I'm literally playing Factorio right now, with my kid. Got into it over Christmas based on HN talking about it all the time. Good game to multi because I don't have to pay attention all the time.
It really reminds me of software in many ways. You fiddle with tiny little things like balancing a belt, and then move on to building belt balancers. You then move up the abstractions to where you're not really placing inserters all the time. Maybe you make some blueprints and you're placing a whole set of nuke power plants in one go, or looking at trains.
The kid loves it, but you can (luckily) tell the difference between what he makes and what I make. That engineer keep-stuff-organized thing takes a bit of time to hone, but he's getting there. He also understands how to find root causes now, based on looking at where there's a blockage in production and tracking back along the chain.
One thing that's interesting is that the game is a bit, you know, dark. I mean we've built hell and the kid doesn't mind. Literally paved paradise with concrete. The air is black with robots, 100k of them at the moment. There's furnaces all over the place. We got rid of the steam power generation but there are huge areas of nukes all over. The natives are getting atomic bombs thrown at them constantly, it takes a while to even get to the nearest spawner. Or water that isn't green.
And yet he doesn't ask about how we destroyed all the cliffs and filled in the lakes, and chopped the trees.
Dyson Sphere Program is a great Factorio-like that feels more optimistic and less dark. It’s still about harvesting every last resource though. On the other hand there’s Terra Nil, where the goal is to clean up a destroyed landscape and then leave it without a trace. It’s more of a puzzle game than a factory game, but still worth playing: https://vfqd.itch.io/terra-nil
Yep, currently playing through DSP myself, as a factorio veteran.
DSP is a great successor, even more than Satisfactory. It's amazing how well the DSP devs have figured out how to scale from small factory plots to inter-planetary supply chains to galaxy-wide economies, all to build a mega project.
The only thing that's really missing (and same with Satisfactory, IMO) is the punishment for expanding too far too fast, the way the bugs in Factorio operate. DSP is supposedly adding combat later though, so we'll see how it pans out.
I'd like a greater focus on externalities, honestly.
Oxygen Not Included does that really well IMO. Almost every production process has inputs and outputs, and a lot of the outputs are waste that you need to figure out either how to utilize as input in another process, or to dispose of safely and in a scalable way so as to avoid negative repercussions. Waste isn't just in the form of products either. For example, one of the challenges that sneaks up on new players is that heat is also a type of waste, and if you don't take steps to manage it (for example, by insulating your power generators), it can wreck your colony.
Yeah, ONI is fantastic in this regard. I find myself struggling with it in late game for precisely this reason - if you don't lay the ground work for things like heat when building your initial setup, it's much harder to rip it up and move on.
With DSP you can just move to another planet and rebuild, which is great from scalability but less important challenge wise.
Speaking of that... When people talk about limitless cheap energy from fusion reactors in 30-50 years, I wonder about goal warning from water great from all that energy consumed and turned into waste heat radiated into Earth's atmosphere.
That will be a problem in a few hundred years of our energy consumption continues growing at this rate; I've done the math on this website a year or two ago.
At the rate our energy consumption is growing, even if we avoid climate change wrecking our society today, the heat waste of our energy production will start to eclipse the effects of climate change in only a few centuries, at most a millenium. Which isn’t that long of a time.
You can get pretty far by being extremely efficient. We keep making better and better superconductors and even have some above room temperature. Vac-trains with superconducting maglev is more efficient, in principle, than anything short of orbiting. Better materials can make dry mass near nothing.
Reversible computing requires no fundamental energy input.
Space based solar power could make sure the waste heat from electricity production is almost zero and only useful energy is pumped to the ground.
You can shade the Sun at the limit. And you can shade only the portions of the spectrum that are not biologically active, i.e. shade infrared. That's tens of Petawatts.
You can also literally build radiators at high altitudes to dump waste heat into space before it gets conducted into the atmosphere.
You can also just do more work in space instead of on the ground.
I think also we won't grow exponentially but instead linearly or quadratically. That's actually sustainable for as long as the universe would've lasted anyway.
Depends on the source of energy production - if we're drawing all our energy from solar and wind, then we're not introducing new energy into the earth. That's the problem with fossil fuels - we're reintroducing sequestered carbon into the atmosphere; if we were to burn wood instead and keep the carbon cycle in balance then it wouldn't be an issue. Nuclear energy does introduce new energy though, so that could cause issues.
That's actually not true. If we use solar energy, we are reducing the albedo of the earth, thereby introducing more energy than otherwise.
As far as wind, you are correct, but the amount of wind energy we can harvest is limited enough that there simply won't be enough at that point assuming that trend.
Similarly with wood, at that point we would just run out of wood.
Question-are we reducing albedo with solar? Solar cells appear more reflective than soil; I wouldn't think that albedo would be reduced unless we were putting solar cells over the ocean. Do you have a source for this, that's an interesting conundrum but seems counterintuitive. I would think that solar cells actually reflect more heat than they absorb, I have had to work around them and they act as though they reflect more heat than soil. If you can back that claim up, I'd be really interested in reading more.
Are you accounting for population collapse? Increased energy consumption corollates to wealth correlates to below-replacement birthrates.
If that doesn’t solve the problem, a culture capable of generating and using that much energy will just build space colonies, which solves the problem too.
That’s the only potential way out, yes. We’ll need lower population on earth, but to continue our current speed of scientific progress we’ll need the same or an even larger population overall, so we’ll have to move into space (the final frontier, these are the voyages…)
It’s not sustainable with our current consumption standards, especially considering AC usage, space usage for single-family homes, and meat consumption.
If everyone was a vegetarian living a dutch lifestyle we’d have no issue, that’s true.
We're capable of developing and building out abundant energy production over the next century if we want to, and doing so is going to be a far preferable option to deliberate material deprivation.
I can't find it, sorry. You can reproduce it, though, just increase energy consumption exponentially by 1.04 or so until it reaches 1-2% of the insolation from the sun. I had done it a different way but retrospectively this is easier and better.
The energy we produce is still a minuscule fraction of the energy we receive from the sun, so it will be a long time before that will be an issue. Also, I'm increasingly doubtful we'll see practical fusion energy in this century. We'd better focus on using the energy that's already here: sun, wind, etc.
On the multiplayer side - Eco. An incredibly underrated game. You have a month of playtime to extract resources, develop your society, and be advanced enough to stop an asteroid. Leaving minimum impact is heavily encouraged, and it has the most sophisticated economic system I've seen in any computer game.
This, I have joined a small server and it is just a good game.
I went in expecting it to have "cringeworthy levels of hippy idealism", but no, it is actually a reasonably sane game. It is the first game since Wurm Online that I have felt like part of a community thanks to the game mechanics themselves, and not just incidentally. A lone person will need inordinate amounts of time to go far into the tech tree, so instead people specialize, and soon after I was running a delivery company that moved orders of resources between players, with people greeting eachother when passing by at the trade district.
Not really, the game is really made for the "10s of people scale".
But thanks to how it works, it doesn't need 10s of coordinated people, you can certainly just join some existing server with a friend and have an equally good time.
This was my biggest annoyance with Eco. It really does take a community, which is disappointing because you can't scale it down to 1-4 players. Are there any mods for this?
They've recently revamped it so you can adjust various levels (skill increase, cap, multipliers, etc) and make it possible to play with fewer. I've actually run a couple of single-player games, completely vanilla. Fun in a different sort of way.
It has a base setting for something like "1-3 players" that's pretty quick, and there are some advanced settings with which you can make things "cheaper" -- both in time and in resources -- via some coefficients.
I also "cheat" at the start by using vanilla commands to research and level up in all the disciplines -- makes the game more about finding and efficiently utilizing resources without also having to scavenge random stuff to "research". Since there's such a breadth of everything, it reduces the grind ("specializations" are annoying if you're forced to be a jack of all trades) without making it too easy.
It still feels like a real accomplishment to build a large building -- both architecturally and via thinking about how each block traces back to the resources pulled out of the ground -- without requiring huge amounts of time in the game. I'm fairly proud of this one [1], and more so of the industry and infra that supported it.
Plus, Eco is just gorgeous, especially when in single-player with low ecological impact there are so many animals hanging around all the time (peep the alligator in that shot).
IMO with a low total player count, a lot of the more interesting mechanics in the game go completely unused, even if you add multipliers so resource gathering is conveninent time-wise. No point in using the shop system with just 3 people, let alone the government stuff. So while I'm sure you can fiddle with the numbers, it just won't be the same experience.
Factory Town is my current go-to. Rise of Industry has its points, as does Voxel Tycoon, but Factory Town is cheery and fun and it brings back the Factorio-style logic networks (and be prepared to use them, as it takes away Factorio-style train-routing — though you gain tagging support.)
DSP is excellent. I beat it before Factorio, and liked it a lot more, but I then went back to Factorio to scratch the same itch and after beating it think it's a bit better. The modding support and multiplayer, especially,
DSP is prettier, grander in scale, and also has a lot of niceties that come with being part of the second generation of the genre. Absolutely worth playing if you enjoy Factorio.
I've been waiting for Terra Nil since August, i think. I'm always bummed out when i see someone playing a game for video, and it's "not available yet". It's almost as bad as games that have been in early access for over a year.
Satisfactory had even more of that effect on me and the kid when we played it. Perhaps because of being 3D and having all sorts of native flora and fauna that was very good at being annoying and getting in the way of construction.
It essentially made it fun to destroy the native environment and replace it with concrete. It's not even that we didn't mind doing it, it's that we enjoyed it. It was kind of unsettling, since it made me think that is how I would feel if I were a 19th century British colonialist bringing "order" to various native lands.
I got sucked into Satisfactory a while back. After about 100 hours in the game, I was standing at the top of a cliff looking at my creation and said to myself "I'm the worst ecological disaster this planet has ever seen."
I'm planning to start a new save soon, and I think I'm going to try playing with some self-imposed rules, like not removing vegetation. Not as much, anyways. I'm not exactly a budding architect; where I bothered with buildings at all they're mostly giant boxes filled with machines. But I've seen some pretty creative, inspiring buildings on the Satisfactory subreddit and I think the game is flexible enough that I could create a factory that incorporates the nature around it rather than just smashing everything flat.
>myself "I'm the worst ecological disaster this planet has ever seen."
Really? Worse than an asteroid strike, a massive volcanic eruption, a massive flood? Blights and other naturally occurring diseases that have wiped out entire species are much worse ecological disasters than building an entire Manhattan.
If you building was the worst thing that ever happened to that planet, it wasn’t modeled as a real planet in the first place.
In a sense they were the only ecological disaster the planet had ever seen. Something isn't a 'disaster' unless there's some sentient observer to judge the outcome. Asteroid strikes, volcanic eruptions, floods, gamma ray bursts, black holes... they're not disasters, just events, until someone gets upset about them.
