What is interesting about Factorio | Hacker News Reader

What is interesting about Factorio

fuseki.net

303 pointsivee303 comments

As someone that stopped playing games in university, I've found it weirdly hard to get back into games many years later.

Factorio seems like the type of game I would've liked as a teenager, but now it just feels like work to me.

As do most interesting games. It seems like there's a learning curve to games that I don't want to spend the time dealing with anymore.

I understand the need to treat life as a dichotomy between work and play, but I feel you might have lost some of the magic of your childhood. For me it's the opposite, I hated complex games as a child but really enjoy them today.

For me, the best feeling is working hard for something and really getting into the details and enjoying all the complexity of the experience / challenge.

I think that most human beings are wired to enjoy this kind of activity if they can get past the energy activation barrier.

I've been in situations where I did not value the above. Looking back, I believe I was:

- too mentally drained to enjoy anything

- any free time goes to diving into Random Access Media (reddit, hnews, youtube, etc)

- Never feeling full of energy or excitement and unable to find meaningful recharge

I saw a psychiatrist and got diagnosed with depression (systematically defined as not wanting to do anything at least once a week). Since then I've taking an active approach to monitoring and improving my mental state. Specifically:

1. Identifying true energy restoring activities: 3 of them are - 1) engaging in conversations where there's a decent amount of laughter 2) Sleep / naps and 3) exercise

2. Identifying energy traps - things you do when you have no energy but don't restore energy. Several examples: 1) Netflix, 2) social media, 3) reddit, 4) youtube

3. Figuring out my mental health dietary needs (what is it that you're longing for that is unconsciously affecting your decision making) and making active plans to get them in a regular way. This could be social validation, laughter, new engaging experiences, feelings of accomplishment or accolade, etc.

Instead of feeling like I don't want to do anything when I wake up, I more often find life as exciting and looking forward to the challenges and new experiences of each day. And yes, I enjoy Factorio a lot when I have the time to play (which is rare).

Thank you for sharing this. I've been feeling out of sorts and overwhelmed[0], and this really resonated.

I generally tend to avoid things like (3) unless sharing them with someone else, and this feels like the reason why, moreso than being a waste of time or generally "not helpful for my mental state". There are plenty other things that I still do, which click as "energy traps" now that I read this - gonna reframe into sources/sinks internally, but still. Thank you.

I will likely lose the location of this comment by the time I've really tested cycling between sink and sources (which should take a few weeks or so at least), but I'm going to spend some time exploring my energy landscape today and see where it takes my well-being.

[0] Work has been nuts, so some of the overwhelm is just normal, but I suspect another portion of overwhelm is well explained by the energy metaphor.

> 2. Identifying energy traps - things you do when you have no energy but don't restore energy. Several examples: 1) Netflix, 2) social media, 3) reddit, 4) youtube

So, do you avoid them now? If so, what do you do when you're tired after work? It's hard to feel entire afternoons with exercise, sleep and conversations...

The ideal cycle you want is focus, rest, focus. It's an energy trap if you get tired from focusing but your rest activity doesn't refresh you back into focus mode.

In my experience, it's not that you replace energy traps with energy recovery - you instead create plans that allow for more focus, rest, focus cycles throughout the day.

If your work drains you completely when you go home, maybe you can try to create some plans for how to approach work holistically, sparing some energy for life outside of work.

For instance, create a plan that ends the work day with a lot of energy to spare by adding in a lot more rest cycles, including naps (laying down with eyes closed also restores energy) and walks. I also find creative outlets like writing or music quite restful, and as others have mentioned, a surprisingly lot of things restore energy - you just have to discover and note them down.

Not the OP, but for me energy restoring activities are “active” ones, like hobbies where you create/build something. Working on a painting, photo, sculpting, writing, working on a side project, playing intelligent games with your dog, ... Passive activities, like consuming TV or Netflix or worse social networks, at least for me are draining my energy levels.

By they definition, isn't going to work an energy restoring activity?

A hobby is something you go out of your way to do because of personal passion. If you approach your job like it's a vacation, then probably.

Wait, if you don't want to do anything once a week you're diagnosed as depressed? How many people don't want to just sit around even once every week?!

The official stance from my psychiatrist was, if you have times where nothing seems that interesting to do or there is no motivation to do normal day to day activities, and that happens regularly (once a week) then you're clinically diagnosed as having minor depression. If you have those several times a week it can be major depression.

Me for one. I find it hard to sit down and watch TV for more than an hour at a time.

I have a foot injury right now and the mental adjustment to sitting more instead of being up and around is...significant.

Not even once a week?

Is your job stimulating or boring? I have a hard time expending energy learning to play games to solve fake problems, when I could be using that energy to solve real problems, including, as you note, my health. Also, raising my kids.

Ironically, what you wrote often explains the misery of work. After all, it's hard expending energy to solve fake problems at work, when there are real and more interesting problems to solve after work.

It is interesting to hear a similar feeling (I use to be heavily addicted prior to university). While I still do play games, I focus on short ones (story-driven like Life is Strange [1]) or ones that can be decomposed into intensive moments (e.g. StarCraft 2, Doom 2016/Eternal [2], Black Mesa, Ori and the Blind Forest/Will of the Wisps).

I am not even tempted to play games that are work, or longer endeavor. To the point, that while I love the Witcher universe (read all books before it was cool; like, 20 years ago) I decided to rather watch all cutscenes than play. (I call it gaming porn.) With Factorio - I know that 15 years ago it would totally addict me (I was to SimCity, and Transport Tycoon Deluxe; I have a kink for building and maintaining systems).

Now... emotional catharsis, or intense flow of shooter, is what I play for. Working for dozens or hundreds of hours - I prefer to spend the time creating something. It is not (only) "I am adult and blah, blah" - just I know I would feel nauseous guilt on one side, while some sense of accomplishment when creating something for others.

[1] "Games in which you talk - and get immersed" https://medium.com/@pmigdal/games-in-which-you-walk-and-get-...

[2] "Doom 2016 vs Doom Eternal: UI side-by-side" https://medium.com/@pmigdal/doom-2016-vs-doom-eternal-ui-sid...

I've found that I am still willing to play RPGs that have some decent plot or game mechanics, but only if I'm able to skip past the grinding phases—either through cheats or by playing older games in an emulator with a literal fast forward button.

When it comes to city builders and similar games (including Factorio), I'm too easily distracted by the metagame puzzle of wondering about optimal strategies. I can't play them for long before I end up closing the game itself and pulling up documentation about the game's rules and internals, and that usually breaks me out of a potentially addictive cycle.

Even if you don't play, I highly recommend following the Factorio Friday blog posts. The development team is very transparent about what they are working on and will often dive into interesting problems and solutions, including failed attempts. They are both technical and approachable.

Interesting that you have the same feeling.

I used to like RTS-style/city builder games and put endless hours in them (think simcity, rollercoaster tycoon, settlers, ... ).

I barely play games anymore, but now I focus more on short (sidescroller) action games. Where each level lasts only a few minutes. (super meat boy, zombie night terror, hotline miami, ...)

Maybe it's a case of instant gratification seeking. But it seems to work for me.

Similarly, I mostly stopped playing video games few a few years after getting out of the habit in university. When I tried playing a new game, it just didn't grab my attention and I didn't feel like continuing playing.

In the last couple of years, I have had a few games finally make me feel the enjoyment that I remembered feeling when I was younger. And examining my own feelings when playing, what strikes me is that the first 5 to 10 hours of a game with some depth can be quite un-enjoyable, and they become dramatically more engaging once I've gotten over that hump. I think that was the case when I was younger as well, but when I had more free time on my hands it didn't feel like as much of a waste of time.

Same here. I was introduced to Factorio by a friend who setup a multiplayer server for us and a couple of others. The teamwork held my interest for a bit longer than other games, but even there I eventually just spent my time clearing out enemy nests rather than working on the factory. I’m a programmer, I already spend most of my day wiring things together endlessly.

> As someone that stopped playing games in university, I've found it weirdly hard to get back into games many years later.

> Factorio seems like the type of game I would've liked as a teenager, but now it just feels like work to me.

Same. I was an avid AoE, Survival Horror and Gran Turismo nerd (quitting right before the GT academy happened to my dismay) and I held quite a few records during the outbeak days. But it fell off my radar entirely after sophomore year in University.

I got into Factorio for a week after Steam allowed Bitcoin purchases and I had a go as it looked interesting; I ended up playing like 6 hours a day only to come to the same conclusion you did: this is work, with clearly little to no ROI or ultimate gratification.

So with that in mind, I went on youtube, saw the ending and got over it and stopped a time sink right away.

Even when I thought I'd try to create a solar only Factorio factory, only to see one on Youtube and hearing the guy sunk 1000s of hours into it and scoffed at the idea.

I uninstalled it entirely when I realized how the gaming Industry was migrating toward a free-ware micro tx based business model that relies on in game purchases for upgrades like Fortnite.

These things are designed and optimized for targeting those with addictive behavioural patterns.

I still want to build a driving simulator like this one day, but half the process and challenge will be the build itself:

https://www.carscoops.com/2020/04/this-guy-turned-a-mini-coo...

I actually located an ideal candidate on craigslist: a Focus hatchback with a blown drive train for $700 that I wanted to convert to Colin McRae's Martini Livery WRC car from the 90s.

>I uninstalled it entirely when I realized how the gaming Industry was migrating toward a free-ware micro tx based business model that relies on in game purchases for upgrades like Fortnite.

but... Factorio is literally the antithesis of this.

The idea of "seeing the ending" of Factorio undermining its appeal seems disconnected from my own experience. I'm not sure how giving up a game with no micro transactions helps that issue with the gaming industry either.

> The idea of "seeing the ending" of Factorio undermining its appeal seems disconnected from my own experience. I'm not sure how giving up a game with no micro transactions helps that issue with the gaming industry either.

I guess it was the stark realization that the Industry was in the midst of shifting to this predatory business model and that I (seemingly) was also prone to the pitfalls of its optimization that did my head in... I didn't need to divert my attention away from my work or my relationship, and yet I still managed to spend 6 hours a day playing and researching how to get the most efficient layout and upgrades for a game I only found by a random impulse purchase.

I'm well aware that Factorio doesn't have micro txs, as I mentioned: I paid for it in BTC.

I guess it seemed like in my absence the gaming Industry took what was once a seemingly innocent, fun thing you did to pass the time or play with friends with known upfront costs for development/expansions and hardware into an altogether exploitative trap that was refined by what appeared to me at least, as the same addiction based conditioning beavhiour patterns seen in Social media platforms.

Fortnight went on to make over a Billion dollars, countless of stories of kids stealing their parents credit card in the process (and then uploaded to social media) showed how effective their strategies were, at least on impressionable minds; so, I'd say my intuition turned out to be right.

So much so it became a meme:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbAMrNpMrg8

I guess when I saw how underwhelming something like Factorio is when it ends it made me realize I need to cut my losses and focus on something that actually enhances my quality of Life? Facrorio seemed more like a distraction to me, then and now.

Factorio was mildly amusing at best, it reminded me of a more intricate look at what the building up resources portion of RTS games could be; by contrast I'm looking forward and prepared to sinking tons of hours on Cyberpunk 2077 and AoE 4, but that's mainly because they've been in development for so long and I've followed them closely since the beginning.

But, in practice I'm fairly sure that my initial excitement will fizzle out to my other hobbies, as I have so many.

Another anecdote to support this observation: I bought Watch Dogs 1 and 2 for PS4 when 2 came out to support the genre/studio, but I hadn't owned a console since PS2. They sat in their shrink wrap for years.

I recently got the time/chance to play and got a friend to lend me his PS4 when he went on vacation. I played 1 and it was fun in a GTA kind of way and I got to the last mission in about 2 weeks, which I couldn't beat so I went youtube saw the ending(s) and was satisfied enough to then start 2.

I must have gotten 4 hours into it before I lost all interest and just watched the no commentary 'cut-scene movie' someone uploaded in the background while I went back to working on other stuff. I can't even remember how it ends now, which goes to show how much I was paying attention. The plot was solid, and entertaining, I just preferred to do other stuff instead.

"Factorio was mildly amusing at best, it reminded me of a more intricate look at what the building up resources portion of RTS games could be; by contrast I'm looking forward and prepared to sinking tons of hours on Cyberpunk 2077 and AoE 4, but that's mainly because they've been in development for so long and I've followed them closely since the beginning."

These aren't criticisms of Factorio so much as statements about your own taste in games. You just seem to like other types of games, which is fine, but it's not a slight on Factorio.

I personally hate FPS games and almost every 3D game out there... does that mean these games suck? No, they're just not for me, but plenty of other people love them, and in fact they are the most popular type of games out there. I think that's sad, but the people who love those games don't care a bit about what I think, and the games industry isn't going to change direction for me.

I'm personally overjoyed that a game like Factorio exists, and consider it a near miracle that the developers put so much love and effort in to this game in an ocean of trashy, super buggy, low effort, generic games out there. They really carved out a very special niche for themselves, and I couldn't be more grateful.

I just hope they open source it eventually, so it can never die.

As someone who has recently got back into games, Factorio is a ton of work—and I love strategy games like Civilization.

