For those that were unaware, we upgraded from Unreal Engine 5.3 to 5.6 with Update 1.2.

That's a lot of numbers.

While that may not seem like a huge jump, we did in fact skip several updates to the engine.

For context, 5.3 came out in September 2023, and 5.6 came out in June 2025.

To put that in perspective, 5.3 came out when Max Verstappen got his world record 10 consecutive race wins.

The last time we upgraded engines, Red Bull had a competitive one.

Yeah.

So we have a bit of a mantra with engine upgrades around the studio, which is the longer you wait, the bigger the pain.

And it's just genuinely true.

Epic Games, the creators of Unreal Engine, add a lot of amazing features and performance improvements with each update, such as better multithreading support for modern CPUs.

This is really good for CPUs with eight cores, which have been pretty standard since around 2019, 2020.

We can push certain systems in our game to the CPU in a shared multithreaded pipeline rather than running them in isolation.

This leads to higher FPS overall and better scalability as your factories grow.

The only kicker is that if you're not running a CPU with multithreading, your performance might have gotten worse with this update.

It's a bit of a give-and-take situation, but this really helps us future-proof the game for years to come.

Another thing we're utilizing in this engine upgrade are lightweight scene capture methods.

This basically allows us to keep rain and other cool effects constrained to your viewport, which gives you great visuals at a low performance cost.

For those that don't remember or haven't gotten your work-mandated history lesson on Satisfactory lore, the game actually had weather for a bit back in Update 6, just before the engine upgrade to UE5.

Back then, however, the team was using scene-depth tech that wasn't native to Unreal Engine, and it wasn't easily supported in the move from UE4 to UE5.

Now though, UE5 has their own lightweight scene capture methods, and this actually allowed us to properly integrate weather to satisfactory again.

Okay, that's all I'll say about engine upgrade features, but if you want more information about these changes, including our transition from CPU-based instancing to GPU-based instancing,

I can make a more detailed video with our tech artist, Ben.

Let us know in the comments below if you'd like to see that.

Basically, big updates like this jump from 5.3 to 5.6 often come with core engine changes that create ripple effects for a game as large as Satisfactory.

These changes touch basically every aspect of the game and require significant review from the team to get functional again.

I know we have this reputation of being like a big, powerful, hunky game studio.

You know, the bad boys of game dev, if you will.

But we're actually a pretty small team.

Yeah, there's like seven programmers.

And while they are absolute wizards in C++, they are most active on the satisfactory side of development, not the engine side.

We did our best to catch as much of this as possible with our EXP branch and our own internal testing, but some issues have slipped through the cracks.

We're actively addressing these, and we do want to apologize for those experiencing reduced performance or any other issues.

We're working on it.