notes

I've adored what I've played of Satisfactory, but I've held off on delving too deeply into Coffee Stain's extraordinary automation extravaganza. See, I know that it's going to obliterate my social life for at least a month, because that's what factory sims do. Hence, it only seems fair that I bring my partner on that glorious adventure of social self-destruction. Yet our only other PC in the house is a Steam Deck, and up until now handheld Satisfactory has been a suboptimal experience due to its mouse-heavy control scheme.

As of Satisfactory's recent 1.1 update, however, this has now changed. The update adds an array of new features to the game's sprawling tangle of conveyor belts, including an overhauled photo mode and a buildable personnel elevator. But the most exciting addition for me is proper controller support, which also applies to Valve's handheld PC.

I took the update for a brief spin on my Steam Deck, and the difference is immediately apparent. Menus are now easily navigable with the analogue stick, no longer requiring you to faff around with the trackpad. Moreover, placing construction units like assemblers and drawing out conveyor belts seems far more intuitive than it was.

I should note that Satisfactory still doesn't feel like a game designed with Steam Deck in mind. Mainly, you still need to squint a bit to read the menu and HUD text, likely why Satisfactory isn't Deck verified yet. But "playable" is a much more accurate description now, and I can see myself having a good time building my dream industrial complex while slouched on my sofa or curled up in bed.

(Image credit: Coffee Stain)

This is far from the only change the update makes, though. As mentioned, Coffee Stain has wiped the lens of its photo mode, adding numerous extra filters, effects, poses and so forth, as well as a "dolly mode" that lets players create "small transitions and videos or anything your creativity allows" as Coffee Stain explains in a recent Steam post.

Elsewhere, debris from crash sites can be dismantled for extra resources, while trains now need a buffer placed at the end of the line to stop them from flying off the tracks. There's a litany of new features for resource transportation, such as "priority mergers" which let you prioritise which active inputs should feed out onto the belt first, as well as a throughput monitor that tracks the number of resources rolling along a belt per-minute. Oh, and pipelines now have specific "straight" and "curved" build modes, helping you organise your pipework.

Finally, there's that personnel elevator you can construct for speedy vertical transportation. This apparently enables players to create as many floor stops as they desire, customising the name of each floor as they go. I look forward to the community testing this to its limits, and attempting to build a personnel elevator to rival Satisfactory's space elevator.

Alongside these key additions, the update brings several visual updates, quality-of-life improvements, and bugfixes. "It’s no exaggeration to say this update includes more than a year's worth of work," Coffee Stain writes. Some of this work is in preparation for the game's console launch, which is due later this year. But you can enjoy the 1.1 update on PC (and Steam Deck) right now.

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Shokuho is hardly the first mod to adapt TaleWorlds' Mount & Blade series to a new era of history. Mount & Blade: Warband's startling array of total conversions practically let you command armies anywhere and, indeed, anywhen in the world. Yet not only is Shokuho a total conversion for the slightly less well-served Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord, but it is also one of the most comprehensive, transposing TaleWorlds' historical RPG to feudal Japan in impressive depth and detail.

Shokuho's samurai action begins in 1568, the year Oda Nobunaga marched on Kyoto and sparked two centuries of civil war and political intrigue. As in vanilla Bannerlord, the mod lets you carve a path through the period in all manner of ways, such as building up your own army, or joining the forces of a local lord to rise up the ranks.

Yet while Shokuho is built upon Bannerlord's foundations, this is no simple reskin. Shokuho boasts a completely new map that, according to the creators, is "five times as big as vanilla [Bannerlord], with 56 towns and 181 castles," all of which are based on settlements, clans, and kingdoms from the era.

Moreover, as well as bundling in the popular Diplomacy Mod, which adds systems like alliances and war exhaustion, it also features several mod-specific mechanics. These include tiered castle sieges where you must fight through multiple checkpoints, and fully simulated naval battles that let you control your own ships, destroy enemy vessels with archers and gunfire, or board them with your own troops. Amusingly, Shokuho has pipped Bannerlord to the post here. TaleWorlds is working on its own naval expansion to the base game, but it won't arrive for some time yet.

Also, considering Mount & Blade has never been a visual powerhouse, Shokuho has a remarkable sense of style. The release-date trailer published a couple of weeks back shows battles taking place across windswept grassy plains and misty forests, snow-dusted sieges of mountain fortresses, and a samurai duel beneath the golden canopy of an autumnal Japanese maple. Developer Dockside Interactive has clearly taken a leaf out of Ghost of Tsushima's artbook, and it's paid off.

Shokuho is available to download over on ModDB. As for Bannerlord itself, TaleWorlds' War Sails expansion was originally scheduled to launch next week, but it has since been delayed to autumn as the developers get it ship-shape.

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