Playing Factorio is not unlike doing engineering work itself. Initially, I was hooked. After a while, the brainpower it takes to build and refactor large factories felt too demanding.

It began to feel more like work, than enjoyment.

That's exactly what happened to me. I played it obsessively for a few weeks and then it just started feeling like I was solving the same kind of problems I already solve all day for money, and if I was going to be doing that I might as well be getting paid. Which I guess shows how much I love my job (or at least the fun bits of it) but also kind of took the wind out of my sails in-game.

Edit: Also I got to the endgame point where you spend 99% of your time just setting up new mines and rail depots to keep feeding the beast. That was a fair while ago though so maybe there's more to do endgame, or maybe I'd just finished the game which is also OK.

I go through a cycle like that every so often. I start a new game of factorio after a long break, get super addicted for a week or two, and then get a feeling that its just work, and I'd rather be working on some python project because I don't have to deal with biters attacking me in VS code.

Late game factorio feels exactly like coding, except you can't copy paste as well and make loops and other time saving abstractions.

"Late game factorio feels exactly like coding, except you can't copy paste as well and make loops and other time saving abstractions."

I'm not sure what you mean by "as well", but Factorio does have various rather sophisticated methods of copying and pasting. For instance, there's the regular Control-C sort of copy, which allows you to rotate the entities before pasting, should you prefer. Then there are blueprints, which let you select which entities in a copied blueprint to store, what icon(s) to assign them, and let you have a library of blueprints and folders of blueprints even. That's more sophisticated than some text editors' copy/paste features.

As far as loops go, you can actually create loops in Factorio.

First, there's the simple belt loop. Those can be pretty useful (like with Koravex enrichment process, and coal-powered coal miners powering themselves or each other are also pretty popular).

Inserters can also be used in loops (from box to box, for instance).

Then there are more sophisticated loops involving trains and entire factory groupings.

Then there's the circuit network and combinators, which provide a visual programming language in which loops are possible. Some mods provide combinators will expose the full power of Lua programming to you in-game.

This is not to mention the possibility of writing your own Factorio modules in Lua, which literally is programming in text in a traditional language, and where you can write loops to your heart's content.

As for "time saving abstractions", with the Factorissimo2 mod, you can even abstract away parts of your factory and reuse those parts as modules. These modular parts can themselves be abstracted or nested as submodules of other modules, etc.

I dont mean like a literal loop, but gameplay loops that you cant automate.

This includes things like plopping down yet another mining base, plopping down yet more production, etc...

You can make blueprints for all theses things, but you can't automate the blueprint placing. Sometimes you need to reconfigure circuit stuff for special train stops, so they get the right products, and as far as I know this can't be done via blueprint.

It just gets tedious after a while, especially because it doesn't take all that much to build a rocket, making it unnecessary if you just want to beat the game.

"You can make blueprints for all theses things, but you can't automate the blueprint placing"

You can, actually. Check out the "recursive blueprints" mod.

And yes, someone made an automatically self-expanding base using said mod. It's impressive.

Factorio is a game to automate things. So finally I thought that watching Factorio play on YouTube is ultimate automation.

Definitely. The article is pretty subjective; I'd say there are lots of glaring flaws in Factorio. I played it for a while, stopped when I hit a major problem, but when I came back the game had changed quite a bit and I couldn't get back into it.

Flaws of Factorio in no specific order:

• The car has maddeningly terrible physics. The OP claims this yields "comic fun". It doesn't. It just means you're constantly crashing into trees and needing to repair the car.

• At some point I hit a biter nest I couldn't beat, couldn't go around (some sort of story based misson). There was NO way past this obstacle. No way to make the game easier, no way to beat them, I was even reduced to looking for cheat codes or ways to hack the game files (there weren't any). So I just dropped the game. The sudden cliff-edge in difficulty made no sense and felt like they hadn't play-tested their own game properly.

• The GUI is terrible. I have no idea why he thinks it's good.

1. Placing rails is an exercise in frustration because it's so easy to mis-align things and end up with two pieces of rail that don't quite line up, forcing you to then dig it all up and try again.

2. Placing signals and stations is an equally frustrating exercise in finicky nitpicking. There are lots of ways to set up a railway line such that it simply doesn't work, with no hints about why or what you did wrong. It feels like debugging an embedded system.

3. The article cites "TIL I learned a shortcut" being a meme - that's because the GUI doesn't help you learn any shortcuts.

4. The icons are very small yet high detail, making them difficult to distinguish sometimes. There's no way to zoom anything to make this better. The colour schemes are washed out. The art is just unattractive.

• Randomly generated maps mean you may often end up with an unusual shortage of resources, or things in weird locations.

• The core mechanic is extremely hard to actually improve at. Although I enjoyed making factories at first, I pretty quickly realised this was too much like programming to actually be enjoyable long term. Factories quickly end up drowning in 'tech debt' if you aren't experienced, so you're constantly tempted to restart levels and try again to make a more sustainable factory, but then you end up stuck again later when you obtain some new bit of tech and realise your factory is wrongly structured for the next part of the game again.

The article hints at this last problem. He says "As tempting as it is, don't restart a new factory when you want to rebuild. Just learn how to use bots to deconstruct, and fix it. It'll be more fun that way."

Er, great. And how do I learn how to use bots to do that? The game did eventually get a few half-hearted tutorials that I found actually more confusing than the game itself, but I don't recall any about bots. You quickly realise that most of the information you need to learn the game is on random user-written wikis.

Factorio has managed to get some market success despite being pretty badly built in many ways. I'd definitely recommend checking it out for the novel conveyer-belt mechanic, but if you like building games Cities: Skylines will be much more satisfying and a far more professionally built product.

>> At some point I hit a biter nest I couldn't beat, couldn't go around (some sort of story based misson). There was NO way past this obstacle......

The research tree gives you many different ways to kill a biter nest: * Flame Throwers * Turrets / Laser Turrets * Personal Laser Defense * Combat Robots * Tank * Artillery * Atomic Bomb

>> Factorio has managed to get some market success despite being pretty badly built in many ways.

Maybe the game is not for you. But you are way off base here. The Factorio team has built a very solid product here.

Just want to second how solidly built the game feels. There's definitely a learning curve which keeps on going for many hours (and I think that's a big part of the appeal) and there's some missing in-game information that I've found myself having to look up online - that much is true.

But the UX has incredible amounts of well-thought out polish. Different sized hitboxes for different components, often really favoring playability makes navigating bases really handy. Live map view with the ability to zoom into a location you're not currently near to get a real view of the factory at that point. Unrealistic long reach. Smart notifications on events happening in the base. Graphs diagramming pollution generation and electricity use by factory component type spanning the whole game period. Map layers showing which zones are protected by your defenses, or the extent of spread of pollution, or the routes and locations of your automated trains. And dozens of really useful shortcuts as mentioned.

The game would be perfectly playable without any of these and still be really fun but the love and attention put in by the devs is very clear. And the most amazing thing is seeing all of these things happening all at the same time with thousands of moving pieces updating at 60hz and the game still runs smooth as butter. As a developer I've been very impressed by how smoothly this game runs. And as a gamer I have seen much much simpler games put computers to the test to achieve much less.

"the UX has incredible amounts of well-thought out polish"

I agree so much with this. The UX seems so incredibly well thought out.. much more than virtually any game I've ever played.

There are some wrinkles and annoyances here and there, but virtually everything I've had complaints about while playing the vanilla game I found mods for later that solved it.

The only major complaint I still have about the UX of the game is the circuit network and combinators, which are a very clunky attempt at visual programming that don't provide enough feedback to keep from descending in to spaghetti code when doing something of even moderate complexity, and debugging these things is an absolute nightmare.

This was during some sort of story-driven tutorial in which biters would swarm a base after a few minutes of play, so research wasn't relevant. There was no way to get past them except by just beating them out action style. I did search pretty thoroughly.

"This was during some sort of story-driven tutorial in which biters would swarm a base after a few minutes of play, so research wasn't relevant"

I have heard of this issue, and have seen a screenshot of someone else in the demo where the game placed the biters way, way, way too close to the player's base. That's just unfair, especially for a newcomer to the game.

I'd consider this a bug in the demo, and would report it as such to the developers.

In my own playthrough of the demo, about a year or two ago, I did not have this issue. The biters were well away from my base, and I had ample time to research the technology I'd need to beat them by the time they became a serious threat. I think they must have messed up the demo sometime after that.

The workaround for this is to play the full game, and forget the demo. There are plenty of tutorial videos on youtube which you can watch which will help you with any part of the game you don't understand, and in the full game you can choose a map that doesn't have any biters near by (or even make them peaceful so you don't have to worry about them at all).

I was playing the purchased game, so it wasn't a demo.

It was on a level where you had to reach a computer in some crashed rocket, if I recall correctly. You had to build turrets and keep them filled with ammo, but you started in a corner of the map with no base or raw materials, so you really had to move quickly before the ammo the game gave you to start with ran out and you became overwhelmed. You also had to use grenades to take out a biter nest so you could get to the rocket, and had a limited number of those too. So it was basically an action game rather than a building game at that point and a very badly balanced one.

But like I said I felt there were a lot of other issues. I really wanted to like the game, but "solid" wasn't the impression it left me with.

"The car has maddeningly terrible physics. The OP claims this yields "comic fun". It doesn't. It just means you're constantly crashing into trees and needing to repair the car."

I agree about the car physics, but there are mods which will let your car run over trees and rocks without taking damage. You still have to be careful about running in to parts of your base, but bots can almost instantly repair both your car and whatever you hit if you do hit it. Also, there are mods to make the car physics more realistic, but it's still a pain to drive... especially over a network in multi-player where there's lag.

"At some point I hit a biter nest I couldn't beat, couldn't go around (some sort of story based misson). There was NO way past this obstacle. No way to make the game easier, no way to beat them"

You can turn on peaceful mode, and various mods exist to reduce the difficulty of the biters.

"The GUI is terrible. I have no idea why he thinks it's good."

I love the GUI. I think it's really well done for a game of this complexity.

"Placing rails is an exercise in frustration because it's so easy to mis-align things and end up with two pieces of rail that don't quite line up, forcing you to then dig it all up and try again."

This is easily solved by copying and pasting already aligned portions of rails. Another way to do this is by clicking on the arrow at the end of a stretch of rails and that'll let you extend them and move them around without committing until you like the layout (kind of hard to explain with words, but it's very useful and I think it should eliminate any placing issues you have that you don't just want to use copy/paste for). Finally, there are rail blueprints you could use, and even automated blueprint placement (see the "recursive blueprints" mod) than can be programmed to be as precise as you want.

"The article cites "TIL I learned a shortcut" being a meme - that's because the GUI doesn't help you learn any shortcuts."

Not true. The game shows you tooltips when you hover over portions of the GUI, and those tooltips show shortcuts (if there are any). So there's definitely plenty of shortcut discoverability in this game. Also, if you look in the "Controls" settings, you can search for game features that have shortcuts. That's great for discoverability (though it would be even better if you could do a reverse-search by typing a shortcut and be shown which feature that shortcut activates, which Factorio can't do as far as I know).

"The icons are very small yet high detail, making them difficult to distinguish sometimes. There's no way to zoom anything to make this better. The colour schemes are washed out. The art is just unattractive."

I agree about the small, unzoomable icons, which can be a bit hard to read sometimes, but at least for me playing on 1920x1080 resolution, it's rarely a significant annoyance. Very rarely I need to know what something is and have a hard time figuring it out because of the size of the little icon.. and usually in those cases I can get more information on the entity by mousing over it or clicking on it. 99% of the time that's not an issue, though.

As for the art style.. yeah, it's pretty bland. There are some mods which enhance the art a bit, but I've yet to see something that makes the game really beautiful.

Fortunately, the sound effects in the game are pretty good, and somewhat make up for the lack of visual flare.

"Randomly generated maps mean you may often end up with an unusual shortage of resources, or things in weird locations."

There are a number of things you can do about this

First, you can preview maps and control various settings that affect the random placement of resources. If you don't like the way things are placed on a random map, you can try another.

Second, you can edit your own map and that way have no randomness at all, if you don't want it.

Third, you can use someone else's hand-edited map.

"Although I enjoyed making factories at first, I pretty quickly realised this was too much like programming to actually be enjoyable long term."

This is a matter of personal preference. Personally, I enjoy the similarity to programming, and actually find it less annoying and mind-numbing than ordinary programming. Factorio programming is more fun for me than regular programming (except for combinators and the circuit network, which really are super annoying for anything even moderately complex).

"Factories quickly end up drowning in 'tech debt' if you aren't experienced"

Well, that's where playing the game more helps.. just like in any game, you get better at it by playing.

"you're constantly tempted to restart levels and try again to make a more sustainable factory, but then you end up stuck again later when you obtain some new bit of tech and realise your factory is wrongly structured for the next part of the game again"

I find myself getting better and better at this each time I play, and when I watch videos of really expert players play the game I can see that much more sophisticated organization is possible.

"how do I learn how to use bots to do that?"

I'd encourage you to search on youtube for videos on any part of the game you struggle to understand. There are a wealth of tutorials on there.

Also, I can recommend the #factorio channel on the Esper IRC network, the Factorio forum and r/factorio on Reddit. There are many expert users on there who would be happy to help you.