Satisfactory was fun for a while, and I want to try the v5 features still, but even as an FPS vet I get headaches and frustrations trying to do accurate placement of buildings, let alone tightly optimal.
Amazing graphics optimizations, considering the dynamic lighting and how many objects are rendered.
The 'zooping' or whatever they call that allows you to build multiple things at a time is outstanding. Enormous time saver.
With a few exceptions, I think building placement is outstanding. Hold alt and it snaps, even if the other building is far away, with audio cues. Conveyor belts give a dopamine hit every time I place a long one. That is with foundations of course. Without them you get the spaghetti mess.
What is more difficult than Factorio is that there are no blueprints or robots to build stuff for you. Also, the terrain doesn't help, we can't just destroy cliffs. But that's also interesting.
Satisfactory is in my top 3 of all time, just ahead of Factorio. 2200 hours vs 1600 in the latter. I like it for the 3D exploration and hand crafted map. I love that (if you don’t cheat yourself out of it by abusing ramps) you can spend hours on expeditions through treacherous terrain to get to the next resource.
However my gripes are the same as yours. Placement is an unwanted meta-game that they ought to remove via better QoL features. The existing alignment, snapping, picking, and repeating features are inadequate for a game like this.
> And yet he doesn't ask about how we destroyed all the cliffs and filled in the lakes, and chopped the trees.
I guess it's because he knows that it's just a game. And there's nothing in the game's rules that allows you to befriend the natives. There's simply no other choice that is rewarded other than expansion and domination, because the natives will always be hostile when you get close to them. Plus: The natives expand too. From time to time new biter bases spawn.
If Factorio took place on Earth, that would be pretty dark. But, remember the backstory is that you've crash-landed your spaceship on an alien world filled with giant hostile insects who will attack you when you get too close, even if you build nothing and never pollute. Hardly a paradise!
On the subreddit, I once read a good argument that perhaps the backstory is actually more sinister. Supposedly you're crashlanded … but you launch a satellite? (Instead of ever escaping?) The poster supposed that, what if the narrator is a faulty narrator, and in reality, our character has been sent as a sort of advanced terraforming agent send to prepare the planet for colonization or such. After all, the engineer needs no sleep, no food, never seems to tire, can somehow research a wide range of complex technology on his or her own. Perhaps the PC has simply been led, or programmed, to believe that he's crash landed (or perhaps that's even the truth, just the crash landing was on purpose, to deliver him to the planet), and programmed such that he can't recognize the cognitive dissonance of getting to a rocket but never leaving, always expanding …
it's quite easy to put a dent in the "poor good alien" narrative: stand around doing nothing. once enough time passes, biters will kill you irregardless. mind it does take a while for them to come get you, but they will come: https://i.imgur.com/GFxUvu4.png
so the engineer motive is clear: survival, not invasion.
besides, the aliens are an infestation, not part of the ecosystem; as a matter of fact, alien left to their own device will expand and kill the planet biomass. aliens are there to consume, no less than the engineer.
Eh, life tend to sit in an equilibrium with its environment, biters will happily destroy it. Their evolution and multiplication happens regardless of engineer actions.
> Peace is a human invention, it does not exist in nature.
Common core is literally destroying people minds
Ever heard of symbiosis? Countless species not only tolerate each other, they cooperate one another. And yes that includes predators like crocodile and plovers or sharks and remoras.
Ppl here brandishing "totally incorrect" and spouting nonsense.
It really doesn't. Life sits in a complex, chaotic feedback loop which on our mayfly timescales tends to orbit around a semi-stable attractor. It only does so because everything is killing everything else just as hard as it can, while everything else tries to kill or outcompete it right back.
It's not like if all the foxes suddenly disappeared the rabbits would just reach optimal comfortable population and then start using birth control.
Doesn’t that make it even worse? You invade, destroy the environment, and the beings that lived there don’t like it. So you commit genocide and unilaterally decide to destroy the planet.
That’s what really bothered me with this game. I’ve tried playing it in the past but this kept me from liking it and continuing. It’s depressing enough we’re doing some version of that in real life, but at least I’m not fully responsible for it. In the game, I am causing it and am 100% responsible for it.
I don’t know why they did it that way. It could just as well have been without this destructive and deathly element.
For a time I played multiplayer using, IIRC, a mod called Nauvis Day. Combined with some of our other mainstay mod choices (Rampant) it made it very important to track and deal with pollution, though of course it didn't make it into really pro-ecological setup - It just made all sorts of waste and pollution a problem you had to manage (Rampant does it as well, as it makes bugs hardcore and much more intelligent, but Nauvis upped the scale on pollution management).
On one hand, before we disabled it for being buggy i nearly made a bunch of things perfect (if energy intensive) recycled, OTOH I found we had a nuclear artillery shells and trains that could fire them... Then built a pipeline to make the shells and started cleansing...
That's probably a good educational point in favor of the game, as it introduces the concept that material and energy scarcity can exert fundamental control over industrial production levels.
I kind of like that its dark, the aliens attack because of the pollution you create, and yet still the factory grows and I clear the hives with better weaponry.
Its has some connection to reality that cuts deep and yet I want to play more get my SPM to go higher, it feels like everything wrong with modern life depressing and fun at the same time.
My problem with games like Factorio (and more recently Oxygen no Included), is that after I get addicted and get up past 100 hours of gameplay I start to question what the hell I'm doing with my life. Up until that point it's great fun designing, building, and optimizing, but then a switch in my head flips. I start to become anxious about the fact that I was excited about getting better at skills in a virtual world. Usually around this time I start watching videos of more advanced builds, and then become increasingly depressed about the idea of sinking 1000+ hours into a game, when I could just be building something in the real world, or out riding my bike. This is usually the time I put the game down and never play it again.
I think the problem for me is that these games give me the illusion of learning, building, and accomplishing things, which my little engineer brain loves. But once I come out of the haze of addiction, I realize it's nothing more than an illusion, and I just stomach going on.
I feel this way too. I feel like games like factorio "sap my energy" for applying the same skills in real life.
I'm sure that if I applied myself in the same obsessive/borderline-autisitc manner that factorio brings out of me, I could accomplish real world things that actually matter to my life.
I feel like HN browsing also does this to some extent. Makes me feel smart and very technical - but I don't actually DO anything with this knowledge.
Yeah, I feel you. However, remember that these are games. It's fun to play. It's unlikely in real-life that you will get the opportunity to control resources and strategy on the level that Factorio and such offer. Enjoy the opportunity to build. To imagine and see where your imagination takes you. It's good practice, mental exercise.
Much like with story-telling in the form of books and movies, playing (good) games is an opportunity to learn about yourself and reality, and then grow in response.
You are the player of games. Be mindful so the game doesn't play you. ;) It sounds like you're doing well to recognize "enough," when the trade-offs don't make sense anymore, though a bit late. Maybe next time you'll slow down before anxiety need kick in. Good luck, have fun!
Optimizing and organizing are skills that you develop and can practice by gaming, there are plenty of transferable skills, and opportunities to learn from what sticks you up (from one side: i spend so much time optimizing i don’t get anything done, from the other: my stuff is such a mess it’s not getting much done)
You can like doing something and then realize you’re spending more time on it than you want and stop, both things are fine.
I like to explore the game mechanic. I abandon games once I feel like I figured out the game loop and don’t want to invest in the grind.
Why do it? Because building stuff in the real world isn’t necessarily better. What are you gonna do with things you build? In a game, at least you’re not wasting real resources.
Riding a bike is probably better, but what do you do when you’re done?
So personally, I think it is totally fine to invest these 100 hours and then abandon, because they were entertaining. You don’t have to deeply invest and hence, I don’t see it as "a problem".
Many games can be social experiences. Even if the game isn't multiplayer, like a rogue-like (or Wordle -- is Wordle a rogue-lite?) you can compare "runs" with others. Other single-player games have a compelling story or characters you can discuss with friends who have also played it. But some games don't work for meaningful social discussion at all, and it can be hard to want to play them!
>I often wonder if these specific types of games are redirecting a nontrivial amount of human intellectual output into a deadend. They're explicitly geared to lure in the kind of obsessive tinkerer types who've historically driven scientific and engineering progress. Only now, there's little to no payoff for the rest of humanity if they spend thousands of hours consumed by one of these games. What's Newton's modern equivalent doing right now? Probably perfecting a build order in Stellaris.
As the first response there says "Play is a way to learn and hone skills."
And there's an assumption that people who aren't 'playing' would automatically be doing something 'worthy' instead.
I suspect the reality is that most of us here went through an obsessive period of learning something which paid off in unexpected ways later. Eve could be teaching all sorts of things, including business and organizational skills: https://youtu.be/6rEfQ3GT73A?t=878
I have over 5000 hours in Factorio. I am part of a group where several of us are over 5000 hours. Some of us have Autism. Some of us have ADHD. Some of us have both. The majority of us are in the tech industry.
The companies we work at have been made to understand that the factory must grow.
When I play a new game of Factorio I literally stay up for like 14 hours every day until I get a lot of the rocket launch automated. It’s insane, it impacts my health for a month or so after lol
Wait until you see the speedruns; nefrums and wargerr are currently 100% achievements in 6hrs and 5hrs27 respectively (see speedruns.com/factorio
#100)
Launching a rocket is down to about 90 mins without using imported blueprints.
honest question, but is factorio not a similar itch to programming? I always feel with these type of games, that my time would be better spent working on a personal software project, where i get reasonably similar enjoyment, more satisfaction, and presumably more transferable skills.
> that my time would be better spent working on a personal software project, where i get reasonably similar enjoyment, more satisfaction, and presumably more transferable skills.
Sure. Maybe your time would be better spent working overtime too. Factorio is a game, and focus on the fun parts. Battling NPM dependencies after a full work day is not fun, it's just more work. There are some days when you are just cranking out code and not worrying about much else, but those days are not necessarily the norm.
I felt the same way for a while (this is FUN, this isn't work!), but at one point I came back to the game after a few months off, started a new factory, got to something like "automate green circuits", and immediately felt like I was back to battling some NPM dependency. It had lost all its magic and suddenly felt like work again. This was after about 300 hours of playtime over a few years, but I haven't really been able to get back into it since then. It's really unfortunate because it was one of my favorite games when I was still enjoying it.
The biggest hurdle for me getting back in is just getting past the bootstrapping phase to where you can automate the construction of things from blueprints. Luckily the game is made overwhelmingly with mods in mind, so there is a mod for my issue.
I'm with your parent. For me there was a progression.
First playthrough I was anxious to get to the automation parts. This continued as I explored more of the game, more of the automation possibilities, blueprinting, trying to make an all solar, all steam or all nuclear factory etc.
