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"