That’s exactly where I’m at. Played games nearly constantly until the instant I got a full time job and could actually afford a nice computer. Now I just watch other people play games online because I can’t bother to keep up on the computer hardware scene.

Basic dell computers with any video card play games fine. The hardware scene is a benchmarks "game" hobby on its own, separate from the video games.

Yup; I've played factorio on a 2016 laptop and a 2011 desktop, the latter of which is also my "Steam machine". Bad enough hardware eventually limits what you can play, but the barrier to entry is low.

I still play Factorio on a clunky, old, el-cheapo laptop I got in 2013, and it still plays fine in single player (except on really busy screens when zoomed way out, when it crawls). Playing multiplayer over a network can also get really painful, with massive slowdowns in busy areas and in combat, despite only being a few milliseconds away from the server.

I really need to get a new machine.

I have the exact same feeling with games as you now that I have a job and kids. I used to enjoy games like factorio (SimCity, Civilization, Roller Coaster Tycoon, etc) but they do feel like work now!

What I enjoy now instead is actually watching gameplay on YouTube. It gives me a quick fix of the fun without a big investment in time. Also many of the videos can be funny!

This is what I do too, either watch videos of other people playing new games or play the old games that I already know and love (Diablo, Alpha Centauri, Starcraft, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Minesweeper, etc.).

I would highly recommend Rollercoaster Tycoon Classic. It contains RCT1 and RCT2 scenarios and expansions recreated with the RCT2 engine. It's on iOS, Android and Steam. The game is a joy.

http://www.rollercoastertycoon.com/rollercoaster-tycoon-clas...

That's because these kinds of games always were a form of work. When you have a higher purpose in life, these types of games drain you and leave you unfulfilled and unsatisfied and like we should have spent our time in a less tedious and wearisome recreation. I can no longer play Minecraft, and haven't even been able to get into Factorio.

I love rocket league for this reason. There are players of all skill levels, and the game tries to match you with similarly skilled players so you can have fun on day 1. Even if you don't intend to get better, you automatically get better the more you play. Plus, games are 5 minutes long, so if I need a distraction I can play a game or two anytime and feel refreshed.

> these types of games drain you and leave you unfulfilled and unsatisfied and like we should have spent our time in a less tedious and wearisome recreation.

I, too, have given up eating, and sleeping, and joy.

Eating, sleeping, and joy are not typically considered tedious or wearisome.

Eating and sleeping sure as hell are tedious and wearisome, since they're basic maintenance tasks that you have to do if you want to function, taking time and attention away from the things you're interested in doing.

(Yes, I enjoy a tasty meal and a good night's sleep. But I'd much prefer to just live without having to sleep or eat at all. Or, eat a pill and recharge in a base station for 20 minutes.)

Oh man, I've been saying this for years, count me in. Let's find a way to reduce or eliminate the need for personal hygiene while we're at it. Robot bodies! We could theoretically still have sex virtually, too.

> Let's find a way to reduce or eliminate the need for personal hygiene while we're at it.

Definitely. It's another maintenance time waster, another upkeep you have to pay. What's worse, only a fraction of it is needed for survival, the rest is just an elaborate social signalling game with almost unbounded costs in time and money.

> We could theoretically still have sex virtually, too.

Only if it offers improvement over status quo :).

Well, I guess I have accidentally stumbled into the future. Except for the robot body, I could really use one of those because the one I have is starting to break down.

> unfulfilled and unsatisfied

If you're not satisfied, maybe you should try Satisfactory - it's a FPS lite-version of Factorio :)

A stopped playing factorio the second I thought “I really need to refactor this pipeline” because that is literally my day job.

Exactly the same here. Gaming time slowly tapered off during university. Anytime I have picked up a game since then it has been short lived. I'm at the point now where I won't even bother trying a new game (or revisiting an old one). I know I'll get bored of it in 30 mins, so why bother?

It feels like a lot of work picking up a new game. Combine that with the realization that it is just an engineered dopamine loop and that I could be doing something productive, videogames are essentially "dead" to me.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

I've had a hard time as well, but I think the reason is different.

Software work feels very similar to the games I enjoy and I do that 6-10 hours a day. Games effectively trained me to be able to understand and build complex systems, which is great, but now they're just games.

I prefer hobbies that get me away from a computer. It's a pretty limiting constraint -- computers are super useful.

Isn't that funny, I can buy any game now but I usually lose interest after an hour or two playing it like Red Dead Redemption, played 2 hrs haven't touched since. I can get "quick hits" if it's a rapid PVP or something but getting into a story/following some long progression...

I had the same experience, I picked it up a year or so ago and found it to be a great game and something I would have loved when I was younger but it didn't stick. I think these days working on a small project or hacking on something scratches the same itch for me, even if it's something I throw away.

I still follow and keep upto date with most gaming releases but for some reason find the vast majority of them underwhelming these days. Lots of well made time sinks which when I was younger is probably all I wanted but now I'm always looking for something special and never finding it.

Oh, I felt that one in my mid-thirties soul.

I used to waste/invest so much time into games, but now with a wife+kid+job I just don't want to spend my precious time on just any game. It has to be THE game. The perfect game.

Alas, I haven't found it yet. (Factorio comes very close, but it is too time intensive. You can't just play Factorio for 30 minutes.)

As far as games that I've enjoyed recently there is: Disco Elysium (enjoyed more than any AAA game I've played in a long time). No Mans Sky, despite it not living up to it's hype I do enjoy it a lot, easy to get lost in your own stories. I was enjoying Bloodbourne but I don't want to invest the amount of time needed to git gud. And that's about it... any recommendations on your end other than Factorio? it's been recommended to me by a couple of people but it looks a bit too grindy and addictive for my personality.

NES and SNES emulator and ROMs. You can play them via Switch, or pirate them and give Nintendo money to salve your conscience.

Especially if you have kids.

I feel it the same way, and for myself I’ve put not enjoying gaming down to getting older. I don’t mind watch some streams here and there but the thought of getting a gaming machine and actually following through with gaming is no longer appealing. Although I do have peers that still game.

You have to give the game some time. If it's good (like Factorio is) it might just pull you in. You also need to be in the right mood for that particular game. Sometimes you have to try a game many times until get pulled in.

I’ve tried several times but it just repels me.

It has the worst tutorial I’ve ever seen and all the inventory management is just super awkward with weird UI.

That’s coming from someone with hundreds of hours in OpenTTD and the like

I agree, and I dropped Factorio for a year before going back to it and sinking a few hundred hours into it.

What changed? Well partly some UI improvement, but mostly it was a mindset change.

The inventory is rubbish because you're not supposed to have inventory.

It's a game about JIT supply chains.

Instead of building things and working out what to build from them, start from the end and work backwards.

I also had to learn to not get bothered by overproduction and stop trying to buffer overproduced goods.

"all the inventory management is just super awkward with weird UI"

That's funny, for me Factorio has one of the best and well-thought-out UI's I've ever seen in any game (especially for a game this complex).[1]

[1] - With the exception of the circuit network, which is too easy to turn in to spaghetti code and a nightmare to debug.

> the best and well-thought-out UI's I've ever seen in any game

As you place belts, they should rotate to create a path.

There are mods that will do exactly this.

Part of it, frankly is that I hate pixel art. Give me antialiasing and decent kerning, dammit!

It's not pixel-art. All their "entities" are actually 3d models that are rendered into isometric images. And they've also slowly been regenerating all their images with high-resolution models + renders.

It’s rendered to fixed resolution sprites. That’s pixel art.

Play Satisfactory then.

What's wrong about the tutorial? It walks you through the first 5% of the game. The remaining 95% unlock in a way that makes it obviously an improvement to something you have already. Personally I really liked it.

It’s incredible opaque.

The old tutorial was actually better. The new one they introduced is really bad. Not only does it not explain things, but some of the mechanics actually work differently in the tutorial.

This is a pretty good breakdown

https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=72407

They've actually decided to remove the tutorial introduced in 0.17 and go back to the 0.16 one.

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-342

To get beyond a certain point in this game you will need a exact understanding of certain mechanics and advanced patterns. I doubt most people would come up with advanced patterns (e.g. how to build a well working main bus, or a conveyor balancer that works well) by themselves and learn that from the wiki.

If you purely stick to everything you learn ingame, you will probably hit a wall after 20 hours or so.

Yea, after an hour Factorio feels like "can I just write a script instead?"

It's fine to play for a bit with the new tech branches that come out occasionally in the updates.

Literally the entire point is to automate/write scripts.

Factorio scripts are called blueprints.

why do they take up slots in your inventory? It's weird. And the blueprint book seems useless -- and I can't google because there are too many "spoilers" associated with blueprints .... I wish there was more help in game

You put blueprints into your blueprint book so you can switch between them without having tons of blueprint objects around.Also mass import/export. (If I remember right drag-drop into the opened book to add, shift-scroll to quick-switch between the blueprints in the book?)

"why do they take up slots in your inventory?"

The blueprints you make go in your inventory by default because that's the temporary storage area for them. (Incidentally, to get rid of a blueprint in your inventory, right click it and then click on the trashcan icon in the blueprint dialog which appears).

If you want your blueprints to be more permanent and persist between games you can put them in to the "My Blueprints" section of the blueprints screen.

There you can also organize your blueprints in to books of related blueprints.

For more detailed tutorials on how to use blueprints, try searching on youtube for: factorio blueprints

I spend a lot of time focusing on throughput of data pipelines, so Factorio feels a lot like work to me :D

> Isn't it amazing that someone could do something for 100 hours and not think about obvious improvements, and not even wonder if they've been setup?

I have co-workers like this: people who don't bother to learn the tools of* their trade and waste dozens of minutes every day.

Taking the time to master your tools is a COMPOUNDING benefit and, at the risk of sounding inflammatory, is the type of activity that creates "skill gaps" between regular and "10x engineers."

> Taking the time to master your tools is a COMPOUNDING benefit

this is problematic, and the problem is made obvious when you take this fact to its natural conclusion.

are you juggling credit cards to simultaneously maximize the benefits of opening new cards with promotional offers, limiting your interest rates, and maximizing your credit score?

have you investigated the air quality of your working and living spaces? do you know the optimal concentrations of O2 and CO2? do you have plants around you that provide other benefits besides air quality? do you even know what those compounding benefits are?

what about your spinal posture? do you know about wrist shoulder hip and knee angles? do you know how this impacts bloodflow and neuromuscular activation? maybe you just run and/or stretch for 30 minutes a day and call it good enough?

> I have co-workers like this: people who don't bother to learn

no matter how smart you are, youve got finite bandwidth and a finite time to spend it. everyone picks most things they dont bother to learn.

When those tools’ lifecycle is 2 years at most fewer people are willing invest the effort to master them and instead learn on a need basis. If there was a guaranteed lifecycle the benefits would indeed compound and pay off handsomely.

For example I worked on an Angular project and invested a bit of time to learn the framework and certain libraries. I completed the project and it was successful, but my new projects aren’t to be done in angular anymore and I can’t apply all this knowledge, at least for the time being. Am I glad I learned this? Sure. But, this theme has repeated so much in my career that I am reluctant to jump onto a new thing. Instead I doubled down on F# and started learning scheme.

I'd argue that Angular is just a framework and the tool is whatever you use to hammer your angular code together. Your text editor/IDE of choice will probably outlast your use of Angular and therefore OP would be suggesting it is worth the time learning how to maximize your effectiveness with the IDE.

The way I see frameworks is as tools in themselves, but I do see your point, you're probably technically right. But the example doesn't diminish the idea. The ever changing software landscape makes it hard to master things that come and go.

Plus, Angular comes with a bunch of tools in itself. If you take a break for a while you'll have to re-learn the new ways of doing things a few versions later. This is not only taxing, but makes one reluctant whether to invest the time in it or not, and the learning process is a bit encumbered by the idea that it all may go to waste soon-ish. The reality was that even older tools proved to be useful to me as I had to pick up and maintain older projects and having learned that it made it easier. But this may vary from case to case.

Moreover, when something new comes out, everybody is hyping it and when we start using it in my work place, my gut feeling tells me to wait for v2 or v3 or so, such that I don't have to deal with the many confusing changes that take place in the few iterations. But I do that just because I had some bad experience in the past. Others break their teeth with the same frustration that I had. They too may build their reluctance as I did.

This is why I stick to tools that have existed since the 1970s. Emacs ftw!

If you asked 10 years ago why I am going backwards by learning Scheme and Lisp today I would answer it is pointing forwards instead. Forwards is definitely a subjective to me.

This reads pointlessly pedantic to me. You're throwing out examples of things that might actually be important, but most people probably don't think is that important. This is very different from things which people know are important and do frequently, but don't care to learn how to do it properly.

Plenty of people choose not to learn their tools, and would not choose to do so even if time were unconstrained. The inability of people to maximally use all tools available to them is a separate issue, and not an especially important one.

But that is precisely the point. You're complaining that people don't meet some arbitrary level of expertise in their tooling, which is your personal metric.

Not everyone shares your concerns. They may well be concentrating on posture, because _that is a very important thing to concentrate on_ if one has certain issues. Or they may just not consider their job taking them 5 more minutes to perform to be a problem, and they'd rather think about what they're building in their garage, or their kids.