At some point and I don't know when exactly it turned. I like the initial bootstrapping phase and at varying points I just get this "ugh, really? This pre-requisite, then this, then this and then finally I can build what I really want?" and then I shut it down and play Dungeon Keeper 2 or something like that instead.
I would agree with you if this happened during the first playthrough. But it didn't. Not even the second or third or soon after that. It's on the n-th playthrough where a certain tech-tree part just feels like a wall now. Everything up to that is still fun but then there's that wall now that's not worth breaking through.
As for beautiful solution to software development: Personally I am somewhere in the middle. I like beautiful solutions. I advocate for clean and maintainable code. But I have no patience for dogmatic "this the only good way to solve this" BS any longer. There are many ways to solve the same problem. All have their pros and cons. I'm not gonna let my people spend another week refactoring this to some staff engineer's liking, keeping it out of the hands of customers ;)
I had a similar experience but the Space Exploration mod has made it feel like a brand new game again. I haven’t even reached space yet, but lots of the recipes have changed in ways that are more interesting (e.g. the introduction of glass, stone plate, the extension of the burner phase, etc) than a straight replay would be.
In factorio, you have all the information and tools right in front of you. Everything is transparent. There are no black box failures. If there's a problem, you can and will find the source of it and be able to fix it. It satisfies the building+problem solving itch without the painful parts of programming, eg broken dependencies, slow build times, putting an = instead of a ==.
So, yes, programming is of course more productive, but that's not really the point of leisure time.
I like your point about the limit. Real world system debugging can always go lower than my know how reaches. But in my experience the broken dependencies, slow build time, putting an inserter the wrong way are core mechanics of the late game.
Its a similar itch as programming for fun, but often that becomes less fun after spending the entire day programming for money. Factorio is just different enough to still be fun and relaxing, even though its similar.
Programming also comes with baggage that Factorio can do away with (eg sibling comment mentioned build tools, I've given up on an evening of personal programming before because setting up the build environment was too much effort... looking at you cmake you piece of garbage... Or because I hit a bug that was too much effort to find/fix. Factorio "debugging" is much simpler, its about finding blockages or optimizing things, not figuring out why undefined is not a number in some deeply nested code where the value couldn't possibly be undefined but it turns out some async code changed it without you realizing...)
It is, which is why i stopped playing after ~40hrs. "Refactoring" my factory was too similar to refactoring my code, so playing this game after work (and my work makes me tired sometimes) is not a relax I'm looking for on evening after work.
You have the right intuition. From my point of view, I can easily find higher level ways to scratch my building, thinking, tinkering itches.
I'll have cycles where I'll choose lower levels. For example, most recently I purchased a classic hp rpn programmable calculator and have had fun working through the manual, doing exercises, solving problems with it, and of course, learning to program it.
I can only speak for myself but factorio is a little bit easier to zone out and enjoy than a side project. It's not a transferable skill but neither is reading sci fi but I enjoy and spend quite a lot of time doing that.
Winter 2020 I started learning factorio. Winter 2021 I started learning Rust. Same level of frustration at times, same level of joy =) "Bah I'm doing it all wrong! .... Ah that's way better"
I would love to see ~ "Factorio - 524 RPM base, trains only no drones" on a resume
Or heck, even completing either Angels or SpaceEx mods show a serious amount of dedication, "self-starter-ness" and competence in reading documentation. I've put 5000+ hours in and fell off spaceex in the green space science - so much depth.
Been playing Space Exploration mod with some friends for a little over a year on the same map now. Mabye ~300-400 hours into it and just starting to get naquitie feeling solid. Absolutely enormous scale to it
Oh man after I made my first blue space science I knew I had to stop. I have a family and a career and a base back on Navus to worry about. It became clear that success was so vastly out of reach that I wouldn’t be satisfied for months, and my IRL would go far further downhill. Still, I had to try setting up a couple moon bases, and I never got around to building a ship :/
I think that low downside could be a useful company-screening mechanism. Any company who takes that as a negative would probably be somewhere with a poor engineering culture that I wouldn't want to work at. Could certainly be neutral or an eyeroll at some good places, but I'd guess anyone who counts it against an applicant probably isn't a great place to work.
There is psDoom [1] to manage *nix processes in Doom.
There is Dockercraft [2] to manage docker containers in Minecraft.
Managing AWS in Factorio seems like next logical step!
There are docker instances for Factorio, I think I made my own at some point.
But someone should figure out how to simplify the Clustorio installation into a docker-based one. Then everyone could enjoy 60k SPM giga-bases. Even better add auto-scaling to spin up a new EC2 instance when UPS drops below 60 on any node in the cluster.
"Sorry about that brief outage, the biters got closer than I realized and I had to scramble to rebuild the defense system before they overran our Aurora cluster."
I assumed it was a less subtle reference to the fact that you spend half the game massacring untold numbers of bugs, and the aliens in Ender's Game were referred to as bugs.
> I used to be of the opinion that the computer game Factorio was a colossal waste of talent, burning many billions of dollars of GDP every year.... But since trying it out a bit more I’m starting to suspect that Factorio is the rare computer game to actually increase GDP.
Hell of an opener that just makes me immediately dislike this guys entire worldview.
Kinda also backed up by the fact that he doesn't mention the very unsubtle commentary of you basically strip mining an alien planet clean mutating the wild life into a homicidal frenzy in desperate attempt to stop you from killing their home with pollution.
> he doesn't mention the very unsubtle commentary of you basically strip mining an alien planet clean mutating the wild life into a homicidal frenzy in desperate attempt to stop you from killing their home with pollution.
People who get hung up on this are pretty shallow though. It’s such a tiring trope of “oh no, look at how bad colonialism is”. There is a lot of good stuff to discuss about the game beyond the sophomoric analogies with the native aliens.
When people are discussing things like call of duty, battlefield, etc it would be equally as idiotic to discuss “the unsubtle commentary of the horrors of war”.
The game allows one to disable the wildlife, no mods required, so it’s possible to focus solely on game without dealing with it at all.
However. I do think it’s a pretty amazing mechanic that the game designers put in the game, and is a great tool to shine light on the darkest aspect of the human race: our unbelievable capacity to subdue and destroy.
Factorio isn’t just about being dropped in a war zone and shooting the bad guys. It’s about scaling up destruction to a planetary scale. Often unintentionally (pollution) but also intentionally (nukes). These are all very rich and interesting things to speculate on, none of it is “shallow”.
What do you mean "speculate"? Seems pretty straightforward: you're polluting and killing the native life. And? Do that in real life = bad. Do that in a game = ok. I think we all know that.
This post is titled "The Factorio Mindset" and the author spends a lot of time talking about why it's something positive that should be cultivated. I'm not so sure we do all know that.
Call of Duty can teach you teamwork without making you think every problem is solved by an AK-47. Kids play Minecraft but don't expect buildings to float in the air.
Humans are reasonably intelligent and context-sensitive. They understand the difference between "video game" and "real life situation"
honestly, I though the pollution and wildlife aggression were put in the game as balancing elements (urge to switch power source, force to invest in defences, slow expansion) rather than any commentary
Some people legitimately think the purpose of life is productivity. I see quite a few on twitter and I can't help but stare and study them like some alien lifeform.
You might be using the word "purpose" in different senses. The one you're responding to likely means that "the selection bias inherent in our perspective on the world selects for traits that enhance reproduction".
For sure. I'd legitimately love to get inside their heads and see what makes them tick because it's a completely foreign mindset for me.
I saw some recently on twitter who were discussing how they run their relationships like a corporate business... They have standups, 1on1's, scheduled relationship sync up meetings, etc. As if doing this bullshit during their day jobs wasn't enough.
I've played a game called Prosperous universe and witnessed the end of capitalism. Think about it. A game where the enjoyment is derived from economic activity and it's growth. At some point you reach the end of the tech tree. There are no new frontiers to discover. There is no need for further productivity. The game is prone to making itself redundant. If there was no base limit and bots were accepted the entire game could be played by a single player thereby eliminating the need for all other players.
When you consider this inherent contradiction you really start wondering what the point of capitalism is. You reach the end and stop playing. Why haven't we stopped "playing" the same way I stopped playing?
There is an existential crisis at the core of capitalism. Productivity can only exist for the sake of leisure.
Start a game, do absolutely nothing. Witness aliens killing you nonetheless. Aliens aren't the poor good natives, and it's so easily disproven I don't understand how it ever become to be a thing.
Might be overthinking it a bit. The biters are a game mechanic to add time pressure to build your defenses up to par with your factory expansion. Sort of a deadline to stop you from navel gazing too much.
You can disable them entirely at game start, completely skip military tech, and your pollution cloud will still blight the land, poisoning trees and lakes (and fish) around you.
"You can disable them entirely at game start, completely skip military tech, and your pollution cloud will still blight the land, poisoning trees and lakes (and fish) around you."
You can turn off pollution too.
There are also mods that'll let you grow trees or fight pollution in other ways.
There's a cost to pollution in the vanilla game, when both pollution and biters are turned on, so it's not like this game is pro-pollution.
I have a bigger problem with nuclear waste having no consequences.
But even then... it's just a game!
I find it curious that some people get up in arms over the ethical issues in a game like Factorio, yet hardly anyone (outside the religious right) complains in all the violence in the most popular games of all: AAA first-person-shooters... or most games, really, as most of them place the player in the role of a killer, where you solve problems and win by learning to be a more effective killer.
Have you played the game? Biters are an infestation, if you do nothing they'll eat up the remaining available surface and destroy the local biomass. The engineer has at least a choice, and it's goal isn't infinite consumption.
Sure locally a bear can get me in a forest, but I don't need ecocide to survive a bear, and neither the engineer has to to survive biters.
The biters don't actually destroy the biomass. Canonically, in the game, they've been there forever : https://wiki.factorio.com/Enemies , so their expansion is only triggered by the arrival of the engineer.
They also consume pollution, making them symbiotic with the local biomass.
In most of these colonization/industrialization games, the entire point is the thrill of taming a wild land and producing grand feats of engineering out of nothing. The survivalist framing, with mindlessly hostile natives, is just a narrative convenience to brush aside the ethical implications of invasion.
Exactly, the first paragraphs read almost like satire.
I found the necessity to have a devastating impact on the planet's ecosystem fascinating. Even trying a "clean run" where you minimize pollution and number of killed aliens, you can't avoid the alien native's natural expansion. It's probably impossible to win without a lot killing.
That said, I don't think the game has bad intentions. It highlights the zero sum nature of resources and negatives of expansion at all costs.
Huizinga, the early theorist of games in culture, once remarked about contact bridge: "The incredible amount of productive social energy spent on this game could indeed be spent better, but in fact most likely would be wasted on something way worse"
He just beat the game for the first time. I bought it, we played multiplayer. And I taught him the mantra "great is the enemy of good enough". Our run took 14 hours.
