As you expand your factory inSatisfactory, you’ll start to explore more of the map in search of new resources and collectible items. Scattered throughout the world are Crash Sites, which contain Hard Drives when opened. Scanning a Hard Drive at the MAM unlocks an Alternate Recipe, which provide a different way to craft a type of material.
With over 100 Alternate Recipes, it can be difficult to parse through which ones are worth using. Luckily, every Alternate Recipe can be good in some way, but this depends on how developed your factory is. Below, we’ll take a look at some of the best Alternate Recipes, with a focus on early game materials.
7Copper Alloy Ingot
5x Copper Ore (50/min) + 5x Iron Ore (50/min) = 10x Copper Ingot (100/min)
In the early game, copper is more uncommon than iron, due to there being less copper nodes near thestarting locations, and the copper nodes that are available are typically Impure or Normal. On the other hand, iron ore is plentiful no matter where you start.
The Copper Alloy Ingot essentially lets you replace part of the copper ore needed to make ingots with iron, letting you create more overall copper ingots by sacrificing a bit of iron. This recipe is helpful early on, but scales well into the mid-game where copper is used for more recipes.
6Cast Screw
5x Iron Ingot (12.5/min) = 20x Screw (50/min)
Screws are one of the biggest early-game headaches for a lot of players due to the high number of them needed for Reinforced Iron Plates and Rotors. The Cast Screw Alternate Recipe essentially lets you cut out the Iron Rod production step of the equation, cutting down on overall material cost, power usage, and space needed for machines.
Cast Screw streamlines Screw production, making it one of the best early-game Alternate Recipes. In terms of efficiency, there are no downsides to using Cast Screws, as the iron ingot-to-screw ratio is maintained.
5Steel Screw
1x Steel Beam (5/min) = 52x Screw (260/min)
When Cast Screw isn’t enough, you have Steel Screw. This Alternate recipe lets you produce a whopping 260 Screws per minute by using Steel Beams. Early on, this isn’t the best, as coal, and by extension, steel, are much less common than iron.
However, this recipe only uses five Steel beams per minute, which is fairly easy to reach by stealing the excess from an overclocked Constructor making steel beams. The main thing to keep in mind when using Steel Screws is the extra power consumption that comes from overclocking.
4Stitched Iron Plate
10x Iron Plate (18.75/min) + 20x Wire (37.5/min) = 3x Reinforced Iron Plate (5.625/min)
Stitched Iron Plate is a very good option in the early-game for producing Reinforced Iron Plates. This recipe uses more Iron Plates than the normal recipe, but it replaces the need for screws with wire, and also produces more Reinforced Iron Plates at a time.
If you’d rather not deal with screws at all, this recipe is very good for making Reinforced Iron Plates, especially if you don’t need the wire for anything else. Keep in mind the atypical input requirements for this recipe; you’ll need to over or underclock your machines to efficiently produce the required amount of materials.
3Iron Pipe
20x Iron Ingot (100/min) = 5x Steel Pipe (25/min)
The Iron Pipe Alternate Recipe lets you make steel pipes using iron instead of steel. When coal and steel are scarce early on, this recipe is extremely good, letting you use your more plentiful iron supplies to make steel pipes.
Additionally, when paired with the Iron Wire recipe, which lets you make wire using iron ingots, you’re able to create stators and then motors using only iron, which makes production lines much simpler to organize. In fact, this recipe opens up several different methods for making iron-only parts, like encased industrial beams, which we’ll take a look at below.
2Steel Rotor
2x Steel Pipe (10/min) + 6x Wire (30/min) = 1x Rotor (5/min)
On its own, the Steel Rotor Alternate Recipe may seem like more hassle than it’s worth, requiring steel pipes and wire. However, if you pair it with the aforementioned Iron Pipe and Iron Wire Alternate Recipes, you have a very efficient, iron-only method for producing rotors.
While rotors can already be made using only iron components by default, this trio of Alternate Recipes requires less resources overall, and produces more rotors per minute than the default option. Also, this way you don’t have to deal with screws.
1Encased Industrial Pipe
6x Steel Pipe (24/min) + 5x Concrete (20/min) = 1x Encased Industrial Beam (4/min)
Encased industrial beams are a mid-game resource that are used in a variety of important recipes, like heavy modular frames, Mk.4 Conveyor Belts, Mk.2 Miners, and more. By default, they are crafted using steel beams and concrete. This Alternate Recipe lets you instead craft them using steel pipes and concrete instead.
While this recipe produces fewer overall encased industrial beams per minute, if we go back to the Iron Pipe Alternate Recipe discussed earlier, you might start to see its appeal. By combining these recipes, you can make encased industrial beams without using steel at all, instead just using iron and concrete, both of which are plentiful in the mid-game.