"Why doesn't everyone care about the things that I care about" is a very good, very difficult, question to try to answer for yourself.

That is a separate point. The point I was saying was not relevant was "no matter how smart you are, youve got finite bandwidth and a finite time to spend it." This implies that people are not improving on things because of finite capacity to do so, which is sometimes true, but really just an edge case.

You're saying people don't need to care about X, which is true. However, if you choose to spend 10 hours building a pile of blocks, every day, rather than spending 10 minutes learning how to turn on the BLOCKMASTER 9000, you're just being obstinate. Hyperbole and arguments to your personal choice of block building aesthetic aside, there's a large class of problem for which the effort required to both improve one's capabilities and execute the task is much lower than the effort require to execute the task to begin. No matter how much you care about your kids, and how little you care about building blocks, if you must build that tower, it is beneficial to learn how to use the BLOCKMASTER 9000.

Pursuing the latest and greatest tooling mastery for incremental gains usually doesn't fall into this category. You don't need to pursue improvement endlessly. But say, people who refuse to learn how to use a debugger, but spend a great deal of time debugging? People who only share code over email while the team tells them to use git? People who only use global variables in painfully uncomfortable circumstances? If you're coming to work and refuse to invest in such things... it's fully plausible that you are a 0x or -1x programmer. Same for almost any other domain of work.

You don't need to care about anything. The reason you improve is because you want to be better. If you don't want to be better, and are currently bad, there's at least going to be a large social reason why you may want to change.

I agree that people have finite bandwidth but we are talking about people investing in skills that are useful for the primary function of their job. It’s the first thing to consider if you want to improve your productivity at work.

I'm a very enthusiastic worker most of the time, but I have never been rewarded for improving my own productivity at work. Usually improving my own productivity is because of a certain stubborn and personal distaste for intent that can't be backed by action.

I can see why people should improve their productivity at work in the abstract, but I have to admit there isn't much tangible in it for them. They will work 8 hour days however productive they are. Less productive workers are if anything more likely to clock out on time.

Maybe you've never been extrinsically rewarded, but surely you've derived some kind of intrinsic reward for improving your productivity? A sense of pride or joy? :)

Resentment and contempt for the system that does not reward such self improvement which, by the same virtue, means those who do not self improve are the ones rewarded with not expending the effort to improve. So finding a new job is usually the order of the day.

Doing "just enough" to get paid is the optimal course for the majority of jobs.

Finding jobs that extrinsicly reward continuous improvement is hard, probably because rewarding continuous improvement is hard to do - measuring, expectations, reasonable demands, etc. Are not easy.

>useful for the primary function of their job

the number of things that affect your job performance are endless and it is arbitrary where you choose to stop improving. not only is it arbitrary where you draw the line, its arbitrary that you chose to optimize your job in the first place. these things are non-self-evident choices based on personal and societal feelings rooted in first-principle thinking about the meaning of existence.

"invest in your exponential job growth" glosses over some pretty significant life choices that are more important to recognize than saving 30 minutes a day at the office.

This reads to me like someone telling you that you could shave 30 minutes off your commute, and then justifying that you don't have time to look at a map. Plenty of things are very easy to learn with large payoffs; some of which are so basic and so necessary that it is criminally negligible to proceed with such vast incompetence for someone in the trade.

E.g. doctors spending no time to learn about new drugs and prescribing them.

This is a useful reminder; thank you. It's true that my original comment was made in the context of having virtually all of my needs already met, and being far along the path to self-actualization.

I don’t put a very high priority on my job. As long as I stay better than average that’s enough for me. I am not trying to make top tier income as the median income for an experienced developer is plenty to hit diminishing returns.

Simply staying focused on work at work, solving whatever the current issues are, and going home is fine. Languages, tools, and best practices are constantly evolving, staying current is already a significant treadmill adding mastery of everything is an endless time sink.

Pain in your spine, constant headaches or lung problems would also hurt work productivity. Focusing on first-order problems could lead to gains both at work and home.

We get it, you're more fit than your cubical neighbour

In a similar vein, I try to hack my lifestyle for possible upgrades. Anything I can change that will improve the experience for my family and myself is game.

For example, I installed a personal weather system on the house so we could dress appropriately without needing to check outside first. Or, bought a Keurig coffee maker to reduce the time and effort required to make the morning joe.

I call these hacks, "lifestyle upgrades."

Thank you for this comment. I often have trouble articulating why I would rather not put any time into certain things, and this "limited bandwidth" argument is exactly the right one.

> are you juggling credit cards to simultaneously maximize the benefits of opening new cards with promotional offers, limiting your interest rates, and maximizing your credit score?

I mean, I'm not personally doing that, because that's a bunch of manual work; but if I found about an API that I could use to automate doing that, I'd probably budget myself 30-or-so man-hours to trying to set something like that up on top of such an API.

> have you investigated the air quality of your working and living spaces?

Yes; I even bought a CO2 meter. I was feeling ill whenever I closed the windows or when there was no wind, and I wanted to eliminate obvious potential causes. Toxic mold was another possible cause.

Boom! Very well said.

I spent most of my life as a techie in complete agreement with you. My best friend and I are "optimizers" - we type fast, we have macros and tools and utilities that make us more productive.

As a tech lead and then as a technical manager though... my team members who spend (sometimes endless;) time optimizing their tools and typing fast, are not necessarily more productive than the senior experienced experts who type slowly, with two fingers, and OMG I can't even stand to watch them resize a window, if they bother... but tend to sit back, ponder, and then slowly, excruciatingly type effective, efficient, working code that safely satisfies clients' requirements.

It took me years if not a decade to see beyond their slowness with tools, and notice the overall effectiveness of their output.

(This is not to say there aren't tons of people who are slow with both, of course :P )

In engineering disciplines, there's a a difference between optimizing the tools you use in the process of "putting out" what you've already essentially engineered; and multiplying your productivity at engineering things in the first place.

A better text editor might make you faster at typing; but that only matters if your work was "typing-speed bound." Programmers generally aren't bound by typing speed; they're either bound by identifier lookups (figuring out what function or variable they need to use here, possibly using a library documentation or language reference, or checking elsewhere in the codebase); or they're bound by the speed at which they make decisions about the architectural design of what they're programming.

Things that solve those two problems—IDEs with auto-complete and inline documentation display, in the former case; and "convention over configuration" frameworks and uniform syntax normalization linters, in the latter case—can have much greater effects on productivity than just speeding up how fast you can input the code.

But even beyond that, I find the most powerful productivity boosters in engineering are the ones that entirely obviate a particular thinking task. What is a compiler but a tool for avoiding the thinking task of figuring out how your pseudocode properly translates into machine code? You could certainly go without one—but we all agree that that'd be ridiculous to choose to do, when you don't have to, right?

There is a balance to be had between skill acquisition and skill exploitation. Your team members endlessly optimizing are probably not exploiting enough. Their productivity could improve spending less time optimizing endlessly and actually exploiting some of those skills to do real work. Your senior experts who can't type would probably still benefit from learning how to actually type, because it'll be something they can exploit a lot.

I'm 41 now. I still don't mind learning new skills and do it fairly often. But I am getting increasingly crabby about having to learn an entire new skill that I'm not going to clearly be able to exploit enough to make up for learning it, e.g., I get tossed somebody's old project X written in $YESTERDAY'S_FAD_FRAMEWORK and now I have to go learn a dead framework just to see what's going on. I'm not going to get to exploit that enough to make up for the cost of learning it.

When I was younger, I worried more about sampling a lot of things rather than whether I'd get to exploit any given one of them that much. I don't regret it. I think it was the right choice at the time. But as you get older I do think you want to be a bit more selective, if for no other reason than you need to exploit those skills at some point or the acquisition costs are just a waste.

(I'm doing a personal project right now that involves some front-end stuff. I've been doing website development since 1997; clearly JS has changed a lot over the years. I decided to just go with straight JS, rather than spending a lot of time learning a new framework, because I don't anticipate having enough front-end work to do to exploit the time it would take to learn a new JS framework, and while it seems to have stabilized a bit lately (not literally turning over every year anymore), they still seem to be a bit frothy compared to everything else. Meanwhile, modern JS basically has jQuery built in, and template literals can be used to set up an escape-safe client-side template system in about 5 lines of pure JS. So, basically, due to the constraints on this project, I've chosen to learn the handful of things I haven't used (knew about the "fat arrow" syntax and template literals for a while, never had a chance to use them in a detailed way) and then exploit my existing skills, rather than spend a lot of time learning a new framework. Even if I could hypothetically do the actual work faster, learn+use time >> exploit time. And learning more about pure JS has an extremely high probability of being exploitable in the future; even now, learning "React" or one of the other handful of clear winners has only a much lower probability because I could still be dropped onto a project that uses something else.)

This is an excellent point! I personally subscribe to Rich Hickey's "hammock driven development" approach to problem solving, and I think how we approach problems, like our tools, is something that can be optimized with practice :)

It takes a certain discipline to do that. Not everyone has that discipline, and not everyone cares about being the '10x engineer'. Especially not when they work a 9-5 job which pays the same regardless of being a 1x or 10x.

I have been working for my own businesses for about 8 years now. I learned to value my time, so any improvement in efficiency is welcome. But sometimes you just need to get the job done and not invest time upfront in improving a process. It's always a trade-off in time.

> Especially not when they work a 9-5 job which pays the same regardless of being a 1x or 10x.

This is a failure of forethought on their part. It's true that their _current_ job might not pay more for that knowledge, but it absolutely pays off in their career and during interviews as they develop their professional network and people begin to recognize them as a source of in-depth knowledge.

That was exactly my point: not everyone cares about that.

For many (most?) people the main factor in life is happiness. If you like your job, and it pays good enough, then why invest all the work into a future job that may pay better?

Also, there are many factors that come into play during interviews. How well you are able to combine complex Vim commands to shave 10 seconds of a particular task is probably very, very low down the list of competences the interviewer is looking for.

I have better things to do in life than optimise my CRUD creation skills so I can be a source of knowledge for CRUD creation

Have you ever thought about a life beyond CRUD?

Not that I would blame anyone for settling into a life where you CRUD from 8:30 to 5:00, then go home and enjoy your life. There are many jobs out there that are more interesting and better paying with the exact same quality of life trade-offs. If anything, I've found that more challenging workplaces hire people who are more interesting to be around.

I think my chances of getting a job might actually go down if I impress them too much with my peerless shortcut knowledge.

Why ?

Ever proven an interviewer wrong or lesser to their face/in front of their peers (even without being crass about it)?

It usually doesn't fare well for you.

Before assigning failure to other people’s beliefs, you should examine your own assumptions. Not everyone views life success through the lens of career.

I agree with the sibling comment, that "10x"ness is only weakly related to tool usage. I've done some of my best work in ludicrously awful environments because that was the only feasible as a result of a whole stack of previous tech choices made by other people, usually for valid-looking business reasons.

VS2005 inside an XP VM? To build WinCE 4? In 2015? No sane person would choose that environment today, but it had been a valid choice in the mid-2000s and the hardware was still working, so I rolled up my sleeves and fixed the bugs. Customer was satisfied and we all got paid.

The only person I've ever worked with who could concievably be a 100x engineer did some of his best work on paper. But then he was a heavy-caliber mathematician.

Except that the benefit is not yours, but your employer's. Let's take a look at the frontend landscape where every framework lasts 2-3 years at most. By the time you master something, you can start it over. And most employer does not support learning on the job. So you have to learn it in your spare time. The benefit is the employer's, the cost is yours. I can understand when people say f*ck it and they simply protest by not playing by their employers' rules. If they get the salary without investing time, they also reap some benefit at least.

I think the biggest hook for Factorio is that it's an _actual_ visual programming language. So much of what we do day to day ignores this (dominant!) mode of perception. It's extremely refreshing to be able to simply look at a system to reason about it.

(as an aside, I think this is also why the Zachtronics games are so effective)

I seriously struggle with factorio, You have to have a seriously good planning ability to create something that doesn't instantly turn in to a spaghetti. I always end up having to scale up things and then having no room. I find text based programming to be much much simpler. If I need to add more somewhere, I can, my text editor will push everything else out of the way.

Get yourself a mod that starts you off with construction robots, like FasterStart [1]. That plus ghost images plus blueprints allows you to plan your factory, and cut-paste it when you need to. Also, you can persist blueprints across games, so you don't have to re-invent a working factory layout in a new game if you don't need to.

As a bonus, FasterStart also takes away the grind of cutting trees by hand. I use it just for that. Few things annoy me more than having to take a break from building a factory to mindlessly holding right-click and pressing movement keys for a while because RNGesus decided to put a rainforest in the way of my expansion. It's the video-game equivalent of being broken out of a programming flow to sit in a pointless 2-hour meeting.

Another option is to use a mod like Factorissimo2 [2] which lets you put factories inside a building and move the entire building around. Buildings can also be nested so that you can group, say, all buildings related to iron ore -> iron plates inside one outer building. ( * ) Factorissimo2 was invaluable when I played a game with Angel's mods, because with Angel's the process of getting iron plates from iron ore starts off as a one-stage process but eventually becomes like a ten-stage process. There was no way I was going to lay that out on ground level while still accounting for future expansion.

