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Factorio 1.0

factorio.com

1,878 pointsAkronymus615 comments

Addicting and dangerous. When I was in the thick of it my nights were restless as my brain continued to spin on my factory and various ideas for its refactoring. I also suddenly can't not see our global economy and its gradual automation as a massive ongoing MMORPG game of Factorio. The end state then becomes as clear as the state of my final factory - we'd feed raw renewable energy into the system and automatically manufacture an abundance of all goods that people desire. Maybe they all just pop out of the automaton and we gradually lose ability to understand it, fix it, improve it, etc. Depressing. :)

It's sort of that way today, except there are disempowered wage workers powering it all and not-so-clean energy.

A large element of factorio is that as you scale up, you generate more pollution, and then slaughter the native population of the planet because they try and stop you from destroying their world.

It's an aspect of the game I think most doesn't seem to give a lot of thought.

I think this is the most brilliant aspects of the game.

Throughout history, colonization has always required the demonization of the colonized people. Savages, barbarians, white mans burden etc.

Now a typical factorio player would be aghast for murdering humanoids to take over their resources ( or maybe they wouldn’t? Could be an interesting mod!). But we know those slimy brainless insects are just reactive monsters.

But even more... if you play the game, the early waves of the natives can actually do a lot of damage if you aren’t too careful, and can even kill ya. So the game instructs you to absolutely hate these creatures and to fear them. And when you finally build a base large enough to defend itself from hordes and hordes of natives, you feel rather proud, rather than feeling aghast at the carnage. There is a visceral hatred the game has taught you for these “enemies”.

I haven't gotten that far. you can make a lot of the stuff cleaner. I think mining makes pollution, I don't know if the modules will curtail that. But I don't think nuclear or solar+accumulators generate pollution.

Well, let’s not get carried away here. The “native population” are bugs and worms and there is no indication in the game that they’re sentient.

I hear you. I agree. But I also see the concerning potential for ignorance and parallel to new world problems.

They look different. They’re inferior. I don’t see any sign of high intelligence.

Is this something you struggle with when you find ants in your kitchen?

If ants were able to determine that you and your efforts were causing pollution, and could understand that it was you doing it, then organize in mass to attack you to stop it, and when their efforts weren't effective evolve new forms of themselves solely to stop you, I certainly think I would give pause when seeing them in my kitchen, wouldn't you?

There is no indication in factorio this is what's happening. Maybe they just instinctively attack pollution because it smells bad to then without knowing higher level implications of it.

They aren't actual animals that we have to approach scientifically; it's better to look at them through a literary lense.

I personally assumed they were intelligent. I thought the game was making an attempt to draw parallels to the way real life colonialists dehumanazed the native people.

You could definitely read them as being more inspired by scifi aliens like the zerg, though. It is a very common trope for zerg/flood/bugger style aliens to be initially percieved as lacking higher intelligence, but twist they're actually as smart or smarter than humans. But that's not necessarily the case in factorio (afaik, I never got to the endgame). If they aren't intelligent, how does that cast the player's actions? I guess it puts you more in the role of being harassed by wolves?

shrug Sure I guess one can take any interpretation. My point was more that I think it doesn't make any sense to do so. I've played hundreds of games over the years where you kill, murder and maim humans (and animals, and alien life forms). I just don't think there's any interesting philosophical consquence to it, nor any interesting parallels to real life behaviour.

Iirc correctly there is a factorio blig post somewhere about this exact topic, with the original author basically saying 'meh it's just a game mechanic'.

Then again, there's the stardew valley author removing pig butchering from the game for sort of similar concerns, so what do I know.

And they’re unemployable, unfortunately.

>because they try and stop you from destroying their world.

Why would they try and stop you if they weren't sentient?

In that game, how many players would stop if the native population were humanoid? If they were humans? If they would exactly look like the player? How many players leave some place for them to roam?

Building machines is addictive. And like any addiction, there is nothing stopping it.

We should be carried away because one day in the not so far future, somebody has to decide if energy is spent on food production or on mining for bitcoins or some form of product development simulation or calculation. Do we want to have the global ethics that choose the food?

> Why would they try and stop you if they weren't sentient?

Are mosquitoes sentient?

I'm walling spawners with a 8-squares thick wall. Now they can't spawn resistance forces and will just absorb pollution.

I've clocked ~2300 hours on this game. It's called 'cracktorio' for a reason.

The scaling up is so fun. When you launch your first rocket, that's just the start.

The goal is to build an enormous base, to try and launch a rocket every minute or even faster.

It requires elaborate multi-lane train/rails networks to sustain a base like that and it is awesome.

But you can build your bases any way you like and use any technology you want.

Is that what the goal is? I've had so many goals that I didn't realize were intermediate goals until afterwards.

I was thinking the ultimate goal would be to find the edge of the map and wall everything off.

(I still haven't met my goal of really understanding rail signals)

I also wonder if there isn't more in store. For example, I don't see what paving and reinforced concrete floors are for. Will there be wheeled robots, or (sigh) burrowing beasts that can go under walls?

Concrete makes you walk faster, no?

Correct. The walking speed bonuses are:

30% faster for stone brick, 40% faster for concrete, 50% faster for refined concrete

Speed bonuses also apply to cars/exoskeletons making overall travel faster.

Oh great - now I will wear 3 exoskeletons AND pave the earth. :)

AFAIK the game has no edge.

Its like 1 or 2 million squares out.

oh my. It did have an edge in the tutorial scenarios, I just assumed.

Maybe I will just wall off all the passages from nearby bodies of water.

It depends on the map settings. You can either have infinite procedural generation or limited area.

Why would the people who own the factories just give the output to people?

What could people possibly offer, when all the things they're capable of making can be produced at zero cost?

I'm not being snarky, this is something I genuinely worry about. I think Universal Basic Income is the only reasonable answer.

You had the answer yourself. Legislation. Government-run factories for the benefit of the people.

You mean governments nationalize the factories?

Build new ones.

either/or. History is full of these types of tradeoffs. In the completely hypothetical example from above, it would be worth it to figure something out.

I have another theory. Which is that people will beat machines and create and pursue things that we can't even imagine at the moment. I am rooting for human creativity over machines' brute incredible strength.

Even if that's not possible, that's what we should strive for

You could see it in the history of countries that went through a socialist phase (such as Russia): it works, until it doesn't.

As soon as there is no personal incentive (or real ability) to improve things, the tech sector starts to stagnate and fall behind the rest of the world.

The hypothetical case was zero human input, self sustaining factories that rely on renewable energy. In that hypothetical case... How could nationalizing screw it up since there is no human or non-renewable input required? I guess they can "overuse it" so we all become Eloi but we're on the way there anyway.

This implies having all the necessary factories for all things, to begin with. Which seems utopic to begin with, right?

With renewable energy, etc, the country shouldn't fall apart like USSR did, but it is almost certain to fall prey to more entrepreneurial/militaristic neighbors, sooner or later.

Fortunately it's a completely hypothetical situation.

You just discovered utopian communism, the end game - the solution is that the people “owning” the factories are the same who receive its output!

I'm starting to see that UBI is becoming the "answer" to many things in the same way that crypto is the "answer" to many things.

"here, have some fungible tokens in return for doing nothing of value".

Crypto was such a shit show.

> I'm starting to see that UBI is becoming the "answer"

There's been a social experiment going on here at the moment (Australia) - everyone has had UBI for a while in the form of unemployment for everyone who needs it, and paid at a rate that you can live on.

They're finding it hard to get people to pick fruit and so on - it used to be done by back packers who aren't coming because travel isn't happening. Strangely, no one thinks to pay people more to pick fruit and stop it from being a shitty job, instead they lowered the amount they're paying for unemployment. UBI effectively creates a new minimum wage, there are still a lot of jobs no one wants to do, so techtopia will have to wait a while imho.

I am completely okay with letting off-season fruit become more expensive for a while and the tech companies and their vaunted AI divisions get funded by market sensible prices to actually develop the systems we need to do fruit picking robotically (it absolutely can be done, but funding to drive down costs is sporadic).

I mean really one answer here is: maybe we as a civilization don't actually need mass-farmed fruit, because it's not actually cost-effective to produce and consumers clearly don't actually value it very highly.

The point of UBI is a grand solution to stop us having goods and products which depend on creating a defacto underclass.

Yes, same, pay a couple of cents more for a piece of fruit. The trouble is, afaik, is that pushes up the price of local fruit. The local fruit producers are finding it hard to compete on price with foreign imported stuff, (and they like money I imagine), because its picked by slaves and children, the only way to compete is have slave conditions here. A rational response would be to have import duties on fruit and veg so we can pay people properly, but tariffs - no way thats anti global, one of the few things I agree with Trump on.

I disagree with the other answers to your question. There's no guarantee that "the masses" would be able to lay claim and ownership on these automated factories. I very much think the world will move in a darker direction, where the owners of these factories ensure their perpetual control over the rest of us. As for what they get from it? The feeling of power and superiority.

As for the forms of control they will exert, I can think of a few options: media, access to healthcare, and employing you to be a useless drone just so you don't rebel--or to stroke their ego by beating you in a video game, like the link below:

https://www.wired.com/2017/02/clive-thompson-future-of-work-...

Yeah it's likely that by the time the masses realize what the factory owners are up to, it's already too late and the mass produced AI-run robocops/robosoldiers can mow down any kind of violent protest. And the moment the elites realize that there's no guillotine waiting for them any more, they'll do whatever they want.

Even if we land in a UBI world where people don't have to work any more and enjoy a "good" life from their UBI, economic mobility will still be extremely reduced, so gaining relative wealth will become much harder. That alone is quite dystopian.

This was what had happened on Earth in the The Expanse. Most of Earth was on "basic", and you kept it provided you obeyed the rules (one of which was strict limits on breeding). But getting anywhere was almost impossible - in the series you have the street doctor who just can't get educated and trained as a real doctor because even being good at what you do, there's 10,000 more people in front of you who are just better.

https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Basic_Assistance

Wow, that's quite dystopian indeed.

That may be true. But the problem with such systems has always been that there is no guarantee that the kids of those in power are as competent as their parents. Wealth and power is inevitably squandered because talents are still distributed randomly in the population.

Now, when we get to increasing longevity, genetically engineered humans etc, that might change. But then it would also change the parameters of the equation... these future humans won’t resemble the humans of today.

If the people who own the factories can make everything they want, then they have no incentive to expand their factories beyond what is necessary to give them what they want, and, unless their factories takes up all available resources, then what prevents other people from making their own factories? So everyone will just have enough factories to be self sufficient on their own.

However, there are two conditions for that to happen: 1. That there are enough resources to build factories for everyone 2. Everyone have access to the knowledge and means to create those factories.

The way I see it, space exploration is vital in guaranteeing the first condition, and having an open forum of knowledge sharing and research is needed guarantees the second condition.

Your second condition has to do with one of my biggest dreams: "to create a digital library of Alexandria, full of scientific and cultural information, moral debates with their solutions and projects at the planetary level, all open to the public, open to contributions, corrections, debates and with an excellent presentation of the information in all languages "

Isn't Wikipedia just that?

Believe me that Wikipedia is light years away from being "The library of human knowledge", it is more like an encyclopedia of "general culture" that "scratches" the surface of multiple topics so that you can find your answer quickly, but there you cannot find technical information , because much of the technical or "scientific" information is monetized .... (I am not an academic researcher, I am a simple teenager, so my answer is open to correction)

You'd be surprised how much you can find by chasing wikipedia references.

There are no bounds on human wishes.

Art (with factory owners patronizing artists), luxury restaurants, sex industry, etc. There is plenty of room for unautomated work to redistribute money from rich people to ordinary people in the absence of government action. There would be extreme levels of socioeconomic stratification, but I don't think people would just starve or whatever due to lack of jobs.

> Why would the people who own the factories just give the output to people? What could people possibly offer, when all the things they're capable of making can be produced at zero cost?

The answer is simple, protection from them taking it by force. This is literally the reason for liberal democracies.

Dictatorship, feudalism, and other forms of authoritarian structure always come with the downside that the ones at the bottom are trying to get the ones at the top. Thus if you are at the top, you live in worry and fear of a rebelion, revolution, a coup, from your family or friends to betray you, etc.

In that scenario, your day job becomes maintaining your power and authority at all times. Which like any other job, is taxing, tiresome, and hard work. So even though on paper it seems you've got all the goods and services at zero cost, there's a tremendous cost to yourself to maintain that position when others are trying to steal it from you.

That's why, the "right to property" is fundamental. You want a society which can guarantee that right, and give you piece of mind that what you own is yours and no one is going to take it by force. So you can relax and enjoy the fruit of your labor (or inherited factories output).

One solution for this is to create a system that is governed by the rule of law, where no players is in such a bad state that they could be willing to risk it all to steal your piece of the pie. Thus a balance must be struck, where everyone can find satisfaction, even if some get to have a lot more than others.

"and give you piece of mind that what you own is yours and no one is going to take it by force" except for the government that takes stuff by force eg by collecting taxes etc.

That's one solution to not have people take it by force. You agree to a taxation scheme, which trickles down, yet you still retain most of it yourself, and it satisfies everyone. You know exactly how much to give, and you can achieve the right balance of just enough to keep everyone content.

So its way better to willingly agree to participate in a tax scheme, than being at risk of beheading from masses or poison in your drink.

There are other schemes, but it's always the same idea, you need to keep people happy enough and satisfied so they don't come for your stuff. That way, you can enjoy it in peace.

Edit: Well assuming a liberal democratic taxation system. Otherwise taxes can be a way to take even more from people at the bottom, like in feudalism, where land owners tax their labourers for the right to use their land.

> So its way better to willingly agree to participate in a tax scheme, than being at risk of beheading from masses or poison in your drink.

Is it really willingly agreeing when there is no option to opt-out?

This is more of a hypothetical scenario used to describe the origins of a modern capitalist state, rather than any present scenario. However there have certainly been people in history who have been able to make decisions about what laws they want to be subject to. Political lobbying, international migration, and bribery to the purposes of selective enforcement are all methods people have used to this date in the US.

If you're interested in a more theoretical (and less bourgeoisie oriented) discussion of the tensions between a social contract justification for punishment and our practical inability to leave the state, I would recommend "Legal Obligation and the Duty of Fair Play" as well as "A Theory of Justice", both by John Rawls, as well as "The Principle of Fair Play" by A. John Simmons. You may know the second as a standard component of any introductory political philosophy curriculum, and the first and third were parts of a philosophy of law class I took, taken from a textbook by Frederick Schauer. They are quite interesting.

The conclusion I have come to is that we are morally bound by the laws of a state in proportion to the degree that they benefit us in comparison to other possible bodies of law. This approximates our willingness to agree to a given scheme of rules if we were presented with free migration between all possible states, and the extent to which we would prefer the state we are actually in, we should be considered to have willingly agreed to their laws even if that did not happen in reality.

But there often are forms of opt-out, such as becoming a business owner (mild), or moving country (drastic).

People always say "why can't I opt out?" but the reason they say it because they want to opt out while not moving country, or really changing anything about their lives, they just want to not pay taxes right where they are.

As though taxes, government and broader social organization has nothing at all to do with why the roads are paved and there's a municipal sewer system. Or why it seems like it's so hard to find a body of land on Earth where you aren't subject to another, possibly much worse government (military is funded by someone...)

If moving somewhere you wouldn't have to pay taxes always seems like it would be too hard, maybe think on that.

Yea, exactly. You've drastically reduced the scope of who takes your stuff by force. You codify how much they are allowed to take, and even build schemes where you can ideally have input into that amount.

Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes_Jr.#1900...

>The answer is simple, protection from them taking it by force

What if you have a factory that produces superior robots that can repel any uprising against you?

As long as humans exist, there will be someone that finds a way. Sabotaging the factory, reprogramming robots etc are some broad ways in which this can happen.

Those who can do that might as well use their ingenuity to build their own factories and join the factory owning class.

Thats mighty optimistic, given that most of the world already lives in terrible poverty and the wealthy already often use millitary robots to quell malcontents with sufficient success.

Most of the world does not live in terrible poverty. Most of the world used to live in terrible poverty. Highly recommend reading "Factfulness" if you still believe miserable poverty in the norm across the world. Your vision is likely highly skewed by the media and your own unusual wealth in the context of the world / history.

Ultimately if you are made of flesh and blood any adventure you partake in is one small piece of lead away from ending. This is why guns are perceived as the great equalizer; no amount of bodyguards or telekinetic combat robots can stop a bullet traveling 800mph+.

You could just not go outside, but at that point with the onset of depression from complete lack of socialization and Vitamin D you'll eventually kill yourself, yourself.

> The answer is simple, protection from them taking it by force.

No force can stand against an infinite amount of drones, to name just one thing. Those who own the means of production that no longer require workers will also own all means of warfare. Few people own more and more, faster and faster. This will not magically wrap around to the opposite.

You and I are very different people.

I asked, "If it costs someone literally nothing to save lives, but they can't profit from it either, how can I CONVINCE them to do it?"

And your answer is, "They shouldn't have to. We should militarize the police to protect their rights to be heartless."

I don't even know how to respond.

No, that's not the right answer.

But that's not at all what OP answered.

Rather that it could be gainful for the owners of the factory to give out part of its produce to provide stability and hence protect the factory.

You completely misread his answer. Read it again. He just explained that they SHOULD give things away to gain peace of mind.

What if people who control UBI decide you are no longer worthy of receiving it?

Then it’s no longer universal.

What are you trying to say/ask?

There’s a valid scenario where eg felons lose these rights. This is how large some sections of society are disenfranchised today. Not hard to imagine this kind of stuff happening with UBI as well.

Exactly. Not just felons. It's not hard to imagine people labelled as "terrorists" or "trouble makers" being excluded.

The point of UBI though is to dismantle the administrative overhead and waste of existing welfare systems. A proper UBI implementation deliberately ensures it is administratively difficult to try and selectively remove people from the system.

You can't just replace a system where a very few people with real needs receive a large amount of targetted support with one where the same amount of money is distributed evenly throughout the entire population. Handing out free money is always popular; leaving people to suffer or die from lack of necessary medical treatment costing far more than the UBI payments, not so much. The introduction of a UBI would not automatically eliminate the need-based welfare system and its administrative overhead. Even if it did, in the end there would still need to be a system to keep track of who is qualified to receive UBI payments (even if it's just based on citizenship / residency), who has or has not been paid, where the payments are to be deposited, etc. Stopping one person's UBI in response to a court judgement would be trivial.

I worry more about increasing it past the laffer curve.

Competition will push prices to almost zero too ideally. This is how capitalism should work. Technologically driven deflation is key but cronyism likes to mess with it and try prevent it thus the complex financial system.

> The end state then becomes as clear as the state of my final factory - we'd feed raw renewable energy into the system and automatically manufacture an abundance of all goods that people desire. Maybe they all just pop out of the automaton and we gradually lose ability to understand it, fix it, improve it, etc.

This is the premise of E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops”.

Fully automated luxury gay space something.

