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Comment by snicky | Hacker News Reader

Please, please don't mention Factorio, it's too addictive. I bought it on Steam during Christmas 2 years ago and almost forgot there's a world outside. I spent 80 hours playing it in a couple of days and it was just one game. Later I found out that most people beat it much faster (https://howlongtobeat.com/game.php?id=17455) and it made the guilt of wasting time even stronger.

It is an awesome game though. Just don't start.

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Oh, you liked Factorio? Let me tell you about this game called Oxygen Not Included, it's similar, but with more thermodynamics, and cute little dupes running around...

I only have 560 hours played so far.

You, my friend, are true evil.

Also, I have a lava powerstation.

I like my magma-powered petroleum boiler.

Still haven't built a sour gas boiler, but one of these days I'll get there!

ONI's bugs killed me. You spend a zillion hours building up a colony, then another few hours routing up some wires to get a closed feedback system, and then the system glitches and cant resolve the wire routing or the pipe routing or something and it all breaks down. Frustrating like a programming language with no error messages and a buggy compiler.

When did you last play? They frequently release updates/bugfixes so you might want to pop in again to see if things haven't improved.

Also that's where creative mode really shines - to test out ideas because getting the proper ratios plus fighting bugs can take a lot of trial and error i.e. "debugging".

Do you mean fighting bugs in the code, or literally fighting those weird bugs that fly around the caverns? Do they get aggressive, like the biters in Factorio?

You don't have to fight any critters in ONI, at least not that I'm aware of. You can kill, cook, wrangle, breed and farm them for resources, as many of them provide useful input/outputs, such as feeding Hatches your "trash" in order to produce coal. I often to refer to this list for help with which ones are useful: https://oxygennotincluded.gamepedia.com/Critter

Pokeshells get angry if there are poke eggs near them and will attack your dupes. Other than that, all critters are peaceful.

This was maybe six months ago. Maybe a little less?

I absolutely love Factorio (it's one of my all-time favorite games), and heard a lot of good things about Oxygen Not Included, and the let's plays I saw of it looked great. But I found it really boring when I actually tried it. YMMV

I'm also extremely addicted to Factorio, and terribly afraid of getting hooked on Defacto. And not only because it uses a similar 3x5 font as Mike Koss's "The Terminal" terminal emulator for the Apple ][:

https://web.archive.org/web/20051217102712/http://mckoss.com...

When I got bored with Oxygen Not Included, I switched it into sandbox mode, and played around with the paint brush tools, creating and cooking and freezing different materials, like a KidPix-like radioactive chemistry set, mixing together and juxtapositioning and melting and freezing all the different kinds of solids, liquids, gasses, lava, oil, water, ice, the hard vacuum of space, etc, to see how they all react with each other.

Here's a video Pawsome Gaming made of Sandbox mode, but I went a bit crazier with dangerous combinations of water and lava and other weird materials:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NniVJd89Gqk

After a while, that got boring too, but don't miss out on that part of the experience!

Also: I'm only going to say this once, because even saying it once might ruin somebody else's life like it's ruined mine, but: RimWorld!

What I love in Factorio and dislike in ONI is how hard it is to build closed system that can last for hours in ONI. And it's hard to deconstruct in ONI (esp. when heat and liquid is involves).

Factorio I found you could make some pretty stupid setups work with enough determination. My first rocket launch after a 30 hour file with one row of conveyers per resource is proof of that.

ONI I found has a wall, somewhere in what I think is referred to as the early midgame where if you messed up your initial base design you've lost. I've never managed to make it over this wall. Generally the reason I lose is some combo of bad gas/bad power management.

Beating Factorio quickly is not the primary point. It's more of an engineering sandbox than an objective. (Of course optimizing for time is valid.)

Also, please tell me how to pack 80 hours of anything into a couple days. :-)

The primary point of Factorio is what you want it to be, right? There are explicitly speedrunning achievements so surely that type of thing is the point for some folks. And to a certain mindset (time) efficiency is one thing that is fun to optimize.

I've watched a bunch of Factorio vidoes (like KathrineOfSky, and her multi player guest games), and it strikes me how vastly different people's styles are. There was one where she was playing with a German guy who LOVED filling in nice neat square coast lines, and she liked to leave them all "natural".

> Beating Factorio quickly is not the primary point.

Maybe, but once you get into speed running it, it certainly feels like doing things slowly is against the point. (That and everything before robots feels so glacially slow... hard to adjust with Seablock and robots and good logistics chests being so far down the tech tree...)

You start on a Friday, forego sleep and responsibilities, and let your weekend couple-of-days spill into a Monday with a brief distracted work day and the early hours of Tuesday.

Did I really need to make a 2x2 self-regulating nuclear power plant that is fed by a 3x2 beaconed kovarex sushi belt? No, but I wanted to.

Come on, just play for 10 minutes!

My last 3 Factorio games have started well, then I try "the big rebuild", then it starts to feel like work and I go program instead.

I had much the same experience with SpaceChem. I haven't dared buy Factorio.

I use unrepentant coal-powered spaghetti until I get nukes and bots. Then I auto-deconstruct my shame and let the bots deal with my blueprints. :D

I've wasted 2000+ hours of my life according to Steam on Factorio. At this moment I'm beyond shame to admit it.

I played it for a couple hours (4-5) with a friend and then stopped, because I was bored out of my mind.

It’s called cracktorio for a reason. The factory must grow.

Factorio is like entertainment jackpot. You pay $30 and have endless entertainment for a lifetime. I played upwards 300 hours, still no sign of getting burn-out. Probably at some point I'll move on, but it's a practically infinite game...

I'm literally 3000 hours into Factorio and haven't burnt out on it. In fact, I'm just barely starting to get into the mods; I've done two complete Seablock runs (0.16 and 0.17), and I'm currently doing a Brave New World + Seablock run.

Lol I feel that, I still haven't even launched 1 rocket. Very close though!

Have they improved the beginning of Seablock? The last time I tried, the beginning of it was so glacially slow that it didn't really feel fun.

... then I probably shouldn't tell you about satisfactory.. add a dimension to your factory.

For others looking for Factorio-like games, I highly highly recommend Satisfactory.

Any idea when it will be out on Steam?

They said Soon(tm) on their latest trailer.

Factorio is apparently Tobi Luetke's (CEO of Shopify) current favorite game, and in a podcast he mentioned it helped him hone the faculties needed to run a company.

You know, it can be completed even faster https://www.speedrun.com/factorio

ooo, nefrums got pushed down today.... so I expect he will do another run pretty soon, he usually live streams it on twitch. Given his last run, and all the mistakes he made, he should be able to get sub 2 hours

You clearly enjoyed it. So why consider it a waste of time?

over 1000 hours of entertainment. for less than $30. can't beat that. zero guilt.

https://factoryidle.com/ is another similar game but it's browser based for those who aren't on a platform supported by Factorio.

Dear god... Steam says 800+ hours but I stopped playing it on steam a while back and shudder to think how much time I've dropped into that game. Easily over 1500 if not closer to 2000.

my fastest to finish the game so far is just over 4 hours. Which is about twice the fastest speedruns. Check out Nefrums who does speedruns of factorio... https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCo9CIGA3vGlkuGGzTLPvJ5g

Note that self-reported numbers like that tend to be biased towards those who are optimizing for time or are more experienced.

I've spent over 100 hours on Factorio. Somehow I still haven't managed to launch the rocket. I always ending up some cool mod and I start a new game.

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