[1]: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/FasterStart

[2]: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Factorissimo2

( * ) IIRC this is disabled by default because people think it's unrealistic. I just pretend a nested building is an upper floor in the third dimension and the belt connections are freight elevators.

> have a seriously good planning ability to create something that doesn't instantly turn in to a spaghetti

If you only design factories from scratch by yourself, that's akin to being handed an assembler programming manual as your only reading material and building up every programming abstraction yourself. You likely won't discover the best abstractions.

After a while playing factorio I decided to watch experts play the game on YouTube, and that's like a programming novice watching an expert. They know how to create well-known patterns (especially with belt mechanics) and deploy them readily. Watching these videos is like someone handing you a library of programming abstractions your can put into your own code.

at least on the initial play through, i think that would ruin the game for me. i personally would prefer to discover the patterns on my own, or at least to the best of my ability. it's tempting, but i've become aware that reaching for the strategy guide tends to be a huge spoiler.

I picked up Pillars of Eternity a while back and couldn't get past the character creation screen without looking up strategies for character building. I couldn't get through the "it doesn't matter just pick something that sounds good" block. Bad experience for me, ended up dropping the game very quickly even though it has great ratings.

It's really hard to play a hardcore CRPG[0] like PoE if you haven't been playing some similar games lately. PoE gives you everything the moment you launch the game, then leaves you alone. This is intentional and really fun if you already have the muscle memory for theorycrafting[1].

I find RPGs which let you rebuild your characters in the middle of the game very approachable. They are good gateway drugs to get some familiarity with the genre. Divinity: Original Sin 1/2 are good examples, I highly recommend them. Any ARPG[2] will also do since they ask for less number crunching and more reflex building. Many of them never allow you to set your character before you progress in the game. Some JRPGs[3] are like that too (i.e Pokemon games).

Find me on Steam if you need some good RPG recommendations: https://steamcommunity.com/id/diegoperini

[0] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=CRPG

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theorycraft

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_role-playing_game

[3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/JRPG

Divinity 2 is a really interesting one. The beginning of the game is utterly terrible when you're just starting out. Almost all of the battles are out of your league, there's very limited opportunity to get stronger, and if you're not interested in stealing the most basic scraps of equipment, it's hard to get anywhere in the game if you're not familiar enough with the battle mechanics.

Great game, but probably one of the most unreasonably difficult starts of any I've seen (relative to what seems to be the intended level of difficulty in the game). I nearly dropped it because I couldn't find the few stupid crocodiles that were killable after hours of walking around getting thwomped by everyone. Which was really annoying because the characters have strong personalities, so they say shit like along the lines of "let's go kill them all" and then be pathetically underpowered.

Totally get that. In RPGs I still sometimes have the habit of reloading if things don't go as planned and feel like this ruins the fun for me. Getting rid of engrained habits is hard :/

On the other hand, I really like having spaghetti factories. Having the same few pattern repeat a bazillion times just looks boring. Would love to stumble over my first saves, since those were the most organically grown. But back then I believe saves were stored in the install dir and i most certainly have uninstalled my "non-steam version" since.

Thankfully, by now I mostly internalized that planning the perfect factory will actually take me more time than just building something good enough and upgrading/replacing it later.

That's why I love it. I just went back to play last night and I got my Red and Green science built in a way with zero excess. All the miners lead straight into a furnace which fed straight into an automation factory which fed straight into the Red and Green science. The only thing I used belts for was getting the sciences to the Labs.

Then I unlocked the the next level of science and it all instantly became spaghetti and belts were backed up across the board.

The thing that makes the game easier is understanding the ratios. There is a golden ratio for basically anything. And it's actually harder to get the right ratios at a smaller scale because you end up with a lot of decimals that throw everything off. If you can get clean whole numbers for a majority of your ratios, then you have a nearly perfect automation process even if it's all spaghetti belts.

I need to learn how to use trains and the circuits because I have NEVER used them. IDK why I'd want things to turn off and on, or why I'd want to use a train to bring mats, but I assume these are critical things stopping my megafactory dreams.

"If you can get clean whole numbers for a majority of your ratios, then you have a nearly perfect automation process even if it's all spaghetti belts."

Another way to go is to use robots for delivery. That way there's no spaghetti of belts because there are no belts.

That also works, but you can't really do that until like midgame unless you use some mods. You need to have at least red and green science production and have researched a fair bit of technology before you get robots. Then you need the chests which is another tech. But yeah, normally once I get the robots I setup an automation factory just to create robots and put them in the roboport.

Then I can start getting rid of belts by just having the robots do the work. Setup a hit load of worker bots on the perimeter to fight any of alien things and fix the damage automatically.

The robots change the approach massively. But, I also enjoy the process of creating belts that get consumed near perfectly so that I create the exact same amount of each science. That's just my OCD side of things though.

The only time I've ever completed a game is when I made giant 80x80 cells served only by trains. Each cell was dedicated to a single recipe, with vertical train stations on the left for inputs, vertical train stations on the right for output, and beaconed factories in the middle.

Each cell focused on executing the recipe as fast as it needed to to fill up the output station faster than it could be drained by other cells' input trains. If something was being produced faster than other cells' trains were draining it, then it would back up and stop (and even shut off power via a switch logistic-connected to the output chest). If something was being produced slower, 80x80 is plenty of space to add more factories till it isn't.

Near the end the bottleneck was actually how fast I could ship ore from the faraway mines to the smelter cells (I built it organically so all the smelter cells ended up near the center, while the ores were coming in from the outside), but at time I was launching one rocket every few seconds so it didn't really matter.

Building it took multiple days because I only built out one or two cells a day, but the freedom from having to think about belts and ratios was worth it. I did not have to worry about prioritization because if one cell needed an output more than another cell, its trains would implicitly be coming to the output station more often. With belts you can end up with a situation where, say, the demand for green circuits is high but your iron plate bus only has two lines dedicated to the green circuits factory area, and there's no space to add more lines. With trains I would just add more factories to the green circuits cell, and its iron plate input train would automatically start running more often without me needing to do anything to it.

Unfortunately that experience has spoiled the vanilla game for me. Every time I try to play I remember how easy it made things and don't want to play any other way, but I also remember how many days it took to build and I don't want to repeat it.

This is what I love about it - it's actually hard to do things elegantly.

It has a skill curve where playing at a high level is something you learn over a long period of time. It gives it immense replayability to delight in the opportunity to build something slightly more robust or scalable.

If you derive enjoyment from the learning part and set your expectations appropriately (so you don't feel frustrated expecting more from yourself than your skill level), it becomes really addicting.

PS: https://factorioprints.com/ is a great inspiration if you just don't have time to figure out things yourself.

Factorio is artificially limited to make it more interesting.

Real visual programming languages allow building and collapsing abstractions and don't add space constraints.

You could just as easily say "text coding is so hard because if I realize I missed a character I have to start the entire file again; it would be nice if I were using something other than 'cat > file.c <<EOF', like visual blocks that could be rearranged later.

Factorio lets you rip apart factories and rebuild them (for no cost) for this reason, and even as a seasoned player while I have my go-to strategies, I still end up rebuilding sections.

That's not failure it's just part of the gameplay! There are a few mods that can make your life a bit easier though - check out Factorissimo which lets you make self-contained buildings.

Hah, and that is my biggest complaint about real visual programming languages, like LabView. They are fine for writing simple software from scratch, and the dataflow aspects have some neat features like trivial parallelization. But man are they a pain to maintain software in. You either spend massive amounts of time rearranging blocks, and rerouting wires, or your code becomes visual spaghetti.

True. But much like you can use external libraries in your game, you can search and copy (or take inspiration from) designs posted online.

The other thing is that it goes at a speed that we can comprehend.

If I type

  for (let i = 1; i <= 10; i++) console.log(`Round ${i}`)

And you run that in your console, it happens in the blink of an eye. Not with Factorio, it's fast, but we can still follow it. We can still see the individual materials being inserted or taken out.

That makes me think of a project idea: create an environment that executes fast but not at the speed of a computer (like Factorio).

I've long thought it would be neat to make a Factorio mod that lets you represent pieces of data as items that can be passed around and processed by different steps. For multithreaded, message-based programs it could really help one spot problems as the thing runs, e.g. messages never being responded to because someone's output buffer got full.

You can run in a debugger that steps through and shows variable values, has a pointer, etc..

MIT Scratch.

This game made me empathize less and less with environmentalists. Forests are an impediment to a transport network. Wildlife are pests. Renewable energy has extremely low ROI.

In the same sense, Paradox games make you less sympathetic to the classes you're not a part of. Governments and rulers operate under a different set of rules than those of individual rights (except those of a sovereign), civil liberties, and labor conditions. War crimes just become a means to an end. In Factorio, you play the role of invader/exploiter/colonist, even if the role was thrust upon you. In one of the Factorio blog posts, a developer writes:

> Imagine yourself living in a perfectly balanced natural environment. With total freedom. A place where your ancestors have been the inhabitants for centuries. Evolving, understanding, and being part of this peaceful world and rich ecosystem. Totally integrated. On this land you can get aliment easily, due the lack of serious predators and pollution, and with the friendly company of your fellows, the only thing you have to take care is food, relax, and reproduction.

> Imagine that suddenly, something falls down from the sky. Something that starts the extraction of the minerals, and the eradication of your forests. Even further. Imagine that this newcomer, making use of the stolen resources, starts the production of massive machines aimed to automate the robbery and the production of a never ending factory which creates not only pollution in the air and water, desertification on the land, and starvation for your people, but also, creates heavy weapons in order to exterminate you and your entire species.

> Wouldn't you be angry? Isn't that newcomer a sick bastard?

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-69

Games are abstractions, and in abstractions, all of the complications are stripped away to focus on a specific mechanic. Abstractions in real world reach breaking points: at a certain boundaries, water operates as a different state of matter, in which a "liquid" abstraction/conception no longer applies.

Solar is less CPU intensive than other types of energy (thus saving the actual environment, interestingly). Factorio is incredibly well-optimised, but at some point this starts to matter.

Solar + storage lowers your pollution and the pests.

I wish there were a way to restore the environment like planting trees in order to also remove the pests.

For a sizable factory, massive spaces must be dedicated to renewable energy, which means obliterating lots of pests. And building the renewable infrastructure--mines, crude pumping, transit, smelting, refining, manufacturing, landfilling lakes, bot deployments, defense--are massively expensive and polluting. By comparison, nuclear (or even coal!) is much easier on the wildlife.

If the trees didn't look so depressing in this game, there would be motivation for reforesting (beyond reducing pest problems) - making your factory look nice, with an ordered mix of nature and high-tech industry.

"I wish there were a way to restore the environment like planting trees in order to also remove the pests."

There are mods that will let you plant trees.

Planting trees will reduce pollution, and that in turn will lead to you getting bothered less by biters, the native life forms of the planet.

sounds like a bad case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_rhetoric

Ha! I'm not the only one that knows about it! Yay!

Procedural rhetoric is an awesome concept and one that I'd wish to be seen discussed more often.

And I second your statement.

" This game made me empathize less and less with environmentalists. Forests are an impediment to a transport network. Wildlife are pests. Renewable energy has extremely low ROI."

It's funny you should say that. I noticed that nuclear energy in Factorio is waste-free, and (at least without mods) there's no risk of a nuclear reactor suffering a meltdown and massively damaging large areas of your base.

Also, it was interesting to see just how massive a solar panel array you'd have to have in order to match even a coal power plant, never mind a small nuclear power plant.

On the other hand, Factorio's factories pollute, and fighting hard to reduce pollution is a major part of the game.

>"No risk" Well if a biter manages to kill the reactor while it's hot I think it explodes. But that's unlikely to happen unless lots of things go wrong.

My computer gaming has been pretty modest for the past 6 or 7 years. An hour here or there, mostly on the weekends. I don’t really get absorbed in games that much anymore.

Factorio is something different. I started playing it on a Saturday morning. Slept a few hours that night. When the sun started rising Monday morning I realized I should probably try to get a little sleep before heading into the office. Never had that experience before or since. Probably the closest I’ve ever come to a “bender”.

> It's also extremely addictive to engineers.

Quite the understatement. Pretty much every engineer that I've introduced to the game has played for at least 40 hours.

I'm a former engineer. Toolmaker to be precise. I just could not get into this game no matter how long I tried.

I love making stuff as a hobby, and reading all the good reviews this game had it seemed like a great way to kill a few spare hours. But I just couldn't gell with the game.It just seemed like I was back at work but now not getting paid for my time.

For me, Rimworld is where it's at.

I feel the exact same way. It's interesting that you mention Rimworld - I dived into Rimworld when I first got it and came to appreciate the way little things add up in that game and make the simulation more interesting (be it positive or negative). The complicated UI is slowly unraveled and becomes intuitive as you learn the game because there are simple feedback mechanisms for actions that affect your colonists.

Everyone tells me I'd love factorio. Every time I load up the intro tutorial I have the intention of finally diving in and just.... nothing. I can't get into it. I don't feel an incentive to learn the building and crafting UI's. It just feels like work. I'm not even sure why I'm building the things I'm building, or what the aim of the game is.

Maybe rimworld sucks me in because I can immediately empathize with the plight of the survivor, whereas factorio seems to be all about building efficient machines for the sake of building efficient machines.

