Project Setup

You should either be preparing to clone the Starter Project, or you downloaded a zip of it in the previous steps of the tutorial.

The Starter Project folder will be your modding workspace, and could grow to a considerable file size depending on what kinds of mods you make. As such, you should extract the folder somewhere convenient so that you can find it later.

DO NOT put the project in any of the following locations:

DO consider putting your project folder in one of these locations:

You can use this Starter Project for developing multiple mods at once, since each mod will be its own separate plugin folder within the project.

Feel free to rename the Starter Project folder to whatever you like.

Depending on if you plan to clone the project or downloaded the zip, go to the relevant heading immediately below.

Wwise is an audio and sound system used by Satisfactory, and setting it up is required to get your modding environment working. Setting up Wwise can be confusing, but we’ll walk through the steps here. Be sure to follow only the steps listed here - Wwise will often present you with lots of additional messages that looks like errors or warnings but can be safely ignored.

Start the Wwise launcher that you installed earlier and update the launcher if prompted. Make sure you have signed in to the launcher. It can give ambiguous error messages when trying to integrate Wwise if you aren’t signed in. Next, open the Unreal Engine tab in the sidebar. Do not click any of the update buttons on the Unreal Engine Wwise tab. Satisfactory requires a specific version of Wwise to work, and updating can prevent your mod from working correctly. Click on the Open Other button next to the "RECENT UNREAL ENGINE PROJECTS" header and select the FactoryGame.uproject file contained in your Starter Project folder. Your project should now appear in the Wwise launcher. Click on the Integrate Wwise into Project…​ button.

Change the left hand drop-down to All. Then select the same version you installed earlier (likely 2022.1.5.8242). The version number may have additional numbers on the end of it e.g. 2022.1.5.8242.1234 but as long as it starts with 2022.1.5.8242 it should work.

If version 2022.1.5.8242 does not appear even after you have selected All, edit the .uproject file in a text editor to be sure that EngineAssociation is set to 5.2.1-CSS.

If this version still doesn’t show up, try any other version starting with 2022.1.5.

If you missed a required component as part of the Wwise installation, it may show a yellow warning box indicating what’s missing as well as a button to "Modify" the installation. Go ahead and follow what it says for this step only. If Wwise warns you that it could not find an installation in a red warning box, that means you have not selected the correct version as stated above. If you see a blue box offering both "Modify" and "Add Plug-in", that means it’s configured correctly, so continue to the next step.

Under "Wwise Project Path", click the little triangle dropdown on the right and choose New project to clear the path.

If everything worked according to plan, you should now be able to click on the blue Integrate button. Do so, and agree to the terms to start the process.

That’s it! If Wwise shows "Operation completed successfully," you have integrated Wwise into your project. You can close the Wwise launcher.

Note: the below gif may select a version that does not match what is written above. Please use the version mentioned in the text above.

Next, you’ll need to generate the remaining files for the project with Unreal Engine’s "Generate Visual Studio Project Files" tool.

Right-click on the .uproject file in your Starter Project folder and select Generate Visual Studio project files. If this option appears for you and runs without error, skip down to the next section. If this option errors, check out the Troubleshooting section below.

Otherwise, you’ll need to run a tool from the command line to generate the project files.

The command will follow the form below:

Here is an example of a completed command:

Next up is compiling the project from Visual Studio. It is possible for Unreal to compile the project as well on launch, but if there are any errors, Unreal will give a very vague report as to what went wrong and you’ll have to rebuild from Visual Studio anyways to get more details. As such, it’s best just to always compile from Visual Studio so you don’t have to build a second time to see the error report.

Open up the FactoryGame.sln file in your project folder.

Once Visual Studio loads, you should see a list in the Solution Explorer containing entries for UE5, FactoryGame, AccessTransformers, and more. It’s important to note that these separate solution items exist only for organization purposes. When it’s time to compile your mods, compiling any one of the items will compile the whole project. The only exception to this is the UE5 entry which will do nothing when you compile it since you already installed that by installing the custom engine version earlier.

