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Dyson Sphere Program is a great Factorio-like that feels more optimistic and less dark. It’s still about harvesting every last resource though. On the other hand there’s Terra Nil, where the goal is to clean up a destroyed landscape and then leave it without a trace. It’s more of a puzzle game than a factory game, but still worth playing: https://vfqd.itch.io/terra-nil

Factory Town is my current go-to. Rise of Industry has its points, as does Voxel Tycoon, but Factory Town is cheery and fun and it brings back the Factorio-style logic networks (and be prepared to use them, as it takes away Factorio-style train-routing — though you gain tagging support.)

DSP is excellent. I beat it before Factorio, and liked it a lot more, but I then went back to Factorio to scratch the same itch and after beating it think it's a bit better. The modding support and multiplayer, especially,

DSP is prettier, grander in scale, and also has a lot of niceties that come with being part of the second generation of the genre. Absolutely worth playing if you enjoy Factorio.

Anything for iOS?

There’s builderment, that is kind of a simple factorio but without creeps (or main character for that matter)

Mindustry and Shapez IO (browser) are pretty good.

I had forgot about Mindustry...

What have you done to me! Loved that game and wasted way too much time on it, will have to spend some more.

Edit: Looks like it even got a fair few upgrades since! You can even code in game now.

On the multiplayer side - Eco. An incredibly underrated game. You have a month of playtime to extract resources, develop your society, and be advanced enough to stop an asteroid. Leaving minimum impact is heavily encouraged, and it has the most sophisticated economic system I've seen in any computer game.

Can you play Eco with 2 people?

Not really, the game is really made for the "10s of people scale".

But thanks to how it works, it doesn't need 10s of coordinated people, you can certainly just join some existing server with a friend and have an equally good time.

This was my biggest annoyance with Eco. It really does take a community, which is disappointing because you can't scale it down to 1-4 players. Are there any mods for this?

They've recently revamped it so you can adjust various levels (skill increase, cap, multipliers, etc) and make it possible to play with fewer. I've actually run a couple of single-player games, completely vanilla. Fun in a different sort of way.

>I've actually run a couple of single-player games, completely vanilla.

I'll have to give it another go then. Do you have any recommended settings for this?

It has a base setting for something like "1-3 players" that's pretty quick, and there are some advanced settings with which you can make things "cheaper" -- both in time and in resources -- via some coefficients.

I also "cheat" at the start by using vanilla commands to research and level up in all the disciplines -- makes the game more about finding and efficiently utilizing resources without also having to scavenge random stuff to "research". Since there's such a breadth of everything, it reduces the grind ("specializations" are annoying if you're forced to be a jack of all trades) without making it too easy.

It still feels like a real accomplishment to build a large building -- both architecturally and via thinking about how each block traces back to the resources pulled out of the ground -- without requiring huge amounts of time in the game. I'm fairly proud of this one [1], and more so of the industry and infra that supported it.

Plus, Eco is just gorgeous, especially when in single-player with low ecological impact there are so many animals hanging around all the time (peep the alligator in that shot).

[1]: https://images2.imgbox.com/a4/c0/T32EKVh1_o.jpg

IMO with a low total player count, a lot of the more interesting mechanics in the game go completely unused, even if you add multipliers so resource gathering is conveninent time-wise. No point in using the shop system with just 3 people, let alone the government stuff. So while I'm sure you can fiddle with the numbers, it just won't be the same experience.

This, I have joined a small server and it is just a good game.

I went in expecting it to have "cringeworthy levels of hippy idealism", but no, it is actually a reasonably sane game. It is the first game since Wurm Online that I have felt like part of a community thanks to the game mechanics themselves, and not just incidentally. A lone person will need inordinate amounts of time to go far into the tech tree, so instead people specialize, and soon after I was running a delivery company that moved orders of resources between players, with people greeting eachother when passing by at the trade district.

Yep, currently playing through DSP myself, as a factorio veteran.

DSP is a great successor, even more than Satisfactory. It's amazing how well the DSP devs have figured out how to scale from small factory plots to inter-planetary supply chains to galaxy-wide economies, all to build a mega project.

The only thing that's really missing (and same with Satisfactory, IMO) is the punishment for expanding too far too fast, the way the bugs in Factorio operate. DSP is supposedly adding combat later though, so we'll see how it pans out.

