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Comment by donio | Hacker News Reader

https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry is an open source game with some similarities to Factorio

Here is the pathfinder code:

https://github.com/Anuken/Mindustry/blob/master/core/src/io/...

https://factoryidle.com/ is another, similar game, in-browser, for those on platforms where Factorio is not supported.

What platforms does Factorio not support that people play games on? According to steam it support windows, mac, and linux.

Mobile or non-x86 hardware?

Yeah, there was a recent PowerPC request (following IBM open sourcing their chips and them getting into the enthusiast price range), but the forum moderators answered that a supported version didn't make economic sense, and an unsupported version would be a bad idea :

https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=76453

(The devs themselves didn't comment, but they probably think in a similar way...)

This looks like the same framework as a recent reactor idler I player recently. I think it is the same dev. It was horribly time gated and had a scummy practice of offering the player to “buy fast ticks” and then balanced the game around it. I like reactor games (and am working on one, praised be to ic2 and gregtech) so I played it, but I cheated in infinite fast ticks. Even then the game took me weeks of open browser time and CPU load to get to the end. Reactor games have inherent metagame difficulties to overcome and this dev exploited them to make money. I am not a fan of them.

What's a reactor game?

They’re a small class of game where you have a 2D cartesian grid where you can place heat sources, heat spreaders, and heat dissipators. The goal is to maximize heat production without melting down. The first instance I know of such a game is industrialCraft2’s nuclear reactor. You can play with it here.

https://github.com/MauveCloud/Ic2ExpReactorPlanner/releases

Nuclear reactors are fun because fuel cells are also neutron sources, so their heat output increases if you place them adjacent to each other. The allure of these games, to me, is a geometry playground where you can make your number bigger if you do a little mental math. The 2D grid nature limits complexity if you have simple rules and components, so the solution is to have more rules and components. ;) I know a fair bit about the tool set of these games just by spending many hours playing and thinking about them, but I’m not going to turn this post into a design document. I should write/publish one at some point so maybe fewer clumsy balance mistakes are made in future games.

There are instances of games like this popping up. Some of them are low effort money grabs, but some are okay.

https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/comments/6jfuxq/l...

I have thoughts for solving the idle nature of the game by having diminishing returns on a design as time goes on (perhaps changing what metric a player wants to maximize) or by giving them complete control of the tick rate (this seems like a bad solution since some players may feel the urge to just idle anyway). I want to add in more fun designs, equivalent to multiblock structures in minecraft. Perhaps a fusion reactor that requires spending energy on confinement coils and heat injection.

Mindustry have small maps, Factorio have endless procedurally generated maps, that is a big difference.

Thanks for the link.

Do you know any similar games that don't focus on tower defense and military (like factorio does)? I love the resource flows, transport problems and factory building.

You can play Factorio with the enemies turned off. I do that too, because I find getting distracted by enemies annoying. The downside is that the whole military part of the research tree becomes pointless.

Another way is to have enemies but set them to be peaceful until you attack them first. Downside is that it's finicky. The enemies love to roam randomly, so if you accidentally hit one with a car or build a rail track too close to one of their bases such that one of them wanders on to it and gets run over, all the enemies on the map will instantly become hostile.

Have you played the Seablock mod? It's basically that.

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SeaBlock Also some of the total conversion mods (IR, Youki, etc) allow an insane investment into the macro, you can just turn off bugs.

I'd really hesitate to say that factorio focuses on tower defense/military. There is defense, but unless you are ramping up the difficulty the bugs aren't really that much of a problem - more of a low level pressure unless you expand deep into their areas - and, you have the option to turn them off completely when starting a new game, and you wouldn't be losing a major part of the appeal (like minecraft with creepers off).

I have played factorio a lot, and at this point I'm looking for a different game, or something where the design does not include bugs in the pointless way factorio does. It's an otherwise fantastic game. Maybe it's not even wrong to have adversaries, but the way it's done in factorio is so simplified (infinite bugs from outer space) it seems like satire.

You could always check out gregtech :^)

Gregtech new horizons is the only bastion of the industrial vision, but unfortunately the eccentric devs focus a bit too much on manual gatey things.

how does this game claim to only need 100MB of ram? small maps sizes?

edit: woops i remembered wrong. i wonder how sales are going for this game?

Since it's currently[1] the 8th best-rated game on Steam of all time, I'd say really well.

-[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Reviews_DESC

Steam Store ranking is a bit iffy (and you included DLC and bundles), SteamDB ranks Factorio as n=°2 (behind Portal 2) :

https://steamdb.info/stats/gameratings/

Also, the OP was talking about Mindustry, which, at 89% is in good position too !

https://steamdb.info/app/1127400/graphs/

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