Satisfactory Starting Locations Compared

You pick one of four places to land, and the choice matters less than it feels like it should. Nothing is locked behind a starting area, the whole map is reachable from any of them, and you can relocate whenever you like. What differs is how much the first ten hours fight you.

The four areas, with the game’s own ratings

Area	Flatness	Biomass	Resource amount	Diversity	Recommended for
Grass Fields	★★★★★	★★★☆☆	★★★☆☆	★★★☆☆	First-time pioneers
Rocky Desert	★★★★☆	★★★☆☆	★★★☆☆	★★★★☆	First-time pioneers
Northern Forest	★☆☆☆☆	★★★★★	★★★★☆	★★★★★	More experienced
Dune Desert	—	—	—	—	Advanced

Those stars are the game’s own assessment, not a community opinion. Two things stand out: Northern Forest has the best resources and the worst terrain, and Grass Fields is the only one rated five stars for flatness.

Grass Fields

Open, flat, and forgiving. The description calls it the first viable building location FICSIT found, and it is the default recommendation for good reason: flat terrain removes the single biggest source of early frustration.

The trade is distance. Mining locations are spread out, so you will be building outposts and long transport lines sooner than you would elsewhere. That is not a problem — it is the game — but it arrives earlier here.

Pick this if it is your first playthrough and you want to spend your attention on learning the production systems rather than on fighting terrain.

Rocky Desert

Balanced on every axis and rated slightly higher than Grass Fields on resource diversity. The description calls it the textbook FICSIT-approved location.

Its distinguishing feature is proximity to the sea, which makes water trivially available. That matters more than it sounds: coal power needs 45 m³/min of water per generator, and the first time you build a coal plant is the first time water logistics become a real problem.

Pick this if you want a first playthrough with fewer compromises than Grass Fields and do not mind marginally less flat ground.

Northern Forest

The best resources in the game and the worst terrain. Five stars for biomass and diversity, four for amount, and a single star for flatness.

That single star is the whole story. Height differences everywhere means every factory platform needs pillars, every belt run crosses a gradient, and the foundation-first discipline that is merely good practice elsewhere becomes mandatory here.

Pick this if you have played before and want the resource density. Building on it without knowing how foundations and pillars work is how people end up with a factory scattered across a hillside at six different heights.

Dune Desert

Marked for advanced pioneers, and described as initially considered too risky before further investigation found it viable. Large open spaces, but the harshest starting environment of the four.

Pick this if you have finished the game once and want the landing itself to be part of the challenge.

What the choice does not affect

Worth being explicit, because the decision feels weightier than it is.

Nothing is exclusive to a starting area. Every resource, every node, every collectible is reachable from anywhere. There is no bauxite-only start.

You can move. The HUB can be dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere, and most players’ eventual main factory is nowhere near where they landed.

Resource layout is fixed across all four. The map is authored, so the nodes are in the same places regardless of where you start — unless you enabled world randomization at world creation, which shuffles them deliberately.

Difficulty is unchanged. There is no damage modifier or resource multiplier attached to the starting area. The rating differences are about convenience, not challenge scaling.

What actually matters more than the choice

Three things that will affect your first ten hours more than which area you picked:

Whether you build on foundations. Flat ground makes this easier, but the habit matters more than the terrain. A platform on pillars turns Northern Forest into flat ground.

Whether you do MAM research. Blade Runners come from the Quartz tree and change every minute you spend on foot. That is available regardless of where you started.

Whether you check belt marks against extractor rates. A miner on a pure node feeding a Mk.1 belt wastes half the node, and that happens in every starting area equally.

Checking what is near you

Once you have landed, the node browser on this site lists every resource node with its purity and coordinates. It is more useful after you have picked than before, because the question “what is near my base” is answerable and “which area is best” mostly is not.

Relocating later

Since most players do move, worth knowing how cheap it actually is.

The HUB can be dismantled and rebuilt. Progress, milestones and unlocks all live on the save rather than on the building, so moving it costs you the materials to place it again and nothing else.

Your first factory rarely survives anyway. The smelter row you built at Tier 1 is producing at a fraction of what you will need by Tier 4, and most people abandon or rebuild it regardless of location.

Outposts do not need to be near home. Once you have trains or even a truck route, a mining site three kilometres away is no less convenient than one nearby. The distance penalty applies to your own travel, which hypertubes solve.

So the realistic pattern is: land somewhere forgiving, learn the systems, then build the factory you actually want wherever the resources you need happen to converge.

World randomization changes this entirely

If you enabled randomization at world creation, everything above about resource distribution stops applying. Node positions shuffle, so the ratings for resource amount and diversity no longer describe what is near each starting area.

That is the point of the setting, and it is why it is recommended for a second or third playthrough rather than a first. On a randomized world, scouting replaces planning, and no guide can tell you what is near you.

The starting areas themselves — the terrain, the flatness, the biomes — are unchanged, because the map geometry does not randomize. Only what is buried in it does.

Common mistakes

Agonising over the choice. Grass Fields or Rocky Desert for a first run, and you can relocate later regardless.

Picking Northern Forest first for the resources. The resources are real and so is the one-star terrain rating.

Assuming a starting area locks you out of something. Nothing is exclusive; the whole map is reachable.

Treating the landing site as your permanent base. Most players move. Build the first factory where you land and the real one wherever makes sense later.