Satisfactory's top-tier quantum tech will let you transmute metals like an alchemist
Also, higher-tier belts are real.
Not too long ago Coffee Stain Studios posted a nice, quiet video flying over the "Quantum" machines that'll make up the final tier of technology in their first-person factory-building survival crafting game Satisfactory. Now, a second 20-minute video has explained almost everything about what that tech will do in-game.
The banner feature of Quantum-tier technology is that it'll allow you to use the Quantum Converter to transform one kind of resource into another: Copper into sulfur, iron into limestone, coal into iron, quartz into bauxite—and perhaps most excitingly for those who like to make giant power plants, bauxite into uranium. Using some special unannounced resource you, too, will be able to transmute the fundamental elements of Satisfactory like some kind of medieval alchemist.
Furthermore, community manager Snut has also confirmed that a final, faster conveyor belt will be added to Satisfactory when it releases. That'll mean it can actually keep up with the amount of raw materials output by the fastest possible mining rigs.
"That is the mark 6 belt, there's another version of the conveyor belt," said community manager Snut, contradicting literally years of announcements from the studio, before following up that "We were always gonna do this. We've just been, like, lying."
The other big building for Quantum tech is the Quantum Encoder, which can fluctuate massively in power to create the much-hinted-at superposition oscillator components for your factory's highest tiers of play. That's alongside many other new top-tier resource recipes across various structures like magical "Ficsite" materials to build with, diamonds, dark matter crystals, and even new artificial power shards for overclocking everything in your entire factory forever.
For those that love their efficiency, one of the best bits of news is that Ficsite combined with the waste byproducts of nuclear energy can be used to create a lesser-power nuclear fuel that has no waste product—thrillingly efficient! And also you don't need to store all that pesky, deadly radioactive byproduct which is good, in my opinion.
This has been a great year for factory games already, and with Satisfactory 1.0 coming out this month and Factorio: Space Age on the way later this year we're going to get better and better.
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Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.