An unfortunate consequence of this organization system is that Visual Studio does not understand that each of these solution items will compile the whole project.

As such, we do NOT want to use the generic 'Build Solution' operation that Visual Stuido provides. Doing so will try to run the build one time for each solution item we have in the project, wasting some time, and, if there are any error messages, duplicating them many times over!

In preparation for compiling our project, first select the Development Editor Solution Configuration and Win64 Solution Platform in the top toolbar. Development Editor is the editor program that you’ll be using to make mods. It’s near the undo/redo buttons and the play button menu items.

To start the actual compile process, right click on any of the solution explorer items under the Mods folder, for example, SML, and select Build.

This will take some time; go pet some lizard doggos as you wait. See below if you run into any issues. You’ll know it’s done when the little box-with-cubes-piling-into-it icon in the colored bar at the bottom of Visual Studio goes away. You can monitor its progress from the Output pane (View > Output) if desired.

After it completes, you should select the Shipping Solution Configuration from the top toolbar (the same place you selected Development Editor earlier) and start another build. Building both of these is required for the editor to function correctly and for you to be able to distribute your mod.

Now that you’ve built the binaries, your Unreal Editor should open without any issues.

The Unreal Editor allows you to create new content for the game and helps build your mod. It also heavily relies on the C++ project, so make sure you don’t change stuff in there unless you know what you’re doing.

Depending on how your copy of Unreal Engine installed, you may be able to double-click the FactoryGame.uproject file in the Starter Project folder to open the editor, which will directly open your project.

If that doesn’t work, you’ll have to open the Unreal Editor separately, then browse to your project. You can find it by searching for it in the Windows search bar (it should appear as Unreal Engine - CSS) or by navigating to where you installed it, which is probably something similar to C:\Program Files\Unreal Engine - CSS\Engine\Binaries\Win64\UnrealEditor.exe Once the welcome panel has opened, click "Recent Projects", then "Browse" and select the file FactoryGame.uproject in your starter project folder.

Opening the project for the first time can take a considerable amount of time as it compiles shaders.

You might be told that some modules were "missing or built with a missing engine version"; press Yes and allow it to build. This will take some time, and will drastically increase the size of your project folder - go find some more lizard doggos to pet.

If this step fails, you should go back to compile the editor from Visual Studio to find out why it’s erroring and return here when finished with that step. Consider seeking help on the Discord if you are stuck here.

Once you load into the Editor, you might see a popup that says 'New plugins are available.' You can safely dismiss this popup.

Now is a good time to familiarize yourself with the Unreal Engine editor through various other tutorials. We suggest you take the 'Welcome to the Unreal Editor' guided tutorial that the editor should be telling you about if you haven’t taken or dismissed it yet.

We also suggest the following resources:

Alpakit is a tool made by the modding community to make building and testing your mod more convenient. It’s one of the editor plugins that comes pre-installed with the starter project.

Note that if you have not yet installed the Satisfactory Mod Loader (SML) in your game files, you can use Alpakit to build SML for you and put it in the right folder. This could cause problems if your copy of the Starter Project is not up to date with the latest SML changes, in which case you should either update your Starter Project or use the Mod Manager’s development profile to install SML for you instead.

The Unreal Engine 5 editor is very dark by default. It may be difficult to read depending on your computer settings and eye health. This video shows how to change the editor’s color scheme and provides an alterative grey theme you can use out of the box.

That should be it. Your starter project should now be set up and ready to go! In the next section, we’ll walk through creating the base Plugin for your mod, then run through a couple common modding examples to demonstrate how to get started making your own mods.

The Starter Project also includes and ExampleMod that you can look at, which includes examples like those described in this documentation, as well as a few things that don’t have docs pages yet. It also has some examples of C++ mod functionality. Consider looking around in there after completing some of these tutorials.