Taking the time to light up your factory has as many functional advantages as it does aesthetic.

Lighting up your production lines in Satisfactory is easy at first--you're building outdoors, and the power of the sun takes care of any visibility problems you might have, at least during the day. But building outdoors isn't sustainable. You'll have immensely long, confusing, and inefficient factories that will make the game less fun to play. It's better to build buildings to house those machines, and that's where lighting comes in. Lighting for visibility, information, and style are all worthwhile pursuits, and will even require different applications of components in some cases. This is a starter guide for lighting up your factory, covering general ideas and concepts and some technical aspects of light.

Light Sources:

There are three different light sources in Satisfactory. The sun, factory lighting, and repurposed signs.

Lights

There are a few different standard lights in Satisfactory, including a standard ceiling light, two different kinds of flood lights, and street lights, all of which can be controlled through a lighting control panel.

The Sun

Finally, there's the ultimate light source, the sun. You can use windows or leave open gaps in your walls and ceilings to create dynamic and dramatic lighting. It's harder to use the sun as functional lighting without just having an open-air factory, and even then it'll still be dark at night. The big thing to keep in mind here is that the sun travels West to East in Satisfactory, and windows oriented along that axis will get the best play.

Signs

Another great source of lighting is signs, which you can purchase from the Awesome Shop, using points earned via the Awesome Sink. There's a caveat here to keep in mind, and that's that you need to have Global Illumination (Lumen) enabled, which won't work as well on older graphics cards. You also may have to tinker with console settings to make them work as you like. More on that later.

Global Illumination in Satisfactory

If you're wading into lighting using anything but the most basic tools, you'll want to learn a little bit about how it works in Satisfactory. The feature is largely unsupported, and developer Coffee Stain Studios currently has no plans to make changes to the game to better support it. So it's a pretty basic implementation, and you'll most likely have to wade into the console to make some changes, as Coffee Stain made some changes to the default settings to improve performance a couple years back.

You can open the console by pressing `/~ on your keyboard. Here are the commands you'll want to know:

r.AOGlobalDistanceField.MinMeshSDFRadius [number] - you can enter numbers 1-20 here, and 14 is considered by the Satisfactory community to be the "sweet spot."

r.LumenScene.SurfaceCache.CardTexelDensityScale [number] - you can use this setting to increase or decrease the render distance of Lumen-based lighting. Cranking this up to high can really tank your performance, so if you do mess with this one, we recommend small increments.

r.Lumen.TraceMeshSDFs.TraceDistance=2048 - this command helps with light going around corners appropriate.

r.Lumen.TraceMeshSDFs=1 - this will allow you to mess with reflections.

Any of these can affect your performance, so change these settings carefully. You can't really screw anything up permanently, but it's still good to make these changes incrementally.

Another important aspect of Lumen is that you can use the physics of light to create unique looks. You can block lights using columns and other objects, or use the fact that some things, like walkways, have edges around them, to create lighting embedded into the floor.

How to Use Lights

There are a few big pros to using standard lights. You have granular control over how much light they output when turned on, from 10% up to 100%. You can set them to turn on only at night--great for lighting up roads, railways, and the outsides of buildings. You can also set the color of the lights to a variety of different options. You can set all of this through the Lighting Control Panel, which will allow you to control entire circuits of lights with the flip of a switch. Both the night lighting setting and the control panel are great for conserving power when you're not using a particular section of your factory, as each light uses a little bit of power. That's the main argument against using lights--2MW of power isn't much on its own in Satisfactory, but across a large factory it can really stack up.

How to Use Signs

Lights are good for, well, lighting. But factories don't just have lighting. You'll find all manner of guides and markings to help you parse your surroundings. Signs are well suited to this task. For example, using banner signs as guidelines on walkways will help you, lights or not, to make sure you're heading in the right direction. That's not a problem with a starter factory, but once you start heading toward the higher tiers, this becomes more and more useful.

Similarly, you can use signs as under-lighting (think about customized cars for this), up lighting, down lighting, et cetera. All your smelters have red lighting, all of your constructors have blue lighting, and so on. You can get tons of information about your surroundings at a glance with creative use of sign-based lighting.

It can also be cosmetic, of course. You can use lights to create a sinister vibe befitting the FICSIT goal of stripping the planet of its resources, using black walls and red lights. Or you could go with black and white if you wanted to go for a House Harkonnen look.

It's also worth noting that Satisfactory really doesn't care about physics (aside from the physics of light if you turn Lumen on). You can leave items floating in the air if you like. The Infinite Nudge mod is especially helpful here, as it increases the detail with which you can manipulate objects like beams and pillars. Once you set a beam to the angle you like, you can put some signs on it, and then tweak the angle, to create different shapes and the like.

To use a sign as a light, first remove any text and icons, and then set a color for the sign that you'd like to use. Set the Emission Strength to 2 or 3. This will turn the billboard into a highly customizable light source that you can point in almost any direction, block with objects, and more to create any number of effects. Along with the requirement of Global Illumination, another caveat is that you have to drop these signs one by one, and then you have to copy the settings from one light and paste it onto all of the others. It's not the worst thing in the world, but it's not quite as smooth as ceiling lights in that way. If you're deep enough into factory building to start using blueprints, you can of course integrate these into your blueprints to make all of this setup essentially effortless.

To leave your factory unlit is a disservice to this game. Light in Satisfactory is at least as useful as it is aesthetically pleasing, and shouldn't be ignored.

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How to Light Up Your Production Lines in Satisfactory