The world trembles as a world-class AI researcher takes an interest in a factory automation game :)

Ever heard of grey goo? ;)

Yeah there have been a couple of attempts, mostly leaning on the "recursive blueprints" mod:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF--1XdcOeM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygQSDEmY1Wc

Isn't that what Musk actually does? Makes the machines that makes the machines. :)

Every one who works for him should know that we need to ditch our burner inserters asap and get to ... wait, not solar... solar + nuclear with a circuit to turn it on and off depending on steam.

> we'd feed raw renewable energy into the system and automatically manufacture an abundance of all goods that people desire

Metal isn't renewable. The factory must expand!

So glad you mentioned this I haven't seen anyone else talk about it. I quit playing this game because I couldn't sleep afterward. So weird nothing else has ever affected me like that

At my last job they liked to play diplomacy online. With 2 day turn times. I ended up quiting the game because I couldn't think about anything else.

Trying to work out which of my colleagues would betray me, and what the best position for my units for the next turn.

I don't consider myself particularly competitive, but the need to minmax was strong with that game, and the social/diplomacy element was just infuriating.

> Trying to work out which of my colleagues would betray me

An interesting GDC presentation on a similar subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9WMNuyjm4w

This is essentially the plot of the short story "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster. It's from 1909 and is alarmingly prescient.

https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machi...

Best game I have every played ! (source: trust me) 8.5 years in early access is no joke, the game is definitely something !

Some of my favourite youtube videos on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF--1XdcOeM [Self expanding factory, recursive blue prints]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feHq2Ken43M [Factorio Rocket ballet, for reference it took me 30 hours to launch a single rocket]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KoV_Zk2IRs [Factorio base tour, this base looks like a CPU die when zoomed out]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjtXHsv5E6M [Another Factorio base tour]

And mods. Lots of mods. Some very good, others also silly.

A recently updated one is Renai Transportation, adding Train JUMP-tions:

https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/i5yoaj/train_junc...

A recent video from Nilaus that some of the audience here might find amusing: Factorio real-time dashboard using Grafana.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91rxQfpqge8

o m f g. Hilarious and great at the same time.

Satisfactory is like a 3D version of Factorio, which lets you build huge multi-layer mega factories up into the sky. But it's not as deep and sophisticated as Factorio, and doesn't have drones or blueprints. (That would be a lot more difficult to accomplish in free-form 3D, than with Factorio's 2D tile grid.) It's kind of like the giant simple Legos for younger kids, as opposed to Factorio that's more like Lego Technic.

Satisfactory is well worth playing if you yearn for a 3D version of Factorio, but I still keep going back to Factorio, which is more like "Dwarf Fortress" in its depth and sophistication. Satisfactory's world is breathtakingly beautiful, lovingly hand-crafted by artists instead of procedurally generated, which makes it all the more satisfying to despoil and ruin with huge mega-factories belching out smoke and radiation.

This guy's videos stress testing and abusing Satisfactory are awesome:

I Produced so Much Nuclear Waste the World Is Ruined Forever - Satisfactory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh2oF-eZTD8

I Built a 600 Meter Human Cannon That Ends All Existence - Satisfactory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2X3wlvoShg

I Made the Game Unplayable with This Gravity-Destroying Tractor Ball Pit - Satisfactory

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

I Crippled the Game by Building to the Heavens - Satisfactory gameplay - Let's Game It Out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X77MHTOEwXo

What Happens When You Let a Maniac Build a Factory - Satisfactory gameplay - Let's Game It Out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vYYhL9Vt8o

I feel like if you want a 3D favtorio then going back to the mother: modded minecraft, is the best option. I have put multiple thousands of hours into industry games over the past ten years (few hours in the past two years though). Gregtech was what got me started and in some ways is still the best. GT6 is complete and a standalone game (Mechanatia I think) is currently being worked on. Factorio definitely wins on ability to automate and scale up, but it is very wide and not very deep. That is to say, there is no exponential growth power or resource requirements by moving up 5+ tech tiers. Combining many tiers with powerful automation would be a very fun combo. Modded factorio is probably the best place to look for this. For now, afaik, the biggest factorio mods are focused on going even wider.

I love Minecraft, and have played waaaay many hours of that too. But I'm not up to date on the latest mods, so thanks for the recommendations!

Both Minecraft and Factorio use grids, which make automated building with blueprints a lot easier.

But I can't imagine a good way for Satisfactory to support reusable blueprints in an unconstrained 3D world, the way Factorio does in a gridded 2D world (or the way Minecraft could in a cubic 3D world), where a big part of Satisfactory is building around the landscape, natural artifacts, and threading tangled conveyor belts around your other machines and belts and architecture.

When you're working with a 2D grid, it's easy to make reusable blueprints that you can systematically stamp out and plug together. (It's a lot like GPU programming, parallelizing tasks by spreading out the data to multiple processors, processing it in efficient units, making tradeoffs about bandwidth and buffering and transports, and merging it all back together again).

But there is so much variation in Satisfactory's 3D world and degrees of freedom in construction, that everything you build is unique and not nearly as modular and replicable as Factorio's blueprints.

On the other hand, Satisfactory's 3D building tools are fantastic (and it would be frustrating and impossible to play if they weren't so good): they make it really easy to connect up machine inputs and outputs with conveyor belts and pipes, and route them around like spaghetti code.

Here's something I posted earlier, quoting Dave Ackley on why he didn't transform his Moveable Feast Machine from 2D to 3D, who said: "I need to actually preserve one dimension to build the thing and fix it. Imagine if you had a three-dimensional computer, how you can actually fix something in the middle of it? It's going to be a bit of a challenge. So fundamentally, I'm just keeping the third dimension in my back pocket, to do other engineering."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22304110

Dave Ackley, who developed the Moveable Feast Machine, had some interesting thoughts about moving from 2D to 3D grids of cells: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21131468

DonHopkins 4 months ago | parent | favorite | on: Wolfram Rule 30 Prizes

Very beautiful and artistically rendered! Those would make great fireworks and weapons in Minecraft! From a different engineering perspective, Dave Ackley had some interesting things to say about the difficulties of going from 2D to 3D, which I quoted in an earlier discussion about visual programming:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18497585

David Ackley, who developed the two-dimensional CA-like "Moveable Feast Machine" architecture for "Robust First Computing", touched on moving from 2D to 3D in his retirement talk:

https://youtu.be/YtzKgTxtVH8?t=3780

"Well 3D is the number one question. And my answer is, depending on what mood I'm in, we need to crawl before we fly."

"Or I say, I need to actually preserve one dimension to build the thing and fix it. Imagine if you had a three-dimensional computer, how you can actually fix something in the middle of it? It's going to be a bit of a challenge."

"So fundamentally, I'm just keeping the third dimension in my back pocket, to do other engineering. I think it would be relatively easy to imaging taking a 2D model like this, and having a finite number of layers of it, sort of a 2.1D model, where there would be a little local communication up and down, and then it was indefinitely scalable in two dimensions."

"And I think that might in fact be quite powerful. Beyond that you think about things like what about wrap-around torus connectivity rooowaaah, non-euclidian dwooraaah, aaah uuh, they say you can do that if you want, but you have to respect indefinite scalability. Our world is 3D, and you can make little tricks to make toruses embedded in a thing, but it has other consequences."

Here's more stuff about the Moveable Feast Machine:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15560845

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14236973

The most amazing mind blowing demo is Robust-first Computing: Distributed City Generation:

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

And a paper about how that works:

https://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/papers/paper_tsmall1_11_24.pd...

Plus there's a lot more here:

https://movablefeastmachine.org/

Now he's working on a hardware implementation of indefinitely scalable robust first computing:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1M91QuLZfCzHjBMEKvIc-A

Buildcraft’s builder can stamp complicated structures, but if you want to use it in factories then every stamp will need some hands on work. Ticking tile entities have fragile metadata that don’t like getting placed by non-players. There may be workarounds, but then you need to implement a blueprint system that can handle arbitrary ticking tile entity metadata. It might not even be a good idea to do this even if you can. Anyway, assuming these are solvable problems and someone has solved them, then you could have a factorio-like experience.

The thing is, factorio came out swinging with better automation than any minecraft mod. It is much easier to place things together and have them run free. Logistics bots are an absolute game changer in industry games. The bar has been raised.

I think there could be a whole book about designing reusable Factorio blueprints, like "C++ Template Metaprogramming".

The kind you can easily stamp out rows of, and then hook up easily to standardized busses.

You can sacrifice some space and efficiency and cost for modularity and ease of building big banks of them with robots.

There are mods that add blueprints to Satisfactory. Kind of wonky but definitely works. I'm sure official blueprints will work fine. My gut feeling is that we will see it in Update 4 since it's the most requested feature.

Best game ever btw and this comes from a seasoned Factorio player.

I more or less beat (I escaped but haven't gone back to do stuff in the "Real world") Compact Claustrophobia recently and one of the things that ends up teaching you is a 3D composability that wouldn't really apply to the real world.

Compact Machines are pocket dimensions of fixed internal size (the first one you get is 3x3x3, the last you'll build is 13x13x13) that all exist as a single 1x1x1 cube on the outside. From inside you can reach any of the six sides of that cube with a "tunnel".

So if you've got, say, a simple basic Minecraft furnace with fuel flowing in the left, and stuff input to the top, output from the bottom, you can replace that with a 5x5x5 Compact Machine, with three tunnels inside, and any amount of complexity that fits. Maybe inside the 5x5x5 machine you turn fuel into electricity, you run four electric furnaces, and you parallelise the processing. Externally though it behaves just like the furnace... except both faster and more efficient.

The limited space in Claustrophobia (before you escape) means you feel compelled to actually solve problems in place this way, whereas normally you'd be tempted to just be lazy and add a few extra pipes here, an extra hopper there and soon it's a vast sprawling mess. When 13x13x13 seems impossibly large you cut that sort of nonsense right out.

I remember a comment from you a few months ago regarding factorio and you pointed out that it was "just" an implementation of a specific variation of a cellular automata ruleset.

I enjoyed the comment but when I went back to find it in your history I discovered that you are a prolific commenter and that I was unable to find it.

Do you remember it and if so can you link to it or expand more on which cellular automata rule set it is?

Factorio (and also games like SimCity) are not actually pure CA rules, but they combine cellular automata techniques together with many other techniques like system dynamics, etc.

Will Wright gave a great explanation of how simulation games combine different techniques together in three intersection dimensions: Topologies (agents, networks, and layers), dynamics (propagation, growth, grouping, order, allocation, mapping, specialization, and nesting), and paradigms (cybernetics, system dynamics, cellular automata, chaos theory, adaptive systems, network theory).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdgQyq3hEPo&t=35m50s

>Lessons in Game Design, lecture by Will Wright, Computer History Museum, November 20, 2003.

Maybe the comment I posted about Factorio and CA was this, in the discussion of John von Neumann's 29 state cellular automata rule -- It is a pure CA, and a historically interesting one that he actually designed on paper and wrote about in a book. I compared it to Factorio, in the way Factorio uses conveyor belts in four different directions to direct the flow of items, and JVN29 uses arrows in four different directions to direct the flow of signals. But you can put a lot of different kinds of things on Factorio conveyor belts, but only ones and zeros on JVN29 arrows, since it was designed to be minimal and mathematically rigorous like a Turing Machine, not practical and convenient to program and fun to play like Factorio.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22727228

>Von Neumann Universal Constructor (wikipedia.org) 90 points by amjd 4 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 29 comments

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_construc...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738598

>[...]

>Factorio players will recognize these tapes of construction instructions as 2D "blueprints" that construction drones use to build patterns of factories and conveyor belts, etc. In Factorio, after your drones have build a blueprint in the unpowered, unsupplied state, you can connect it to the power grid, hook up pipes to deliver fluids, and run conveyor belts in and out of it to deliver resources and products, and it will immediately starts doing its thing. Playing Factorio is uncannily like von Neumann 29 state cellular automata programming, not by coincidence. So it's a great way to get your head around cellular automata programming, gpu programming, parallel programming, queuing systems, and data flow programming in general!

>Factorio Tutorial #20 - Bots, part 1 - Construction robots

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLOyk55uI2Y&t=19m32s

>Factorio just doesn't have the ability to construct cells by spilling items off the end of conveyor belts, or destroy cells with conveyor belts, either. But maybe there's an extension for that! And John von Neumann's 29 state cellular automata doesn't have swarms of construction drones that build and tear down blueprints in parallel like Factorio does, so there are some differences. But the basic idea of grids of cells with conveyor belts carrying items between factories is the same.

Also I wrote some more about JVN32:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22737079

>The Real Time Crossing (Buckley, p. 457, The real-time crossing organ) is like a road intersection that splits the two crossing lanes, then uses traffic lights to give cars in each pair of lanes alternating turns to cross, and then merges the lanes back together (since each intersection works at 50% throughput, you need to split, use two of them, and merge -- Factorio and Satisfactory players will get what I mean, in terms of conveyor belts, splitters and mergers, and conveyor belt throughput).

Also I asked Alan Kay about Factorio and other games here, and he replied:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11807250

>DonHopkins on May 31, 2016 | parent | favorite | on: Alan Kay's reading list

>I've heard you say that Rocky's Boots was one of your favorite computer games. Please, off the top of your head, what's your top-n list of inspiring games that you think people learning to program should play?

>I've been playing Factorio [1] [2], which I think would resonate with your love of Rocky's Boots, cellular automata, queuing theory, visual programming, system dynamics and distributed control systems. It's in the spirit of John von Neumann's 29 state cellular automata [3] and universal constructor. [4]

>[1] Factorio: https://www.factorio.com/

>[2] HN Factorio discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11266471

>[3] John von Neumann's 29 state cellular automata: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_cellular_automaton

>[4] JvN Universal Constructor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_construc....

>alankay on June 1, 2016 [–]

>Hi Don

>I think I'm so out of context wrt video games here and now that I can't come up with a worthwhile reply. I liked Rocky's Boots because of the brilliant combination of the content and the idea behind the game play -- and they were well matched up. I liked the idea of its successor "Robot Odyssey" a lot, but advised the TLC folks to use something like Logo for the robot language rather than the Rocky's circuit diagrams (which were now not well matched up to the needs). As you know I really tried to get the Maxis people to make "Sim City" a rule based system that children could program in so they could both understand the generators and to change them (no luck there).

>If I were to look around today, I'd look for something where the underlying content was really "good" for children -- I doubt that cellular automata would be in my top 10 -- and then would also have good to great game play.

I haven't played minecraft in a while, but I really enjoyed Industrial Craft, and haven't heard of Gregtech.

I looked into it a while ago, and noticed that IC hasn't been kept up to date with the latest minecraft versions, maybe it's a dying community. Would you say GT is a spiritual successor?

Maybe it's time to fire up the servers this weekend :)

GT is to minecraft what angelbobs is to factlrio IMO.

A good entry point for GT is, I'd say, Gregblock.

Honestly I used to hate Gregtech when it was in modpacks I used to play with my friends for making things grindy, but playing Factorio gave me appreciation for what GT was trying to do. More large scale automation, but at the time we were too used to magic box mods that let you upgrade to faster magic boxes to realise.

My personal biggest problem was with the conduct of Greg. But honestly, even that is in the past.

My feeling is the modding scene as a whole and the people in it were much less mature in those days. See also fights between mod authors breaking people's worlds for unsupported combinations or attempts to block use in specific modpacks etc. And the ubiquitious overly modular mod so they could put each component behind its own adfly link.

Yeah, with greg, neither side did well.

GT was an add-on to IC2 and its development ran alongside IC2 during IC2’s hayday. There have been six official GT versions, but the latest one is on 1.7.10.

GT5 had an expansion to it made (GT5U) that was so great that it inspired the creation of GT New Horizons (GTNH).

GTNH is the currently the most active GT community, but it goes a little off the grind deep end imo. There has been a large amount of effort to balance every recipe in a huge number of mods and it’s great fun if you’ve already played through GT a few times.

GT Community Edition (GTCE) is a fan recreation of GT5 in contemporary versions of MC. The last I saw, the maintainer had bad vision and was not receptive to feedback. It is not worthy of the GT name.

I just had a look at IC2 today. Their newest supported Minecraft version is 1.12.2.

I decided to go with Thermal Expansion/Dynamics/Foundation instead though. Also for 1.12.2.

Thermal stuff just feels much better designed and integrated than any of the IC based stuff.

Mine craft industry required a lot of manual mining and not nearly as much automation. Factorio refined the loop.

Mining and crafting is a fine primary loop. It inspires zen much more than factorio. The more advanced tech mods require automation. I have never needed to set up a bang-bang controller for my fuel burner or spreadsheet out perfectly matched rates to avoid overflow/underflow issues in Factorio. In some ways modded minecraft demands more automation engineering, and I find that fun.

Advancing in minecraft tech trees grants more powerful mining tools so you can clear entire veins in minutes, or set up quarries that mine everything to bedrock (with the sorting and processing system being a fun challenge).

Factorio certainly cuts the chuff and opens up the ability to physically scale up to an absurd size. The controls work is less needed, but the geometric layout is more critical. Since minecraft bases are expected to be small, advancements in tech must be in faster, small machines.

> I still keep going back to Factorio, which is more like "Dwarf Fortress" in its depth and sophistication.

If Factorio and Dwarf Fortress had a baby I would adopt it without hesitation and raise it as my favourite child and sole heir.

I have tears of laughter. These videos truly are awesome.

I'd sure hate to work on a product with that guy working in QA! Oh the bug reports he would generate! The Satisfactory developers must have a dartboard with his face on it.

Ah, but i waited 8.5 years to play factory, no way I'm going to play prerelease satisfactory.

I actually don’t like the hand crafted nature of the map because it severely limits replayability. Sure it’s damn pretty but once you explore once and learn the interesting/valuable spots, the sense of awe and wonder that comes from exploration just vanishes.

I find it kind of weird that programmers seem to like this game. I tried playing it for a bit and all I could think of was how much more efficient things would be if I could just write code instead of running around on a map to achieve the same thing.

The whole game seemed like a forced distillation of programming into a form that can be consumed by the masses.

Despite programming-adjacent elements it's just a sandbox game.

If you don't enjoy the core idea of playing in a souped-up sandbox you probably won't enjoy it.

For example with Zachtronics games (very programming-puzzle-esque games), I doubt I could play it for long. It would be similar to messing about with an Esolang, but more structured. While I enjoy using Esolangs, I can only ever do it in short bursts, and I imagine the same would hold if I started playing a Zachtronics game. For Factorio, it is just barely different enough from regular programming (due to various parts, such as the grid based nature of reality, etc) that if I am in the right mood I could play it quite easily for several hours. Yet, if I am in the wrong mood/state-of-mind, then I will constantly compare it to what I am coding and likely stop playing after an hour. I will say that Factorio is far more distilled in it's problem solving nature than you'll usually get with programming, which can make it scratch that itch of solving something. While I still enjoy Factorio after playing it for some hours, I'm more likely to code now than I am to play it. Still quite enjoyable and worth the money and possibly the time, though.

Do you like games at all? Almost any game would be “more efficient” if you could just write code to declare yourself the victor. Games - for that matter, pretty much any leisure pursuit whatsoever - are not about efficiency.

Oh I do play a bunch of games. I have no problem enjoying strategy games like Civ, EU4 or base builders like RimWorld. Factorio is just too much like programming for me to find joy in it.

