When you start a new game of Satisfactory, one of your first jobs is to fuel the biomass burner that appears on the back of the Hub building. You can do so by clearing all the bushes in the area and burning the leaves, which is easy enough.

However, you'll eventually want to gather a lot of wood and remove trees that grow too close to your factory areas and truck paths. The best tool for this job is the chainsaw, but the chainsaw in Satisfactory has some unusual quirks that you might want to know about.

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How to Unlock the Chainsaw

Satisfactory Obstacle Clearing
The Obstacle Clearing milestone in Satisfactory

The chainsaw is part of the "Obstacle Clearing" milestone. This reward set is on the Tier 2 list, and it unlocks after you complete the first onboarding tutorial objectives. To earn the chainsaw, you'll need to spend:

  • 500 screws
  • 100 cables
  • 100 concrete

This milestone also comes with three bonus inventory slots and access to the solid biofuel recipe. The biofuel alone makes this milestone worth picking up since it's the most energy-efficient fuel for biomass burners. Just make sure you keep some for yourself because the chainsaw needs solid biofuel to operate.

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How to Create and Operate the Chainsaw

Satisfactory Chainsaw Big Tree
Chopping down a big tree in Satisfactory.

Once you earn the right milestone, you can craft a chainsaw in an equipment workshop. You'll find it in the first section, "Tools." The chainsaw recipe calls for:

Once you craft your chainsaw, you'll need to equip it. From your inventory, click on the chainsaw and drag it into one of your "Hands" slots. You can then swap between hand items by scrolling the mouse wheel up or down.

However, your chainsaw won't work unless you have solid biofuel in your inventory. No other biomass or fossil fuel will work: unlike biomass burners, the chainsaw can only use one kind of fuel.

Once your chainsaw has enough fuel to operate, you can use it to chop down trees that you can't otherwise remove. This includes small trees that are only slightly bigger than bushes, and giant trees that stretch into the sky. No matter how big the tree is, the chainsaw can cut down around 2.5 trees for each unit of solid biofuel. With that in mind, it's a good idea to keep even numbers of biofuel in your inventory.

The chainsaw also has two modes you can switch between: Single Mode and Area Mode.

  • Single Mode will only chop down the tree or bush you're currently targeting.
  • Area Mode will remove all the trees and bushes in a small radius around the targeted plant.

There are no real benefits to leaving a bush or tree alone, so Area Mode is what you should use most of the time, and the chainsaw defaults to using this mode. Chopping down two trees at once costs the same as chopping them one at a time, and bushes don't use any fuel, so there aren't any downsides to using Area Mode.

One last chainsaw suggestion is to always carry a weapon in your other Hands slot. Unlike certain other video games, the chainsaw in Satisfactory is just a tool, and it won't do anything to hostile animals. You have a good chance of coming across dangerous animals when you go out chopping trees, so it pays to be wary.

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Satisfactory
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Released
September 10, 2024
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WHERE TO PLAY

DIGITAL
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Developer(s)
Coffee Stain Studios
Engine
Unreal Engine 5
Genre(s)
Simulation, Sandbox, Base Building, Open-World, Management
How Long To Beat
105 Hours
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