Yes, Rimworld is easier to get into for many. "Survive" is a way more obvious and natural goal.

But once I got more and more into the details, Rimworld was the one frustrating me. I probably just despise this kind of "Storyteller" aka Event choosen by Wealth & RNG. This ruined the fun for me and is probably the reason I played Factorio easily 10 times as long as Rimworld.

The closest Factory has to that is the pollution mechanic, but that doesn't feel nearly as contrived.

I believe difficulty can be adjusted right? If you're not much for unforeseen attacks.

Not sure it would be fun for me with something like a peaceful-mode.

Combat is a useful "problem" to solve/prepare for. But having understood those are just randomly selected, totally interchangeable events (that btw, actually change after reloading a save) made them feel arbitrary to me.

Added to this, the difficulty of those events is fully determined by some arbitrary "value" of all the stuff in your settlement combined together. Build a big wall around the settlement? Value just went up. But not if those were natural mountains. Thus to beat the game, you want an effective defense while keeping that arbitrary value low. And this just kind of killed the immersion for me.

Thing is, I also don't see a good way to avoid such value driven systems when designing a survival-game that is supposed to keep being challenging. There is little risk of "game over" in Factorio or Oxygen Not Included once you got past the initial challenge and it becomes more of a SimCity than survival. Civ becomes a chore. Games like Don't Starve have a high skill floor and the restarts made me loose interest just about when I had learned enough to get through winter. "Go to harder area"-games just incentivize not taking risks. Time-based difficulty is an OK compromise at best...

Perhaps you can answer this for me then: what is the goal in a game of factorio?

Factorio is a sandbox game where you are free to set your own goals.

As a new player, my goal was to explore everything the game had to offer, and that meant researching all the technologies in the game and learning how to use them effectively.

A secondary goal is to make efficient use of space, which is limited by biters, base layout, and resource layout.

Another goal is to automate as much as possible instead of hand-crafting.

Yet another goal you might have is to defend your base against the biters to go after them pre-emptively. If you enjoy the combat in the game there are a wealth of ways to get more of it or increase the difficulty. On the other hand, if you don't like combat you can dial it down or even get rid of it entirely.

Mods increase your options exponentially, and give you much more new stuff to explore and use.

Like any sandbox, what you do with everything you're given is up to you. The limits are: your interest, your skill, and your imagination.

The stated goal is to launch a rocket.

But doing so hardly ever gave me a feeling of closure (excluding the 8h achievement speed-run) I got after finishing some story-based game and the "you won"-screen has a "keep playing" button for a reason... I expect most player use it.

If the core game loop doesn't bring you satisfaction and you don't find motivation in setting your own goals, then this game just isn't the right one for you.

The factory must grow

I feel like I didn't get the same satisfaction out of factorio until I turned the difficulty up enough to feel like the bugs were a threat so I could lose. Admittedly I turned it up too high to get that feeling and had to restart with a bit less difficulty. Then I had a reason to build walls/turrets/etc because I couldn't maintain safety without them and planning for mining expansions.

I highly recommend the Rampant mod. It makes the biters smarter (they'll seek out the weaknesses in your base defense), let them use pheromone trails and conduct pre-emptive raids on your base, and makes them tougher in general.

Depending on what you have to fight them with, the default settings of Rampant might be too difficult, in which case the mod has lots of options that'll let you dial that difficulty down. Also, you can get various other mods (like improved weapons, far reach, or tweaked evolution rates) to make fighting them easier.

I like the game and think it's fun and interesting but the graphics are a big turnoff for me. I find it a lot harder to see what I'm looking at or if parts are lining up just due to the overall brown / ugly colors. If it had something much easier on the eyes I think I'd be more interested overall.

This is why I'm looking forward to Satisfactory coming to Steam within the next month or so. 3d Factorio with much better graphics.

Interesting. I used to play video games but now I mostly 3D print stuff and design robots for fun. I don’t think video games are a bad use of time generally, but I feel so good about doing actual engineering for fun that I’m always a little surprised with games that are supposed to be fun for engineer types. I kind of wonder why actually doing engineering for fun isn’t more popular?

Certain game types basically are puzzles that are similar to the kinds of puzzles one would encounter during engineering things.

Factorio is one of them, but other puzzle games such as topological ones (Spacechem, Opus Magnum, Infinifactory, Molek-syntez), programming (Shenzhen IO, TIS-500, Human Resource Machine, Silicon Zeroes) or logic ones (Baba is you) kind of scratch similar itches.

As for doing engineering for fun, some of us are stuck doing rather boring tasks at the office, and the idea of having a game that one can just put away seems less daunting than having a code/hardware project that could potentially sit uncompleted. Designing robots definitely is fun, although it requires a fair bit of working space and tools.

Well I guess the idea behind engineering at home for fun is that it doesn’t have to be boring tasks. And I tend to work on completely unnecessary things such that there’s no time pressure. That makes it a lot more fun and rewarding than working at the office. Like I recently designed a pair of headphones from scratch. They sound better than any of my other headphones which are all a bit cheap. It totally didn’t need to be done so I could put it away whenever. But it was lots of fun to dig in to. That feels more rewarding to me than a task where all of my progress is virtual. I should say I’m not trying to criticize others who play games, I’m just curious about it. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

That's pretty cool with regards to the headphones. Do you have a link to your project?

I agree that it's really enjoyable to build physical things. I have one 3D part that I've been meaning to print for a while, but without a 3D printer at home it's a bit trickier to get it done. I wish I had a home workshop, but Silicon Valley prices make that a rather expensive proposition. There's no more TechShop either. :-(

(I know nearly nothing about audio equipment).

Weren't you afraid that you'll somehow botch the headphones and they'll play an excessively loud sound, which will permanently damage your hearing or give you tinnitus? Or can that risk be ruled out somehow?

I wasn’t worried about that. I tend to assume I’ll figure things out. And indeed the wiring for the headphones is “cut a 3.5mm cable, solder the leads to the purchased headphone speakers.” The only thing I brought to the table was design of the enclosure for the headphone driver, which can’t really create bad loud sounds.

I think there is just too many options how to build things in real life so it can be overwhelming. In video game, the selection of tools is intentionally limited so it isn't so daunting.

Perhaps there should be a wiki or something just about all the different skills a human can have. And each skill would have some description how to get started ("first couple levels") and links to other skills. The links would describe that if you enjoy skill A, here's why you might also enjoy learning related skill B for this and that reason. So you could choose in what direction you want to continue the learning.

Yes, the game is a tailored experience you can pick up and quickly become engaged in. I suppose engineering for fun takes more self direction. Your idea for a wiki sounds interesting, though there’s enthusiast communities on reddit and elsewhere that may already have answered “how to get started” questions. So in a way, the resource you mention exists as data on the internet. For much of what you want to learn, you’ll find out how to get started with some time at the search terminal.

Engineering as a job often requires a lot of grinding to get an outcome, even the “easy” engineering (?) disciplines like embedded software work in my experience.

Your “engineering for fun” is perhaps not what most engineers do day to day. And certainly our jobs and workplaces generally are not explicitly designed to be enjoyable with satisfying outcomes.

Well yes a lot of workplace engineering is drudgery. That’s why I love the freedom I have with projects at home. There’s usually no time pressure, and I can work on what I enjoy. I learn constantly and develop new skills. It’s super fun!

I had the impression of working while playing Space Chem, a really good puzzle game with awesome music. I think the developer made another game but haven't tried that yet. In the game you can compare your results with others and in most cases you have to decide between optimizing for simplicity or speed. Seriously, if I just had a sliver of the ambition I had while playing this game for other projects...

Relevant Vice article: Why Do We Play Video Games That Feel Like Work? (2015)

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4x38aq/why-do-we-play-vid...

I would claim that playing Factorio constitutes as doing engineering for fun

Well when I do engineering for fun I’m learning skills that directly apply to my jobs. So I gain experience with PCB design, CAD and 3D printing, or software. Perhaps Factorio flexes general cognitive skills like problem solving and algorithmic thinking, but it’s not going to help you get better at learning KiCAD for example.

Parent is doing some very interesting work. Check out his profile.

I bought the game on a hunch in its very early development. At some point they introduced their weakly reports on development, which were extremely interesting about the problems they were facing. Great developer and I love how successful it became. It seriously deserves all the praise.

Even in very early development, when it still looked horrible, the core elements were already a lot of fun. I am no game developer, but for everyone that wants to go that route, I would seriously recommend reading their "friday facts". And even if you are just a developer of the mundane, it is super interesting.

The definitely set the bar for developers interacting with players. They change things back when people don't like it. They fix problems quickly. They keep everyone updated on what they have worked on recently, and what will be worked on soon. No BS, no promises, no PR. It reads more like an internal dev blog than something you'd print, but I like it for that.

I've played it for many hours, and the thing that still asthonishes me the most is how incredibly efficient the code must be. While I haven't played with that specific purpose in mind, I've never managed to create a factory big enough where you'd notice a slowdown in the simulation.

Thousands of grabbers, trains, drones, belts, factories, aliens, environmental effects, different sorts of networks, all with their own logic, and somehow this game simulates it all like it's nothing. And it never crashed on me. You can make amazingly intricate factories all you want, but the truly great piece of engineering will always be the code that runs it all.

The developers frequently blog about how they're doing it, often going into immense detail.

Without spoiling too much, I have no qualms about calling them some of the best in the industry. The entire industry, that is, not just in games.

Their blog posts are great. They sometimes blog about really obscure parts of game development. It’s interesting to read even if you are not building games.

...and here they are: https://factorio.com/blog/

Factorio is probably one of the best $$/hr values outside of Dwarf Fortress, which is free.

It’s also basically engineering catnip, consider yourself warned.

For those who are interested, it’s the stated goal of the devs to never put the game on sale. They think it’s worth $30, and they intend to sell it for $30. So if you’re interested, don’t wait for a sale, buy it now!

I'd be interested in reading their analysis on price setting.

$30 is much more than it was 3 years ago. I've been waiting for a discount on factorio. I guess I'll take it off my wishlist.

>I've been waiting for a discount on factorio.

Don't unless the company is bought out. They will never discount the sale price as it leads to the behaviour you just listed, people will only buy the game when it goes on sale leading to low sales when said game is not on sale.

That is definitely not the reason why they don't go on sale. Sales are a good business practice and they usually result in higher sales. They don't go on sale simply because they want to be fair to their customers. They've said many times that they are financially well off and that they don't need the large amount of money that a sale can bring in.

One might justify keeping the original ticket price as it being unfair to early acquirers to lower prices but I don't find that a compelling argument; people are usually happy to pay extra for novelty. The early acquirers get something for paying the higher price.

Usually second hand goods draw prices of older items (ie less novel - shop-new but not design-new) down. But quashing of secondary markets for software allows prices to be kept high.

I have an irrational urge to acquire this 2nd hand now ...

People only buy it on sale because for those people the value isn't enough to justify the cost. Sales can increase revenue.

the game isn't considered finished yet (current stable version is 0.17.79). they have been gradually raising the price as they get closer to "finishing".

It was $20 during early access. So while that’s a significant price jump in terms of percentage, $10 more isn’t a big cost difference in total terms.

Compare that to AAA titles at $60 a pop, and Factorio is a steal.

This is a good write-up, and the most interesting point is about self-efficiency. It kills me to see software engineers not use multi-paste or multi-cursors. But I agree this is “human nature”. I have totally proven this to myself when I tried “lazy bastard” play through (the rule is once you basically get the first assembling machine you’re not allowed to craft in inventory). It wasn’t annoying, it was actually much more pleasurable and less stressful, because I set up automated process for everything. That’s what Factorio is about, and it is a very educational game (also a severe time suck).

For anyone here who's only played vanilla Factorio (ie. Factorio without mods), you should really try it with mods.. the mods enhance the game in so many ways (from eliminating annoyances, to making things more convenient, to adding way, way, way more content).

I absolutely loved the base game, but the mods made it 10 times better for me.

The same is true for Minecraft. Try the modpack GT: New Horizons. It turns the game basically into a factory building game, and the depth and amount of content is insane.

Is Minecraft not already a factory building game? My son makes the most wonderful machines with redstone.

Would you have a small list of recommended mods for someone like me with ~50 hours in Factorio? Thanks.

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Helicopters

https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Optera/LogisticTrainNetwork

On the other side of a list of small mods, here's some cool modpacks I've enjoyed:

- Space Exploration (go to space!)

- Industrial Revolution (intermediates galore!)

- SeaBlock (Start from nothing!)

I don't know if you finished the game yet, but if you haven't, I suggest that you do so before adding mods, just so you have a good feel for what the vanilla game is like before you start changing stuff... it'll also give you a sense of what you don't like or would want more of, and that'll let you more intelligently pick mods.

That said, I'd divide mods in to several types:

First, there are convenience mods, which make certain parts of the game less annoying or less tedious. Among those, I'd recommend:

- Squeak Through - Lets your character squeeze through spaces that you couldn't in the vanilla game. It doesn't sound like much, but it make a huge difference and makes the game much less annoying.

- Tree Collision - Similar to Squek Through, this lets you move through forests easily.

- Splatter Guard - Keeps you from getting killed by trains.

- Repair from Inventory - Automatically repair items in your inventory.

- Packing Tape - Lets you carry filled containers.

