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.
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).
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...
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.
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.
I have a foot injury right now and the mental adjustment to sitting more instead of being up and around is...significant.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
but... Factorio is literally the antithesis of this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, actually. Check out the "recursive blueprints" mod.
I really need to get a new machine.
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!
http://www.rollercoastertycoon.com/rollercoaster-tycoon-clas...
I, too, have given up eating, and sleeping, and joy.
(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.)
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 :).
So, painting stays, dusting the apartment goes.
If you're not satisfied, maybe you should try Satisfactory - it's a FPS lite-version of Factorio :)
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.
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.
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.)
Especially if you have kids.
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
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
If you purely stick to everything you learn ingame, you will probably hit a wall after 20 hours or so.
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.
As you place belts, they should rotate to create a path.
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.
It's fine to play for a bit with the new tech branches that come out occasionally in the updates.
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