I also know many people like this at work, and wish they could have the Factorio experience.
If you refactor at the first sign of trouble, you remain blind to totally new to problems just around the corner.
I mean, some people just prefer to play the game more leisurely. It's not a speed run or a business deliverable. I have around 80 hours on my factory so far and it's pretty clear to me I could have "finished" by now with a lot more corner cutting but I'm enjoying the process of exploring each tech tree discovery in depth and scaling things out "right". This takes longer, but it's fun and I feel better about the end result, and isn't that the point?
Also -- playing the game over again gives a colossal speed benefit. Probably half of my time spent on this game has been ripping up everything I did that I realize clearly won't work nicely once I reach the next tech tree item. Knowing what the end game looks like in advance saves a lot of time.
I think I partly like this game because it reminds me of programming before programming was work. Trying to get through everything as fast as possible sounds like the antithesis of that, but maybe that's just me.
I got to the point where I could copy-paste walls with lasers around an area and then develop inside it at my leisure. Then the game was no-worries building therapy.
No worries until the next bitter wave comes, and oh my god there are 20 behemoths and holly crap this drawing a lot of power, wait why am I experiencing a brown out? Oh no.....my coal mines are electric powered on the same grid as the turrets and the buffer is low......They made it through the wall.....They are destroying the base including the coal mines......Time to start over!
This is why you have a separate defense grid, and a capacitor farm to serve defense demand, and when the capacitors run low you have a logic network to read the value of `A` (accumulator fill %) and turn off everything that isn't critical (mining, etc). (Of course, you'll need this switch at any satellite installation too.)
You may need to shift-click some electric poles to disconnect them from other poles, and use copper wire to connect them exactly how you want.
Add a lowkey alarm buzzer (the speaker) to let you know this is going on. Try to have a second, louder one that detects whether it's failed and the factory is still on because of a short circuit. Conduct tests by wiring in a constant combinator outputting a fixed value of A (possibly negative).
One-man Factorio is a lot different than big-team Factorio. As a single factory-developer, you need to be startup-like and remember that your time in the present is the most valuable resource.
So always automate everything the first time, because you WILL need more of that component. But do it in a quick and dirty and unscalable manner so you can move on to something else. Start with box-fed production lines; when you're sick and tired of refilling the boxes, it's time to re-do it better.
Build a system to support this throwaway development, where you can tear things down later and replace them and it keeps working. Start with a narrow bus, not eight lanes each for iron and copper — but keep it open for expansion downstream. When you run out of space near the start of the bus, don't just move things a few tiles to squeeze in an incremental upgrade: build a much bigger production line further downstream. You'll have more and better components to do it right.
And always, always, always, keep your interconnects separate from your production components. You don't need a single straight-line bus like some people think, right angles and parallels and grids are fine, but if your belts are snaking through something else, it's real hard to tear down that something-else, and it's real hard to scale up. Encapsulation is important.
And when you're finally scaling up like crazy, ready for the big leagues, use a high-throughput component someone else developed and have your robots install it.
That's been my takeaway from these games, too. It really helped with my perfectionism because it makes the negative effects of it tangible; you notice how much more time you lose by trying to be perfect rather than just getting your supply of materials up and running.
The factorio dev team are such fantastic software engineers, I wonder if this was an emergent feature of building what they want or if there was actually intentionality in making this a common takeaway from playing the game.
If you haven't, read their blog! It's a master class in release notes and development communication.
For me "beating" those type of games isn't the point. I've got nearly 1,500 hours on Rimworld and I've never beaten the game. It's more interesting to me to create different scenarios and see where they go and what stories come from them than to try to optimize for racing to the end.
Yeah an earlier poster mentioned something about there being no black box problems and that all the information to do anything is already out there to read. I think this is only true if you are looking to beat the game in a prescribed way. There is a massive amount of space for experimentation and defining your own resource restrictions and goal state.
A good example of this in Satisfactory (haven't played Factorio) is balancers vs. manifolds. The idea is that you have factory components that need to feed other factory components at a certain speed to get to 100% efficiency. One way to do that is to place the correct number of splitters and mergers to get the right ratios based on the output rate of the various components and the input rate of the others (the balancer way). The other way (the manifold way) is to just hook up one factory component that needs to feed another and let it run until it has filled up it's buffer. Then add a splitter to take the overflow and repeat until you are at 100%. Do this for all inputs. A complicated balancer looks like a drawing of a Christmas tree made of balancers and mergers and takes up a lot of space. A manifold is just a line of constructors or whatever with splitters in front of them going from one output to one input.
You can put up a manifold without doing any math and just stop adding factory components when it can't feed the next building. You can sink hours into just designing the perfect balancer for your situation, let alone building it. I always go the manifold way.
My guess is, it has to do with how you handle 1, 2, N. The first time we write something, we write it just for that specific case --- no point overengineering if you don't know you'll need it. (Hence the "YAGNI" advice that is common.)
Now, there are two things that code has to handle. You could put in a simple bit of special-case logic, or a case statement, and move on, OR you could instead spend time, codes, and tests making it robust to handle many different types of input, with a type-specific config system that makes it easy to add new type-specific behavior.
Our predilection on many teams is to skip the middle part, and write robust automation the first time we hit a special exception. ("This used to be about ordering burgers but now we want to also order shakes, and they don't have a cook-time.") It seems like the OP was suggesting that we do a "crappy" good-enough solution to that intermediate phase of complexity, as there's a chance you might not need more than that.
The idea is that you grit your teeth and let code be deduplicated twice (but no more), rather than immediately DRYing up code, so you'll (hopefully) have a better sense of what the common code should look like.
(I personally think it's too hard in practice, as common code can be written sufficiently differently to not be recognizable as common by the Engineers Of Tomorrow).
The first time you implement, the default is to over abstract. The second time even more. By the third, you have a good enough idea of what you need to then build something robust. Each phase is faster.
Second iteration is almost always copy and paste of first with small tweaks. I’d rather that than some kind of conditional.
The best UI almost never fits the most convenient technical solution so we optimize for UI and then technical.
In what situations did this mantra help? I am the same as your friend, I have like 100 hours and I have never reached the endgame, always unsatisfied with my factory.
Construction Bots can automatically "tear down" your trash areas, and unlocks the "copy" and "paste" buttons, meaning you rebuild the areas much faster.
Bots are roughly blue-science, or the ~halfway point of the tech tree.
---------
So everything "Before" construction bots can be basically seen as a "prototype" or "throwaway" factory. Everything "after" construction bots is also a prototype, because you can just hit the "deconstruct planner" and tear everything down automatically and reconstruct from scratch whenever you want.
If everything is a prototype, then perfection doesn't matter. Instead, you're "pursuing" perfection, teardown whenever you think you have a better grand plan, and copy/paste the design back if you make a mistake (or Ctrl-z / undo your decisions as needed. Etc. etc.)
as you unlock more technologies, it becomes increasingly easy to refactor/maintain a large factory. ex: bots are a major inflection point in the game. you could scale up petroleum processing and red circuits before getting bots (you need these two things to make them), but that involves a lot of manual effort. it's usually better to do a barely sufficient (but tileable!) petroleum and rc setup, then immediately fix it after making a few construction bots.
more general tip: clean interfaces are more important than massive capacity up front. in the long run, you will always need more steel/circuits/etc than you can serve with a single production line. but even if the internal layout is a mess, a functional unit with a clean interface can be scaled horizontally forever.
Cleanliness doesn't really matter, because space is infinite.
-----------
So long as you've unlocked enough military (ie: shotgun in the early game, or tank in the mid-game), you can just clear out more room and then build there. (Shotgun has significant pierce-damage, enough to kill the alien bases. Tank also has significant pierce damage and impact-damage, allowing you to win against small / medium aliens through the midgame rather easily and cheaply)
Don't even "tear down" your oldbase. Just fully abandon it and move elsewhere. Even without bots, there's no penalty to "just leaving".
---------
Bots / deconstruction planner is more of a thing if you're tired of cleaning out biter-territory and want to "recycle" your old areas.
Hi, it's me your local site reliability engineer. I care about things like latency, monitoring, and being able to understand the overall moving pieces. Scaling things in appropriate ratios is also relevant to me. I'd put you in a storage box and nuke if I could, but let's go have this conversation standing on these train tracks.
Good luck bootstrapping your first Kovarex U235 units!
A properly done Kovarex U235 takes about 2-hours to bootstrap itself. By this point in the game, you need to be able to "predict" how the factory will work in 2+ hours of latency and make sure things work as expected. (Or I guess you can blueprint copy/paste from an internet forum... but I find that "my own designs" are what make Factorio fun)
------
Once you're able to "predict" how the factory works in 2, 3, 4 hour scales, a lot of good designs open up. You focus on throughput and *eventual* designs... willing to wait 3 hours to get things done.
And by "wait", I mean go play somewhere else for those 2 hours. There's always more work to do, a design that takes 3 hours to complete _AUTOMATICALLY_, but only 5 minutes of manual / human input is superior to a design that takes 10-minutes of human effort but completes in 15 minutes.
The #1 resource in Factorio is player-attention. You should be laying out designs, and then _LEAVING_ in most situations. You let the bots complete the area and come back to "verify" when they're done.
maybe we are talking past each other, but I'd say clean interfaces and bots are very important even if you don't want to tear down the original factory. you want to be able to double production of high volume products with a couple copy-pastes. can't really do this if you have some gnarly IO setup.
I agree clean layouts inside of functional units is unnecessary. land is cheap; just make something that works and cp it everywhere.
> you want to be able to double production of high volume products with a couple copy-pastes.
In my experience, no.
Any high-volume production needs to be built from the ground up from smelters (or even miners) on downwards.
If you have 1-belts of iron feeding your factory and then want to expand, the easiest way to do so is to build a parallel +1 belt of iron (including the 70+ smelters and 50+ miners somewhere else) somewhere.
The terrain and issues of that other area (ie: water, cliffs, trees, etc. etc.) will be different. You can only legitimately "copy/paste" designs if you have an advanced set of terrain modifiers: landfill to erase water, cliff-explosives to erase cliffs, and flamethrowers to erase trees. (Chopping by hand takes too long. Even bots take too long in many situations to erase trees, especially at low-bot speed levels).
-----------------
If you try to "logically" add it to your factory (originally designed for only 1-belt), you end up with non-obvious starvation points everywhere.
Its far easier to declare the entire "logical belt" region to be a cohesive design (from mines to smelter to assembly machines to science to labs: beginning to end of the entire process).
There's an additional bonus to this: belting the "end-product sciences" is very easy and low-throughput. Instead of "moving your factory" around, it makes far more sense to "move your science belts" around.
