In Satisfactory, everything has a recipe. Iron Plates require Iron Ingots. Screws require Rods. Reinforced plates require Iron Plates and Screws. But in the same way that a cookie recipe will let you substitute out things like eggs and butter, Satisfactory has all kinds of alternate recipes that let you make items out of simpler recipes and more common resources. They range from being true game changers to being something you should skip. In this article, we'll explain how to find Hard Drives and get the most out of them, and lay out some of our favorite alternate recipes, focusing especially on the early game.
How to find and use Alternate Recipes
Being inventive and creative isn't enough to make an alternate recipe--you need cold, hard data, in the form of Hard Drives. You'll find tons of Hard Drives around the Satisfactory map as you explore, build new sites, and connect sites together. Once you unlock Radio Signal Scanning in the Quartz research tree, you can also scan for Hard Drives using the Object Scanner.
Once you have a Hard Drive in hand, though, you can head back to your Molecular Analysis Machine and dump the drives there for safe keeping.
There are a few important things to note about using Hard Drives. Each drive will randomly select a set of alternate recipes when you research it, but the options reflect your current status in the game. In other words, you're not going to get an alternate recipe for nuclear materials when you haven't even unlocked oil processing. You can re-roll each drive's alternate recipe options once, but we recommend holding off. The MAM can store multiple Hard Drives, and there's absolutely no rush to use that new drive right away. By leaving that undesirable recipe in the MAM, you're ensuring that next time you research a drive, you won't get that same recipe again, as it's kind of reserved. Rerolling it later also means you'll be drawing from a wider variety of options more reflective of the progress you've made.
In other words, save those Hard Drives up until you see a recipe that fits your needs.
For a full, in-depth list of alternate recipes, the Reddit community has a great alternate recipe tier list worth consulting.
Speaking of which, here are some of our favorites from the over 100 alternate recipe options.
