One of my all-time favorite games just announced an expansion, yet all I feel is fear

« Core Values is the first paid DLC for Satisfactory and a major expansion, » developer Coffee Stain studios announced on Tuesday, with the trailer above revealing that the construction sim is taking building deep underground for the first time, introducing « new resources, flora, fauna and more. »

Here’s how this news finds me: I should be Matt Berry in Toast of London convincingly shouting « Yes! » But instead, I’m Matt Berry in Toast of London saying « Yes! Yes!! Yes!? Yes!?!? Yesssss??? Yesssssss????? » over and over again, somehow increasingly unsure how to prounce a single syllable or what the word, in fact, actually means.

Compared to some of the dizzying hour counts some of my friends and colleagues have in life-consuming games like WoW and Dota 2 and Final Fantasy 14, my ~400 hours in Satisfactory across a few years is relatively mundane. I love the game, as I expressed in our 2024 Best Sandbox award. A small part of me is excited by the idea of going back to it. My building partner in crime and I left a monolith unfinished in our last world, with grand ambitions to route trains from across the entire map into one enormous central tower that would be visible from miles away. I do kind of want to finish it one day.

But another, bigger part of me knows that dipping back into Satisfactory for even a day will reignite the hunger. It’ll be all I think about, all I want to play as soon as I log off work. No new games, no movies, just endless ways to optimize my construction chain for five more encased steel beams per minute.

I can never have enough encased steel beams. You understand that, right?

Perhaps there’s a small amount of lingering Covid trauma tied up in this seed of dread, because I spent a good chunk of my lockdown months playing Satisfactory nearly every single day. But I still enjoyed playing a bunch of it in 2025, too. It’s just that rare game that puts my brain in a vice grip as soon as I start thinking about it. One minute I’m having fun laying down some train tracks, the next I’m literally dreaming about how much we have left to build before we’re « done. »

Perhaps that’s what’s so scary about the announcement of a Satisfactory expansion: the blunt acknowledgement that it—and I—may never be done. Not when we’re six feet under, or 600.

Core Values is coming « later, » though it has a Steam page right now.