-------
Its very hard to turn a "1-belt of iron + 1-belt of copper" factory into a "2-belt of iron + 2-belt of copper". Very very difficult, you really shouldn't be trying to find space for the extra belt or smelters.
Just "soft abandon" the base, and build your 2nd belt of iron + 2nd belt of copper elsewhere. Then build 2-belts of your red+green+blue+purple science (or whatever outputs your old base were doing) to lead to the new science center. "Abandon" the old science center as well (since the "old science" center won't have the extra science to advance forward).
"Abandoning" the science center means that all that space opens up for you to move your science-belts to the necessary location towards the new science center. Maybe you need to plow through some old areas but it'd be easier to do this from an "abandonment" mindset rather than a "cleanup" mindset.
---------
The only way you "cleanly" have room for that 2nd line of copper or iron, is if you magically remembered to leave room for the 70-smelters before you built the base. This is unreasonable.
EDIT: I guess you use yellow/red belts in the early game. 24-smelters per yellow belt of production. 48-smelters per red belt of production. 72-smelters per blue belt of production.
How do you grow 24-furnaces into 48? Doubling the size if you upgrade from yellow to red? (Or upgrading from 1x yellow to 2x yellow?). Its non-trivial to run that many lines through the middle of already-built factory areas.
And unless you planned for it, 24-additional furnaces is a non-trivial amount of space.
before I have bots, I usually put down a minimal production line that doesn't saturation a belt. I place them perpendicular to the main bus, so they can be 2x'd or 4x'd before saturating an output belt or fully consuming an input. in the early stages of having bots, I scale them a couple times as needed.
but once I have a good number of bots and a couple speed upgrades for them, I try to switch to remote train-served factories for bulk items. so doubling steel really is as simple as copypasting the original smelters and train stops. with current train mechanics, you don't even have to rename the stops. from here you can either fully transition to block architecture (probably overkill for vanilla) or widen your original bus at the end by injecting materials via train.
if you do it right, the only manual effort for scaling is adding new trains to prevent starvation.
It sounds like you're inadvertently benefiting from an advanced concept called "compression".
A yellow iron-belt can send at most, 15-iron per second, towards the factory. The player can spend this on 3-steel per second, 15-green circuits per second, 7.5 gears per second, or any such combination of intermediate materials.
However, "steel" has an interesting property, every "1 steel" you send down the factory is equivalent to sending 5-iron down to the factory.
---------------
This means that your singular steel belt sending only a partial belt (maybe 6-steel/second, which is only 40% capacity) is "equivalent" to sending 2-iron belts (30-iron per second).
"Compression" means that you only have to think about running 40% belt of steel, rather than 2x 100% belts of iron. This takes up 1/2 the space and is far simpler in the overall picture, and even leaves room on the belt for up to 2.5x expansion later. (Your 40% yellow belt can "expand" to 100% capacity in the long-game, ultimately reaching the same throughput as 5x yellow belts of iron at 100% capacity).
Playing with "compression" can lead to simplified designs. Similarly, green-circuits are great at compression (1-iron + 1.5 copper per circuit), as are gears (1-gear == 2-iron). But steel is among the best (5-iron per steel).
--------
If you work at the "steel" level and plan around a "future steel belt", you end up benefiting from compression and leading yourself towards simpler designs.
But that's an advanced concept. This isn't something I'd expect a beginner or intermediate Factorio player to get. The beginner/intermediate player would try to brute force the additional iron-lines using iron plates directly, and have a difficult job of doing so. It takes multiple playthroughs before you realize that belting-steel has benefits over belting-iron from a factory throughput perspective.
-----------
The recommendation I put above, to belt your science to new locations, is the ultimate answer to this compression. A blue-science pack consists of 1.5x adv. circuit + 1x engine + .5x sulfur
That is to say: one blue-science pack is 7.5 copper + 12 iron + 3 plastic + 1/2 sulfur, or roughly 23-resources per blue-science pack. That's a compression ratio of 23-to-1, superior to steel.
This makes "belting" blue science around a relatively efficient endeavor from a human-labor perspective. (True: the factory has to work 23x harder to "fill the belt", but if we're talking about "eventual consistency" measured in the scope of hours, its not really that big of a deal to wait for the belt of science-packs to fill up to its steady state level.
And by "wait", I mean, "play the other elements of factorio while waiting". I know its going to take 3 or 4 hours to happen, but I know it will happen with 100% certainty because I have confidence in the design. So I do it, and move on to base expansion / building more train outposts or other manually-intensive jobs.
--------
In any case, "just expand steel" turns out to be one of the easier tasks. I don't know if you knew steel was specifically a high-compression item worthy of attention like this, but... that's an explicit strategy. One that took me many, many playthroughs to understand and take advantage of.
Usually we fix that with trains, and in some of our last games we started working on pull (or Toyota) model of resource management, with smelting blocks colocated with metal patches, and various sub-factories pulling resources in by signal-triggered trains
I guess I'm talking about the earlier game, where I've seen many, many players 'get stuck at blue science'.
A lot of players get stuck there because you need to advance to the 2nd iron patch around then, because the starter patch is too small to sustain red circuit production.
Or I guess you can wait like 10 hours for that small patch to make enough red circuits.
But yes, a well designed train network solves the problem. But that's a nonobvious step for many players.
--------
Main bus style does work through that stage of the game, but requires preplanning.
--------
If you wish to keep your old design (aka: no restarts), building a 2nd base and connecting the two bases up (either with trains or belts) really is the answer.
In any case, the game's default settings force you to expand in the blue to purple science period, before all options of the tech tree are available.
In particular, mindustry can actually run scripts within the game to automate a lot of things. If you like factorio you're going to like these 2 games.
Me and my friend are actually working on a somewhat similar game called Captain of Industry [1]. The game is less about automation and scaling and more about realistic processes, mining with excavators, trucks logistics, and taking care of your workers. It's not done yet but we are quite close!
PS: To my surprise, simulation games are a lot of very technical work full of algorithms and optimizations, compared to an average SWE work in a tech company.
Just curious, if you're focusing on realistic processes, how come that excludes realistic spacing/placement of structures (based on your websites background video/image)? Wouldn't the two go hand in hand for the feeling of the game you're trying to build?
I am not sure what do you mean by "realistic spacing/placement of structures", could you elaborate? Do you mean that in reality you would not build a farm next to a blast furnace? That's true, we did not implement any mechanics regarding building proximity to others, but that is certainly an interesting idea!
When I mentioned our focus on reality, I meant that the mechanics and processes are mostly driven how things are done in the real world and by playing the game you can even learn something new (e.g. steel production needs oxygen). However, it is a game and this can be done only to a certain degree, especially the early game has a lot of "shortcuts".
As an example of realistic mechanics and processes, you build excavators that mine ores and coal, trucks haul materials around the factory, terrain collapses as it is being mined, iron and steel smelting produces slag that needs to be disposed, fertilizer for farms is made from ammonia (synthetic process) or from compost (natural process), etc. (see our wiki for more https://wiki.captain-of-industry.com/ ).
Sure, I'll try. The structures are all lined up and flush up against each other, and the buildings are bunched up. There's nothing wrong with that, I was just confused by "realistic processes". To me that also means (closer to) realistic functionality at the structures too, both in placement and functionality. Since you mentioned it, it seems like a key part of your game but to me that isn't communicated in the video sample.
Im working on a video game too so I understand the necessity of limitations and shortcuts. And your point could be entirely clear if I were to play the game. I'm just pointing out, IMO, there's a disjoint between what I see and what you say.
Edit: I'll add, I believe the communication and interpretation of game functions is extremely important. Im creating a city builder/simulation game, but the depth of the simulation is determined by what's communicated to the player, not what the code does. I could create an intelligent game AI and a sophisticated economy, but if it doesn't communicate that to the player in any way, then it's no different than RNG to the players eyes.
I agree! Do you happen to know of any small discord servers / other communities for game devs making simulation games? The larger ones I've been to were just too big.
I dont have a name for my game yet. I'm only 3 months in. When I get to the point where I have a SimCity 2000 level of functionality, I'll know I should keep going and will start putting together a brand/webpage.
I am not in any game dev discords. Frankly, I am having hard time engaging with the indie game dev community (be it on forums, reddit, discord), it seems that the problems I am dealing with (and could use some help with) are very specific and quite technical, so my posts are usually unanswered. I'd love to find a good place for having such discussions.
I haven't tried factorio yet, but it seems very similar to mindustry, except that mindustry is also a mix of "real" tower defense and RTS.
I really like mindustry. It's open source, available for free on multiple platforms (it's java), and paid on others.
It constantly gets updated, and has a nice progress curve. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the recent addition of processors. It breaks the balance of the game a bit, as you can basically program your own AI for it, and do stuff like smart electric grid load balancing, shutting down reactors before they overheat, and use units as resource transports. On the other hand, it's fun to play with, and with a bit of automation you can save a lot of space.
As an electronics engineer, that game is quite appealing to me, and nicely illustrates some of the challenges we face everyday in engineering: refactoring, dependencies, synchronization, modularity vs optimization, "security", etc.
Obligatory Zachtronics and Screeps links. TIS and Shenzen are my favorites of the zachtronics series. I've never really gotten into screeps but it always looks so cool.
Also http://factoryidle.com. There's no "person" that you're in control of and it plays different for other reasons, but it's definitely in the same category.
There's also Satisfactory if you like a 1st person view of things.
I tried Mindustry a bit and found it not very appealing, but looking back at it I realize a big part of that is just the visual appeal - or the lack of one.
Song of Syx looks interesting though, definitely worth at least a try. Thanks for the recommendation.
If your life goal is to optimize for "productivity", then you will of course encounter your issue. I imagine the vast majority of people seek out leisure activities. What I've found that Factorio does for many programmers is that it hits the same dopamine receptors that productive programming does, just in a non-work context. A professional football player should be able to enjoy playing basketball in their off-time because it's another athletic activity and not feel the guilt of improving their football skills.
There is a fine line between "this game exercises the same parts of my brain as my day job, but with a vastly different set of restrictions and consequences" and "I stare at a screen exercising this part of my brain all goddamn day and the last thing I want to do in my leisure time is stare at a screen using this part of my brain even more".
I am an artist; I flirted briefly with Minecraft for a while, then looked up from a flawed first attempt at an underwater glass dome at 3AM, decided I would much rather exercise my creativity in a realm where I can show it to other people and maybe make some money from it, and uninstalled Minecraft forever.
I don't think you're alone there. This was EXACTLY my mindset as well.
I have the same problem with the various Japanese logic puzzles (Soduku, Nurikabe, Hashi, etc):
1) This is fun!
2) Hmm, I'm using the same algorithms to solve every puzzle
3) I could probably write a solver
4) Don't write solver. Move on to something else.