Zachtronics aren't even hiding it---just write some microcontroller code!

I think it's the difference between what feels like work and what feels like an emotional resonance. Or I guess, whether you end up enjoying the process, or the outcome.

For example Doom Eternal is basically, IMO, one of the best games ever made, because it's one of the only games where the combat loop gets a physiological response from me. I can't play it at all if I'm in the wrong headspace, but it's amazing when I'm in the right one.

Factorio really has to hit the same sort of "zing!" feel. Programming-wise for me, it's the feeling of unbridled power at just tearing things apart to refactor. Because that's a hell of a different feel to the day job.

Do you need a PC to play this game or does it work on any laptop?

Any x86_64 Windows, Mac, or Linux machine will play it. Bigger factories will bog down on lesser hardware.

Bigger factories being the kind of thing that takes hundreds of hours to build.

The game is beautifully optimized and will run quite well on a potato.

A 2011 MBP can't run it at all

I played it on a 2012 MBP; only started lagging at the very end right before I managed to launch a rocket (which broke my addiction to it, thankfully).

I highly recommend using a USB mouse if playing on a laptop.

It's the game to teach people what technical debt and refactoring is.

When you start building your factory, you think about how to get first steps just done (ship it!). Over time complexity and scope of your factory increases, but old code, I mean old machines, are still there, getting in the way.

You can choose to ignore it and work around it using underground belts and similar solutions, or you can take on a proper refactoring, limiting your progress in the short term.

It also impressively shows the other side of things, where you can keep your factory running on hotfixes until pretty much the end of the game.

You can most certainly launch a rocket (i.e. ship your final product) with any kind of setup but if you want to build a sustainable rocket launching platform, you will most likely have to nuke production (as in, you can literally nuke your production) and re-build it.

Nuking your starter base is silly unless you're on death world and have some impenetrable defense set up that's hard to attain elsewhere without significant work. Usually to start a fresh megabase you just load up a car and drive a couple minutes to a new location. Then you can keep supplying the construction materials of the megabase with your starter base. (To those unfamiliar: yes, "the end of the game" -- launching a rocket -- is really the start of the game to seasoned players, so the initial base you launch the first rockets with is commonly called the starter base.)

The starter base is probably a UPS sink. Nuke that trash, it's not worth the flock of construction robots to disassemble it.

The point of the late late game is to minimize UPS (updates per second). It becomes memory bandwindth bound at some point. It demonstrates what's possible with today's technology. In comparison, Microsoft Word can not keep up with my typing in a new, blank document.

A starter base on the order of up to say 100-200 spm usually doesn't have much of a ups impact at all in my experience but I guess it could be on wimpier hardware. Or if you rely too heavily on logistics robots, but I think people usually don't go mass logistics until later.

I haven't played in a long while and never quite got a rocket launched(can't recall why). Any tips for getting to that point very fast without feeling like cheating the phase?

https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/i9hwx9/factorio_s...

Incredibly timely, thanks!

haha i love that. it just shows us that gaffa/silver tape hotfixes are the real deal.

Once you get logistics bots you can monkey patch anything with a requester chest.

Sounds like fun but only if you’re not a programmer, for whom it would just be work.

Depends - Some games like this are addictive and great fun for programmers too. I played "Spacechem" to death. It's effectively a two-thread, multiprocess, visual turing-alike machine with an organic chemistry theme. It's awesome.

Lots of programmers enjoy Factorio - personally I think it's because it's less annoying than work, so we do what we like minus management

Several Zachtronics games are just "programming, but intentionally annoying".

I don't really see the appeal compared to ordinary programming. My favorite programming game has actually been a flash game where your goal was to transform binary strings (represented as sequences of blue/red dots) into other binary strings. You were still writing in Befunge, but the rest of it came off as trying to be helpful to the extent possible, rather than giving you a goal and then disabling the tools you'd want to use to get there.

Are you perhaps talking about Manufactoria?

http://pleasingfungus.com/Manufactoria/

Probably my favourite flash game.

Yes, one of my favorites too.

It's even less of a game, but I also had a lot of fun with http://incredible.pm .

What do you think about Opus Magnum? I don't think that one is particularly annoying; the depth of it is rather interesting.

It's one of the games I was thinking of as "programming, but intentionally annoying". Checking my installation, I seem to have completed the first three chapters.

Some things off the top of my head that I find annoying:

- Puzzles start feeling like they're asking more for busywork than for puzzle-solving. I enjoy thinking about "how do I do this?" I don't enjoy thinking "well, I know exactly what I want to do, but it's a huge slog to actually go through the motions."

- You can't rotate the thing that accepts a polymer. So if you end up making the correct thing, but your orientation is off, you get to manually re-lay every part of your machine, instead.

- Everything uses the same clock.

- You can't even apply purely mechanical fixes for everything using the same clock, like a three-arm grabber with one of the arms cut off. There goes the conceit that the rules are justified by the theme.

I like that Opus Magnum scores you separately on time, space, and monetary cost. That was a good idea. I like working out fundamental minimums for how quickly I can produce something (based on the source pieces I'm allowed...) and designing something that can achieve that. The animation of a completed machine is fun to watch.

I think the monetary-cost mechanic seems underdeveloped.

> Puzzles start feeling like they're asking more for busywork than for puzzle-solving. I enjoy thinking about "how do I do this?" I don't enjoy thinking "well, I know exactly what I want to do, but it's a huge slog to actually go through the motions."

I think you will enjoy this puzzle game:

http://qrostar.skr.jp/en/jelly/

Don't let the cutesy graphics fool you, this is a masterpiece in puzzle design.

In case you are not on Windows or don't want to download the exe for some reason right now, you can try this html simplified version

https://avorobey.github.io/jelly/

wow, great find!

Trying now... this is an astonishingly good puzzle game.

Wow, I just finished the first level and I can already tell that I'm going to love this game. Tightly crafted puzzle games are my favorite genre - thanks for mentioning this one.

I much prefer Spacechem. Opus Magnum has the control separated from the machine, so it’s easy to optimise all the timings. With Spacechem, you have to play with having the red Waldo control the blue, because the blue already has a command at that point.

I guess it’s like Harvard vs. Von Neumann. Harvard is more practical, but Von Neumann allows more fun hacks.

Again Spacechems chemistry/physics seems too bogus that it killed all immersion for me.

Yes, but its alchemy/chemistry seems to make no real world sense.

Intentionally annoying? I find it extremely fun to find the most optimal solution in those exactly because the toolset is so constrained.

Finding the most optimal solution in real programming is impossible because the scope is always enormous.

Very much agreed here. To me it’s programming with limited scope, simple well defined goals, and no side effects.

Pretty much everything programming isn’t in the real world.

And feedback too. In the real world your program don't tell you if they're correct, or efficient without a lot of extra work.

It's also much easier to find a solution if you know there is a good solution to be found.

I feel like there are different types of constraints. Some are useful for creativity (limited number of specific resources), some are annoying (making you work harder to achieve known goal).

I stopped playing exapunks because of this before the end. The limited instruction set, limits on movements, etc. are cool - they force new solutions. Not having functions or advanced templates is just annoying - I need to implement the same thing multiple times, by copy-pasting.

They're the line for me. Factorio is fun, Zachtronic not so much. And within those: Opus Magnum was better than others because the presentation appealed to me. Factorio I do not play "efficiently" because the "just plop blueprints and let bots handle it" style is boring - I much more enjoy organically grown chaos. Sometimes play challenges with artificial limitations.

I see Zachrtonics games as just the fun part of programming. Programming, but you don't need to mess with build files, tooling, unit testing, deployment, maintenance, customers, PMs, etc... It's just the puzzle solving part of programming, which is my favorite part of programming.

I thought that about TIS-100 and Shenzhen I/O until I played them, I recommend both

I liked the idea of these games but I was the opposite. I couldn't shake the feeling that it was just work. I found myself procrastinating them. Wish I could enjoy the puzzles more.

Though I already have weekend programming projects that are more fulfilling and work towards something more concrete than "yay, solved a puzzle", and the games just made me wonder why I wasn't putting this time into those hobby projects. Factorio made me feel this way too.

On the other hand, I've been playing Morrowind lately (OpenMW) which gives me a nice mental break from programming. Apart from the fact that I couldn't help but write a parser for its game files once I saw how simple and documented the format was. Bit more fulfilling to have a `tes3_parser.go` at the end of my puzzle-solving session than to have solved some contrived TIS-100 puzzles for a fantasy computer.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Tes3Mod:Mod_File_Format

Factorio was fun at first, but then it quickly felt like a pencil and paper optimization problem for something that doesn't even exist. Whether that tickles your fancy or not is probably like whether cilantro tastes like soap to you or not.

I do PCB layout, which is way more like factorio. Still I enjoy the game a lot.

Yeah. I recently bought a game on steam where you create and manage a startup. You have to do stuff like research landing page, hire devs, ux people etc. About 10 mins in I was just thinking that my time would be better spent actually doing this stuff rather than doing it in a game.

Sometimes, it's therapeutic to do something in a sandbox where there really isn't any adverse ramification to screwing up.

This. I would even suggest it might be good training to coop with the manager if it was a possibility. I bet manager would learn quickly whats a technical debt, why it shouldn't be ignored and that sometimes high level goals cannot be pursued directly. Also devs would learn quickly that sometimes we have to stop the crazy conveyors doing binary operations on the payload and just keep it simple.

Exactly my review. I usually play it when work is slow to keep my brain entertained, but when I get proper work at work - factorio is no longer my friend. Game is like drugs - ill just do small updates to my fab - boom its 4am.

Agreed. This game was too much like work and quickly got burnt out.

Burning out on a game only happened with warframe for me.

Factorio is like programming. But without management or customers messing anything up. You are in full control of the whole project and have fairly clear requirements. That makes it a lot more enjoyable.

Plus, it has trains :-)

> Plus, it has trains :-)

Which will run over the programmer.

To be fair, trains will run over bugs, too!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8SBp4SyvLc&t=1m17s

Sounds like you could get the same thing by writing a real software project to scratch some itch you have. Sure, other users might come eventually and, but you can just ignore those and keep building what you like.

Yeah but Factorio lets me nuke space bugs.

That... is actually an argument that can't be refuted. Happy hunting! :)

You can quickly ruin some hours of programmers if you post the wrong link.

https://regexcrossword.com/

And if you thought that was not challenging enough:

https://rampion.github.io/RegHex/

I'm a programmer because I enjoy programming. That's also why I enjoy Factorio.

Or alternatively take a Moore's law view: the original factory remains there forever, eclipsed by the much larger, more orderly and modular, one build next to it.

Walk speed is a surprisingly big constraint on the early game, until you get various upgrades; you build a small factory because you don't want to walk round a larger one.

Walk speed is a metaphor for the AWS budget.

exactly, the original factory is likely the construction/logistic bot production center, it'd be slow but not necessarily inefficient, so it can stay while the bot build the modular factory elsewhere

You can also use the internet to find solutions to all of it!

Or input/output, or scalability and to a limited extent security (aliens attacking weak spots).

This is actually what ruins the game for me. I get to a place where I need to recreate large chunks of the factory and it just feels too much like work.

It's one of those games that I wish I could love, but whenever I attempt to start it now I just remember that feeling of "ugh, why don't I instead code something, at least I'll create something".

To me it's surprising how many games can actually be viewed like work.

So true! Super Mario games are basically a giant learning curve of controlling your character, where steps are well defined and cut into levels.

I'm convinced that some games are actually Ender's games. Forklift simulator 2020? You're actually controlling a forklift somewhere in Germany and Hans is now out of work.

And much like in Ender's Game, uncountably many are now dead by my hand.

For those missing the reference:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forklift_Driver_Klaus_%E2%80...

The wiki page is fine, but the video is quite literally Not Safe For Work. My German boss at the chemical company showed the whole team. Kinda gorey but in the Monty Python Black Knight sort of way, and similarly hilarious. Klaus' story is made up but it's based upon thousands of tales written in blood. Definitely gave me an enhanced appreciation for safety culture.

That's a fun one, but it's about Klaus not Hans.

Forklift simulator is a game you can buy: https://store.steampowered.com/app/939450/Forklift_Simulator...

Thanks - and for 'Ender's games': https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender%27s_Game

Just in case you aren't at work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C37MnfXD1z8

https://xkcd.com/1897/

I guess the obvious thing to point out are the multiplayer modes for Call of Duty, Battlefront, Overwatch, etc.

Short films have been made about this, and of course Ender's Game.

I tried one of the truck driving simulators. Got stuck behind a slow minivan. Where is the fun in simulating the most frustrating part of my workday?

You can use the 40T to remove the problem which could have slight repercussions in real life.

I turned off traffic violations in the options, bought the most powerful truck I could, and now make every delivery at 90-100 mph.

Of course I'm also doing it in VR and with a steering wheel setup

The same with Train Sim. Waiting 5 minutes for a red sign is very realistic but there is no fun in it.

According to some games theorists, all games:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/10/dont-...

I was not prepared for the length of that article but I couldn’t stop reading

https://youtu.be/48slZc5ITK4?t=319

Yeah but you can have robots do all the heavy lifting.

It really feels like a time waster until you get the drones to do those chores. I had a huge sprawl just because teching up to drones again in a new map felt like too much work.

Just add a quality of life mod giving you earlier access to precursor bots, e.g. Construction Drones[1] or Nanobots[2].

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

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

This mod is great, really speeds up the early game to get to the more interesting middle and late games.

Watching AntiElitz speedruns and going for No Spoon taught me how to sprint through the early game and get to bots and a large amount of production quickly.

Indeed, and to explain for the audience, in speedruns the split to get construction bots up and runnuing is around 40 minutes.

The WR time to launch a rocket and get 'space science', the final science is currently about 1hr46m.

Drones are a lot easier to get to now after they tweaked the sciences/tech tree, you're now able to pursue drone science immediately after green. Mods are always available if you need it immediately though.

I usually bootstrap a second base, make heavy use of trains, and ship materials back to original base. At this point I generally don't tear things down

In the manufacturing industry that's basically drop shipping.

More like if a manufacturer needed to make a new product so they built an entire new factory next door and ran electric and plumbing from the old building and abandoned it.

In fact it's exactly like this because that's what the game is about.

The game has logistics drones that can transfer predetermined resources to keep a certain box at a certain level.

And thus was born the service-oriented architecture.

No, that's multiplayer.

Not sure why you're downvoted- that's how my friends and I would play multiplayer, with certain players taking "ownership" of specific raw material sources and shipping them to factories operated by other players.

Yeah, bootstraps all the way: 1. Bootstrap "base 1" to Automation 1 (Coal etc.) 2. Bootstrap "Base 2" for Red/Green science, automate building components 3. Main bus "Science Base" maybe up to first rocket (maybe some train in resources) and later repurpose for module construction. 4. Train Base to goal SPM factory

The game has some major transition points where refactoring makes sense, but often the correct solution is to tactically upgrade as much as possible, and get to the better point to rebuild.

Seablock playthrough once updated for 1.0.

"Build one to throw away"

Somewhat, but also build a new one while letting the old one still perform useful work, decommission when it is beneficial.

All bets are off in seablock.

Lol this is what a company I worked at did and they spent almost a year trying to get version 2 to parity with version 1 and finally gave up short of parity

I feel the same way, although it's even worse with Zachtronic games (like SpaceChem for instance). At first I enjoy them because "it's just like coding" but then after an hour or so I think "well, it's just like coding" and I realize that I could be doing something more productive. I guess it must be like playing Guitar Hero if you're a professional guitarist.

I think these games are great at teaching people about concurrent programming, race conditions and locking though.

Anecdote: I got my first programming job while in the middle of a SpaceChem run (previously, I was just a hobby coder). I quit the game in a few days after starting that job, as I found it required the same "brain juices" I had already depleted at the office.

Yes, my greatest lament about life is that “brain juice” appears to be a limited resource

But I believe, there are different types of "brain juice".

I run out of the one required for nasty bug finding, very soon, but when that one is gone (and after a short break to clear the mind) I can go on creating new code/architecture for hours.

I didn’t really see these nuances until I was diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed stimulant medication. It basically gives me a large tank of “rainbow juice” that works for any task and lasts 4-6 hours.

Going back to the parent comment, one remarkable effect of this is that I rarely desire to play video games like I used to. It seemed like I always had enough juice for video games but rarely for other life obligations, but with the rainbow juice I am just as motivated to do all that other stuff as I am to play video games.

I see comments like this and seriously start to wonder if I'm an almost 40 year old man with undiagnosed ADHD.

If only my insurance covered mental health...

There are online tests you can take. If you score high enough, its worth the few hundred dollars to get an official diagnoses. This is coming from someone who was diagnosed ADHD as an adult.

I feel the same way!

Seeing this comment makes me think that I should consider talking to a doctor about ADHD. I can't even focus on playing a video game for more than 30 minutes most of the time.

I would not feel comfortable needing a drug to be productive.

I do struggle a lot at times with focus, but I rather try to balance it with good and healthy livestyle. Lots of sleep. Exercise, meditation ..

But I have a toddler boy, who can mess with sleep and rhythm a lot, so having the possibility of a "rainbow juice" is definitely tempting.

Have you noticed bad side effects? Do you allways take ritalin(?) for work? Or just on special occacions?

I’m probably on a very similar drug to OP. I take it monday-friday.

Common side effects of ADHD drugs are loss of appetite, difficulty sleeping, and increased heart rate. It basically puts you into fight or flight mode for 6 hours a day. More blood to your brain + muscles, less to everything else (digestion, immune system for example).

One weird thing about it is the first few times you take it you’ll get a feeling of euphoria, like you’re on cocaine. This is _not_ the way the drug is supposed to feel, it goes away if you stick with the same dose for a while. Some people keep going up because they think the euphoria is part of it, and that’s really dangerous.

It really does work incredibly well for me. Especially for programming, where you’re most productive when you’re not pulled out of a flow state. I went from a B average to straight A’s when I started taking it in college. It made it so easy to oranize my schedule, I just worked/studied from 8-6 every day. No late nights, no procrastination.

Personally, I have no feeling of withdrawal when I go off of it for weeks at a time. Though I have developed a bit of a psychological dependency around work, where I kind of tell myself I won’t work well without it, which becomes self-fulfilling.

It’s not all good, not all bad. Hopefully this helps!

Yes, that was a really helpful shared experience, thank you!

Basically, it enforced my point of view to only try it out, if I really think it is neccecary.

I never done cocaine, but weed.

With the right time and settings it can help me get into a flow lasting for 10+ hours. But weed really does not help mid or long term, my productivity goes into steady decline after couple of days.

And coffeine I never liked, so I prefer the natural rhythm, with varying success.

I most definitely have mixed feelings about it. Granted, I wasn't diagnosed until my mid-30s, and I like to think I accumulated a respectable pile of life accomplishments beforehand (along with some dramatic failures) so I have a pretty thorough understanding of my own performance baseline. By the time I had a career and family, my problem was no longer failing to be productive, but rather failing to be productive at the right things at the right times. The modern world is built around consistency, planning and schedules and these things cause major problems for me, as for most of us with ADHD.

