If you didn’t know, Satisfactory has a beta version that anyone can get in on. If you’re interested in giving feedback to the devs at Coffee Stain Studios as they continuously build this gorgeously addictive first-person factory simulator, then here’s your chance.

It’s super easy to join, but of course you first need to buy the game either from the Epic Games Store or Steam. You’ll see that the game is in Early Access - it has been since March 2019 - and there’s still so much more that the developers have planned for it.

In a recent video from the developers, community manager Jace Varlet explains that the next big update for Satisfactory - Update 4 - will be coming to the experimental version of the game on March 16. The experimental is essentially the game’s beta version, and if you’re interested you can play it yourself as long as you already own Satisfactory.

If you got Satisfactory via the Epic Games Store, you can simply download and play the version of the game labelled “Satisfactory Experimental” which you’ll find in your games library.

If you have the game of Steam, you’ll need to right-click on Satisfactory in your games library, then navigate to Properties > Betas, and select “Experimental” from the drop-down menu under “Select the beta you would like to opt into.” Steam will then download the experimental version of the game.

Varlet does advise that before doing this, make sure your save files are backed up just in case something goes pear-shaped. Your save files should be located here:

C:\Users[YOUR USERNAME]\AppData\Local\FactoryGame\Saved\SaveGames\

Just remember that although you’ll get access to Update 4 as soon as it drops on March 16, playing the experimental version will mean you’ll likely experience a pretty unstable version of the game. But Varlet emphasizes just how informative the experimental is for them: “The feedback and crash reports and all that kind of stuff we get from [the community] is just on a level that we couldn’t get ourselves when testing internally.”

So once they’re confident that they have gathered sufficient community feedback from the experimental branch, the developers will go ahead and implement Update 4 in the more stable Early Access version. They’re hoping to do this a month or so after releasing Update 4 to experimental.

Source: Twitter

READ NEXT: Satisfactory: How to Tame the Lizard Doggo (The Easy Way)