Exactly, I only played Factorio and Dyson Sphere Program when I was depressed. Every other time if I feel bored or burned out enough to try to play a session I think about my list of backlogged greenfield great ideas and immediately end up doing one of those. They are honestly just as creatively rewarding and fun in the greenfield stage at least.
Factorio is right on the cusp for me. SpaceChem, too. TIS-100 was a bomb for me; if I'm literally writing code, it better end up in a GitHub repo.
With Factorio for me, I always reach a point where I know how I'm going to scale up, and then I lose interest in actually doing so. Just knowing that I could do it is satisfying enough.
I love construction/management games but I very rarely "finish" them for exactly this reason. The moment I can see exactly how I would go about making it to the end goal, I'm done.
I haven't identified with a HN thread in quite a while. The moment I understand how to do something or that it's possible, I'll drop it. That includes my personal projects.
On the one hand, it is a vastly better debugging experience. You can see the entire state of the machine, and easily step through the execution.
In contrast, with my day job, I'm dealing with incomplete documentation, poorly designed and very large libraries without adequate comments or organization, subtle bugs that only occur in unidentified situations, etc.
But at the end of the day, TIS-100 felt more like work or a hobby project, so I'd be better off doing one of those.
Factorio has trains. Also, at my programming job they frown on the use of shotguns, flame throwers, explosive rocketry, and the use of tactical nuclear missiles to solve problems.
My experience was similar. I tried Factorio once, and gave up because it was very tedious, and too much work to consider it fun. I would have liked to enjoy it, but it's not for everyone.
I've found myself following a similar thought progression. For me, the difference is that in Factorio I can decide to completely refactor my base and not have to deal with any angry stakeholders or teammates that disagree with my direction.
The biters do make refactoring a bit more tricky. Got to at least keep base defenses up and running. That could be seen as the equivalent of keeping existing users happy.
That's also the reason I don't play games like these. Programming scratches the same itch for me and has fewer limitations.
Still I enjoy the absolutely insane creations of some people in those games. I'll never forget the Doom-style 3D engine[0] someone created inside Factorio, with (iirc) a clever configuration of trains as a huge graphical display.
I have this feeling often, but I still go back to games. To see any fruits of my efforts doing real programming would take days or weeks at this point, and I want to do something that more or less immediately rewards me for my efforts.
One thing I don't see mentioned on here often is actually rather surprising. Modded Minecraft! There are a lot of highly technical mods that are focused on providing resources that enable mass automation, and many modpacks that push the limits of that concept.
Some of my favorite modpacks are Enigmatica 2: Expert, Omnifactory, and one I just started recently, Divine Journey 2.
They all have a similar process of starting with nothing but a book full of quests to guide your progression, and end up with you automating everything from farms to quarries to mob grinders in order to produce items that have comically difficult "recipes" to craft.
Scratches the same itch as Factorio, Zachtronics games, Satisfactory, etc. but often has some fun side goals such as making your factory look beautiful, exploration, fighting bosses, and best of all, getting your friends hooked on the game and playing on a server in a group!
I've been on the fence about Satisfactory, but I just checked Notch's twitter and the dude is STILL sitting there playing it all day
The man's rich enough to be swimming with whales or partying in space and he's sitting in his basement playing Satisfactory.. there must be something to it
Bitburner (a game in which you use javascript to "hack" computers... not really hacking, but really using your javascript skills)
Screeps (use real programming languages to harvest and compete for resources... sort of like an RTS, but where you program your units instead of directly telling them what to do)
Neon Noodles (use a simple visual programming language to program robots to make sushi... super innovative game, with a free demo on steam... highly recommended)
There are a couple games from Zachtronics that literally have a programming component to them (TIS-100 is almost all programming, but with a weird computer).
Mindustry has a little programming if I recall correctly -- mostly it is tower defense and resource gathering, though.
EDIT: As you can see, everybody was excited to bring up Zachtronics. Really neat developer.
> I used to be of the opinion that the computer game Factorio was a colossal waste of talent, burning many billions of dollars of GDP every year.
I dunno if the author is joking or not, but I heard this argument over and over. Am I in the minority to think that it's totally insane that everything should revolve around raising the GDP?
I feel smart people working at Facebook or Google working hard at finding new ways to serve more ads to more people is the huge waste of talent.
A charitable interpretation is that it’s an attempt to continue the spectacular growth of labor efficiency that has lifted large sections of the world out of poverty. Doesn’t change that it’s rather silly to constantly think of individual actions’ effect on a macroeconomic measure.
Labor efficiency didn't lift anyone from poverty, social policies did. We are more efficient than any time in history but we still have to work full time to survive.
I'm consciously avoiding Factorio because I know what it would do to me. It already took one of our team members.
As for automation: I'm surprised that scaling is presented as the main - or actually only - reason for automating. I for one don't automate for speed, I automate for correctness.
The other day we discovered that some of the tens-of-megabytes JSONs we're reading on a regular basis have an error: single-element arrays were replaced by that element, so e.g. `[1]` would become just `1`. That was okay for the parser on the receiving end, but not for the recently introduced more efficient serializing module.
I could just go over those files and search all such occurrences by comparing them to the reference type definition - would take less than an hour provided I didn't make any mistakes. But I'm only human, so I opted for something else, namely: drawing from the pile of rich manure that is the npm repository and finding modules for:
1. Generating JSON schemas from TypeScript type definitions.
2. Validating JSON files against JSON schemas.
Armed with these tools I modified the files until the validator confirmed full correctness. Took longer than expected, but now not only can I guarantee that these files are error free, but any future ones as well.
I think scaling is presented as the main - or actually only - reason for automating because it's actually the only reason for automating in the game. Nothing that you can automate in the game can be done incorrectly.
I think game like Factorio shows that level of automation is kind of quantized.
First there is no automation, then one resource is automated but others are not, then several are automatized, but combining them is not. There are gaps where building the next thing doesn't make sense even if it makes sense when you have little bit more resources.
I think this is true in business as well. It's hard to tell when you have crossed the threshold where building the next level makes sense.
You tend to use a lot of time and money to build the next level of automation and only then you can measure if it was worth it or not.
A tech company focused on logistics has at least one boss or founder who really likes factorio, the game for and by programmers who like logistics? Who could have guessed^^ It is cool if they let people expense it though, but motivating the 20$ per employee cost is pretty trivial. Compared to similar expenses like a yearly fruit basket, Id wager giving programmers/logistics workers a free factorio probably has a better impact on work performance. I think op is underestimating how much people learn from games, but it is also not exactly a high bar to pass, and Id wager factorio teaches more than most.
I agree that it's chump change. Many startups provide a $100/month budget for "whatever" self tech expenses that can be spent on things like games, etc. This isn't groundbreaking by any means. Still cool that they do it though.
Now comping employees for after-hours time spent playing factario -- now that would be groundbreaking haha
> Id wager giving programmers/logistics workers a free factorio probably has a better impact on work performance.
I'd be skeptical of that claim. I'm sure there would be at least a few engineers that showed up to work pretty tired because the factory needed more iron plates. :-)
Yeah, think I'm less assuming that people wont let it negatively affect their work, as much as assuming that the people for whom it does would have been playing something else with the same effect.
If you figure it out, there will be a lot of interest^^. I kinda miss the "just one more turn" till sunrise sessions, but half of that is me missing that the only thing that happened the day after was a slight headache.
In theory, finding the ‘Factorio’ aspect of production just-enough management in other games is easy; Big Pharma is a lovely example of this. But instead, I want to talk about Stardew Valley, and the psychological effects of scaling up production.
There is a very popular player mod for Stardew that allows automation of all “click to perform” actions normally operated by the player: Harvest fruit from a tree, Brew honey into mead, Cook wood into coal, Age mead in cask, and so on. Essentially, it introduces the conveyor systems of any production game — Verb Noun With Machine — and uses footpaths as the invisible conveyer belts. It is possible, with careful pathing, to build a farm that is automated from harvest to sale, and generates an endless supply of any product with minimum downtime.
I found that when I applied this approach to Stardew, it was really fun making it work, and once I had it all working, there just wasn’t anything left to enjoy. Not because the game doesn’t have a near-infinite list of things you can produce (especially with mods), but because it turns out that the joy I derived from Stardew is about doing things myself. And so my intricately-pathed full scale production farm sits unopened.
I point this out because in tech we often forget that capacity and automation can, in some cases, be inversely proportional to enjoyment. I could apply a photo editing ML algorithm to my photo library and no doubt it would be nice, but I enjoy the act of taking a photo and fiddling with it, even if I send exponentially fewer photos to my friends. One of them has a complex multi-device “ingestion pipeline” and it treats them well for their purposes, and I’ve built one before, and it turns out I just don’t enjoy digital photography at that scale.
I love playing games like Factorio (though I haven’t gotten much into it yet) for their own sake, and I don’t deny that it’s possible to enjoy the art of scaling and automating these things, and that others feel differently. But my experience with Stardew pipelines was a really useful lessons in learning what I enjoy and when I enjoy it, and when that means I shouldn’t scale it up any further.
Factorio is my favourite game of all time by a country mile. The thing that is so amazing to me is when you first play it and suddenly you realise that what you thought was the goal of the game (to launch the rocket) is literally completely irrelevant and the goal has at some point just become "to play more factorio".
The factory doesn't have to grow to feed the rocket. The factory must grow because it must grow. And you're there to make it grow.
Then pretty soon you've launched hundreds of rockets and you're still thinking "if I can just get my trains working a bit better, remove this bottleneck then I can expand over there..."
Gah, this happened to me literally yesterday, where I started a new Factorio map and had to close it after like an hour because I knew a) how much time I'd be able to sink into the game and b) how similar it was to my day job, which means I could just do my day job and feel 90% of the satisfaction while also earning money doing it.
Rarely does an article online hit me as directly as this one does, good work.
I own a copy of Factorio, yet I never play it. Whenever I think about playing Factorio, I think what I really want to do is emulate biology, not industrial machinery. I want a game that lets me alter genomes slightly and try out several branches to see which ones are better for the world I'm trying to create. I want to fast forward through time so that evolution can run its course, then if I don't like the outcome, I want to be able to go back and try something else. I also want to be able to share evolutionary steps as code (in text form, not graphical!) with a community. The steps should be expressed in a functional language. Effectively, I want my quasi-biological world to take on a life of its own and I want to be able to run reversible experiments on both my worlds and other people's worlds.
Early in my software development career, I tried building something like this. It's a really interesting problem, highly recommend trying it yourself. Even with a simple system and very modest skills: it was able to create results that surprised me, which was very rewarding. Copying previously written comment (you might also be interested in the "ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program" topic of the thread or other similar projects in the comments)
When I was learning to program, I tried to make a toy artificial life evolution simulation. Particle organisms on a 2D plane had 'dna' which was a list of heritable traits, like size, speed, number of offspring. Bigger organisms could eat smaller organisms, but they burn energy faster. 0 energy = death. When two organisms of opposite gender collided and had sufficient energy, they'd give some of their energy split among the offspring, with each offspring's 'dna' values set to one of the parent's +/- 5%.