Stimulants (Vyvanse in my case) are blunt instruments; they alleviate the specific behavioral problems that plague those of us with ADHD but also enhance performance in general. The biggest danger that I see in my own behavior is the tendency to forget about all the self-management practices I learned before my diagnosis. With stimulants, you can do irresponsible things like stay up late for no good reason, get four hours of sleep, and still be fairly productive once the medication kicks in. I have to be really honest with myself on a daily basis about whether I'm using it to overcome a deficit caused by ADHD, or a deficit caused by bad behavior.

The second biggest danger is developing unrealistic expectations about what I am capable of accomplishing. For example, I am currently pursuing a PhD in computer science, and the decision to do so was made by the medicated version of myself. I don't regret the decision one iota, and it's a goal I've had for many years, but I already had a long list of projects and goals when I signed up for this and I definitely deluded myself about just how many of those other commitments I'd have to set aside for a while (or forever) in order to get a PhD.

"my problem was no longer failing to be productive, but rather failing to be productive at the right things at the right times. "

That is my problem right now, too. I am just scared, that medication really does not help me long term, for all the reasons you mentioned.

Thank you, for sharing.

Sometimes referred to as Spoon Theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory

We've been calling it mana among my group.

What is it?

I'd tell you all about it, but I'm currently all out of it ;)

Look into Ego Depletion. There's academic disagreement over just how "consumable" willpower is. My assessment of SOTA is:

- ego/willpower is finite/depletable

- Most people have more or less the same amount of it as the average. People with "more willpower" typically are more efficient with it

- non-neurotypicals and those that "don't fit in society" (ADHD, ASD, bipolar, trans, nonbinary, anxiety, OCD) often spend much willpower on "passing"

- it's linked to everything from blood sugar levels, insulin levels, brain blood flow, dopamine levels, D1/D2 activation ratios, and probably gut microbiome

It helps to balance out the stress on different faculties. If you write code for 14 hours a day you're gonna burnout but if you balance a variety of activities it is possible to be very productive while not feeling exhausted.

maybe replenish "brain juice" by drinking it from another brain?

If you're into that kind of metaphors, you may like the game 'Carrion'; warning, lots of pixel blood. It launched not long ago and does a great job in creating an 80s horror atmosphere. At the same time it's a relatively easy metroidvania platformer, so I find it a genuinely good activity to recover "brain juice" after coding.

Thank you for recommending this. I just bought the game and I’m most certainly going to be spending a few weekends on this : )

Emotional, mental and physical energy are all limited resources.

Kind of how all games are.

I could sit here and get virtual levels and virtual money... or go raise my actual human fitness level, or go work on my actual business for actual money.

Games are an easy win to feed you nuggets of feeling like you did stuff, but a poor substitute for real life.

But there is only so much time that you can be effective at running a business or running. Some people need to relax from the stress of work and tiredness of exercise by playing games for example.

But is it all that relaxing to build and run a complex virtual factory? Sometimes if the level of difficulty is too high it can become stressful.

I understand that there's satisfaction in it. That satisfaction can be hard to get at work sometimes. At work, you can be asked to work on things you don't like, that sometimes feel even more pointless than a game.

Part of the reason why I have programming side-projects at home is because they're an outlet to get the satisfaction of building software the way I want to.

The consequences of messing up a make believe factory is essentially nothing except one’s own time loss. The consequences of messing up a real factory are obviously substantial. What games or side projects let us do sometimes is to explore and enter a more diffuse mode of thought which has some tangential benefits to other activities. Spending too much time “being productive” can be counterproductive because one can get tunnel vision too busy executing tasks instead of reimagining or optimizing those tasks. Too much time questioning the work and nothing materially important gets done either.

Yeah, most games should stay in a fantasy land... Like where you mostly kill your enemies.

Eh. Time and place. People need downtime and even though I don't game much these days, I think fondly of all the hours of Starcraft and Starcraft 2 I played. And beating Xan on Godlike in Unreal Tournament 2004 (and totally cleaning up when we had lan parties) was just so fun.

Real life is fun too. But games are part of life.

Recreation is important and one form is not more "real" than another. Notwithstanding the fact that some games feel like work (and therefore suck, in my view), for those that are enjoyable, that provides value, whether it be chess, team sports or a video game.

Maybe there's something to be said for opting to lead a more creative rather than consumptive lifestyle. Ultimately though, something only matters if you think it does. My work is largely bullshit, and I can't think of a business I'd want to get into that also wouldn't feel like bullshit. I think the value I'd extract would precisely be in the connections made and the problem-solving itself. How important is another piece of enterprise software to extract money from people that no one thought they wanted until it exists?

What about a B2C app that solves a real problem for real users in a new or better way than existing apps? That seems like an easy way you can deliver real value. That's what's gotten me moving on all my personal projects so far—though granted, I haven't published/monetized them yet, just shared them with friends and family. But I get value from them and my friends and family get value from them, and that makes me feel good.

Value to someone, sure. I wouldn't necessarily see the value in it.

I do have personal projects, one to do good, others out of curiosity. Mostly out of an urgency to be creative. I don't think this carries more meaning than pure leisure.

Have you considered changing your line of work, and perhaps seeing if you can use your existing skills to help you in a new career?

I'm eyeing off a few avenues, I wouldn't mind not writing software for money anymore but it would also be cool to use my hard earned experience to my advantage. One avenue I thought of was music composition, because there are ways to automate some of it with code that I could use to provide some extra value, but it's also enough of a leap from my current career that it would be a wildly new endeavor.

Nonsensical argument unless you generally spend time you should be working gaming or spend time you could be relaxing working.

If you want to be a workaholic and spend your free time working, go right ahead.

But you will end up like my father, mid 70s with no real relationships with your family, obsessed with "completing your legacy" and a general inability to enjoy anything that isn't "work".

If that sound like fun to you, go right ahead.

Me, I'll continue to work at work and spend my free time on relaxation.

You only get one life, spending it chasing dollars and dimes is a poor life plan

I work on programming projects I find fun. What makes it recreation is that it's something I want to work on, I don't have others imposing deadlines or requirements.

A mechanic can enjoy working on his own project car in the off time.

Both of these things are productive in a way that playing games isn't, but they're still recreational. It's not spending your life chasing dimes. It's looking at the different recreational things you could be doing, and choosing the ones that also intersect with being productive and have a side-effect of helping you professionally.

Games and play -- of the "unproductive" kind -- are a fundamental and valuable human activity. Not everything has to produce something beyond mental well-being. Plus, of course, children learn by playing.

We can keep learning by playing as we get older, we just change the scope. You have to tend to your curiosity to keep it fit and capable.

Sure. You don't have to convince me of this! I'm already a believer :)

Nobody said your hobbies must be productive. But some people prefer it to be, and I don't think it's right to shame those people as if they're just chasing dimes or denying part of what it is to be human.

Productive is all relative anyway. Children learning by playing is productive, the productive part is the learning that is a byproduct. Working on a project car is fun in itself. It doesn't become less fun if the person doing it is a professional mechanic. Would you tell a person who plays games professionally in an e-sports league that they must do something else for fun?

I think it is a sign of good life when you find a way to get paid for doing what you enjoy. And if you enjoy it, then it is still fun when you do it outside of work. The productive benefits of it do not make it less fun.

I agree with both of you, to a degree. Playing a single player video game is unlikely to help you build relationships with others. And yet never stopping to enjoy life in all its variation leads to a pretty empty life, too.

> Playing a single player video game is unlikely to help you build relationships with others

I disagree. I have fond memories of discussing Zelda on the playground as a kid. Similarly, online communities are formed around basically every notable single player game. It's still a shared experience, even if it's not shared at the same moment.

Your father got a child, so he's clearly not obsessing enough about work.

There is more to games than videogames where you raise levels or virtual money (which are, in turn, a very specific class of videogames).

Would you say the same thing about fictional books? They're generally regarded as being worth the time, but aren't they also "a poor substitute for real life." You could be having your own experiences instead of reading made-up ones. I don't see why games should be different. Certainly not all games are created equally, and some exist only to suck away time and money, but it's obvious when that's the intention.

Eww, games trying to substitute 'real life'. Realism is boring. Games should be ART. Something you CAN'T experience in real life.

I found with "Opus Magnum" that, yeah, it was programming of a sort, but since it was all these wacky physical devices, that it was enough unlike coding that it switched back to being a fun puzzle.

But, yeah, with "TIS-1000" it was just programming, and sort of unnecessarily (and unpleasantly) difficult programming at that.

I really enjoyed TIS-1000, possibly because of the constraints the machine and assembly language posed. Finding clever ways to work within those constraints was fun. Same sort of fun I get when writing 6502 ASM for ROM hacks on my Atari 2600.

In my day job at the time the game came out I was doing node.js microservices. So it was refreshing to work at the bit level again.

Wow never saw SpaceChem before. Thanks for the unintended recommendation :)

I hope I didn't sound too negative, it's a good game and can be quite a bit of fun.

This isn't a problem with the game. This is a problem you are having with games in general.

I have it too, and it's a consequence of growing up and/or having more responsibilities.

I can either play Factorio, or I can spend time with my kids. Factorio, which I love, loses every time.

The only games I play now are ones I can play with my kids. ... so I set my daughter up with Starcraft 2 and am teaching her about strategy while still scratching that gaming itch.

My dream is to have a multiplayer LAN based VR Elder Scrolls game to play at home with the family.

I think it's a bit of both. I have that with all games too, though generally I have it less-so with games that don't take my creative energy which I would rather use for coding or arts.

I have little to no problem getting myself to play Starcraft II or other strategy games which I love. Low-effort story-based games are also easy to get into.

There's multiplayer in Factorio.

Starcraft? Wow nice, what was the progression to that point, I assume it was not her first game

Depending on how old your kids are, they might enjoy playing Factorio with you. My daughter is 3, and she is always up for playing "The Train Game". She mostly enjoys telling me what colours my trains should be and where I should drive them, so I need to use a more train-based system than I would otherwise.

The fun is once you have the construction bots for me you can make them destroy segments and from then on you can just ghost build everything else.

For example, I am playing on an OARC server, basically new players get their own base space, and I'm trying to get to my friend we both kinda picked 'far away' as options so we wouldnt clash with each other, so I've got blueprints I keep dropping that keep expanding my logistics network + power grid northward / westward as I make my way to him. The construction bots do all the work, my factory gets all the materials to them.

I've taken a break since, but then once I can reach out to him I will probably build train tracks going to and from his base and mine. I'm also using the robots to build a massive base. I can just ghost place whatever I want where I want it as long as the robot tower can cover that area.

I've just got to the point where i can use robots. How do you go about ghost building stuff? Do you have to use blueprints? Can the constrution robots just build anything for you if the mats are in chests?

You should have gotten a tutorial presented when you got bots, that'll go over over how it works.

You can just place ghost items by hand (press shift) but not much point. The advantage is being able to smack down whole bunches of machines in blueprints.

They can build anything if the products are in provider chests. They have the exact items, they won't build from intermediate materials.

It's possible to order bots to put out things for you without blueprints. You need a personal roboport, and some construction bots in your inventory. It's been a while since I played, so I don't really remember if you just place with left click, or some modifier and left click. It vastly increases the range you can reach when building manually and its an excellent qol upgrade. The more construction bots you have (up to the researched limit) the more faster it'll be, because they have to return to you to pick up the next piece.

I forgot to mention in my comment, if you hold shift when putting something down, it will ghost it. So you can have 1 of every item you need, no need for a personal robot port, and they will ghost it. The great thing about letting bots build is if you don't have all the materials they will drop it as it comes into the logistics network!

Edit: fixed a typo

Yeah, ghost placement is what I was thinking of, thanks for the reminder! The approach you suggest requires being in the range of a logistic network however, while carried construction bots are only limited by the range you have available from the engineer.

There are tons of designs you can do with bots, some have built completely belt-less bases using them. They're limited by their speed and range however, so you always have to balance to the constraints of the tools you use.

They build from the logistics chests, and yeah by blueprints. You can also have them tear things down as well, and they wind up in logistics chests. One thing I am doing is I have two separate logistics networks, and from my main I have conveyors taking things I want to the 2nd logistics network.

You can also start a Sandbox game mode to explore everything you can do (note infinity chests are extremely useful, you pick a item in the game, and it will produce as many of them as you want perpetually, then your inserters can pull those out into conveyors simulating different parts of what you'd like your factory to look like). Definitely recommend this approach, you can explore as much as you'd like to explore.

Also note, there are a few websites with prebuilt blueprints as well.

You can copy existing sections of your factory with Ctrl-C and paste ghosts with Ctrl-V. There's also a paste buffer that you can scroll through with the mouse wheel.

You can also cut + paste

It takes a lot of the tedium away when you made a miscalculation and need to be just a little bit closer or further from something.

Now you can cut, move over 1 and paste.

I've also found it really nice for rails. If you want a t-junction, just go away from everything and make a 90-degree rail curve. Then cut it.

Then go back to where you wanted the t-junction and paste in the curve and rotate it and paste again to get perfectly lined up sections of track.

and then you can have blueprints and upgrade planners and destruction planners.

upgrade planners let you convert say all slow belts to fast belts and leave the inserters alone.

destruction planners let you remove only walls but leave the electrical towers and rails alone.

it just goes deeper and deeper.

When my factory has grown so big and unwieldy that I start to feel a massive refactoring is in order but that it's going to be too much work, I just start a new game and use the lessons I learned from the previous game to design a better factory next time.

"Seagull contractor" :-)

That sounds like a shitty sequel to the goose game.

Most players just build a new factory and then deconstruction planner their old one en masse once the new one is up.

...which itself isn't all that different from software development.

I felt the same way. And then I think I want to automate it.

I heard scripting is possible? Do experienced players use it, to automate things?

Have you reached the construction robot tech? It removes the requirement to place items by hand, and the game largely turns into a "planner" game.

No, I did not. But I played it 2 years ago and maybe it was not even there back then? Anyway, I might give it a try again ..

Likewise, and I spotted it early on so never really got into it. Systematic games are my favourite kind of game, but when it gets as raw as factorio is I suddenly snap out of immersion and realise I'm working but in a game.

I've found it actually heightens the enjoyment for me. Unlike work, I can completely refactor my base from the ground up and no one will yell at me.

Completely agree, refactoring your layout is too expensive. What I typically do is just start-afresh with all the resources I have accrued from my current factory -- still fun!

I mean, if it's too much work you didn't plan ahead well enough (and/or you need to get to the robots so they can do the work for you).

Roboports chained together to form large logistics networks with construction bots and blueprints (whether of your own creation or easily downloaded) my friend.

If recreating a portion of your factory "feels too much like work" to do it really sounds like you haven't availed yourself fully to the tools the game gives you to do it.

Had the exact same experience with Satisfactory. When you need to scale production up it becomes like a real job. You need to plan, refactor, etc.

When I now see those videos on Youtube with huge factories I wonder how many hours that person has wasted. I'm not against enjoying a video game, but when the activity is so similar to real work... why not do that instead and get something real in return?

The “guitar hero” vs “learning guitar” paradox.

> I'm not against enjoying a video game, but when the activity is so similar to real work... why not do that instead and get something real in return?

Because dopamine :).

I enjoy working too :)

Wow I often feel that way when I do most things! I think you just have a passion for programming and it is your hobby in addition to profession.

> This is actually what ruins the game for me. I get to a place where I need to recreate large chunks of the factory and it just feels too much like work.

Are you using drones and blueprints?

Once you unlock drones, you can create huge swaths of factories in seconds. You just need to come up with a design that works, and then replicate it.

Did you get copy/paste going?

That was when the creative:tedious ratio got rebalanced for me.

Programmer crack!!!

The people behind this game stream on Twitch, and you can see what their development process looks like.

Do you have a link to the channel? I'm having trouble finding it.

https://m.twitch.tv/rseding91/profile

There are no past videos there but you can follow him.

Thank you!

It teaches that if you wait a while eventually some magic technology (drones, trains, faster belts etc) will allow you to bypass technical debt and/or simply eliminate it with a single demolish command.

And it teaches that humans can do whatever they want to a world, level all the forests, kill all the locals, because eventually we are going to fly away. Not our problem anymore. Space people are above the petty concerns of terrestrials.

That's quite a take. The upgrades gives you totally different options.

It’s for this reason I personally dislike factorio as a game. Don’t get me wrong, the game itself is fantastic, but I don’t have the patience for it.

Rather, I find myself trying to build a factory top down. I write a bunch of sticky notes with material requirements and calculate backwards “how many labs do I need?” “How many gears do I need to make the beakers?” “How much do I need to mine to match that hourly throughput of gears?

It’s the perfect candidate of a game to write an algorithm for. Assuming a known seed, it’s trivial to design the most efficient system based on those parameters.

And at that point it just becomes work. It’s really designed as a bottom up game, but I think about problems top down and for that reason factorio drives me nuts.

You really need a combination of top-down vision combined with bottom-up implementation, mixed together with a healthy dose of pragmatism.

It's enough to know that you'll need lots of gears and to know that you'll need high-capacity mining eventually. But there's no great harm from having a few extra or from having not quite enough to max out beaker production; just start the process, get some gears, get some beakers, and refine as needed. Without a little top-down vision, you'll end up severely overproducing some things and underinvesting in others, which is no good, but you'll never be able to build an optimal factory without first building a suboptimal one.

There's still plenty of room for creativity even with an extreme top-down approach, like this series does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ8QDQmOoys

> Over a few months I designed an entire Factorio base without testing any of it. The goal is to create a mid-sized base capable of building a megabase. A secondary goal is to not break down or rebuild anything ever.

The challenge isn't that it's hard to figure out the ratios or math out the machines you need, it's in getting to having the production to make that base without falling asleep waiting on things. Continual bootstrapping towards that end goal is the gameplay.

I just make labs and factories in arbitrary amounts, and then adjust the amounts later as I go based on where I see the bottlenecks. I tried getting the ratios exactly right up-front when I first started playing, but it was almost never worth the effort because I would usually outpace the production of a specific input resource (especially when I later built new factories that used one of those inputs too).

And the speed runners are the ones doing waterfall design rather than agile.

Except it doesn't have very good refactoring tools. Sometimes you need to change just one small thing about some sub-graph of your factory, but circumstances require you to re-do most of it to implement that change. This is just busy-work, and not "fun", to me at least.

I know later in the game more options open up, but that doesn't help me get there.

I wish for a Factorio-style game where I can just drag (groups of) machines and conveyors around, and I just pay cost for however much just changed.

For me the game got so much easier when I started to construct drones. There was almost no need to build belts any more! Not sure what it says about me as a developer though...

I have built an entire no belt factory. It works for the most part but damn it's slow. I do transition a lot of the technical debt from the green and red sciences so I can properly support the rest of the science development.

Probably a huge fan of microservices and cloud computing.

Haha, neither of those. I guess solving everything with drones = "reuse the same favorite tool for all kinds of jobs".

It sort of struck me as "the learn new concept" vs "keep doing what I know".

You can get really good at burner inserters or learn about electricity.

Or keep get fancy with belts... or learn about trains.

or get a personal roboport and learn cut/copy/paste

I played one game of Factorio that took about 30 hours; I 'almost' finished then decided I was done with that.

