Alternate recipes in Satisfactory are your rewards for exploring the world and researching hard drives collected from crash-landing sites. As their name implies, they give you alternate ways of manufacturing a product, which can potentially make your production line a lot easier to design.
While many Satisfactory players may value resource and power efficiency above all else, talented nerds in the Satisfactory community have already made alternate recipe tier lists by crunching those raw numbers. Our picks, on the other hand, prioritize convenience. So, with this, you’ll be better served in your progression through the tiers without having to make mile-long infrastructure to transport resources across the map.
10) Cast Screw
The Cast Screw recipe is a lifesaver in the early game when all you have is biomass burners for your power needs. This alternate recipe cuts Iron Rod from the Screw production chain and lets you make Screw straight from Iron Ingot, which means less Constructors running, and more power saved. As you progress through the game though, Cast Screw’s relevance falls off as most Satisfactory players including myself tend to cut Screws from mid to late-game production lines completely.
9) Iron Wire
You can cut out Copper from Wire and Cable production using this alternate recipe. While Copper is not a bottleneck in any of the starting regions, you now have the option to use Iron Wire makes Stator and Motor factories Copper-independent. So, you can just focus on areas with Iron and Limestone nodes (which are far easier to find together). This also opens up possibilities in the mid to late game when finding Copper nodes in otherwise opportune locations might be hard.
8) Stitched Iron Plate
When we talked about cutting Screws from production lines, this presents many Satisfactory players their first opportunity to do so. With this Reinforced Iron Plate alternate recipe, you need Wire instead of Screw (the other component, Iron Plate, stays the same). Couple this with the Iron Wire recipe, and you can make Reinforced Iron Plates out of Iron nodes only and that too, without having to deal with the dreaded Screws.
7) Iron Pipe
You are in Phase Two of the Space Assembly Program and you have unlocked Coal Power Plants and Steel Production. This is when you go far and wide to hunt for Coal nodes—first and foremost to produce power and then to mix with Iron in the Foundry to produce Steel Ingots. And if you are in some areas of the map like the Grassy Fields, Coal is not the most easily available resource (especially if you used the four normal nodes in the Coal Lake all for propping up a large power plant).
The Iron Pipe alternate recipe, added in Satisfactory’s 1.0 update, eliminates Coal from the Steel Pipe production line and lets you make it from Iron Ingots alone. While it takes copious amounts of Iron to do so, when are you ever in shortage of that?
6) Encased Industrial Pipe
The Encased Industrial Pipe is a perfect match if you picked the Iron Pipe recipe earlier and lets you make Encased Industrial Beams straight out of Iron and Limestone nodes. Since this is the resource for laying out Mk. 4 Conveyor Belts and Lifts (with Mk. 5 being ways off in Phase 4), being able to make it with Steel Pipe and Concrete lets you reserve all the Coal for your large Turbo Fuel power plant projects in Phase Three.
5) Heavy Encased Frame
This alternate recipe is a godsend for a multitude of reasons. First, it eliminates Screw from the production line (which is already a good enough reason for almost all Pioneers). Secondly, it replaces that with Concrete which you already need for producing Encased Industrial Beams that are needed for the coveted Heavy Modular Frame production. And if you had the hard drive RNG in your favor and got both Iron Pipe and Encased Industrial Pipe alts before, this otherwise difficult production line gets significantly easier to build. You just need Iron and Limestone. Yes, that’s it.
4) Heavy Oil Residue
Whether you settle on Rocket Fuel, Turbo Fuel, or plain old Fuel to carry your power infrastructure until Nuclear, the alternate Heavy Oil Residue recipe is a no-brainer to use in the first set of refineries where you turn your Crude Oil into Heavy Oil Residue. Compared to the base Plastic and Rubber recipes where you get it as a byproduct, you get twice the amount of Heavy Oil Residue with the alt recipe (with Polymer Resin as a byproduct now, which you can turn into Rubber, Plastic, or Fabric as you need). This means more Fuel down the line for your Fuel Generators.
3) Diluted Fuel
While the previous alternate recipe nets you twice the Heavy Oil Residue from Crude Oil, you can further double it with the Diluted Fuel alt. The only caveat is that you have to wait until Tier Seven to get this recipe (and Blenders to make your Fuel from Heavy Oil Residue and Water), at which point you might have already solved your power needs until, of course, you go the Nuclear route in Tier Eight.
2) Sloppy Alumina and Pure Aluminum Ingot
These alternate recipes are lifesavers for Pioneers who decide to build their first Aluminum factory around the Gold Coast area (the nearby pure Bauxite node on the tall cliff honestly asks for it). If you don’t already have the infrastructure built to bring Quartz to the area, it can be a major Achilles Heel. However, with the Sloppy Alumina and Pure Aluminum Ingot alts, Quartz is no longer part of the Aluminum Ingot production line. So, you can wait a hot minute to connect your Quartz outpost to the train network.
1) Oil-Based Diamonds
This late-game alt lets you net double the number of Diamonds from the same number of Particle Accelerators. As the name implies, you need Crude Oil instead of Coal now. But that’s not a big deal at Phase Five—You might repurpose the Oil nodes you were using for your Fuel Power Plant (of course, if you switched to Nuclear in the meantime). Less Particle Accelerators mean less strain on your power grid and I call that an absolute win.