As I was developing this, I hadn't figured out how I wanted to do food yet, so as an easy first step, I just had a constant amount of energy that was split amongst all organisms on the screen. Lots of little dots buzzing around, was kind of neat but nothing too special. I left it to run overnight.
When I came back I was very surprised: previously i was running at about 30FPS - now it was running at about 4 seconds per frame. The screen was filled with dense expanding circles of tiny slow organisms emanating from where organisms had mated and nothing else.
My simulation evolved to outsmart my simple food algorithm: when food is divided equally among all organisms, the best strategy is to use minimal energy and maximize offspring count. I had populated the world with a default offspring count of ~5 and they had evolved to the tens of thousands. The more offspring an organism had, the greater the amount of the energy pool would go to their offspring.
It was a very cool "Life, uh, finds a way" moment - that such a simple toy simulation of evolution was able to find an unanticipated optimal solution to the environment I created overnight was very humbling and gave me a lot of respect for the power of evolution.
There's a "game" called Critterding, which was passable at evolution and stuff, lots of knobs to manipulate the creatures and environment. Then someone made another version called Critterdrug which adds a "shared canvas" that all creatures can see and manipulate if they want/can.
I'm hoping that some day the source code is released, i've talked to the critterding person, but they don't seem amenable to it. Critterdrug is probably my favorite evolutionary algorithm example.
I'll never be able to do the game(s) justice, even if i link a video of the shared screen.
Another recommendation is cellular automata, perhaps combined with some evolutionary algorithms (like genetic algorithms, genetic programming, etc)...
You can use a functional language to program them, or any other kind of language of your own choosing.
You could write your own from scratch or using any one of many libraries to do some of the heavy lifting for you and concentrate on higher level problems.
There's a lot of literature and research on all this, so it's not at all hard to get started if you're in to programming already.
If you want to add more of the human dynamic to resource management and refactoring, I suggest FrostPunk. While Factorio feels more like managing and scaling code, FrostPunk feels like running a startup. It's rewarding, but very stressful.
You're right, the theme is a dystopian climate nightmare. The resource management, regular sacrifices, and dealing with growing human problems make it feel like a small company that is struggling to grow and succeed, which is more relatable to me.
I just don't get this. I feel like people back port their learning experiences to games that have a similar enough structure. A nice observation, but you can't go in the reverse direction by playing Factorio to learn something tangible. Factorio doesn't have the same failure granularity as the real world and so the usefulness of the analogy/mindset just doesn't do it for me.
Plus my skill can be replaced by roughly how well I can memorize other peoples' factory patterns.
Don't get me wrong though, it's a great game, and probably had the same impact for its genre as Doom had for FPS games.
Recently discovered Satisfactory. It's roughly GTA2 vs GTA3 when compared to Factorio (2d top down vs 3d open world). I'd love to hear peoples thoughts on the two games and what one does well vs the other. What people get out of either.
Having sunk vastly too many hours into Factorio, and recently just about 'completing' Satisfactory, I think Factorio is the far richer factory game.
Satisfactory's unexpected joy is in exploration, such as finding all the alternative recipes. However mid game starts to be a bit of a drag, and late game is borderline miserable (the Smart! mod helps tremendously but I'm talking vanilla-only experience here). In particular in satisfactory you never out-tech problems. You never get tools to help you start abstracting away details like you do in Factorio with construction bots, beacons, modules, and substations.
Satisfactory makes me want to design & build pretty or well laid out factories. But since it doesn't give me any tools to help with that, I end up with just floating slabs in the sky of endlessly repeated simple connections.
Factorio feels far more rewarding when you come up with clever layouts for things, as you can then copy/paste it. Or design it to be modular for later expansion. There's the metagame there if making things tileable for rapid expansion later on. Satisfactory largely doesn't have that. It's too painful to expand anything, so it's all one & done stuff
Satisfactory is more designed for social interaction. That alone makes it worthwhile.
I suspect this is part of my own mindset. Satisfactory is all about watching the sunset over your factory as you goof around with good friends after a real world hard days work. There's no frantic action to be had by design. The factory is slower.
I really didn't like Factorio at all. It's either too frantic with enemies or just a grind with no enemies. I'm always down for Satisfactory and beer with friends though. That game has a relax and chill factor like no other.
Satisfactory is smaller scale (resource patches far apart, most of the build being about transport and linking a few buildings together, power being harder to achieve, and overall feels resource constrained) and Factorio feels like a blank canvas to paint factory on.
From the footnote:
> In CS terms, expanding a poorly-specced and unmaintainable Factorio base is O(log(n)) while expanding a perfectly specced one is O(n), but the coefficient on the first is massively higher.
Shouldn't this be the other way around? Speccing out requires higher upfront effort, meaning a higher coefficient, but ultimately results in better long term results in overall required effort, for an O(log(n)) graph.
Factorio is an SRE game if there ever was one. It comes with graphs and dashboards. You can create audible alerts. The QPS (errr, biters) will come and the factory better be ready. Success failure is a thing.
Shoutout to Satisfactory. I've seen many players that resonate with Dyson Sphere Program also enjoy Satisfactory. Not quite as in-depth as Factorio, but an amazingly, amazingly well designed game in both over experience and gameplay.
The logistical puzzles in it are... Unfortunately, a lot less interesting (And these games, by design, are all about logistical puzzles. Feeding stuff into an assembler isn't interesting - getting your stuff to the point where you can feed it into an assembler is.)
The logistics network is too powerful, pilers don't really change how items move around, and fluids/gases/solids are treated the same.
Satisfactory is IMO a superior Factorio in that it drops the Tower Defense and resource-depletion mechanics. It's also in 3d.
I can understand that Factorio is balanced differently but it's annoying to build up a factory and then need to do non-factory things when a resource runs out or aliens attack your base.
Early game I agree, but mid/late game I couldn't disagree more. Satisfactory desperately needs a construction bot or blueprints or something to help you build at the scales it starts pushing you towards, or you just afk forever. Also the ticket loop as the endless resource sink is far less interesting than factorio's endless research paths.
I actually think the resource depletion mechanics are the one thing missing from Satisfactory. Constantly adjusting to keep the raw materials flowing in is one of the things that keeps Factorio from getting stale for me.
For what it's worth, the aliens are a completely optional part of the game. I almost always play with them disabled now so I can focus on the more fun parts of the game.
Also some mods can counteract resource depletion if desired.
If you've completed enough of the base game, I can recommend Seablock (which includes AngelBob) and Space Exploration as two mods that make the game dramatically larger. I played some of Pyanodon (which is also sometimes mentioned as a big mod) but I found it kind of gratuitously complex.
I feel compelled to repost a comment of mine from the simutrans thread:
—
So, this is totally pop-evolutionary-psychology, but I think the relevant predisposition is towards hoarding. For 100,000 generations, humans (and our ancestors before then) have had to gather and store food and other supplies to see them through the winter (or other hard times). We are wired to do this because we would have died out if we didn’t.
Building games let you build up your hoard of stuff (whether trains, rails, buildings, tiberium silos, green circuits, …) in a tight feedback loop that repeatedly triggers the “this is my stuff, now I am safe” dopamine response.
This also explains collecting hobbies, and goes some way towards explaining the desire for wealth acquisition in general.
In keynesian economics the desire to hoard is known as liquidity preference because you want things you hoard to be immediately accessible i.e. liquid and require compensation to cease keeping something immediately available.
Most physical objects deteriorate over time which makes gold inspired money an exceptionally poor way to keep track of things because the things that deteriorate disappaer but the gold that represents the things that deteriorated did not.
So people hold onto gold or money without limit as it does not capture the full cost of deterioration leading to an imminent crisis in an economy that is not growing because the ponzi scheme has been exposed.
One of my top gaming moments ever was launching the rocket in under 6 hours. I launched it at 5:59:40. Then I realized the "There is no spoon" achievement was for 7 hours (and it's now 8 hours after 1.0 launch).
I love programming and I hate games like Factorio where you're (to a degree) doing the same thing with logical thinking and optimization etc.pp. (I like games and I like puzzles, but this feels like work to me, in a language I hate, with an IDE I hate and with no undo).
At least this article doesn't tell me I will love this and I should play it, unlike all the others. So thumbs up for the article :P
I’m in the same boat but I wonder if that’s just because we’re programmers and anything short of perfection is time wasted for us.
When you’re first starting out, it feels amazing to input two numbers, add them together, and print them out to the console. When you’re a professional programmer, it feels like you’re wasting time if you’re not defensively coding against future concerns and potential feature needs.
Likewise in Factorio, I can’t enjoy success in any part of the game because I feel that any investment in one level could potentially be taking away from planning for the next level. Level, in this case, being the current level of technology researched in the game.
I realize that this is irrational but I surely can’t be alone on this.
More than just the native flora and fauna, Satisfactory dumps you in an area that's largely pleasant to be in. Factorio has a very desaturated, green-and-brown "videogame" look, and it's not all that pleasant to look at after a while.
A "mac user" isn't who you are as a person. It's who you're being in a moment of time. If you want to play PC games, buy a machine that handles playing them and use it for those instances. In this case, it looks like they only released Satisfactory on Windows, with mostly good results playing on Linux using Proton.
Streaming clients like GeForce Now have come a long way if you want to play games as a Mac user. It's what I use to play Satisfactory and it works really well in my opinion.
Most of the mods I use are utility and convenience mods... here are some of my favorites:
= Todo List - don't know how I ever lived without this mod, which I use to keep track of what I need to do next... absolutely essential for larger bases. I really wish it could be used 100% from the keyboard, but it's still good despite requiring the use of a mouse.
= Angel's Addons - Storage Options - the only one of the Angel mods I use... it gives me much larger storage containers, like warehouses, so I don't have to bother with the annoyance of dealing with lots of tiny containers
= Attila's Zoom Mod - lets me zoom much further out than the vanilla game does, also lets me view specific positions on the map very quickly and reliably
= Auto Deconstruct - marks drills for deconstruction once the resources they're mining run out... just a nice little convenience mod that stays out of the way 99% of the time, and simply makes the game just a little bit smoother in that I don't have to manually find any of the drills that need deconstructing
= Belt reverser - quickly reverse belts... saves so much time. This should really be in the base game.