- Fill4Me - Automatically fills things things like turrets with ammo when you place them.

- Even Distribution - An easy way to put the same amount of something in to multiple entities (ex: same-sized batches of coal in furnaces).

- Belt Reverser - One keystroke to reverse the direction of a belt. Much easier than doing it by hand.

- Atilla's Zoom Mod - Zoom out much further than you can in the vanilla game. Also has keystrokes for quick zoom in/out.

- Todo List - I couldn't live without this mod, which lets me keep track of what I need to do.

- Far Reach - Lets you manipulate far way items as if they were near by. This could be considered "cheating" by some, but it makes the game much more convenient. If you are concerned that the game is too easy this way, you could always raise the difficulty with other mods.

- Where Is MyBody - When you die a line will be shown on the screen pointing to your body, so you can find it more easily and get your inventory back.

- What is it really used for? - A nice way to find what items are used for (which the vanilla game does not tell you.. it only tells you how to craft items).

The second category of mods is one that adds major features to the game and/or lots of different items. In this category, I can reommend:

- Factorissimo2 - adds "factory" buildings that can contain other buildings (including, if researched, more "factory" buildings). This is very useful for packing a lot in to a little space. If you're constantly running out of space this could be a good mod for you.

- Bob & Angel's mods - if you want a trillion intermediate products to extend the game

- Yuoki Industries - lots of strange, different items and intermediate products that feel very different from vanilla

Finally, if you found the vanilla biters too easy and want more combat, I'd recommend the Rampant mod, which makes the biters smarter and tougher. If you find Rampant too hard, you can dial down the difficulty in its options and/or install some other mods that give you more powerful weapons.

Ok, so this wasn't a small list of mods.. but I couldn't narrow it down any further without feeling like I'd left out some crucial mods. Hope you find something here that interests you.

Thanks for this! I haven't played in a while, and have been meaning to get back into it.

Thank you so much :). I'll try some of these next time I go down the wormhole!

I find myself playing factorio every few months. I play and play and play until at some point i realize that I'm fooling myself: Adding that extra steel production plant, with all the blueprinting, train routing and refactoring that is involved... I'm no longer escaping work. Actual Work now seems like less effort. And that's when I'm cured for a few months.

Factorio is the DOOM of factory games. It has spawned a new Genre that is a blend of RTS like StarCraft, and city builders like City Skylines, HOWEVER it adds a crucial element to distinguish it from a simple mashup of genres - automation. Only after Factorio are we seeing automation factory games, like Satisfactory, recently Industries of Titan.

Automation is truly a genre on its own. It's just about growing your economy by removing yourself from the equation. It's about how efficient and scaleable your base is, both which revolve around automation. Unlike RTS or 4X city builders, the quality of your automation will determine how fast your grow and how long you survive.

One annoying aspect in Factorio in the short time that I have played it was that there is a player character, who needs to move to each location before an object can be placed there. It adds a degree of tedium in building, if having requiring the player sprite to move about..

I agree, but it forces the player to do something about it.

After a few hours in a game, I typically develop an autonomous train network with various train stations. I build one for my own personal train (which gets loaded with all the stuff I might need for an outpost). I can call that train to my location, provided I'm near a train track, by setting a temporary station and manually asking my train to pick me up there.

I must admit, navigating my world in a high speed train (eventually, my train gets fuelled from nuclear cells) is exhilarating.

Late-game mechanics (bots, etc) actually turn the game into an RTS and allow you to grow from this 'move around your factory' gameplay mode into 'plan and deploy dozens of remote factories straight from the map view'.

The game does introduce a few ways to deal with this: there's cars and trains for getting around fast, but also you can command construction bots from any distance if they're in an area with radar coverage. It is a bit limited, but it does give some encouragement to create controllable long-range contraptions.

6 exoskeletons (yes, they stack) and a couple of personal nuclear power plants and you can outrun cars and some trains for that matter.

You could try the "Brave New World" scenario. In it you don't have a body, just robot friends.

yeah, I use "longreach" and don't feel guilty about it at all. You can also build ghost items from the map view, which bots will fill in. For really remote areas I still do have to find the right train to ride, but this mainly solves it. Never hearing that beeping sound while building locally is totally worth it.

Apparently the devs added a reach limit to prevent people from keeping their factory going by manual loading for hours and hours; since I don't do that, there's no harm in it.

I wish the gameplay could have done without that player agent in view and be playable in an eye-in-the-sky type of view point, like Cities Skylines or the Simcitys.

just get mods and don't feel guilty, or use sandbox mode and play

Absolutely blown away by how good Factorio is, fiendishly addictive, seemingly endless possibilities.

I can see why it appeals to those with an engineering/tinkerers mindset.

Also from this post I just learned that Copy/Paste is a function in the game, _sigh_

Factorio is my current favorite train set. Community feedback and a very long development cycle made it awesome.

You asked is it devils? But forgot the parts about nuking bugs. Shooting bugs, killing all the bugs

I haven't played it for long, but one thing I felt with Factorio and with the Anno series is that there is no RNG. I feel it would perhaps be more fun with an RNG element. Like, the assembly lines won't create identical items, but there will be some statistical variability. Also sometimes total duds are created that will cause problems downstream. Also random plant failures and downtime. In my imagination it would be more exciting.

Angels & Bob's mods and/or Seablock might scratch this itch.

I can also recommend Satisfactory. Similar game with more immersion through 3d world.

Only down side is that it can't scale to the levels Factorio can. (Only applies to us that like to build massive megafactories).

Yep. I've enjoyed both, but I think it comes down to:

If your draw to the game is is your sense of connection with the place you're in, Satisfactory probably does a better job of that, with the pretty scenery and ability to build in 3D. Factorio's world feels very flat in comparison. I wrote a bit about that and possible ways to make it less so in https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-309

If your draw is wanting to build very large, complex factories, constantly pushing production to new limits, that is what Factorio excels at.

If anyone is looking for an immersive game to play I would recommend Subnautica.

If you liked Subnautica, try Outer Wilds.

> immersive [...] Subnautica

I see what you did there.... :-)

One thing notable about Factorio's game mechanics is that crafting is idempotent: the tech tree is a directed acyclic graph. If one is looking for a different experience in which one thinks about closing manufacturing loops, I would recommend Oxygen Not Included, where you have to sustain life amidst an asteroid colony.

> One thing notable about Factorio's game mechanics is that crafting is idempotent

What do you mean by this? You craft a thing once, you have one thing. You craft it again, you now have two things. That doesn't sound idempotent to me.

I think idempotent wasn't a good word but I think the idea being described is that crafting is acyclic.

For example Copper Wire + Iron = Green Circuit.

There's no recipe chain that takes in Green Circuits and produces either Iron or Copper Wire.

So once produced, you need to find a higher function for your products. You can't 'unmake' through a cyclic recipe.

Contrast that to ONI's water cycle, where clean water gets made dirty then cleaned again.

So ultimately in Factorio everything is leading toward the only resources that get destroyed - Science, Rockets, or Coal (or other energy types).

"There's no recipe chain that takes in Green Circuits and produces either Iron or Copper Wire. So once produced, you need to find a higher function for your products. You can't 'unmake' through a cyclic recipe."

There are Factorio mods that will give you access to recycling machines that will let you get back the ingredients that went in to making whatever it is that you put in to them.

So Factorio's recipes can be fully cyclic, if you want.

Oops, was thinking about composing arrows on crafting graph, not the action of crafting and the consequent inventory, and that was needlessly confusing. I should have simply said that it's non-invertible.

I tried Oxygen Not Included, after watching some Let's Plays of it that seemed interesting. However, once I actually played it I found it to be really boring compared to Factorio. Unfortunately, I didn't keep track of the time so played for more than 2 hours and so couldn't get a refund from Steam, otherwise I would have refunded it. Haven't touched it since.

By contrast, I've played hundreds and hundreds of hours of Factorio, which I just can't get enough of, especially with mods, which increase the scope and possibilities of the game tremendously.

A notable exception to this is uranium and modded Factorio. In particular, Angel's Petrochem has a bunch of those loops. If you're interested in trying it I recommend Factorio SeaBlock.

WARNING: stay far away from this game... way too addictive. I've lost so much time to it... you have been warned!

Was it really lost? Can you imagine yourself on your deathbed regretting that you played Factorio?

I hope I'm not even half the way to my deathbed and already regret how much time I spend on games (and the knock-on effects).

It's not that playing games (incl Factorio) doesn't feel satisfying. But the time we have is pretty much the only finite thing in life and thus what we can do is limited. Spending time somewhat deliberate seems like a good idea.

Again, that doesn't mean playing games is bad. It can be a great source of joy and broaden your horizon, just like other media. But moderation is key. Spending time in ways that allows us to meet people/ learn skills (we might even use professionally)/etc will probably have a bigger impact on our lives down the line than the 2000th hour of playing Factorio.

You regret it now when you have more than half of your life ahead of you. But when you have nearly all of it behind you do you think you'll still regret it?

I don't think I will.

What do you think you will regret? Is it not something that could have been changed with more time? Or are you trying to imply you won't have any regrets... and wouldn't that make the question kind of meaningless?

As for me, that depends... I might end up a lonely bitter old man who constantly/wistfully mourns the wasted potential cause of all the whishes/goals I had but never worked on. Getting away from spending that much time on games should make this scenario less likely. Thus my attempt to get on a different path.

But yeah, your constraints of only thinking about past and present is kind of interesting. That can pretty easily lead into the meaning(-lessness) of life, but lets not open this can of worms for now.

I think I'll regret not using more of my time to do things that bring me joy. I think I'll regret the times in my life when I was doing something other than exactly what I wanted to do that moment.

I can't be sure though because at 41 I don't regret time spent working because it wasn't that bad and money earned allowed me to have a lot of fun gaming. Also I don't regret time spent with people. So I can't be sure if I regret anything on my deathbed, other than that I don't have more time to enjoy things. I'm pretty sure I won't regret wasted potential, because I know how unique it is to realize it in any spectacular manner. I could as well regret not winning the lottery, and I'm at ease with that.

My life might be meaningless in any objective sense. But some people have drawn some utility from it and it's absolutely meaningful for me because I'm the one living it. It's the only thing I got and I'll never have anything else.

Your life experience seems quite different from mine. When you describe someone as "doing only exactly what he wants to do in that moment", I'd imagine something quite different. A heroin addict. Someone excessively overweight. A kid never doing house-/homework. Or, well, someone playing video games excessive amounts of time.

The thing I wouldn't picture is moderation. Or awareness of long term consequences.

Again, most things that feel good are fine, as long as done in moderation. What you describe doesn't sound excessive at all, so sure, play more. Sounds like you've got the foresight to understand the trade-offs and hopefully have the willpower to not let it get out of control.

Since once it's out of control and you spend 14h/day on games and media for years straight, getting yourself back to normal can be quite hard and require external help.

> I'm pretty sure I won't regret wasted potential, because I know how unique it is to realize it in any spectacular manner.

"spectacular manner"? I feel you're overestimate my standards. It's more a case of "I justified that excessively expensive GPU in 2008 not with gaming, but wanting to do more GPU programming. So why is the best thing I've got to show for the last decade a (nearly finished) CS bachelor?".

I understand to have many years ahead of me. And all of that might leads me to a great path with a happy ending. But right now I'm certain having played less would have made such a path more likely.

They should do a pandemic version where you make masks.

It looks like programming but in a more cumbersome fashion. I enjoy and understand the appeal of puzzles (Recurse is a good game), but this is too much like work.

It is intentionally cumbersome, at first, but as you master the technology tree you get access to ever faster robots, blueprints, automation via the circuit network, self-maintaining defenses etc. You can construct and dismantle distant parts of the factory from the map view etc. Basically, you journey from insignificance to near-omnipotence.

The author might be interested in knowing that both the cofounders of Factorio are dan-level go players.

My brother gave me this game for my birthday and, oh man... I couldn't stop playing even though I was on a holiday trip. Now I have detoxed and I'm back to having a life. One day at a time.

Mindustry is a game similar to Factorio. It's open source and free to download on the Play Store. Warning: it's super addictive

Does anyone know what the website is made of? I like the simple markdown and especially the tagging!

Look up Satisfactory

I actually purchased Satisfactory on their release date and it was rather underwhelming.

The core gameplay loop is very different between both; the one in Satisfactory seems to be more about building some automated set up, then exploring while things are building, as the factory production seems rather slow. In contrast, the core gameplay loop in Factorio (increase the production of whatever input is currently starved, build new more complex set ups) is clearly more polished and engaging, IMHO.

Of course, that could change, Satisfactory is still in early access and it seems that they've been more focused on adding new environments and gameplay mechanics than touching the core gameplay loop. Satisfactory is also a lot better IMO with regards to exploring stuff, just like Subnautica.

Satisfactory is interesting in its own way. It'd be easy to initially think that its the better/easier game to get into for someone who hasn't played a game like this before, but I'd argue the opposite. The three-dimensionality introduces logistical insanity that is startlingly difficult to wrangle, and the first person viewpoint makes planning the factory floor very difficult. The terrain is also a constant challenge, whereas the terrain in Factorio is generally pretty easy to work around.