Then, when I was between jobs, I thought "oh, I see how I could do a better job; I'll just play one more game.." and my playtime quickly went up to 120 hours. I was writing TODO-lists in a book, etc. (The "craft no more than X items by hand" achievement was fun).

I mean, +1 to both "if you're on here you'll love it" and "if you're on here, be careful you don't spend too much time on it".

Recently, my gf found me still awake at 05:00 playing factorio. Had completely forgot the time and thought it was closer to 02:00. That's when I realized that I had to stop playing the game because it is so addictive. I simply can't play that game in moderation.

Oxygen Not Included has the same sort of effect for me and my experience with that game has kept me from picking up Factorio. Once you start getting into ONI's automation tools and design optimization; time just ceases to exist.

It remains the first and only game I have ever fully removed from my Steam library (not just uninstalled) after purchase.

+1 ONI. Truly a black hole that manages to warp time itself.

Also maddening being an early fan in beta, then repeatedly throwing out whole designs, plans and game files as they kept adding new things in the game and changing them.

ONI is great, yet one 'game' is much longer than Factorio. I bet you can launch a rocket much sooner in Factorio than in ONI. Also, I found Factorio easier and less stressful than ONI. There's no real 'lose' case and the progress feels faster.

However I've found ONI nukes my modest computer much more rapidly than Factorio. That was disappointing, coming from massive sprawling Factorio bases.

This is why I've never played Factorio and do not plan to. It sounds like exactly my kind of drug.

I have two friends who said the same... it's kind of weird to think there are games that can just be too good or dangerously good.

But then, some other friends just don't like it. Still a personal thing I suppose.

on the other hand, the first few times I played factorio, I started thinking how to optimize my household...

I have played the game to completion once. I was utterly addicted and could not tell time while playing. I would say something like "Ok, just 5 minutes to finish this and save." and an hour later still be playing. I have over 60 hours in the game and I played it for like a week. It was bad. I have not let myself go back.

This is one reason I think it's important to that kids be exposed to video games.

You need to learn how to stop when you need to do other things. It's better to learn that when you're young and the consequences of overplaying a game are simply that Mom and Dad will be mad. Later in life, the stakes get higher: If you can't make yourself turn the game off when you need to, you might flunk out of college or lose a job.

Great game and it has come a long way. Even the early versions were quite addicting. For me this is one of the best games in the last 10 years along with Kerbal Space Program (there may be others, time is in short supply these days).

If you are not into computer games, I would still recommend to visit their site. They have "friday facts" where they describe the work they did over the week an what challenges they had to solve. It is very well written and poses interesting problems. Really interesting for software devs, even if you are not in game development.

Oh if only I was not a programmer!

KSP has taught me so much about subjects I was interested in, but afraid to put in the time in - rocket science/engineering, orbital mechanics etc.

I’ve not tried Factorio myself but I’d wager it will try to teach me stuff I mostly already know - queue theory, concurrency, automation...

Factorio is much easier. (Cracktorio a running joke)

Its base appeal/game loop is building new system and then doing optimization and refactoring. As you progress through game you itch to improve things and do them better at bigger scale.

You build a small setup to produce a wire.

Wire is used to build next thing. Next thing is used as input for another thing, and so on.

But you now need ton of wire. So you have to go back and create more wire production, but there is no space there... so you refactor or build more wire production elsewhere... but how do you connect it... and copper ore is low, need to build train to ship more ore from somewhere else... and so on and on until you realize it Sunday 10pm. Where did my weekend go?

KSP forces you to learn how things work if you want to go beyond mun. Transfer orbits and plane equalization done by feel doesnt work outside of Kerbin SOI. At that stage KSP has a huge step for player to take in order to progress in game.

But also you now understand a lot about rocket science. Factorio doesn't really do that. You might learn some at intuitive level like: planning for future, leaving room for expansion, don't do everything at once, don't forget to build automated death traps outside you home xD

> until you realize it Sunday 10pm. Where did my weekend go?

It's much worse really, it's Sunday, two weeks later.

One of the most “high” moments I’ve ever felt in a game was the successful lunch of my first orbital craft.

That first orbit I felt so excited I had to stop the game and run around the house. I tried to explain it to my SO but she couldn’t understand why that was.

Maybe because I’ve been taught the math part of it in school, but when the rocket equation, gravity losses, earth gravity assist, drag losses etc “clicked” I actually related all of those independent things in my brain to make a tough task possible.

I got as far as visiting Jool moons but it was not as exciting. Well maybe except the first time I calculated a hochman transfer orbit to Duna.

Imagine if schools could teach like that.

Oh, the world we'd be living in... one can only dream.

Railroad signalling.

I think it'd be cool if a "joint mod" was created between factorio and KSP. You use factorio to get raw materials, the R&D tree is shared between the games, and when you want to launch something, your available parts are whatever you've manufactured and loaded into the assembly building.

I'm an industrial engineer and have thought about how to teach manufacturing concepts through the game. Tons of great lessons such as one piece flow, problems when you build up inventory, correctly balancing different production rates between machines, factory layout, etc.

And as another commenter pointed out, sometimes you're "refactoring code" and paying your technical debt.

At one point there was definitely a mod where you built the rocket in Factorio and launched it in KSP.

KSP's kOS mod package is what made the game 10x more fun for me. Everything is automated now.

Factorio only sort of deals with queuing theory, concurrency, and so on. Probably to the same extent relative to the actual depth of these subjects as Kerbal Space Program deals with aerospace concepts relative to what aerospace engineers do.

But IMO that's not actually the hardest part of Factorio. The hardest part of Factorio is the same as for software engineering: how to build something that scales and where you can still reason about it. One of the big challenges after just "beating the game" is hitting specific scale targets (the community calls it megabase building), and the factory sizes needed to do that definitely reach the complexity limits of human brains, so many of these players start establishing design conventions and start writing down notes and documentation and calculations for themselves.

I've definitely done things like using a stopwatch to measure roundtrip time for a train in order to calculate latency/throughput numbers for a supply chain in Factorio. But you rarely need to do more than back of the napkin math to be effective.

I think it's fairly well-known at this point, but I find it interesting that the game will never be on sale [0]:

> We state it on our steam page, but people are still asking about it so I want to state it officially. We don't plan any Factorio sale. I'm aware, that the sale can make a lot of money in a short period of time, but I believe that it is not worth it in the long run, and since we are not in financial pressure we can afford to think in the long run. We don't like sales for the same reason we don't like the 9.99 prices. We want to be honest with our customers. When it costs 20, we don't want to make it feel like 10 and something. The same is with the sale, as you are basically saying, that someone who doesn't want to waste his time by searching for sales or special offers has to pay more.

I like their reasoning, and I think it helps to show how focused they are on the quality of the game (as well as, you know, 8 years of early access).

[0] https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-140

It's an interesting and strong technique I actually hope more games take on, even as a player.

I also like it. But I doubt that most games can afford to take a stand like that. Only the most well received can do this IMHO.

There are always people only secondarily interested in a game. Maybe it's not their first priority genre or whatever. If the game company needs to convert as many customers as possible, staying with the same price forever probably won't work out.

Exactly.... Making bad games and then making money off said bad games is just bad for everyone.

I think sadly this mindset really limits their playerbase, and will ultimately expedite the decline of the game and online community.

Steam Sales have a massive effect on games - thousands of new players try the game simply because it happens to be 15% off today or whatever. Even the "Free Weekend" play converts thousands of players that find the game fun. It makes trying out a new indie-type game feel less like a risk.

Now that Factorio has real competition in this type of building game (Satisfactory - which I highly recommend if you liked Factorio), they might discover their principled stance against any Sale might waver a bit.

To each their own I suppose. One day, Factorio will be on sale... once the playerbase dries up and they desperately try to inject life into the game. Or not... maybe they let it wilt away... which would be a real shame.

you're going to have an extremely hard time justifying that this attitude has or will "expedite the decline of the game and online community" given that they've been in early access for 4 years, continue to add sales, have an exclusive (and active) reddit, active modding scene, etc. 4 years is practically infinity when it comes to the uber-long tail distribution of indie video game success stories; not only that, but the game continues to add and keep players.

Eh, Steam Early Release program has this effect with a _lot_ of games that, otherwise, would never see the light of day.

You can play an ER game, get bored, stop playing for 6 months, and then come back and tons of new content is available now. This keeps the player base around too.

Usually though, once a game calls itself "1.0" or whatever, the new free features tend to stop shortly thereafter.

(which is more than fair, it's a "completed" product now)

Where will this game be in another 4 years, after little or no new content? All games have a shelf life.

The developer could stick to their principles and ride it out, and shutter the game once enough people have lost interest. Or... they could have a Steam Sale and extend the life for years at a time. We'll have to see...

FWIW, I play Factorio and Satisfactory for different things. Factorio is where I go when I want to whip around quickly with my designs, flinging around blueprints and optimizing to my heart's desire. There's also that base/tower defense element that can be a different kind of thing compared to what you get with Satisfactory.

Satisfactory is a more meditative experience for me where I enjoy building and exploring within a beautiful, hand-crafted world. I find myself building with cosmetics more so in mind over optimization.

Sometimes I'm in the mood for one or the other, but they feel distinct enough for me to not substantially cannibalize my time. Though, mine is but one point of data!

> Even the "Free Weekend" play converts thousands of players that find the game fun. It makes trying out a new indie-type game feel less like a risk.

It has a free demo.

> thousands of new players try the game simply because it happens to be 15% off today or whatever

Really? Why? That's such a small amount.

Because it's a sale?

Getting on the front page of Steam is a massive boon to any game. Having a sale, even if small (not unusual on Steam) is often enough to incentivize people to try it.

I've not played the Demo version - but usually demo's are pretty limited. Free Weekend's tend to be the full game, multiplayer and everything. It's a fantastic way to get a ton of new players instantly - and many (myself on several occasions) become paying customers as soon as the weekend ends. Basically, it's letting the game sell itself at that point.

Steam Summer/Winter Sale is huge. That's why it's silly for these developers to totally write off any sale forever. Very foolish and not wise. Then again, they did say that over 4 years ago... and "they" do say to never say never.

I think you can get on the front page without a sale?

And well, such a small amount doesn't really grab my attention.

> Steam Summer/Winter Sale is huge.

Isn't that because of the big sales? I wish the Summer/Winter sale didn't have any small percents so there's less noise!

That's not really what I said. Assuming a game must be bad because it is offered at discount is .. not very wise. Not every good game is as lucky to be an indie hit with relatively low cost and high acceptance.

Also for me I probably will never buy Factorio because of this. I absolutely accept their decision but I don't have enough time for this game to justify 25 bucks I guess. I would rather play other untouched games in my collection first. I guess the honest business model saved me from spending money :) Still says nothing about the quality of the game.

Jason Rohrer said Castle Doctrine would never go on sale but he changed his mind in March.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/249570/announcements/detail...

From what I've read sales are not about making a lot of money in a short period of time, but are instead about seeding the community for more word of mouth. That games do best over the long run when they hit a critical mass where they get most of their purchases from people recommending it and sales were a strategy to ramp that up faster.

One alternative option is to offer rebates (or credits for subscription based products) based on referrals.

AFAIK sale-based pricing is about squeezing consumer surplus, as described by Joel Spolsky [0].

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

Yes, it's about collecting the money from people who wouldn't buy it at all otherwise.

Relatedly, I have a crapton of games purchased of Steam that I will probably never get around to playing.

I don't have any moral problems with sales. Some people have money and less time. Others have less money and more time. Sales let each of those groups use the resources they have acquire the product. People with less money but more time can spend that time hunting for deals. Busy people with cash can pay full price.

This is a type of price discrimination, which has highly debated morality and unequivocal efficacy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination

Interestingly, the word "moral" doesn't appear at all on that page. The "debate" must be elsewhere.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-ethics-quar...

https://econsultancy.com/what-is-price-discrimination-and-is...

They already price discriminate. In Latin America Steam store you can by Factorio spending just US$9,00.

Some people value the product differently. If I'd play it for hours, probably it is money well spent, but I'm a casual gamer. The game looks nice, but I wouldn't spend the price of good books in it.

Obviously people might not like it, but can you summarize the moral arguments against it?

Moral arguments against price discrimination center around fairness and inefficient outcomes.

For example if a vaccine for an infectious disease was priced higher for people who are more likely to be exposed to that disease (because they have a greater willingness to pay), it could create an unfair burden on this buyer segment and even place the overall population health at risk. Just because a seller knows they have greater leverage over this vulnerable population.

I think medical care is a problematic example to use because health is already fraught with moral connotations, and medicine as a product category is not at all conducive to an efficient market.

Arguing, even correctly, that price discrimination is bad for healthcare does not necessarily imply that it's bad for other things. Healthcare is different.

Take education as another example

Parents a and b are considering whether to enroll their children in a private school.

Parent A lives in a nice neighborhood that can lobby for better funding for public schools.

Parent B lives in a worse school district.

The private school realizes that parent B has worse options, and that they can upcharge parent B. The private school knows that at a certain price point parent A will simply decide to send their child to the high quality public school in their district, so they charge that parent less.

Parent B is disadvantaged because they have weaker bargaining power, and the price discrimination is simply exacerbating existing inequalities in the community.

I don't think that price discrimination is inherently unethical. But the criteria used to discriminate can certainly be unethical. Look up "reverse redlining" for example.

Again, schooling is another example that is already heavily morally loaded (the opportunity we pass on to our children may be the most important aspect of all of society) and where there is nothing even approximating an efficient market.

Reverse redlining has to do with housing. That is a market with many buyers and sellers, relatively good information symmetry, etc.

Except if you try and price gouge parent B, it doesn’t work because they’re poor. So instead you price gouge parent A because they are rich, by raising tuition and giving a charitable scholarship/discount/etc. to parent B.

Who said parent B has less money for education than parent B? I just said they live in a worse neighborhood for public schools.

Classic price discrimination is when people who can afford to pay more, pay more. Most people consider this more just rather than less just.

I learned that price discrimination is about willingness to pay, which can be influenced by ability to pay but is not directly equivalent.

My problem with sales is that time spent looking for sales is not at all socially beneficial, it's human labor that's completely wasted. If we want poorer people to have better access to the goods and services richer people buy, we should just give them more money.

Edit: In a way it reminds me of mining cryptocurrency. It's a system designed to reward people who can prove that they're wasting some other resource.

> that time spent looking for sales is not at all socially beneficial, it's human labor that's completely wasted.

A more "economically neutral" perspective (not that I claim it is a better perspective) is that there is labor that this particular human has available. Letting them choose to spend it on hunting down a sale is strictly better than removing that choice. There may be "better" things they could do with it according to you, but ultimately it should be their choice.

The irony is particulary deep here because hunting down a sale is surely no less wasteful to society than actually playing Factorio which is a pointless videogame famous for being an addictive time-sink. If the goal was to maximize societal benefit, we'd remove Factorio from the market entirely.

> If we want poorer people to have better access to the goods and services richer people buy, we should just give them more money.

I think you're jumping to a conclusion that these people are particularly poor. But my only claim is that people have different relative distributions of money versus time, and that is probably true at all wealth levels. There are both idle rich and workaholics. There are poor folks working three jobs and raising three kids and others that are couch potatoes.

Sales are a way to let consumers at any economic level reflect their relative priority between time and cash.

> A more "economically neutral" perspective (not that I claim it is a better perspective) is that there is labor that this particular human has available. Letting them choose to spend it on hunting down a sale is strictly better than removing that choice. There may be "better" things they could do with it according to you, but ultimately it should be their choice.

Unless you consider the sale price as the base price, in which case you're forcing people to spend time hunting a sale to not get gouged, and it's strictly worse than having a fixed lower price.

I think the economic perspective is that there is no "base" or "real" price. Each transaction is unique and is legitimate as any other.

You can take that set of transactions and apply any number of narratives:

* The sale price is the base price and that others are gouging is a narrative that you can apply to the set of transactions.

* The full price is the real price and sales are a delightful bonus that you give to people who show that they care more by hunting down the sale.

* The full price is the real price and sales are a charity you give to those less able to afford that price.

* The sale is the real price and the full price is a way of milking the rich who are too foolish or lazy to get a good deal.

Etc.

But the transactions themselves don't provide enough data to determine which of these narratives, if any, is closest to the truth.

I can see the value of letting people pay with time if they are less inclined to pay with money, but I wish we could let them pay by actually doing something useful with that time, rather than by having them waste it (and I don't think entertainment is a total waste of time).

I don't know of a good way to actually make that happen, and I'm not suggesting we should ban sales or anything like that, just that the current system wastes people's time and it would be better if it didn't.

> If the goal was to maximize societal benefit, we'd remove Factorio from the market entirely.

I suppose you're one of those people who sees video games as, well, I'll use your own words:

> pointless...addictive time-sink

The same could be said of novels, movies, sporting events, TV shows, and plays.

Removing art and entertainment from society because it's not "socially beneficial" is a terrible policy.

The end of society should be to improve human life. Producing things that are economically useful to produce more things is a means to that end. It's a very effective means. But if you confuse it with an end, you get a terrible repressive society where no one's allowed to do anything for the joy of it.

People voluntarily use their money to buy things they enjoy. Money is basically a credit the economy gives to people for helping the economy produce stuff, that then allows them to consume some of the stuff that the economy produces.

If you disallow people from spending their money on things that aren't "socially beneficial," the whole economic system implodes because (a) there's no incentive for people to produce stuff because they're not allowed to get consumption as a reward, and (b) there's no consumption to drive the incentive to produce stuff.

Minecraft has been the most successful use of this, I think. Minecraft price has only steadily risen over time.

Also, for quite a long time the tradition was that a game only goes on sale after a successor has been chosen. Steam sales are a comparatively new concept.

When Factorio 2 comes out, you will most likely be able to pick up Factorio for $10.

It's $10 on my steam page.

I think this is great. make and sell a game. No monetization tricks, no data collection idiocy. And they will have loyal fans.

It would be good to watch managers, CEOs, CTOs or other higher management playing Factorio. I would pay for a Twitch/Youtube stream with Elon, Bezos, Mark, Nadella, Gates and other "famous" people to see how they play such games. On a second thought, that would make a good documentary/interview, seeing how high profile managers and engineers handle similar games, what they enjoy in their spare time :-)

Since Musk and Bezos are actually building rockets I'd think they'd find a simulation to be less fun in comparison. But maybe they'd enjoy it the way a chess grandmaster enjoys playing blitz as relaxation during a break in a tournament game.

Musk has joked in the past in some Reddit AMAs that he models all his rockets in Kerbal Space Program first so who knows.

This is more likely to be marketing than reality. If he really works 100 hours a week.

Maybe modeling rockets in Kerbal is part of that 100hrs of work.

Musk is already playing a game; it's called "the simulation", and we're all in it. I'm not joking; according to him, we are most likely in a simulation. [0]

[0]: https://www.space.com/41749-elon-musk-living-in-simulation-r...

Musk would load a factory built by someone else, then sue his way into owning it (re: https://meaww.com/elon-musk-tesla-cofounder-lawsuit-settleme... )

FYI - Web of Trust marks that site as potentially harmful...

Search for `web of trust leak`.

It would be a game changer for anyone involved with manufacturing layout for solid objects at any level of business. I've personally used my own perspective from playing Factorio to influence real world factory design. It's a great way to strengthen intuition that complements knowledge and theory.