= Bob's adjustable inserters - a quick and easy way to adjust where inserters pick up and drop off to... should also really be part of the vanilla game
= Closest first - make construction bots build and deconstruct close things first.. don't know why this isn't the default
= Even Distribution - super useful way of quickly distributing resources over many consumers, instead of loading resources to one consumer at a time.. should also be in the base game, imo
= Exploration Vehicle 1.1 - lets vehicles run over and destroy trees and rocks in the way
= Explosive Termites - quickly destroy annoying trees. There's a Tree Deleter mod I used to use until it stopped working. That was good too, and even faster than the termites.
= Far Reach - some might consider it cheating, but I just find it annoying and a waste of time to always run back and forth across the screen to do something... this lets me do it from anywhere on the screen.. with a zoom mod, my reach becomes even greater.. both of these together with some turrets make fighting vanilla biters too easy, so if you want to fight biters with this combination I'd recommend using a biter enhancement mod like Rampant to make the biters more of a challenge
= Fill4Me - auto-fill items with fuel/ammo when you place them... very convenient. See the above note on the Far Reach mod, as this is another mod that together with Far Reach and the zoom mod makes fighting the biters too easy.
= Ingos Advanced Start - gives you a bunch of bots and an exoskeleton to start with.. I love this, as I really don't enjoy the slow speed and slow construction/deconstruction rate that I'm stuck with in the early game... this lets me get to the fun parts of the game faster. Not recommended for one's first playthrough, but I find it essential afterwards.
= Inventory Repair - uses repair packs auto repair items in one's inventory.. another nice convenience mod that just does the right thing without interaction
= Laser Lines - super useful for aligning stuff perfectly
= Land Mover - dig holes to make landfill... with the Far Reach and a zoom mod using landfill will let you make 100% secure barriers against biters. Some might consider this cheating, others a welcome relief. I just turned off biters completely eventually, so it doesn't matter to me now, but the mod is still useful to me for crossing lakes and the like.
= LTN - Logistics Train Network - not an easy mod to learn to use, but totally worth it for large train networks, and my favorite of mods of its kind, but I'd use it with LTN Combinator and LTN Content Reader for more convenience
= Miniloader - very quick loaders and unloaders that don't impact UPS nearly as much as some similar mods
= Nixie Tubes - a nice way to display info about various signals
= Power+: Power Utilization Meter - adds signals showing useful information about your power networks
= Splatter Guard - keeps you from being run over by trains.. there are a bunch of other mods like this, which I haven't tried... probably anything that does the same thing will be good enough
= Squeak Through - absolutely essential mod that lets you walk through tight spaces you otherwise couldn't
= Train Network for Players - an easy way to call a passenger train to your location
= Vacuum Cleaner - quickly pick up stuff on belts or from the ground.. much more convenient than the vanilla method
= Where is my body - shows where you died... lots of mods to do this sort of thing.. any of them are probably good. Something like this should probably be part of the vanilla game too.
I use many, many, many more mods (over 100 in total).. but this should be a good start for just about anyone.
I've also disabled biters in my games, because I just find them annoying at this point, but when I had them enabled I also liked to use the Rampant mod to make them more challenging, and a bunch of improved weapon mods like Modular Turrets, which I remember liking.
I got addicted to Dyson Sphere Program... already clocked in 100s of hours, pretty much embarrassed to admit how much I play the game.
Restarted it few times to apply what I learned. It is still early in the game, they keep adding things but that thing is really amazing and provided fun to me that I didn't feel in the game for a long time.
> I used to be of the opinion that the computer game Factorio was a colossal waste of talent, burning many billions of dollars of GDP every year.
Oh no, the GDP!
I appreciate most of the rest of the article, but the premise that it's value is tied to it's ability to influence one economic metric is a very flawed lens to view the world through.
I really like builder games (Anno series) but haven't picked up factorio due to concerns of time sink.
Instead tinkering more with self-hosting stuff lately. I find it scratches the same itch - building / optimisation / problem solving vibe but has a slightly more tangible enduring value (something useful + learning)
I think a missing factor here that hasn't really been brought up is Teambuilding. Factorio lends itself to multiplayer very well, and a team working together to solve problems that are not dissimilar to the coding projects they have at work can be easily worth $20.
I love Factorio. One of my top 10 best games ever. I am currently playing Satisfactory as well. It is equally good and share a lot of things with Factorio but also has a nice exploratory feel to it.
This person sounds absolutely insane going on about GDP lost to people enjoying themselves. That said Factorio is much more psychopathic than GTA has ever been
>I often wonder if these specific types of games are redirecting a nontrivial amount of human intellectual output into a deadend. They're explicitly geared to lure in the kind of obsessive tinkerer types who've historically driven scientific and engineering progress. Only now, there's little to no payoff for the rest of humanity if they spend thousands of hours consumed by one of these games. What's Newton's modern equivalent doing right now? Probably perfecting a build order in Stellaris.
Every once in a while on the HN front page you get some article about a programming analogy or an entrepreneurship analogy.
"Here's why the game factorio is like programming or here's why it's like life. yada yada yada"
Yeah, AND this guy takes the next step and turns the analogy into a "mindset."
Great. Revolutionary. First off.. analogy is amazing. Second... turning that analogy into a way of life blows my mind. Is your mind blown too? This guy is a genius.
The next step, (and I've seen plenty of this on HN), is to turn that analogy into a full blown "theory" of some sort... complete with diagrams.
I mean, out of most of the analogy examples posted to HN, Factorio is actually a good one. The observations that the writer makes are all immediately apparent when you fire up the game, and there isn't anything here that I'd call a "deep cut" or a strained metaphor.
Factorio can literally be renamed "Iterative Development: The Game" and players wouldn't find anything confusing about any of it.
What I'm bringing to the table, is helping everyone notice that these posts bring nothing new to the table.
That's the problem with these analogy posts. People like them but they don't offer anything of substance. Think about it. You identified a connection between two things, yet nothing new was introduced. You get this artificial euphoria of seeing a connection but that's it, it's just an illusion.
It seems like this is merely someone's opinion that Factorio may have some transferable skills, namely a mindset-- along with the limitations-- of automation.
I'm not sure why this would be so frustrating for you. It's not like the author themselves went down your slippery slope to full blown theory. If they had? Sure, that would be a bit of the usually breathless attempts at "thoughtleading", but I see no need for preemptive criticism.
Also congratulations for being really tall. I'm about average height.
No it frustrates me when something so obvious needs to be announced 50 million times as if it's some revelatory discovery.
Here a list of games that are unintentionally turing complete:
Dwarf Fortress
OpenTTD
Terraria
Minecraft
Minesweeper
LittleBigPlanet
Baba is You
Factorio
Cities: Skylines
Opus Magnum
Portal 2
Geometry Dash
You can come up with approximately 10 analogy blog posts for each game... written, of course, from a different blog with each post presenting the analogy as if it's some amazing idea. Then of course post it on hackernews and flood the front page with this stuff.
Well, the world is full of people that have never played Factorio. Some of them are programmers, and when they finally play it they get excited about it and want to tell people about it. Independent rediscovery.
And I'll admit to bring irked sometimes when a recurring theme or repost rears its head on HN pg1 for the dozenth time, so I guess I understand your sentiment. But I console myself with the knowledge that what is old and cliche for me is likely to be eternally new for an ever changing subset of readers.
Also thanks for the list of games-- I had no idea some of them were Turing complete, and will enjoy a bit of dugging internet rabbit holes finding out the details of why & how.
I've played Factorio since 0.13 and am a professional programmer.
It bothers me that people see an equivalence between Factorio and Programming. There's some degrees of programming-like problems, such as spanning trees, graph theory, tree-theory, etc. etc. But Factorio is grossly simplified to comp. sci problems in general.
In particular, the Factorio build tree starts at (Iron/Copper/Stone/Coal/Oil) and ends with (Red/Green/Blue/Purple/Yellow/White science).
Most problems are solved with backpressure. The one exception is oil production (Crude-oil -> Heavy/Light/Gas), which can bottleneck other productions. (Ex: if Heavy oil is deadlocked, light-oil is also blocked). But with an "infinite sink" of science (blue/yellow science uses a lot of Petroleum gas), this problem is solved by simply playing the game more.
------------
Real world programming problems are far more complex. Graphs in fact loop more often, simple trees are rare. Data-organization is far more complex.
In contrast, Factorio has a large number of "valid solutions" because its a simpler problem. Keeping things "simply" a tree with only one multi-output (oil production) really is simple in the great scheme of things.
That said, it is more complex than most games. OpenTTD is more complex when it comes to transportation patterns (path signals, entry, exit, and combo signals, block signals. Tunnels, bridges, etc. etc.). I would recommend Factorio players to try OpenTTD, and see if they can create higher-bandwidth OpenTTD routes than Factorio's simplified train system.
------
I know some Comp. Sci. I'm going to make my n-way balancers off of Benes Networks and CLOS Network designs. But I look at "circuits" and see "vector programming system" and not actually a wire-like / circuit system. The things that are "like programming" aren't very clear IMO. Its somewhat rare for me to actually need to use combinators / circuits in Factorio, because the default actions of all entities "just works" most of the time.
Wube / the original designers are clearly good programmers. The system / game they have made "feels like the fun part" of programming, where you connect mostly-completed systems together in a chain that almost always works. That's because the difficult part of design / architecture has already been done for us by Wube.
Actual programmers designing an API for widespread use come across the same problem. You wanna create an interface that's easy to understand and fun to work with. Wube is clearly good at this. But that makes us at best, the "script kiddies" who simply are laying out Wube's designs, more so than actual "programmers" who express ourselves.
IMO anyway. This isn't a bad thing. The fact that its fun despite all this is a huge degree of success from Wube.
Wow, if it is true, I will surely stop playing factorio, because, apparently, some prick on hackernews would think the game's lead dev is not OK, and I am always quick to pigeonhole a person based on his controversial opinion, which I happen to disagree with.
It really reminds me of software in many ways. You fiddle with tiny little things like balancing a belt, and then move on to building belt balancers. You then move up the abstractions to where you're not really placing inserters all the time. Maybe you make some blueprints and you're placing a whole set of nuke power plants in one go, or looking at trains.
The kid loves it, but you can (luckily) tell the difference between what he makes and what I make. That engineer keep-stuff-organized thing takes a bit of time to hone, but he's getting there. He also understands how to find root causes now, based on looking at where there's a blockage in production and tracking back along the chain.
One thing that's interesting is that the game is a bit, you know, dark. I mean we've built hell and the kid doesn't mind. Literally paved paradise with concrete. The air is black with robots, 100k of them at the moment. There's furnaces all over the place. We got rid of the steam power generation but there are huge areas of nukes all over. The natives are getting atomic bombs thrown at them constantly, it takes a while to even get to the nearest spawner. Or water that isn't green.
And yet he doesn't ask about how we destroyed all the cliffs and filled in the lakes, and chopped the trees.
"How should we make it bigger, dad?"