I'd like a greater focus on externalities, honestly.

Oxygen Not Included does that really well IMO. Almost every production process has inputs and outputs, and a lot of the outputs are waste that you need to figure out either how to utilize as input in another process, or to dispose of safely and in a scalable way so as to avoid negative repercussions. Waste isn't just in the form of products either. For example, one of the challenges that sneaks up on new players is that heat is also a type of waste, and if you don't take steps to manage it (for example, by insulating your power generators), it can wreck your colony.

Speaking of that... When people talk about limitless cheap energy from fusion reactors in 30-50 years, I wonder about goal warning from water great from all that energy consumed and turned into waste heat radiated into Earth's atmosphere.

That will be a problem in a few hundred years of our energy consumption continues growing at this rate; I've done the math on this website a year or two ago.

At the rate our energy consumption is growing, even if we avoid climate change wrecking our society today, the heat waste of our energy production will start to eclipse the effects of climate change in only a few centuries, at most a millenium. Which isn’t that long of a time.

Yes, I think we are in agreement?

Depends on the source of energy production - if we're drawing all our energy from solar and wind, then we're not introducing new energy into the earth. That's the problem with fossil fuels - we're reintroducing sequestered carbon into the atmosphere; if we were to burn wood instead and keep the carbon cycle in balance then it wouldn't be an issue. Nuclear energy does introduce new energy though, so that could cause issues.

That's actually not true. If we use solar energy, we are reducing the albedo of the earth, thereby introducing more energy than otherwise.

As far as wind, you are correct, but the amount of wind energy we can harvest is limited enough that there simply won't be enough at that point assuming that trend.

Similarly with wood, at that point we would just run out of wood.

Question-are we reducing albedo with solar? Solar cells appear more reflective than soil; I wouldn't think that albedo would be reduced unless we were putting solar cells over the ocean. Do you have a source for this, that's an interesting conundrum but seems counterintuitive. I would think that solar cells actually reflect more heat than they absorb, I have had to work around them and they act as though they reflect more heat than soil. If you can back that claim up, I'd be really interested in reading more.

Photovoltaic panels exhibit Fresnel reflection, meaning that they are more reflective at an angle but very weakly reflective head-on, just like glass.

According to this: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020EGUGA..2218924S/abstra... , the albedo is of 0.23, which is a lot lower than the albedo of soil.

I've thought a bit about this a bit.

You can get pretty far by being extremely efficient. We keep making better and better superconductors and even have some above room temperature. Vac-trains with superconducting maglev is more efficient, in principle, than anything short of orbiting. Better materials can make dry mass near nothing.

Reversible computing requires no fundamental energy input.

Space based solar power could make sure the waste heat from electricity production is almost zero and only useful energy is pumped to the ground.

You can shade the Sun at the limit. And you can shade only the portions of the spectrum that are not biologically active, i.e. shade infrared. That's tens of Petawatts.

You can also literally build radiators at high altitudes to dump waste heat into space before it gets conducted into the atmosphere.

You can also just do more work in space instead of on the ground.

I think also we won't grow exponentially but instead linearly or quadratically. That's actually sustainable for as long as the universe would've lasted anyway.

Are you accounting for population collapse? Increased energy consumption corollates to wealth correlates to below-replacement birthrates.

If that doesn’t solve the problem, a culture capable of generating and using that much energy will just build space colonies, which solves the problem too.

That’s the only potential way out, yes. We’ll need lower population on earth, but to continue our current speed of scientific progress we’ll need the same or an even larger population overall, so we’ll have to move into space (the final frontier, these are the voyages…)

I don’t think our current earth population is unsustainable though.

It’s not sustainable with our current consumption standards, especially considering AC usage, space usage for single-family homes, and meat consumption.

If everyone was a vegetarian living a dutch lifestyle we’d have no issue, that’s true.

I’m not even sure that’s true. Energy abundance solves most of these problems.

We don't have energy abundance. We are burning our ancestors (hyperbole for fossil fuels) to stay alive.

We're capable of developing and building out abundant energy production over the next century if we want to, and doing so is going to be a far preferable option to deliberate material deprivation.

Do you have a link to your math?

I can't find it, sorry. You can reproduce it, though, just increase energy consumption exponentially by 1.04 or so until it reaches 1-2% of the insolation from the sun. I had done it a different way but retrospectively this is easier and better.

