New Satisfactory Mac gamer - SMM cannot find install location
Hi, I purchased Satisfactory in the recent Steam sale and have really enjoyed the game so far. However, now I would like to use some mods so I installed SMM but it cannot find my Steam install location.
I have a fairly unique installation on my MacBook Pro (M4 Max). Satisfactory runs great using Steam Windows installed on Wine along with several other Steam Windows games. I used a great resource to get Steam Windows installed and installing any Steam Windows games is now just a matter of doing a regular game installation on Steam.
I am using the Mac version of SMM as I could not get Steam to run SMM Windows (as an external app). SMM Windows probably could run but will need some extra Wine parameters that is beyond my knowledge. r2modman runs fine though so I used those wine parameters with SMM (I found those on the Whisky forum) but it still did not run.
Is there a way to manually set the SMM install location? I have attached my SMM debug info.
Also as an aside I could not get your alternate Satisfactory mod tool ficsit-cli to run at all on Apple silicon. I tried the Windows ARM version (as a Steam external app) and the Mac version (standalone) and neither worked. I'll keep trying to see if I can get ficsit-cli working in the meantime.
Many thanks for any help! Nick
11 Replies
-# Responding to
Key Details for SMMDebug-2025-04-02-17-53-21.zip triggered by @pacificoastSmm is going to be looking for Steam manifests - that's how it verifies a valid copy of Satisfactory and where to install the mods.
Wine is going to cause some weirdness for sure - it won't be able to validate the manifest entry for SF
@Mircea is probably going to have a better chance of answering this, as he is primary dev on SMM
Are you getting any particular error when trying to launch SMM through wine?
I run SMM through Steam as an external app which is launching Wine to run it. It just runs for a few seconds and then stops. I looked through some of the Steam error logs but couldn't see anything that jumped out. Is there a specific Steam log file I should look in? As an aside when I tried getting the Mac version of ficsit_darwin_all to run, it just launches Terminal and gets killed. I tried both bash and zsh shells and both act the same, i.e. getting killed. I followed the tips in this earlier thread to chmod then signing the ficsit_darwin_all app, however, it does the same thing as reported in that thread: https://discord.com/channels/555424930502541343/1324152028670332989/1328444564457132092
Yeah, still no idea why ficsit-cli doesn't run on Apple Silicon, it's compiled the same way as SMM
I run SMM through Steam as an external app which is launching Wine to run itSo is steam is running natively on mac, or running itself under wine? I'm guessing the reason why SMM fails to launch is because it's missing webview2, for which I've found this https://github.com/Winetricks/winetricks/issues/2226#issuecomment-2503340833
@pacificoast Hello, I have the SMM working on my mac. Are you just using wine? if so you should change to whisky which is a gui of wine and apple GPTK. https://github.com/satisfactorymodding/SatisfactoryModManager/releases/download/v3.0.3/SatisfactoryModManager_darwin_universal.zip that is the smm macos download which does not need to be ran though wine/gptk. if your installation is correct it should auto detect your game install. Note: you will have to do downgrade steam when using whisky; refer to here for the guide on the work around to get steam working on whisky
https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky/releases/download/v2.3.5/Whisky.zip
Steam workaround
Hi @RateLimited thanks for your note. I am using GPTK but not Whisky as it didn't seem necessary as my Windows Steam and all games I use run just fine. I used the same SMM download you mention but it does not run, it just gets killed in a Terminal session. Are you using an Apple Silicon Mac? If so which model and which chip?
You should not need terminal for the smm download. as the smm download is a native macos application.
I am running Macbook pro and m1 pro
but if you are using the terminal version of gptk the smm may not be detecting your install
Sorry @RateLimited I was getting mixed up between Mac SMM and Mac version of ficsit (ficsit_darwin_all). SMM Mac runs fine but cannot find my Steam (Windows) Satisfactory Installation that I have running using GPTK and there's no option to manually set it. The Mac version of Ficsit (ficsit_darwin_all) is the one that opens terminal but then kills the app. As ficsit is a CLI app, terminal is where it would run. I think there is some code in SMM to find the Whisky bottle location but I guess there is no code that looks to where Steam installs it via the GPTK/Wine virtual c: drive).
Probably, the terminal version is not main stream for normal people so it would be expected that when using smm the terminal version's bottle would not be detected.
We're still talking cross purposes 😄 Only the ficsit app runs in terminal and gets killed by it. SMM runs (not in terminal) but SMM cannot find the Steam/Wine/GPTK virtual c: drive where Satisfactory is installed. No bottles involved but I get what you were saying!
I have managed to install the mod I wanted to use manually (Pak Utility Mod) and using the SML but when I quit Satisfactory after gaming with the mods installed and then run up another session, the game won't load and I get to stare at the spinning circle for a long time. After a lot of experimenting I have found that after running the mods successfully, before playing another game, I have to quit steam, delete the mods from the Mods folder, run up Steam and Satisfactory with no mods, quit steam, put the SML and Pak Utility mods back into the folder, run up Steam and the game and then finally works. I've no idea why this is necessary and it's painstakely annoying but at least it works!