Improved Steam Deck support is coming to Satisfactory

Satisfactory recently had a fresh experimental Beta for testing, which includes improvements to how it works on Valve's Steam Deck. Currently the game has a Steam Deck Playable rating due to issues with the first-time setup and in-game text being small, with this update making progress towards getting it Steam Deck Verified.

The EXPERIMENTAL Update v1.1.1.5 announcement from October 7th starts by noting:

Hello everyone, Today we’re reopening experimental with several changes, but the most important one of them is an optimization we’ve done a refactor of how we handle Spline Collision in-game, so now Conveyor Belts, Pipelines and Hypertubes should only have collision when a player is near them, this should also result in memory optimizations for bigger saves that use a lot of them.

This could potentially have unintended effects in both Singleplayer and Multiplayer/Dedicated Server so we wanted to release this in Experimental first to see if there’s anything we need to address before these changes come to the default version.

And in the patch notes:

OPTIMIZATION

• Refactored Spline Collision
  • This affects Conveyor Belts, Pipelines and Hypertubes

BUG FIXES

• Fixed “Let’s see what’s out there” achievement did not work when playing in languages other than English
• Fix for a specific crash when loading saves that contain Conveyor Belts built by blueprint auto-connect during 1.1 Experimental when it was not working correctly and have not been resaved since
• Fixed null pointer crash when logging discrepancy between picked up items on client and server

STEAM DECK

• Fixed controller support not working with the Server Manager

• Verified support:
  • First time install now properly supports Steam Deck in-built controls during the first time setup elements (Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime)
  • Steam Deck built-in controls are now always usable and available even when an External Controller is connected

This is really great to see, so soon once it's in the main public build you'll be able to build on the go hopefully without issues. There's a few games on Steam that do need the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime and give you a UI for it, but they often need the touch screen or emulated mouse / keyboard controls, so nice to see another game make this easier for players on Steam Deck.