The energy we produce is still a minuscule fraction of the energy we receive from the sun, so it will be a long time before that will be an issue. Also, I'm increasingly doubtful we'll see practical fusion energy in this century. We'd better focus on using the energy that's already here: sun, wind, etc.

Yeah, ONI is fantastic in this regard. I find myself struggling with it in late game for precisely this reason - if you don't lay the ground work for things like heat when building your initial setup, it's much harder to rip it up and move on.

With DSP you can just move to another planet and rebuild, which is great from scalability but less important challenge wise.

I've been waiting for Terra Nil since August, i think. I'm always bummed out when i see someone playing a game for video, and it's "not available yet". It's almost as bad as games that have been in early access for over a year.

Waiting for http://enwp.org/Miegakure for 11 years and counting.

Satisfactory had even more of that effect on me and the kid when we played it. Perhaps because of being 3D and having all sorts of native flora and fauna that was very good at being annoying and getting in the way of construction.

It essentially made it fun to destroy the native environment and replace it with concrete. It's not even that we didn't mind doing it, it's that we enjoyed it. It was kind of unsettling, since it made me think that is how I would feel if I were a 19th century British colonialist bringing "order" to various native lands.

Satisfactory was fun for a while, and I want to try the v5 features still, but even as an FPS vet I get headaches and frustrations trying to do accurate placement of buildings, let alone tightly optimal.

Amazing graphics optimizations, considering the dynamic lighting and how many objects are rendered.

The 'zooping' or whatever they call that allows you to build multiple things at a time is outstanding. Enormous time saver.

With a few exceptions, I think building placement is outstanding. Hold alt and it snaps, even if the other building is far away, with audio cues. Conveyor belts give a dopamine hit every time I place a long one. That is with foundations of course. Without them you get the spaghetti mess.

What is more difficult than Factorio is that there are no blueprints or robots to build stuff for you. Also, the terrain doesn't help, we can't just destroy cliffs. But that's also interesting.

Satisfactory is in my top 3 of all time, just ahead of Factorio. 2200 hours vs 1600 in the latter. I like it for the 3D exploration and hand crafted map. I love that (if you don’t cheat yourself out of it by abusing ramps) you can spend hours on expeditions through treacherous terrain to get to the next resource.

However my gripes are the same as yours. Placement is an unwanted meta-game that they ought to remove via better QoL features. The existing alignment, snapping, picking, and repeating features are inadequate for a game like this.

A lot of recent changes to the game have been quality of life changes to make it easier to align things.

I got sucked into Satisfactory a while back. After about 100 hours in the game, I was standing at the top of a cliff looking at my creation and said to myself "I'm the worst ecological disaster this planet has ever seen."

I'm planning to start a new save soon, and I think I'm going to try playing with some self-imposed rules, like not removing vegetation. Not as much, anyways. I'm not exactly a budding architect; where I bothered with buildings at all they're mostly giant boxes filled with machines. But I've seen some pretty creative, inspiring buildings on the Satisfactory subreddit and I think the game is flexible enough that I could create a factory that incorporates the nature around it rather than just smashing everything flat.

>myself "I'm the worst ecological disaster this planet has ever seen."

Really? Worse than an asteroid strike, a massive volcanic eruption, a massive flood? Blights and other naturally occurring diseases that have wiped out entire species are much worse ecological disasters than building an entire Manhattan.

If you building was the worst thing that ever happened to that planet, it wasn’t modeled as a real planet in the first place.

In a sense they were the only ecological disaster the planet had ever seen. Something isn't a 'disaster' unless there's some sentient observer to judge the outcome. Asteroid strikes, volcanic eruptions, floods, gamma ray bursts, black holes... they're not disasters, just events, until someone gets upset about them.

I had that moment of clarity when I got the chainsaw, and again when I looked over my giant field of coal generators.

> And yet he doesn't ask about how we destroyed all the cliffs and filled in the lakes, and chopped the trees.

I guess it's because he knows that it's just a game. And there's nothing in the game's rules that allows you to befriend the natives. There's simply no other choice that is rewarded other than expansion and domination, because the natives will always be hostile when you get close to them. Plus: The natives expand too. From time to time new biter bases spawn.

