Satisfactory Vehicles and Vehicle Paths: What Each One Is For

Vehicles occupy an awkward middle ground: more flexible than a belt, less reliable than a train, and cheaper than either. Knowing which one to build comes down to two numbers — how much it carries and what it burns.

The four ground vehicles

Vehicle	Inventory	Power	Build cost highlights
Tractor	25 slots	55 MW	5 Modular Frame, 5 Rotor, 10 Reinforced Iron Plate
Truck	48 slots	75 MW	15 Motor, 20 Reinforced Steel Plate, 20 Modular Frame
Explorer	12 slots	90 MW	5 Crystal Oscillator, 5 Motor, 10 Modular Frame
Cyber Wagon	1 slot	150 MW	10 Reinforced Iron Plate (plus a lot more)

“Power” here is fuel burn rate expressed in MW, which is how the game models vehicle consumption. It converts directly: a 75 MW Truck burning Coal at 300 MJ per unit consumes one unit every 4 seconds, or 15 per minute at full throttle.

The three that matter:

Tractor is the early automation option. Cheap, slow, 25 slots. Good for a short ore run before you have Motors in quantity.

Truck is the workhorse. Nearly double the Tractor’s cargo for a moderate fuel increase. If you are automating a route and you have Motors, build Trucks.

Explorer is transport for you, not for cargo. Twelve slots, the highest fuel burn of the three, and fast. Use it for scouting and getting to a remote site, not for hauling.

The Cyber Wagon is a joke item with one inventory slot and the highest power draw in the list. It exists because someone asked for it.

Fluid Truck

Added in 1.2, the Fluid Truck carries liquids instead of solids. Same 75 MW draw as the regular Truck and the same build cost, paired with Fluid Truck Stations at 20 MW each.

Its case is narrow but real: moving fluid over ground that would punish a pipe. Pipes lose throughput to head lift on every metre climbed, and recovering that costs pumps and power. A vehicle route does not care about elevation for throughput purposes.

If your terrain is flat, a pipe is simpler and continuous. If you are climbing several hundred metres, run the numbers before committing to pumps.

Truck stations draw power whether or not anything is happening

Both the Truck Station and Fluid Truck Station draw 20 MW constantly. That is modest next to a Train Station’s 50 MW, but it is continuous, and a route with a station at each end costs 40 MW before a single vehicle moves.

The vehicles themselves draw nothing from your grid — they burn fuel they carry.

Vehicle paths: how recording actually works

You do not draw a route on a map. You drive it, and the game records your inputs.

Park the vehicle at a Truck Station and open its interface.
Start recording.
Drive the full loop, ending back at a station.
Stop recording.

What gets stored is a path with your throttle and steering along it. This is why the quality of your recorded lap determines the quality of every lap afterwards: a route you drove badly will be driven badly forever.

Drive the recording lap deliberately. Smooth, wide, no reversing, no sharp corrections. A route recorded while fighting the terrain replays those fights.

Why automated vehicles drift off the path

The common complaint, and it has a few distinct causes worth separating.

Terrain the vehicle cannot follow at speed. The recorded path includes your speed. If you took a slope slowly and the replaying vehicle arrives faster, it will overshoot. Foundation the route where it is rough.

Collisions with each other. Two vehicles on the same path will eventually meet. The game handles this poorly. Either run one vehicle per path or leave enough spacing that they never converge at a station.

Creatures. A hostile creature on the route will be hit, and the vehicle can be knocked off course. On a long overland route this is the usual cause of a vehicle that was fine for hours and is now stuck in a canyon.

The durable fix for all three is the same: build the route on foundations. A foundation road is flat, predictable, collision-free at the edges, and creatures do not path onto it as readily. It costs concrete and it turns vehicle automation from temperamental into reliable.

1.2 also made vehicle paths embeddable in blueprints, which makes repeating a standard road segment considerably less tedious.

Drones

Drones are a different proposition entirely: they fly point to point, ignore terrain completely, and need no path recording.

Drone Port: 100 MW, 18 slots of buffer.
Drone: 9 slots per trip, built from 4 Motor, 10 Aluminum Plate, 1 Lightweight Modular Frame.
They burn Batteries as fuel, which is a real production commitment.

Nine slots per trip is small. Drones are for high-value, low-volume cargo over long distances — the classic use is shipping a trickle of something exotic from a remote outpost rather than moving ore in bulk.

The 100 MW per port on both ends plus battery production makes them the most expensive logistics option per item moved. They earn it only when the alternative is a very long belt or a rail line across impossible terrain.

Choosing between vehicle, belt, train and drone

Short distance, any volume: belt. Continuous, no fuel, no failure modes.
Medium distance, moderate volume, awkward terrain: truck on a foundation road.
Long distance, high volume: train.
Long distance, low volume, impossible terrain: drone.
Fluids uphill: fluid truck or train, not pipe.

The honest caveat on vehicles: they are the option most likely to need maintenance attention. A belt that works today works next month. A truck route can be derailed by a creature, a collision, or terrain you did not foundation. Build them where the flexibility is worth that, and belt everything else.

Common mistakes

Recording a sloppy lap. Every future lap repeats it.

Running two vehicles on one path. They will meet, and it will not go well.

Skipping foundations to save concrete. The concrete is cheaper than the time spent recovering stuck vehicles.

Using an Explorer to haul. Twelve slots and the highest fuel burn of the ground vehicles. It is a scout, not a truck.

Expecting drones to move bulk. Nine slots a trip, powered by batteries and 200 MW of ports.