Phil Salvador wrote an article about the long lost SimRefinery by Maxis Business Simulations, and somebody who read it was able to dig up a floppy disk with the original game!

When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery

https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/

SimRefinery recovered

https://obscuritory.com/sim/simrefinery-recovered/

A close look at SimRefinery

https://obscuritory.com/sim/simrefinery-analysis/

The sprawling, must-read history of Maxis’ former “serious games” division

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/05/the-sprawling-must-re...

A lost Maxis “Sim” game has been discovered by an Ars reader [Updated]

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/06/a-lost-maxis-sim-game...

SimRefinery EXISTS! Let's play it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ6Cqn5rTfs

At least Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke plays Factorio, Starcraft etc.

Shopify employees can even expense Factorio :-)

That's super cool.

I've seriously thought of using Factorio for programmer job interviews, as a way to really get inside of somebody's head and see how they solve problems.

Wow that would be cool. Playing a similar game or an RTS to see how the candidate would perform.

I'm not spending 20-30 hours on your interview ;)

Their skill is attracting and utilizing the best Factorio players, not being any good at Factorio itself.

I personally think that quite a large part of the HN community will find or have already found enjoyment in the game. So I wanted to share the release of the 1.0 version.

In all honesty, I had to forcibly remove Factorio from my computer because it was too much of a productivity drain.

I think I averaged like 60 hours a week.

Your future RSI thanks you.

Ooh, I found 100ish hours of enjoyment over two weeks or so. Good thing I lost interest after I launched the rocket (the endgame), otherwise my productivity would have been gone forever.

The achievements in the game are a lot of fun to go after - they're mostly the right amount of painful/challenging and interesting to make you actually want to try for them.

That being said, I've put more than a few thousand hours into the game over the past few years and I think the base game finally got stale enough for me to move on to something else right as they're reaching 1.0, but that's okay. (The big problem for me is that I've been sinking a lot of time into mods like Seablock and after nearly 100 hours into this run I can't see starting over from scratch again just to be on 1.0. I'm not even sure I want to finish this run either knowing I'm unlikely to see bug fixes in the Seablock mod packs, and they definitely could use some work.)

I think the "Lazy Bastard" achievement is probably the worst in the beginning, it's quite an interesting one, though, since you later notice how much easier your life has become because you had to automate every little thing properly in the beginning.

I can't lie - this was one of the harder ones for me to figure out. I eventually found the speed running community to be quite good at this, as rain9441 would stream his 100% runs (that is, getting all of the achievements in one go), and it gave me a good hint on how exactly LB was supposed to work - I kept on screwing up saving the necessary crafts for oil refineries, since the way the game was setup before you literally couldn't build oil refineries in the machines you had, so you had to save a certain amount of crafts for them.

But yeah, it's just a good balance of "wow how the !#( does this work" to "ohhh I'm so glad it works this way."

Did you find anything good to move on to?

Honestly no. I really want to like Civ 6 but it's such a departure from earlier installments that I can't see myself pouring much more time into it. It's a fundamental design change where you're almost forced to play the same in a certain way that I just really don't like, combined with lots of nitpicky problems that earlier installments just didn't have due to being better balanced and better designed. (I think my comment on Twitter still stands - it feels like 2K really Sims 4'd this game right up.)

Played Satisfactory and couldn't get into it - it's just worse Factorio, capitalizing on the popularity of that game with good 3D assets but trading it for terrible planning, crafting and perspective.

I've considered using some of my funemployment time to write one of these kinds of games as I think I have a unique angle that hasn't been explored to death as of recently, but haven't committed to it.

I assume you will not be happy if we tell you that there are mods that drastically increase the granularity of production processes and will make you easily work 200h on a single map before ever launching a rocket..?

I think my loss of interest was more about discovering the entire tech tree, I don't think making things harder will be enough to draw me back. I know there are mods that add technologies, though, maybe those are worth trying.

Well, it sounds like you got plenty of value from the game so maybe moving on isn’t the worst thing. I love Factorio, but there’s so much out there demanding my time maybe it’s best that I also lost interest eventually.

Given the tech tree is infinite, that's impressive.

Infinite how? Seemed pretty finite to me.

There are some numerical upgrades which can be repeated indefinitely at increasing costs -- robot speed, mining productivity, damage for various weapon types, etc.

It's 'infinite' on a technicality. Having your last few technologies on repeat all so your investment in tech-making infrastructure doesn't completely go to waste just barely qualifies, nothing more.

It feels like the only reason they even left it in the game was that it became a bit of a measurement of how well your design scales past the end game - I cannot tell you how many otherwise meaningless 'X000 science per minute' base videos there are on YouTube, but the number is not insignificant. Most of the time it's just 'bot speed++' over and over again, since that's how many of those bases work without running into extreme update per minute (UPM) problems.

Pure angels alone is quite amazing. Especially if you enable the overhauls too. (Industries and technology)

I was the same, as soon as I launched a rocket I was done.

3 years later I played a multiplayer once a week with my buddies during COVID lockdown, as soon as we launched again I got bored. They are going again with more friends and I just join the discord for the chat, I don’t open the game up.

I don’t like solve the same fundamental problem over and over again so, I launched the rocket, done.

I think it is good design for a game to give a sense of closure to the player. You have reached the major goal of the game. Now you can move on to other things and it feels good.

I still boot the game from time to time when I want a low energy activity. I go through the moves. Bootstrap base, then smelting arrays, etc. I try to innovate on some designs a bit (mainly to make things more modular/scalable and avoid having one big resource bus). I find it relaxing.

I never played these kinds of programming games, I avoid them like the plague. I just know they would ruin my life. I don't even want to watch videos about them, that'd be like trying a drug just to see what it's like. Nope nope nope...

It's odd. Personally, I take xanax for anxiety, and have never had the urge to take it for recreational purposes. I moderate my alcohol intake, and smoke up very sparingly... a gram lasts months to me.

Certain videogames, on the other hand, can easily become a big problem for me. Weird stuff.

For anyone who doesn't know about it, Mindustry is a similar game with a more tower-defense angle. Linux, macOS, Windows, and Android.

https://mindustrygame.github.io/

(I have no connection to the project, I've just enjoyed playing it.)

Man, playing it on android phone makes my head hurts. It's small...

Also iOS!

Whoops! It's not mentioned in all the places. Thanks for the correction.

If you can tolerate building the same infrastructure from scratch every level, with a need to max out production and/or do levels multiple times to get the unlock points you need.

At least that's the impression I got from a couple hours of time into the demo before I threw it away in disgust. It was like minutes 15-30 of factorio on loop, plus tower defense. The tower defense was good but not enough to make up for the tedium of setting up drills.

Also if I'm remembering right the conveyors were unreasonably finicky for such a core mechanic.

I actually much prefer their conveyors to factorio's

I like both. Factorio certainly has a lot more depth to it, but Mindustry feels more streamlined. Less focus on the minutia of optimizing the factory and logistics, and more on getting everything set up as quickly as possible so you don't get overwhelmed by waves of enemies.

For Factorio players, here are the biggest differences:

1. No inventory. All structures get automatically crafted as they are built and the resources taken from your central storage core.

2. No inserters. Structures that output resources output them directly into adjacent belts or other structures. This simplifies construction and can allow for amazingly compact designs if you put sufficient thought into them, but can also lead to accidentally mixing the wrong items into your belts and clogging up your production lines if you're not careful.

3. You have blueprints and the equivalent of construction bots right from the start of the game. In singleplayer, it is normal and expected that players will pause the game, queue up a bunch of things to be built, then unpause and let their ship handle the construction automatically.

4. Belts are streamlined and much faster work with. 1 lane per belt, and the UI for constructing belts includes a pathfinding algorithm allows you to easily construct a belt between two points in seconds provided you have enough resources on-hand. Crossing two belts automatically creates an intersection so resources don't mix.

5. More focus on combat. Lots of different turret options, each with their own specializations, logistical requirements, and types of enemies they are good against. The PVP and attack modes are also quite fun.

6. More arcadey. Unlike with Factorio, you aren't expected to keep growing and expanding your factory forever. There is limited space and sooner or later you're either going get overwhelmed, or retreat back into space with the resources you collected. You can finish most stages in an hour or two.

> You have blueprints and the equivalent of construction bots right from the start of the game. In singleplayer, it is normal and expected that players will pause the game, queue up a bunch of things to be built, then unpause and let their ship handle the construction automatically.

> Belts are streamlined and much faster work with. 1 lane per belt, and the UI for constructing belts includes a pathfinding algorithm allows you to easily construct a belt between two points in seconds provided you have enough resources on-hand. Crossing two belts automatically creates an intersection so resources don't mix.

Blueprints, belt pathfinding, and automatic intersections did not exist 11 months ago when I played it.

Thanks for letting me know, because that makes a huge difference. I'll give it another shot some time.

Mindustry is an amazing game once you get tired of Factorio but want something similar. I much prefer Mindustry's timed-wave combat to Factorio's, but Factorio is more in-depth in the industrial processing/logistics side.

In Steam I have roughly the same amount of hours in both.

I got into playing Mindustry on plane rides sometime last year and it has the amazing ability to make a 5 hour cross continental flight go by in an instant.

I first started playing it on a laptop during a long train ride late last year, after having briefly checked it out on Android at some prior point. It definitely passed the time well.

The best part about Mindustry is that at some point you can stop fiddling with the map and just launch with the resources you have. A playthrough for a map is a few hours tops, maybe 3-4 if you're grinding some mineral or want to try something fancy.

Factory on the other hand... I uninstalled after my first quick playtest ended with my SO waking up and wondering why I'm already awake at 8 in the morning (trick is: don't go to sleep and optimize the factory just a little bit longer).

The last game that did this for me was Civ3 and I almost lost a job then, never played a Civ game since =)

I love both. It was frustrating to always begin from zero, but with blueprints, your best structures can outlive the reset, and the maps usually require something unique anyway.

One of my favourite games of all time - sometime in 2018 I overloaded myself on it though. Designing systems at my job then coming home to design systems... well it might have been fun but I think I needed more variety in my life, ha!

unpopular opinion.

I've spent several hundred hours playing this game and I think this game should be treated as an addictive drug. I know it's my own psychological problems but there's whole Reddit thread about how it ruined people's plans etc and wasted hundreds of hours of their lives. In contract, real "prohibited" substances like LSD, MDMA didn't make any negative impact on my life nor addiction. How is that?

I feel like all these additive games (especially one which uses psychological tricks like Skinner box) are some equivalent of brain exploits and should be treated with great caution. Maybe labeled somehow and have a reference where all these "exploits" and risk properly explained. Can anyone explain what tricks it uses to become so addictive?

I think you meant to write Skinner box. I wasn't familiar with the term and noticed the typo while looking up what it was.

yes, my bad. Fixed it. I like this video explanation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c

I watched the whole thing and still have no idea what Skinner boxes are beyond that it has something to do with making people want to push a proverbial button one more time. So how do you actually do that? What ways do games do this? They mentioned some loot drops but I never played a game with loot drops and so don't know what that means either. (The only gaming context I have for the word loot, aside from the dictionary definition, is loot boxes, a word which doesn't make any sense to me: what did you plunder to get that loot---other than your wallet, that is?)

Looking at Wikipedia instead, the Skinner Box page says about games:

> Slot machines and online games are sometimes cited as examples of human devices that use sophisticated operant schedules of reinforcement to reward repetitive actions.

So I guess it's just about wanting to play the game more because it's fun and it's not some magic method that game designers use to get more eyeballs for a not-so-fun game (the way that the linked video explained it)?

A Skinner box is just a feedback loop. You perform an action, and the game gives you some kind of information. Along the way people noticed that some types of information from the game make the player less likely to play again, and other types make the player more likely to play. Games which do well usually reward the user for playing the game. (There are also other criteria such as effective advertising, branding, celebrity, good engineering, and others that I'll ignore for the moment.)

An underhanded game will use this to reward you for actions which directly earn the developer more money. For example, imagine a hypothetical game where you find or earn powerups as you go along. These are both rewards and items that give you the opportunity for another reward. You enjoy using them because they allow you to make progress in the game, and because they are graphically and audibly satisfying to use. So far so good, but if you really want to make some money then you can introduce a way to buy more powerups. If the player is having some trouble with the level they're on, offer to let them buy a powerup that would help them. They'll get all the same reward feedback from obtaining and using the powerup as before, except you earned some extra money. If you want to really earn some money, all you have to do is make powerups rarer the further the user progresses in the game, and more and more necessary. The game can gradually change from a game of skill that rewards player skill to a game of money that rewards the player for giving up money.

Factorio, on the other hand, is a much, much better game than that. If you build a small assembly line that makes some items, the feedback you get is a visual display of the machine operating. When it's operating efficiently, raw materials stream in at speed from one side, and finished goods stream out at speed from the other. If you do the job less well, the effect is visually less satisfying. Perhaps the machines are idle part of the time, because they're not getting enough raw materials. Perhaps the items are not zipping past on the belts like you would want. Maybe the belt isn't quite full of material. Your first attempt succeeded, but only imperfectly. You can then revise your design to improve it, which is a very satisfying feedback loop indeed. The more you engage with this feedback loop, the more your skill at the game improves. The more your skill at the game improves, the better you can play the game. The skill ceiling is really quite high, and building an exceptional factory requires a lot of advance planning and forethought as well as the optimization and debugging skills you have gained from your earlier play.

Either way it's just a game. Many people say that playing games is always a waste of time, because you gain nothing from it. That's not really true. You can gain satisfaction, excitement, catharsis, knowledge, understanding, relaxation, friendship, and so on from games. It's just that some games give you those in exchange for your time invested, and others give you that for your time invested plus a continuous stream of cash purchases.

People watch over a thousand hours of TV per year so if time spent was sufficient criteria for addiction we would be a pretty afflicted population. Think of how addicted I'd be to showering! I do it every day!

I would encourage you to be less hard on yourself. Think of a good game like a hobby. People play hundreds of hours of golf too and still find the time to lead productive lives.

I mostly agree with this, but.

Watching 100 hours of TV a year is probably not excessive. Watching 100 hours of TV a week would be unhealthy. If there are people who lack self control such that playing games adversely affects their personal lives, then (without accusing the developer of malicious intent) something unhealthy has gone on.

I can't say I really agree with "x hours on entertainment like games is x hours wasted".

I think the comparison "it's more detrimental than illegal drugs" is thoughtless rhetoric. Maybe a better comparison could be 'empty calories'. -- I would agree I enjoyed playing Factorio more than I've enjoyed many other games, though.

Watching television for hours every day is at a minimum a bad idea and often an addiction. Many people would go crazy without a signal. Just look at how many people can't even function under COVID! As if being alone with your thoughts or with your family could ever be a problem for a healthy individual or family.

Since the game costs a straight $30 up front and has no in-app purchases, subscriptions, or ads, there’s really no incentive for the developers to use “tricks” to make it addictive. It’s just what I’d call an old-fashioned “good game.”

Plus the code is ROCK SOLID and always has been -- it hardly ever crashes. Yet it's like a pinball machine with 5 million balls in play, and still amazingly fast.

Also the beautiful hires Czechnological artwork.

It's top-notch design, execution, and graphics.

And starts reasonably quickly. And runs really well on Linux, with no quirks or hicups.

(As someone who uses a Linux machine as the "primary" desktop, only switching to a Windows machine for games and other things that need it, I find it really nice to have a quick-to-launch game that runs perfectly on Linux.)

AND allows you to easily spin up a dedicated server for multiplayer, WITH easily synced mods between all players.

AND well-defined mod migration for updating mods to new Factorio versions without breaking them or your maps.

I'm kind of amazed at how the trains keep running (apart from my own inability to truly understand signals)

Ironically I don't think there are any underhanded tricks in Factorio to make it more addictive. There are certainly no loot boxes or randomized rewards. What it does have is a series of tasks that escalate in complexity. Completing these tasks well gives a feeling of great satisfaction, and the result is a single enormous machine of your own individual design. If that's a bad thing, then we'll have to make engineering itself a controlled substance.

isn't the same for lets say an app development?

In many ways. In Factorio, your factory can have concurrency, parallelism, race conditions, bottlenecks, deadlocks, resource starvation, etc, etc.

Looking for those types of problems and solving them is a very fun feedback loop. You can spend a few hours just walking around a large factory, making small incremental improvements as you go, and your entire factory will be visibly better off. The only thing preventing you from doing this to your application is the lack of visibility into the problems. There's a bottleneck in your code right now, but can you find it? They're almost never detectable by simple inspection of the source code, so it takes specialized tools. I would say then that building a large factory is like an optimal form of programming where nothing is opaque or hidden from you.

When I got to the heavy oil, light oil, solid fuel ratio thing to make rocket fuel it made my head hurt a bit. :)

You mean in the sense that programming can be addicting?

Factorio doesn't do the loot box stuff that F2P games are famous for. I think the best way to describe the game's addictiveness is that it's programming, but simpler, and gamified, with much more immediate emotional payoff.

The thing Factorio does do is that it evenly spaces out its achievement moments so that you get a steady stream of goals and accomplishing goals. That's what makes it so addictive: you feel like you're constantly overcoming challenges. And you are, but it's in a game and doesn't translate into real life.

It's definitely addicting. No denying that. I just think it Factorio does a good job of giving you enjoyment for the time you put into it rather than resorting to gambling mechanics like some games. (The list is rather long.)

Yup, Factorio is addictive in the same way that reaching flow (the psychological state) is addictive. It's a game to experience the joy of problem solving.

> Can anyone explain what tricks it uses to become so addictive?

Good game design.

In particular, I see a few broad strokes of good game design here:

* There are always a variety of tasks to accomplish of varying scope and complexity. If a player doesn't feel like adding on the next stage of the factory, they can perform other maintenance tasks like cleaning up local bottlenecks or aesthetic optimization (e.g. straightening out a section of the power network).

* Almost every single problem is directly caused by the player's own actions, through a logical chain of events that's obvious once the player becomes familiar with the game. Why is the widget facility starved for inputs? Because the player previously split off 3/4 of the bolts for other production. The resulting challenges (see the point above) become meaningful because of the history, giving the game a level of intrinsic motivation that is usually reserved for sim games like city builders.

* There's no single "right way" to win. Some players treat the game as a size/speed challenge, to produce the most stuff in the fastest time; others look towards the most efficient or compact layouts; still others are content to reach the basic "win" condition (launching a single rocket) with a bare minimum of facilities and a lot of patience. The game doesn't condescend to the player to explain at them that their playstyle is wrong.

* The game separates "doing something" and "doing something at scale," but it makes the player progress to the latter eventually. As a more concrete example, the player can build the first few science packs (progression tokens) in their inventory, Minecraft style, but they very quickly need to set up automation to produce the ever-increasing required number in a timely way. Over a typical game, the most central aspects of production will go through three or four wholesale renovations as the player designs around different bottlenecks. It's a kind of intrinsic progression that I've seen no other game replicate -- even if you had access to all the whiz-bang shinies at the start of the game, the fixed costs of using them would still push the player to a "starter base -> big base" progression.

