What does “encroaching other’s clearance” mean in Satisfactory

Satisfactory can quickly become a jumble of buildings, conveyor belts, and wires, and it would be very easy to build new structures in foolish places. While this is still possible to do, as we have discovered, the game does offer up a bit of help to try and stop your buildings from getting too close together.

If you are trying to place a building, and see a message that says “encroaching on other’s clearance”, then you will be unable to place the building, and it shall remain as a red hologram instead of a productive, physical building.

What the message means is that the footprint of the building you are trying to make is landing within the boundary of an already placed building. As such, you cannot build the new structure until you rectify the situation. While some buildings can simply be moved to a new spot, others will have their placement dictated by resource nodes. You can try rotating the building by using the mouse wheel, and if that doesn’t work, you may need to deconstruct some buildings and rearrange a little bit.

If you are playing for the first time, then it can take a little while to learn how to look at an empty level and draw up a plan, but when you are new to the game is a better idea to leave too much space for things than too little, as it will help to avoid a lot of problems. You won’t be making 100 percent use of space, but that is fine, as you have a lot of things to learn before you can do that anyway.