Satisfactory's first paid expansion sends you underground
Coffee Stain used its Big Break Showcase to announce Core Values, the factory builder's first paid expansion — and it moves the entire operation beneath the surface.
Satisfactory is going underground. Coffee Stain Studios used its first Big Break Showcase on Tuesday, 29 September to announce Core Values, the factory builder's first paid expansion, and it sends pioneers down into the crust of the planet for new resources, new flora, new fauna and a fresh set of production lines to obsess over.
What Coffee Stain actually announced
Core Values is described on its own Steam page as a major expansion rather than a content drop, and it is the first time Coffee Stain has charged for extra Satisfactory beyond the base game. The announcement post points players at both the Steam and Epic Games Store listings and at a trailer published on the studio's own channel. There is no price and no release date yet: Steam still lists the expansion's launch as to be announced, and the console link in the announcement says, in capital letters, coming soon.
Where the factory is at
Satisfactory left early access on 10 September 2024, a milestone Coffee Stain marked with a second-anniversary post on 10 September this year. In the thirteen months since, the studio has shipped the 1.2 Update and a run of hotfixes but nothing that asked players to open their wallets again.
The base game is currently discounted by 30 per cent on Steam in the UK, down from £33.50 to £23.45, which is a fair guess at the kind of pricing window the expansion will want to land in.
Our opinion
An underground expansion is the right instinct for a game whose whole appeal is the moment you look up from a conveyor spaghetti junction and realise you have been building for six hours. Confining the new toys to caves gives Coffee Stain somewhere genuinely hostile to put the next tier of machines, and the studio already knows how to make the planet feel like it is judging you. The risk is scope. Core Values has no date, no price and a console version that appears to exist only as a promise, and Satisfactory players have spent years being extremely patient. Announce the price and the window, or the community will fill in the blanks for you.