In some ways, it might be better to treat Factorio not as a single game that is 'won' or 'lost' through arbitrary rules, but instead as a hobby. "I've spent several hundred hours playing with model trains" doesn't sound outlandish.

This is an excellent answer. When you read their blog you realize that all those points have guided the current design of the game. There was multiple iteration of the tech tree to invite the player gently into the different "phases" of the game. (see https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-275).

They carefully thought about the name of things, the cost of things to communicate clearly to a new player what he is supposed to do next (manufacture new thing, ramp up the production of old thing, etc).

Will Wright has a great quote on game design that I can't find, but it's something like "What makes games fun is when the player has as many choices as possible, and all of them are good choices."

I think factorio succeeds in this well: there are always many things to do which will improve things, so you have to try to optimize which is is the best decision to advance furthest with a given amount of time.

Yeah, when I went from copper and iron moving on belts to belts and inserters as items moving on belts I started to realize the rabbit hole was getting pretty deep.

I hate Skinner box games too, but Factorio is definitely not one of them. The entire game aside from uranium processing is completely deterministic.

It's clear what you meant, but I just wanted to touch on a nuance: Skinner boxes can be deterministic. "Skinner box" in the context of games generally just refers to the game design feeding you a steady drip of reward cycles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

Loot box mechanics (aka gambling, or randomized reward systems) are what the worst offenders are usually exploiting.

I'm curious actually, is uranium processing not deterministic? Does it not depend on the seed? Or is that seed only for the map and does it not influence other random events like biters and uranium?

The first multiplayer versions basically synchronised with each other and then ran independently, just executing the keyboard input from other players basically. No central server calling the shots. This was hell development-wise, but I think that concept hasn't changed too much actually: you may have a central server that tells your client whether you can really pick up an item from a chest or whether it's already gone, but the local simulation is still local (it's not as if there is an incoming video stream or stream of all entities that have moved; far from it, it's a handful of kilobytes per second). The random engines almost have to be synchronized as I never noticed more data traffic during biter attacks or such.

Of course it's still deterministic. It's a computer program, so it has to be deterministic. Multiplayer still uses a lockstep simulation, so all clients must compute the same random outcome.

But it does introduce an element of randomness that isn't present anywhere else in the game. Every other recipe in the game has fixed inputs and outputs with known ratios, and often very nice ratios. Put in two iron plates and get out a gear. Put in one copper plate and get out two copper wires.

The randomness in uranium processing is used to simulate the cascades of centrifuges used for isotope enrichment without having to track the enrichment of every single lump of uranium, and without having to introduce a hundred different types of uranium ore items. Instead you have a 0.7% chance of getting a lump of uranium-235 every time you process some uranium ore; the rest of the time you get uranium-238. 235 is used for fuel, 238 is used for ammo and for further enrichment.

> It's a computer program, so it has to be deterministic.

Turn up the gain on a cheap sound card with no mic plugged in, and you've got yourself quantum tunneling noise.

If you've figured out how to make that deterministic, go collect your nobel.

That's not a software program, it's a misuse of the hardware.

>real "prohibited" substances like LSD, MDMA didn't make any negative impact on my life nor addiction.

I'm sure you are different (or at least think so yourself) but I have never heard anyone who use drugs that says otherwise before they have stopped using them completely. Also "ruined plans" versus "ruined lifes" is quite a difference. It cannot be a big surprise that someone who gets addicted to a game might also be a drug user. Addiction is not really about the drug itself but the person.

You can look at the dev dayries https://factorio.com/blog/ They are very interresting, I've learnt a lot of technical things reading them. It's a well programmed game !

They are going to stop it now, no Friday facts anymore.

A huge congratulations to one of the best and hardest working dev teams out there on one of the most unique, challenging, and fun games I've ever played. I have put far more hours into factorio than any other single player game. It is an inspiring work. Reading the Friday facts blogs has also been one of my favorite development blogs.

I never got in to Factorio, though I'd been tempted several times. I recently bought the early-access Satisfactory though which is a similar game type, mostly to support the developers (Coffee Stain) who make another game I quite enjoy (Deep Rock Galactic).

The refactoring bit hits hard, how do you structure your factory to minimise time/cost/space, can you increase throughput, do the outputs line up where you need them, how do you ensure a sufficient power supply, etc.?

I bought it with a friend and found it quite boring. I guess I like rimworld or dwarf fortress style games much better.

Same here. I'm a former engineer and thought Factorio would be the perfect game for me, after all I do enjoy problem solving. But it just seemed like an extension of my workday. However I love Rimworld. It's a game I keep going back too again and again. It's a great game for relaxing and unwinding. It's certainly in my top 3 list of best games of the last 10 years.

> The refactoring bit hits hard, how do you structure your factory to minimise time/cost/space, can you increase throughput, do the outputs line up where you need them, how do you ensure a sufficient power supply, etc.?

There are different 'designs'. I'd recommend a main bus design for your starter base. Basically you take key materials, like copper plates, iron plates, steel etc. and then run (multiple) full belts of them down a long line. and build your factories to the side of it, taking your input materials from the main bus.

See here: https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Main_bus

Alternative designs (for much later in the game, if you want to buiold a megabase) are e.g. rail grid, sometimes called city block design. Looks like this: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1as3oMAgOy4/maxresdefault.jpg

You have a grid of rail tracks with standardized squares and standardized input/output locations. Then you automate input delivery/output collection to them either by pure circuit logic, or of you don't hate yourself quite that much using the Logistic Train Network mod: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Optera/LogisticTrainNetwork

A lot of these rules/ideas likely apply to Satisfactory, though there are additional concerns like rate-of-climb for ramps and placement of objects is not (by default without using base-plates) fixed at 90 degrees but works in (iirc) 15 degree increments. It makes things differently challenging.

Once you play Factorio enough times you find that there are some general rules of thumb you can follow, in terms of resource consumption at various stages. Once you know those, it's partly just a matter of figuring out your scale milestones.

I do three stages, a main bus starter base which is enough to fill out the tech tree and launch a rocket, and then once I've automated most things, then comes the first megabase, which after enough time I rip up and build the modularized, distributed megabase (mostly solving the problem of keeping train traffic spread out and avoiding long multilane belt busses). The interesting thing is that building a megabase isn't necessarily just 10x-ing your start base, it's actually doing things differently because how you move resources around starts to become a problem in ways you didn't encounter at the smaller scales.

They (Coffee stain) collect data and send it to Epic (even on the steam version and even if you opt out) and doesn't reply to GDPR requests. I'd stay clear.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/526870/discussions/0/24515950...

Coffee Stain is the publisher for Deep Rock Galactic, Ghost Ship Games are the developer.

Factorio always looked appealing. From a distance though. Never played this for the same reason I don’t do WoW and EVE online. Scared it would suck up every minute of my life.

The difference is that you can put Factorio down. MMOs are very different beasts to single-player games.

I concur with moritonal; although you can easily spend hundreds to thousands of hours in Factorio, it is much, much easier to put down. Unlike with MMOs, the game offers you no incentive for logging back in regularly.

Try it and see how you feel after ~2 hours of gameplay.

> Try it and see how you feel after ~2 hours of gameplay.

Coincidentally "try it and see how you feel" is also how people sell heroin...

They're saying they're concerned that they might get addicted, and you're telling them to try just the tip, just to see how it feels?

I'm a big fan of Factorio but if you're concerned it could take over your life, there's definitely a chance it could.

True it's not as bad as an MMO. There's no daily quests, no social features, (though multiplayer is fun) and most importantly no lootboxes or variable ratio rewards. Doesn't mean it can't addict you for a little bit though.

For many people the "cracktorio" is just a joke.

For me? I am actually serious about the addicting nature of the game.

The gameplay loop is just so rewarding, so that addiction is easy.

Even when the game is boring, its still addictive. Kinda weird that way.

Of course its mostly only boring when you haven't yet figured out the "design patterns" of an efficient base, and/or are too lazy to tear down what you have to build them out.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/11/26 ;)

No, seriously though, I'm speaking with full experience: My main WoW character has a 4-digit days playtime (and that's from several years ago; I eventually did put it down for good).

Factorio is addictive the same way that Civilization is: You want to keep going. Or like Tetris pro players, you might think about your factory when you're not playing and "see" it everywhere. But unlike WoW, you can put the game down at any time: there's no responsibilities you're taking on, there's no grind you must finish, no daily quests that reset calling you to re-do them tomorrow. The game world stops the moment you pause/exit the game.

There's no comparison to a MMO.

> Doesn't mean it can't addict you for a little bit though.

Every good game will. Every good TV show will make you want to binge. It's up to you to manage your time. I believe GP is a reasonable adult and can manage 2 hours of a game without having to check into rehab :)

Warning: unlike Civilization, Factorio UI doesn't feature a real-world clock, and AFAIK there's no mod that can add one, so unless you set an alarm or have a spouse it's really easy to get sucked up ;)

Unlike say a first person shooter factorio is limited to 60fps, so unless the slightly reduce screen realestate is an issue just run it windowed and use the system clock.

There are mods to add the time [0] but yes, it's very easy to lose track of time playing this game.

[0] https://mods.factorio.com/mod/clock

> I believe GP is a reasonable adult and can manage 2 hours of a game without having to check into rehab

Two hours of a game? Yes.

Two hours of Factorio? Not a chance. Unless they don’t make it past 30 minutes in the first place ;)

I was SURE I felt like I'd contracted Coronavirus, but it just turned out that I'd been playing Factorio for so many hours straight without pausing to eat or sleep.

I got hooked on Factorio, but for me Satisfactory was far more addictive. It had that "explore and find goodies" element that has some sort of primal addictiveness in the sense of: "Must hunt, gather food."

Factorio is like a Terry Pratchett book. It has no chapter breaks, no obvious place to stop for the night and put it down. It just keeps rolling along until the sun comes up.

>They're saying they're concerned that they might get addicted

To be clear I don't think I'm inherently vulnerable. It's more of a "let's rather not find out what happens when my love of gaming gets combined with peer pressure & reinforcement loops" consideration.

I do like the Anno series for this though. It scratches the same "city builder" itch but it has a pretty fast burn cycle. i.e. I'll spend a weekend doing little else and then lose interest for 3 months.

For those who like this I would also recommend Mindustry, a similar game which is open source and available for mobile. I actually have spent quite a lot of time with it.

I bought it for €10 5 years ago, in terms for gaming value for money I think only the €10 I spent on Minecraft beats it.

There is a fun minecraft modpack inspired by this game https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/modpacks/manufactio

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

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

I like to look at my factory in terms of the Theory of Constraints. Improving anything besides the bottleneck is a waste. Find the bottleneck and fix that one thing, then figure out what the new bottleneck is. Avoid creating excess inventory (buffer chests).

That's The Goal.

Yup, not unlike how actual factories operate apparently. It's also a never ending process because once you unblock one bottleneck, a new one is revealed somewhere else. That the primary challenge in the game is an emergent phenomenon of producer/consumer systems is what makes it so beautiful of a game.

For anyone who has wondered what would Factorio would look like in 3D, the game Satisfactory from Coffee Stains Studio would be a good idea.

This is like Heroin getting an upgrade. I might have to go break my computer now...

would be interesting to learn the nature (or psychological tricks) the game uses to become so addictive

You always have a next step, a next upgrade to look forward to. It's an uninterrupted treadmill from building your first mine to building you hundredth mega-factory. That's how even quasi non-games like Cookie Clicker can become addictive. It's effectively a Skinner's box.

Gameplay-wise Factorio is a lot more interesting that Cookie Clicker of course.

It's an uninterrupted treadmill cos you just spent 3 hours extra doing seventeen other things and realise you still haven't actually "fixed the copper" or whatever the heck it was you were meant to be doing :)

1600+hrs in ... still pushin' all my buttons.

oh ... and the only game where i've regularly hit 2am and thought "one more thing..."

Yes.

I don't think the developers intend it to suck up so much time. I think they want to make something that's fun.

But I don't think there's anything to the game that malicious developers don't already know.

I think, insofar as it's fair to call Factorio addictive, it's because there's a constant feeling of "just one more thing" (or "just one more game"). There's is constant and continuous frontier of optimization opportunities. But, at the same time, there's also effort/delay in getting the rewards of the effort. -- I think that feedback loop is what people loved about the 2012 XCom Enemy Unknown.

I think it's possible to play in a healthy way. But, I guess if the feeling of "my factory isn't good" and "I suck" drives the behaviour, then that'd be unhealthy.

I'm stuck on 0.18 until I reach 1000 SPM. Real soon now, I just need to improve my iron throughput to relieve a bottleneck in flying robot frame production then I can turn to working out the rocket control units not meeting production quota.

0.18 was just Release Candidate for 1.0 - the only feature added on release is Spidertron, the rest is just fixes. I think you should update.

They even made 0.18 mods to be 1.0.0 compatible this way the game releases with all mods already up to date.

I just finished a 10K SPM base. Finishing a base that big is like finally releasing a product that was in development for a year. I don't know what to do with myself now that its all finished.

Can we make this the UI for AWS please?

I had a co-worker who used to joke about that, but now that I've spent 4 weeks making a JSON template for basically just two VMs, I'm starting to take his idea more seriously.

Fundamentally, the product is similar, but everyone far prefers the Factorio UX over fifty pages of serialised REST objects.

Reminds me of ps/kill/renice built in Doom: http://psdoom.sourceforge.net

Does anyone know if performance/efficiency of the game has gotten better over time? I played it quite a bit ~2 years ago or so, but my 7 year old MBP got really hot and very slow by the time I started using blueprints. From what I read at the time the game was very dependent on single-threaded CPU performance. Maybe they found a way to make better use of multiple cores?

I really want to pick it up again but am not excited to start a new factory if I know I won't be able to complete it.

Considering what factorio is displaying, I’ve always thought the performance is amazing.

Then again, my computer is not 7 years old, but when I played it my desktop was running on an AMD Phenom.

Yes I definitely didn't mean for this to sound as a complaint, I think for what it is it's quite lightweight. It's just that it seemed to be using a single core and if they managed to make it multi-core perhaps it could be even more performant now.

I think it's still largely single-threaded. They value complete determinism: you should never get a different game state one tick later based on a CPU race condition. This is for easier debugging, repeatable testing, accurate multiplayer simulation - and also just that it fits the theme of the game, players expect to be able to design certain systems to work deterministically. This design decision has a performance cost, of course.

Still there have been major performance improvements, including parallelism-lite. And just the fact that it's mainly the same engine that ran on low-spec computers from 6 years ago means it should run very smoothly on modern machines - not all of the Moore's law improvements since then have been about parallelism.

I wouldn't say 'largely'. There are definitely single-threaded parts and if you have 64 really slow cores then you won't get 64 times as many FPS (or UPS, really) as with 1 core running at 64x speed, but that's with all software.

If you have a somewhat reasonable per-core speed, multiple cores should all be loaded with work. Personally I can't say that I've noticed it helped, but that's anecdotal and I've seen the improvements as they came in incrementally rather than in one big jump from some old single-threaded version to 1.0.

> including parallelism-lite

What does that mean? When I look it up I get results for some other game with a similar name.

> What does that mean? When I look it up I get results for some other game with a similar name.

I didn't mean to refer to any established term. I meant parallelization by breaking the game up into systems, e.g. I believe the electrical system can run completely separately to the main thread without losing the deterministic guarantees, while I would think of full parallelization as allowing each assembler or inserter to be simulated in its own thread.

Maybe there's a more established term for this? Parallelization through doing different types of things at the same time, rather than doing many copies of the same thing at the same time.

They've made a lot of performance improvements, but it's still bounded by memory bandwidth and splitting updates across multiple cores would actually slow that down due to memory access contention.

The devs were constantly optimizing the game. They've added a lot of performance tunings, options for video compression, etc. You should give it a shot, maybe download a factory built by someone else to evaulate performance.

Just opened up my largest base (21k/m copper) and it's using 6% of my 8 core cpu. That's around 108% of a single core, but the load is spread quite evenly with the highest cpu utilization at 28% with the rest hovering around 10%. I'd say it's very well parallelized currently.

Looks like fun and it's a game that's been on my watchlist for years. But I've reached an age where I'm pretty sure that once I finish the rocket and escape the planet (that's what seems to be the main goal) I'll never play it again. Just can't be bothered anymore by endless grinding and optimizing. Addictive games like MMOs and building games stopped being addictive for me once I figure out how it works.

That doesn't mean it isn't worth playing the games. Time you enjoy wasting isn't wasted time.

I don't know anyone who launched their first rocket faster than most story-based games that you pay €60 for and get one or two dozen hours of content if you're lucky.

Factorio is half the price for more hours of entertainment, even if you never touch it again after your first rocket launch (assuming you do enjoy it until the first rocket launch and don't put it away before then).

A minority of players (like me) likes to continue expanding and optimizing after the first rocket launch, but indeed most people go play something else first and start another map later, perhaps with friends. On your second run, you'll build a much better factory. Not necessarily because you like optimizing so much, but now that you know the game you can do things much better and most people enjoy seeing that they really made progress in learning how to play a game.

> But I've reached an age where I'm pretty sure that once I finish the rocket and escape the planet (that's what seems to be the main goal) I'll never play it again.

It'll still probably take you a good 40+ hours to do that. Which is fantastic entertainment value for $30.

Looking at the steam global achievements, 16.1% of people have finished the game at all (mid-game achievements are sitting around ~40-50%). There's then 2 other achievements - finish the game in under 15 hours, and finish the game in under 8 hours. Only 2.1% and 1.6% have those achievements, respectively.

I'm also a "finish the game & put it down forever" type of person, but I've come back to Factorio multiple times. Helped tremendously by the map generator settings letting you basically "skip" parts of the game you don't like, or double-down on ones you do like. Enjoyed the trains? Make the ore patches more spread out, but larger so that your train installs are both more necessary and are more permanent. Enjoy being forced to improvise base layouts? Ramp up the cliff generator. Hate cliffs? Disable them. Feeling stressed from the external pressure that enemies provide? Disable them. Etc...

If it helps I found the addictive driver of factorio to be very different than MMOs. It's more like the feeling of cleaning and refactoring code, but more enjoying than frustrating. Hard to explain but their game design is quite good.

Must be getting lots of traffic: https://i.imgur.com/TNIeMoj.png

Great game. Without being critical of the team's awesome accomplishment, I do wonder if there's something to be learnt here about software development productivity. How did the Coffee Stain guys develop Satisfactory apparently so much faster than the Factorio guys?

Factorio started in 2013. Satisfactory started development in 2016 and released 2019. At the time Satisfactory was released it seemed already more advanced than Factorio -- and after only having been developed for half as long. (The visual complexity of Coffee Stain's game is off the charts compared to Factorio. Factorio has a board game style whereas Satisfactory is a modern 3D game. Look at the launch trailers.)

Coffee Stain has about 25 employees working on 2 games (Goat Simulator and Satisfactory), Wube Software has 15 employees working on 1 game (Factorio).

Having read Factorio's dev blogs I feel like there might have been a bit of not invented here syndrome. They wrote their own UI toolkit for instance. Maybe they kept inventing technologies while Coffee Stain found ways to reuse existing tools?

The comparison isn't completely valid.

Satisfactory is not yet released, and still in Early Access.

Factorio was in EA and enjoyable by 2016.

