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.
