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.

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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.