Power
The hard constraint that runs your whole factory: how the grid trips, the generators by stage, water needs, overclocking, and the 1.2 daisy-chaining change.
Power is the one constraint in Satisfactory that bites the entire factory at once. There is no creeping shortage. If demand exceeds supply on a connected grid, the whole grid trips and everything shuts off until you restore balance or reset the fuse. That all-or-nothing behaviour makes power planning a constant background job: you keep supply ahead of demand, build a buffer, and scale generation alongside production rather than after it. The generators arrive in stages that track your tier progression, each with its own fuel and, for several, a water requirement that ties power to your fluid network.
How the grid works
Buildings connected by power lines share one grid. The grid has a total supply and a total demand, and the moment demand crosses supply the fuse trips and the grid goes dark. Restoring it means cutting demand or adding supply and then resetting the fuse. The practical rule is to keep headroom: run generation comfortably above current draw so that switching on a new bank of machines does not black out the factory. Power Storage banks excess power and discharges it when demand spikes, which is the cleanest cushion against trips.
Generators by stage
| Generator | Unlocks | Fuel | Output / water |
|---|---|---|---|
| Biomass Burner | Tier 0 | Biomass, leaves, wood, organic fuel | 30 MW at full clock, scales to demand, not automatic by default |
| Coal Generator | Tier 3 | Coal, Compacted Coal, Petroleum Coke | 75 MW each, 45 m3 water per minute |
| Fuel Generator | Tier 6 | Fuel, Turbofuel, or Liquid Biofuel | Burns refined crude oil |
| Geothermal Generator | Placed on geysers | None | Variable output, no fuel |
| Nuclear Power Plant | Tier 8 | Uranium Fuel Rods, later Plutonium and Ficsonium | 240 m3 water per minute, produces radioactive waste |
The Biomass Burner is the early-game stopgap and needs hand-feeding until Coal Power arrives. Exact outputs beyond the ones above (Fuel and Geothermal in particular) were not pinned down in research, so check the wiki before quoting precise MW figures for those.
Water ties power to your pipes
Coal and nuclear generation both draw water, 45 m3 per minute per coal generator and 240 m3 per minute for a nuclear plant. That makes a coastline or lake the natural home for a coal plant and ties your power base directly to the fluid system. Plan extractors and pipe headlift alongside the generators, because a stalled water line will starve the plant and trip the grid just as surely as adding too many machines.
Nuclear power is not just a bigger generator. It produces radioactive waste you must store or reprocess carefully, and the materials are themselves a radiation hazard. Do not switch to nuclear without a plan for the waste and the Hazmat Suit to handle the area.
Overclocking and Power Shards
Power Shards, crafted from Power Slugs through the MAM, overclock a building for faster output at an exponentially higher power cost. Because the cost curve is steep, the wins come from overclocking the machines that matter most, such as a miner sitting on a Pure node, rather than spreading shards thinly across a whole factory. Underclocking is the reverse and can help hit clean fractional ratios without wasting power.
The 1.2 daisy-chaining change
The 1.2 update added daisy-chaining of power connections, letting buildings carry two power connections via the Caterium MAM unlock Upgraded Power Connectors. The effect is far less pole clutter, since power can hop building to building instead of every machine routing back to a pole. It is a quality-of-life change rather than a new generation tier, but it meaningfully cleans up how a grid is wired.
Related: Fluids and Pipes for the water that feeds coal and nuclear, and Tiers and Space Elevator Phases for when each generator unlocks.