "engine upgrades, optimization, and us trying a solid foundation to eventually ship 1.2 on."

The build features an engine upgrade to Unreal 5.6.1, and also implements "hundreds of improvements, bug fixes, controller polish, quality-of-life upgrades, and localization updates" from the console release. Niazi emphasizes that anyone who joins this test "is helping us out tremendously to get the kinks out," and that the experimental build after this one should start to roll out actual 1.2 features.

Eagle-eyed testers might also notice a few bugs and issues that were fixed in recent updates to the live version of Satisfactory but are present on experimental, Niazi cautions. This is because the two builds have been developed in parallel since before the console release, and you should see all of those changes implemented when the final version of Satisfactory 1.2 consolidates them again.