The Factorio team has slowly grown to its current size - for a few years it was just one or two people and no funding.

Coffeestain was a fully formed team with some funding.

At the point of comparison in 2016, both games were in early access, and, I think, both games were enjoyable. Factorio had a more complex late game in terms of available structures and they had liquid pipes which is a major feature. But Satisfactory also had some things Factorio did not like varied terrain, automated trucks and some interesting first person elements.

You're right about the early funding. Factorio started out with just €21,626 of crowd funding. But after a while they do seem to have reached similar levels given the comparable staffing levels they have now.

I don't think you can really compare both of these games... both are about building factories, but that's it. Factorio is another world of complexity comparing to Satisfactory

I'm not sure how one could measure the complexity in terms of game mechanics, but there is definitely a large amount of overlap in that complexity I would say. Both games have machines to mine, assemblers of increasing complexity, belts to connect them, a variety of possible inputs and outputs. There are things in Satisfactory that's not in Factorio and vice versa -- Satisfactory has a space elevator, Factorio has rockets. I'm no expert on these games but from the outside it doesn't look like one is twice as complex as the other in terms of mechanics.

Having played both, Satisfactory doesn't come close to the scale Factorio has. Especially when it comes to late game scaling, I have 20k assemblers on my longest running save.

> How did the Coffee Stain guys develop Satisfactory apparently so much faster than the Factorio guys?

The games are not even remotely comparable.

Having played both, my opinion is that they are very different games. Satisfactory is much simpler in its mechanics.

Factorio is built on a custom engine and heavily optimized. I doubt you can build a factorio-style mega base in satisfactory and keep things performant.

Factorio has procedural map generation, enemies that build bases and attack you, blueprints, construction and logistics robots, logic circuits, incredible mod support, and you can play with dozens of people in multiplayer and things stay performant and enjoyable.

In the the two games chose a very different development cycle. Factorio released early and often and listened to their community by adding and changing what players were asking for. Satisfactory first released a game that was pretty close to finished, and released, so far, very few updates.

I will say that I enjoy both games, but for different reasons.

Factorio’s engine has an absolutely staggering amount of performance optimization able to support factories that are orders of magnitude more complex than endgame Satisfactory setups. Factorio started out using the Allegro engine and then rolled their own because Allegro couldn’t handle the huge factories that players were creating.

I think the detail you’re missing is that Factorio didn’t start with all of these pieces being homegrown. It became that way because over the years players kept pushing the boundaries, so the dev team decided to put in the extra effort to support it by optimizing like crazy. The game’s engine got several revamps over the last several years just for performance. In this case the effort was informed by real community desire for it, not premature optimization.

Having played both games, Factorio started to choke on co-op multiplayer at the scale of mid-10^5 entities. Satisfactory started to crack (lag artifacts and desyncs) at mid-10^3.

I love that when you click things on the site it actually responds to the click (like you've physically pressed a button).

Up until circa 2006 all interfaces were made that way. Web forms and native interfaces all had inputs resembling real buttons. See 98.css https://jdan.github.io/98.css/ if you want to see what interfaces looked like in the early 2000s.

Heard about this game from Tobi Lutke on a podcast. Bought the early access version while I was in bed recovering from surgery and promptly lost track of the next eight hours. Didn't play for a couple weeks after that, then lost a weekend. Terrific game-- it really does build the muscle to search for the bottleneck in any process.

An interesting AMA with the founder of Factorio from a few years back: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/6e6tkw/im_the_fou...

If you like this game, I suggest you can try “Oxygen not included”

Note that while they are both fun and share many features like logistic systems and machines, they are wildly different in approach.

Oxygen Not Included is an inherently unstable system, and it's a frantic race to juggle all the spinning plates while your colony falls more and more apart. The better you get at the game, the further you can stretch it before it succumbs to starvation, disease, lack of air or death by overheating.

Factorio (in regular mode) has a system that it is possible to keep stable at all times, and once you get a handle on the enemies you play the game at your own pace.

You can achieve stability in Oxygen Not Included. It's not even that hard to do so.

Yeah I've watched streamers with stable bases. Old and new.

I was a bit annoyed by photosynthesis not working as expected. In one of my first games, I used algae to create oxygen. However, this did not remove carbon dioxide, and the overall gas pressure in my base mysteriously kept increasing. I know it's not a physics simulator, but given the name of the game I expected a bit more realism around oxygen production.

Overall the game is a strange mix of physics sim and quirks that don't make sense. For example, industry produces heat and heat spreads as expected. Solid, liquid and gas phase changes happen more or less as expected, leading to fun stuff like steam explosions. But then heat can be deleted in unphysical ways, heat can't be radiated away into space like in the real world etc.

The heat management is one of my biggest frustrations with the ONI gameplay loop. You go from gradually adding niceties to the base like lighting and plumbing to immediately needing some unholy water-cooled system that uses more power than the rest of the base combined, is stupid expensive in refined metals, and doesn't even permanently solve the problem because soon the heatsink waste pool is boiling and searing any dupe that walks past the general area. Oh and you have to do all this before the greenhouse gets slightly too warm and dooms the colony to starvation.

Heat management is super easy with aquatuner and steam turbine, you only need some steel and plastic, which are not so hard to get. Personally for me ONI heat-management is one of minor dissapointments, I think it would have been much more fun and deep if this system was more physically accurate.

ONI has me super frustrated but without the challenge and success part. I reached the surface once when setting the map to super easy and discovered that there was nothing fun there, either. It's fun for a little bit to get things running, but you can't make it a closed loop system (at least at first) and you'll run out of stuff fairly soon. I thought that with enough research you'd get there, and you might, but the way of storing liquids or gases for processing, the heat it creates, the meteors that destroy anything you put on the surface, the crappy power generation methods to pump it all around... I just didn't get that game. Factorio I played for thousands of hours and I'm still not tired of it.

In the planned DLC they plan to significantly rework space and introduce playable asteroids, so rockets will be use as a logistic system between your main base and space outposts.

On your other points, it looks like you simply haven't understood game systems deep enough.

>you'll run out of stuff fairly soon

Geysers can support really large bases and other materials you can get from space missions, which are powered either by oil wells or water geysers. It's a great simplification that you can built self-powering oxygen generators, which consume water and produce oxygen with some leftover hydrogen.

>the heat it creates

Aquatuners + steam turbine setup solves all heat issues. And you can cool metal refineries output directly inside steam rooms which power stem turbine (by using oil or petroleum for coolant).

>the meteors that destroy anything you put on the surface

Bunker doors + radars + a tiny bit of automation. I think that radar mechanics are unnecessary complex and not explained properly, but once you understand it, they are quite easy to use.

>the crappy power generation methods

Even without advanced sour gas/petroleum power setups it's really easy to get a TON of power generation. In mid and late game I usually sit on top of so much power generation and unfortunately game does not have any power sink game mechanics.

ONI is deeply frustrating if you have an understanding of thermodynamics. It doesn't map in any reasonable way onto actual physics. One of the main mechanisms for managing heat is a plant that destroys heat.

To me it feels incredibly hacky and ruins the game.

As someone who tried it 5-6 years ago when it first popped up in my bubble, reached end-game and got bored, is there some summary of how the game has changed since? Of course listing every single change doesn't make sense, but any big changes to the core game?

The early prototypes really nailed the core gameplay loop. The biggest changes since then have been to smooth out the complexity of the various subsystems, vastly increase performance so that you can have a vastly larger factory, and to introduce new types of puzzles such as the nuclear reactors. Blueprints were added fairly early on, followed by straight-up copy and paste a few years later, and they really changed the game. In the earliest prototypes, doubling the speed of your research required manually placing down all the belts and assemblers in order to double the size of your factory. With blueprints doubling the size of your factory is a much higher-level puzzle of cloning the pieces and plumbing them together, rather than the lower-level grind of placing a thousand machines. Trains were added at some point as well, which gives you a long-range transport capability. The circuit network was added so that your factory can make automated decisions without your direct involvement. And the UI has been greatly improved as well.

in addition there are several mods that increase the depth of the production tree and materials used

True! I've been playing Space Exploration (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/space-exploration) recently.

If you'd like to increase the depth of the production tree, consider checking out Pyanodon's mods:

https://mods.factorio.com/user/pyanodon

Endgame options have grossly improved. Overall, combat has been automated at endgame (artillery trains automatically destroy, and automatically explore the map for you). Nuclear bombs can be used to one-shot endgame biter bases.

"Alien Tech" has been removed. All technology options are built traditionally, and now have 7-tiers with names. Red, Green, Grey, blue, Purple, Yellow, and White (aka: Space/Infinite research).

Infinite research are ~7 or so techs at endgame which go on infinitely. +Weapon damage for the most part, but there is also +Productivity (which makes mines last longer and mine faster).

In effect, the core gameplay loop has been extended into an infinite endgame loop. The late game techs are extremely powerful and automate everything that was boring ~5 years ago (ie: killing biters became boring. So its now fully automated with artillery trains).

> Nuclear bombs can be used to one-shot endgame biter bases.

Forget biters, nuclear bombs quickly remove large numbers of trees, which are the true enemy!

On a more serious note, there have also been countless quality of life improvements, like high-resolution graphics, reworked UI, or copy-and-paste (literally just Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V, I have used it even without robots, its so convenient). If you have radar coverage, the map allows zooming in fully (rendered just like the normal view) and you can place blueprints and issue deletion commands anywhere on the map without moving.

Incidentally, you can also order artillery strikes to play a 'prank' on your unsuspecting friend who is standing motionlessly. (Which is why I made a habit out of standing close to the most expensive thing in the vicinity.)

Games can help you figure out parts of your personality in weird ways. I used to do swimmingly with the early game with all the hack and slash building techniques all the way up to ~500 spm. Then the whole set up for trying to get to mega base got me anxious and such. I found most of my bottleneck to be electricity. Since I played on deathworld, placing solar was tedious.

I knew a few different people who struggled early on a lot. They would be stuck handcrafting too much and rarely have those hack job factory setup. But once they got their early base with ~50 spm and robots going, they would start scaling up with neat little blueprints and what not.

Then there were the speed runners who launch the rocket in a few hours.

> Then there were the speed runners who launch the rocket in a few hours.

It's even below 2 hours now: https://www.speedrun.com/factorio#Any

> I found most of my bottleneck to be electricity. Since I played on deathworld, placing solar was tedious.

If there's a major criticism to be had over Factorio, it's that power generation in the game is rather boring, and the Power poles and Light classes are designed somewhat poorly. Solar just doesn't scale in Vanilla - it costs too many materials for too little power, when really it should be one of the easier scalable techs (but should still require lots of research since it's a no-consumable power technology).

You can get through an entire game of Factorio on nothing but coal power if you're diligent about when you expand, but most seasoned players will just burn the excess oil as power, since it's rarely a real bottleneck and oil's one of the most economical resources in the game to get setup - you build it once and... you're done. Forever.

And then there's the super ridiculous late gamers who have to build nuclear because once you start talking in tens of gigawatts, there's just no way to squeeze that out of anything else and remain even close to efficient; the nukes take an absurd amount of concrete, but you're usually swimming in excess stone anyways. Trying to get there on solar is an exercise in actual pain, since you'll mine most of the map just trying to build panels and batteries... so you have energy to mine the map... The bootstrapping never ends.

Some of the mods have done real work to make this better. There's a mod that has fusion as a late game tech which feels like cheating, but then there's modpacks like Seablock where you're forced to continuously rebuild power through your tech generations as there is no coal, your starting wind turbines don't make enough to get you past the first 10 hours, and each successive science step unlocks a new power generation technology that roughly feels in scale with that level of technology (from harvesting low grade algaes for biomass, to growing trees, to farming alien plants and extracting oils, and then to nuclear in the latest parts of the game).

But no amount of modding can fix things so you can have a power pole that is also a lamp, so you can use Brave New World and see things through the stupid unfixable dark night without also spamming the map with build-wrecking lamps (since that mod removes your character and thus your ability to build night vision goggles).

You can install the mod that merges lamps and power poles or the one that makes it always day.

If you want to see how complex and yet beautiful this game can get, checkout Nilaus’ Factorio Master Class on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLV3rF--heRVu2xlDGZiRb...

He also made those designs with community participation on his Twitch stream if you’re into watching old streams. I believe he is one of the best Factorio content creator.

I also want to mention about how Factorio developers have been continuously blogging their weekly updates, FFF - Friday Factorio Facts throughout the development. They’re really interesting and show how the game evolved and it’s history.

This game looks appealing but when I start playing it, it feels like an extension of my job.

Yeah, I love my job, too.

Great game and it gave me quite a few insights into how systems should be designed.

Can you share a take-away example please?

For me in Factorio you have to think carefully how to place your primary (mines, power, oil) and secondary factories (factory generation, batteries, plastics, ammunition etc). Some of this placement comes from the map, but in the early game you tend to place them too close to each other, which you then need to optimise later on when other tech (like oil & nuclear) become available.

Just refinining oil into primary products in this game took me like a week of work and tweaking.

You then get to the end of the game & build a rocket, but think to yourself -- "Yes, but I could maybe do all of this again but properly and without manually making things and the same mistakes". So you start another game and the whole process repeats!

I think this game made me a better engineer. I'm not saying it was worth investing hundreds of hours, but it was fun playing. One of very few games I really enjoyed in the last decade.

I did take a look at it very early on in Early Access. I sort of did not like that it was so deterministic, like many games of the type.

If there was randomness like machines churning out defective parts, machines ageing due to wear and tear etc it would have been more interesting, would even perhaps lead to more interesting tradeoffs. Some type of risk vs reward decisions were not there, which to me is generally a fun component of games.

I'm sure there are mods (https://mods.factorio.com/) like that, and if not feel free to write one (https://wiki.factorio.com/Modding#Creating_mods).

edit: now that I think about it factorio is purposely deterministic because otherwise it would break multiplayer almost totally.

May be possible that it can be modded in, but I get a feeling would likely break the game, and things will go out of balance, since the core game perhaps was not designed for such probabilistic behaviour.

Actually some amount of probabilistic behaviour including variation in the quality and rate of outputs of machines, even atleast variability between the different instances of the machines of the same type would have made it vastly more interesting is my view.

There is probabilistic behaviour in the game for reprocessing uranium [1], presumably they found a way to keep the RNG in lockstep across clients. I'm pretty certain it's possible to make a mod that does what you've described, but I'm also pretty certain it would make the game less fun :P

[1] https://wiki.factorio.com/Kovarex_enrichment_process

That's exactly why I like Factorio more than, say, prison architect. Where in Factorio you make your items move over conveyor belts, in PA prisoners/guards/etc. move in really stupid ways and you constantly have hallways clogging up on the rightmost tile while otherwise being empty (for example; there are many more aspects that are yolo in PA versus 'exact' in Factorio). Heck, one of the silly parts of Factorio is having to move your miners when the mine runs out. That's kind of "breaking down", though it's also predictable, and even that feels like re-doing work I've already done! It's really not my thing.

Seeing your perspective, I'm not sure this is unifiable into a game that both sides would like. I guess we just like different kinds of games.

I think that's what the purpose of the game's enemies are: To give the player a meta-task that disrupts the abstract factory building mode that players can get stuck in.

The comments here made it seem more interesting than anything on the webpage of the game. Guess I'll have to give it a shot :D

Note that there is also a demo and the binaries are DRM-free (for me the demo was a bit small to justify 30 bucks, but after playing on a friend's version for a few week it became quite clear that I had to buy this game).

There's so much overlap between programming and Factorio which is probably why I enjoy playing it. It's like visually creating algorithms. You get to build and compose things from smaller pieces and then create larger things on top of previously built machines and so on while also learning how things work along the way.

it's very inspiring to see factorio in the first place on HN. It's been a while that I'm trying to publish a successful game. I read that the version 1.0 took you 8.5 years. Do you mind talking a little bit about that? Were you always funded? Did you had any investors?

This is one of the most clever and engaging games I’ve ever played. When myself and some friends discovered it, it ate up hundreds of hours of our time in the matter of a few months .... per person. It’s basically visual programming with monsters.

I’ve wanted to try this for a while but I’m a bit reluctant because I’m not sure that after an entire day of systems design, refactoring, building etc I need a evening game of it.

Would it be too much or still refreshing? My favorite unwind game is battlefield 4.

They have a demo version, that's free as in free beer. Try that, see if you like it!

Provocation: if I ever do another (tech) startup in the future, I want to only hire that have played Factorio (I haven't). I would be curious to see if the company can be wildly successful solely based on this criterion.

I always find I start running out of patience for the game once I get to fluids.

I only discovered factorio a few weeks ago, bought it immediately after playing the demo. Great stuff.

What's especially impressive is how little CPU it uses and my GPU's fans don't go mental.

Meanwhile my decent laptop runs a base producing 1000 science per minute at ~40fps... enjoy 60fps while it lasts ;)

I hope I get that far!

Sounds like Danny Elfman wrote the music to the 2 minute video :) has strong resemblance to the simpsons / beetlejuice / men in black, couldn't imagine a better fit.

If you scroll through the Steam reviews it's not infrequent to see people with over 1,000 hours in this game. I've seen one person with over 11,000 hours in game.

The problem with these very long early access periods is that I was deeply bored with this game well before the final release. I can't imagine I'm the only one.

Factorio; the only game I've seen with timeseries, graphs, tiered alarms and notifications, and you get to automate yourself out of a job.

It's like SRE 101.

I love it of course.

I used to love this game, but stopped playing once I heard about Satisfactory. It just takes things to a different level.

I've spent some time playing Satisfactory, but the first-person view often makes it too cumbersome to actually organize/align everything properly.

Satisfactory scratches the same itches, but it's a less deep game than Factorio. That's not a bad thing (Rimworld vs. Dwarf Fortress comes to mind), but personally the transition to 3-D didn't do much for me, and the reduced complexity of production layouts in Satisfactory made it less interesting for me.

But, do you get to destroy other people's factories? (If not, where's fun?)

Sure, pvp exists. It's not the most popular mode (co-op is the default and most popular way to play), but there is full support for this kind of scenario or mod: each object in the game is of a 'force' and you can't do things like open chests or mine (pick up) objects belonging to other forces (enemies). That's also how biters and player-built objects work. There is even a pvp scenario built into the game if I'm not mistaken and setting up a server is very easy (either with the in-game GUI or, if that's more your thing, with the dedicated server on Linux).

One of the single greatest games for programmers ever written. Buy it.

I wasted 2000 hours for this game. Highly addictive.

Why is this Red Alert 2-like game on the top of HN?

It's nothing at all like that.

If it's not clear from the other comments, Factorio is basically the closest you get to injecting pure engineering joy into your veins.

Given HN's audience, there are a lot of fans here.

Most of that website works without JavaScript!

Wish to have this on mobile phone...

Blocked by Windows Smart Screen Filter. Curious way to manage a release.

the blue print feature confuses me

It just gets your robots to build stuff for you so you don’t have to.

Or design things without committing to actually building it yet.

Or hint/show others how something could be built.

Or remind yourself of how you set something up last time.

(I use blueprints extensively.)

I'm genuinely afraid of trying this game.

Games like this and openttd are how I fail classes and lose jobs.

And make friends!

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