But, the world design is totally incredible; it begs you to explore every nook and cranny, and its non-random, so you can link up with friends and share secrets you've found. There's far more super-fun goodies to unlock, like the hypertubes or bounce pads.

Its just different, and I think someone who enjoys one would enjoy both. I tend to tell people to start with Factorio, though; its simple, yet infinitely deep. After about 50 hours in there, you'll gain a new respect for some of the simplified mechanics and fun-factor of Satisfactory; 50 hours there, and you'll gain a deeper respect for the nefarious complexity of Factorio. They complement each other perfectly.

> "The three-dimensionality introduces logistical insanity that is startlingly difficult to wrangle, and the first person viewpoint makes planning the factory floor very difficult."

As a former player of the Tekkit mod for Minecraft, the three-dimensionality is what I miss. As good as it is, Factorio is so disappointingly planar, despite the tools they give you to manage belt intersection and materiel transfer.

One of the big advantages Minecraft, and Factorio, have is their strict global grid system. Factorio's is two-dimensional, Minecraft's is three-dimensional, but they both have one.

Satisfactory does not have this global grid. It does have very limited local grids, when you lay down foundations, but even these are less powerful than the grids on Minecraft/Factorio.

This makes every stage of logistical planning more difficult, which is both good and bad. Highly organized Satisfactory factories are, visually, more chaotic than highly organized Factorio factories. But, they can also be more satisfying to look at; from chaos emerges beauty, against all odds.

"the three-dimensionality is what I miss. As good as it is, Factorio is so disappointingly planar"

For me it's exactly the opposite. I very, very rarely enjoy a 3D game. Factorio's 2D world is a huge plus for me.

I'm definitely an outlier in this opinion, but for me the games industry took a seriously wrong turn in its embrace of 3D games, and I really appreciate it when I can find a solid 2D game like Factorio.

No idea why you're getting downvoted. I have several hundred hours in Factorio and now approaching probably a thousand hours in Satisfactory. Anyone who likes Factorio should try Satisfactory. My absolute favorite games of all times.

Satisfactory is great. Its different than factorio, but definitely worth exploring. There is something about walking through your factory and seeing all those machines work in 3D.

I started with factorio, bought satisfactory as soon as I could......really enjoyed, but then I fizzled on it. I actually go back and play factorio way more often. I mostly just try to speedrun to robots.

You know what else is interesting? Their "no sales" sales philosophy. For me its the reason never to buy it. I actually revolt when I hear their reasons. I feel like it comes down to: we are willing to hurt our options for making more profit to prevent people with lesser budgets from buying it. But its very interesting since a lot of people have the opposite reaction. They feel it is more valuable if it doesn't go on sale and they can support the developer by paying a 'fair' price.

Factorio is a polished experience, with devs committed to bringing it not just to completion, but to perfection (with performance, aesthetics, and balanced gameplay). In contrast, most AAA games are bland experiences built under sweatshops, and most Early Access games wind up half-assed or as abandonware. If there's any game worth your money, it's Factorio.

I don't doubt that it's worth the money. I just dislike their attitude. If it was a perfect fit for me, I'd swallow it and get it, sure. But thruth is I'm only a very occasional puzzle gamer. So i'd probably not play it much or at all. Also, let's not overgeneralize. I'm pretty sure a lot of indie devs are effectively sweatshops too. They face much less regulatory scrutiny and people tend to forgive them easily. Examples like Telltale and Riot tell us how ugly things can get if they grow too quickly and continue operating that way. Which doesn't mean factorio devs are that way too. there is just no way to know. It also depends on the country. For example gaming AAA giant Ubisoft is French. French regulations do not permit much in terms of unpaid overtime.

> But thruth is I'm only a very occasional puzzle gamer. So i'd probably not play it much or at all.

Then why should you care about what the makers of Factorio do?

> Examples like Telltale and Riot tell us how ugly things can get if they grow too quickly and continue operating that way.

Do Factorio developers show any sign that they're "growing too quickly"? Telltale took on dozens of contracts for games that showed no sign of selling well, and Riot went public and were acquired and became Tencent's bitch. How is any of that relevant to Factorio not going on sale?

> Then why should you care about what the makers of Factorio do?

As I said I find it very interesting how people respond to it. This whole thread is an example why. That makes it interesting. Why Factorio? Why not 'Farming Simulator'? Theres other games like this too. For example Dominions. You can't criticize that either without getting /significant/ pushback. What do Dominions and Factorio have in common. I'd say they are both very hardcore games that attract a certain audience. It reminds me of review wars when coding. trying to find every little thing to nitpick on. People really butting heads against each other for no good reason. The spite, the vindictiveness. How we all get caught up in these arguments.

> Do Factorio developers show any sign that they're "growing too quickly"? Telltale took on dozens of contracts for games that showed no sign of selling well, and Riot went public and were acquired and became Tencent's bitch. How is any of that relevant to Factorio not going on sale?

It's not... The comment I was replying to was making other assertions. I would also like to ask you to not use that word again.

You can play Factorio's demo for free.

There's actually quite a lot you can do in it, and it's what hooked me on the game. You might feel different about paying full price for it after you play the demo.

For me, Factorio is easily worth twice or even three times the price they're charging. I've pissed away so much money on half-baked, low effort, insanely buggy games, and even "cheap" games are usually not worth the money. With some games, I feel the developers should have been paying me for what amounted to beta-testing their buggy, poorly conceived and executed product and wasting my time.

Factorio is different. It's true work of love. The developers could have abandoned the game years ago and it still would have been one of the most feature rich, well thought-out, and stable game ever made. But they've kept working on it and adding new things to it without charging anything extra, in contrast to what many other game studios have done when they've released content or new versions of their game and charged for it.

Factorio just keeps getting better and better, and all I've paid was the initial $30 for the game.

Factorio's modding community is also absolutely fantastic, and they've enriched the game many fold as their mods exponentially increase the possibilities in the game and give you tons of new content.. for free.

Well for every game thats worth thrice the money you buy four that are worth ~$0 regardless of them being objectively great games because you turn out not having fun. At least I do. I could tell you Assasins Creed Oddysea is worth thrice the money, because it is, for me. But for you possibly not so much. But maybe I'll check the demo. I wont be giving them any money by playing it. And maybe its so good that i will forgive them their antics. We'll see.

I really want to play this game. I've put it on my wishlist 2 years ago, but I swear, I've never seen it on sale! I wonder if it's because technically it is still Early Access.

The developers have said that they're not considering doing sales.

From their FAQ [0]:

> Are you planning to participate in Steam sales or Bundles?

> No. The price we ask is what we consider a fair price for the game.

[0] https://factorio.com/faq

As jfim mentioned, this game will probably never go on sale but the list price is definitely worth it.

It's $20. For a game you will spend 100's of hours on.

The price was raised a while back to $30.[1]

[1]: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/016-price-change

(I purchased it for myself at the $20 price, but I've also purchased it as a gift at the $30 price. I have definitely gotten my money's worth.)

Oh OK, I too bought it years ago at $20 - but still, that $10 doesn't materially change my point.

$30* US

They have a demo you can download:

https://factorio.com/download-demo

I found

> There's gotta be some innate machine-focused "interest in things" that this is tapping. I've never taken apart or rebuilt a machine, but this gets me anyway.

fairly sad. Factorio is fun, but it's a pale shadow of the experience of making even relatively simple machines work better or differently. Even getting a 2-stroke motor that has a dirty filter running again is immensely satisfying.

I think they're different enough things to both be enjoyed for what they are. I've rebuilt dozens of engines, was a shipyard welder for a few years to boot. Genuinely enjoyed the physical aspects of working on machinery, but Factorio scratches 80% of the itch with 10% of the effort. You get to fun-build while never breaking a tap, busting a knuckle, or wondering where in the ever-loving hell your 10mm socket teleported to when you looked away for just one damn second.

Ahem.

By analogy I'd say it's similar to games like Guitar Hero, where you get a reasonable fraction of the satisfaction of being able to play an instrument for only a small amount of the work.

I find just the opposite, myself. It is not satisfying to clean a gunked up carb or change a dirty filter or spark plug. To me it feels like irritating drudgery I am forced to undertake because of the physical limitations of reality that cause these problems. Abstract "machines" and systems built from them like factories in factorio or software do not degrade, they do not get dirty, they do not wear. I can focus entirely on creating solutions to problems rather than constantly going back and doing boring routine maintenance on something I already had working.

Kinda. But then you don't have the right o-ring and the store is closed until Monday. And you mixed up the BSF and UNC threads on your carbs. And the cloth wiring is intermittently shorting out. Computers are nice in some ways.

“The reason is that, in other fields, people have to deal with the perversity of matter. You are designing circuits or cars or chemicals, you have to face the fact that these physical substances will do what they do, not what they are supposed to do. We in software don't have that problem, and that makes it tremendously easier. We are designing a collection of idealized mathematical parts which have definitions. They do exactly what they are defined to do.

And so there are many problems we don't have. For instance, if we put an if statement inside of a while statement, we don't have to worry about whether the if statement can get enough power to run at the speed it's going to run. We don't have to worry about whether it will run at a speed that generates radio frequency interference and induces wrong values in some other parts of the data. We don't have to worry about whether it will loop at a speed that causes a resonance and eventually the if statement will vibrate against the while statement and one of them will crack. We don't have to worry that chemicals in the environment will get into the boundary between the if statement and the while statement and corrode them, and cause a bad connection. We don't have to worry that other chemicals will get on them and cause a short-circuit. We don't have to worry about whether the heat can be dissipated from this if statement through the surrounding while statement. We don't have to worry about whether the while statement would cause so much voltage drop that the if statement won't function correctly. When you look at the value of a variable you don't have to worry about whether you've referenced that variable so many times that you exceed the fan-out limit. You don't have to worry about how much capacitance there is in a certain variable and how much time it will take to store the value in it.

All these things are defined a way, the system is defined to function in a certain way, and it always does. The physical computer might malfunction, but that's not the program's fault. So, because of all these problems we don't have to deal with, our field is tremendously easier.”

— Richard Stallman, 2001: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-mec-india.html#conf9

It's very fun that you just destroyed the third $50 part and now have to work overtime because your hobby is too expensive.

I had stayed away from the game for fear of being hooked up, but decided to give it a try when I was confined home, so I downloaded the demo. I really wanted to like it, but I gave up after an hour or so, because I felt that the game devs want me to be frustrated. Now, of course nobody likes frustration, but I hate very much everybody who wants me to feel bad.

First of all, I was expecting a sandbox game, and instead I got objectives, and a stupid popup telling me what I am supposed to do.

Secondly, one of the first non trivial objectives is to reach a certain production speed, which, at least in the early stages of the game means hustle (I haven't bothered to check if it changes later on). The game promises hustle from the beginning: you have to feed coal to a machine that extracts coal; you can use robot arms to feed the coal extracting machine with coal, but you have to feed coal to the robotic arm. WTF?

Finally, I'm really done with games where you have to do your thing but also fight monsters. Compare that to, say, Minecraft: you craft a bed, spam lights everywhere and never, ever have to fight a single monster if you don't want to, while you're still free to go and fight monsters with your bare hands if that's what you like.

Is there a sandbox game that is not hustle for the sake of hustle, that doesn't tell you what to do and in which you can do your thing without being too much bothered by monsters?

You can just turn biters off or put them on peaceful mode. Then do what you want. Also, I'd advise you ignore the popup if it bothers you. It comes up only once per game.

Everything in that game can be automated to minimize hustle, if you'd like it to be. Something I found fun was learing to figure out how to automate everything. For example, a drill outputs coal in a direction. The coal can go directly onto a belt, into a chest, into a smelter, or into another machine. Knowing that, you can figure out how to keep the coal drills operating continuously, without using inserters.

BTW, coal inserters will feed themselves coal if they are pulling coal off of a coal belt. So it's useful for feeding coal into your boilers for generating electricity, but not much else.

Finally, do you have evidence the game devs want you to feel bad? I think they want to produce something that challenges their users who enjoy challenges. You are free to respond to a challenge with frustration. But casting blame on the devs for your negative emotional response to their creation is unfounded.

Anno 1800 might float your boat? Or any of the previous games in the Anno series for that matter. The campaign does very much have a story and specific objectives, but the interesting bit is the regular sandbox game:

Turn off pirates and competitors, and either turn off or ignore NPC quests. (There's no penalty to ignoring them, but they sometimes can be useful if you need money.) You'll still have incidents like fires, industrial explosions, disease, and riots, but those are influenced by factors you control, and with well-placed fire stations, hospitals, and police stations you can very much contain them so they're a non-issue.

I quite enjoyed Banished[1] and Surviving Mars[2] for city builders with no needless fighting.

[1]:https://store.steampowered.com/app/242920/Banished/

[2]:https://store.steampowered.com/app/464920/Surviving_Mars/

When did you try it? They added a new version of the tutorial in 0.17 (the one that has the little robot that talks to you), but decided to get rid of it as it's too much hand holding and doesn't really reflect the actual game.

If you want a sandbox game with no fighting, play the freeform game mode instead of the tutorial/campaign (which is how factorio is mostly played) and turn on peaceful mode?

All configurable. You can choose not to have objectives. You can choose not to have biters that get irritated by pollution.

Note that the coal arm (Burner Inserter) will feed itself if it can.

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