If Factorio took place on Earth, that would be pretty dark. But, remember the backstory is that you've crash-landed your spaceship on an alien world filled with giant hostile insects who will attack you when you get too close, even if you build nothing and never pollute. Hardly a paradise!

Is that not a description of colonial America?

Doesn’t that make it even worse? You invade, destroy the environment, and the beings that lived there don’t like it. So you commit genocide and unilaterally decide to destroy the planet.

Wouldn't you be a bit hostile if aliens landed on your world and started exploiting it?

it's quite easy to put a dent in the "poor good alien" narrative: stand around doing nothing. once enough time passes, biters will kill you irregardless. mind it does take a while for them to come get you, but they will come: https://i.imgur.com/GFxUvu4.png

so the engineer motive is clear: survival, not invasion.

besides, the aliens are an infestation, not part of the ecosystem; as a matter of fact, alien left to their own device will expand and kill the planet biomass. aliens are there to consume, no less than the engineer.

> aliens are there to consume, no less than the engineer.

Same as all other life really.

Eh, life tend to sit in an equilibrium with its environment, biters will happily destroy it. Their evolution and multiplication happens regardless of engineer actions.

It really doesn't. Life sits in a complex, chaotic feedback loop which on our mayfly timescales tends to orbit around a semi-stable attractor. It only does so because everything is killing everything else just as hard as it can, while everything else tries to kill or outcompete it right back.

It's not like if all the foxes suddenly disappeared the rabbits would just reach optimal comfortable population and then start using birth control.

> chaotic feedback loop

So, equilibrium

This response tells me everything I need to know about your understanding of things.

Yeah that’s totally incorrect. Every species is an “invasive species” given an environment where it can flourish.

There is only equilibrium because everything is jostling as hard as it can to outcompete everything else.

Peace is a human invention, it does not exist in nature.

> Peace is a human invention, it does not exist in nature.

Common core is literally destroying people minds

Ever heard of symbiosis? Countless species not only tolerate each other, they cooperate one another. And yes that includes predators like crocodile and plovers or sharks and remoras.

Ppl here brandishing "totally incorrect" and spouting nonsense.

On the subreddit, I once read a good argument that perhaps the backstory is actually more sinister. Supposedly you're crashlanded … but you launch a satellite? (Instead of ever escaping?) The poster supposed that, what if the narrator is a faulty narrator, and in reality, our character has been sent as a sort of advanced terraforming agent send to prepare the planet for colonization or such. After all, the engineer needs no sleep, no food, never seems to tire, can somehow research a wide range of complex technology on his or her own. Perhaps the PC has simply been led, or programmed, to believe that he's crash landed (or perhaps that's even the truth, just the crash landing was on purpose, to deliver him to the planet), and programmed such that he can't recognize the cognitive dissonance of getting to a rocket but never leaving, always expanding …

I think that's a bit of a weak point. When I play a violent video game I don't want to kill people in real life. He probably just knows it's a game.

> the game is a bit, you know, dark

That’s what really bothered me with this game. I’ve tried playing it in the past but this kept me from liking it and continuing. It’s depressing enough we’re doing some version of that in real life, but at least I’m not fully responsible for it. In the game, I am causing it and am 100% responsible for it.

I don’t know why they did it that way. It could just as well have been without this destructive and deathly element.

Oh well, I have other hobbies.

For a time I played multiplayer using, IIRC, a mod called Nauvis Day. Combined with some of our other mainstay mod choices (Rampant) it made it very important to track and deal with pollution, though of course it didn't make it into really pro-ecological setup - It just made all sorts of waste and pollution a problem you had to manage (Rampant does it as well, as it makes bugs hardcore and much more intelligent, but Nauvis upped the scale on pollution management).

On one hand, before we disabled it for being buggy i nearly made a bunch of things perfect (if energy intensive) recycled, OTOH I found we had a nuclear artillery shells and trains that could fire them... Then built a pipeline to make the shells and started cleansing...

That's probably a good educational point in favor of the game, as it introduces the concept that material and energy scarcity can exert fundamental control over industrial production levels.

I kind of like that its dark, the aliens attack because of the pollution you create, and yet still the factory grows and I clear the hives with better weaponry.

Its has some connection to reality that cuts deep and yet I want to play more get my SPM to go higher, it feels like everything wrong with modern life depressing and fun at the same time.

Trying to plan things with only solar panels has this Puritan work ethic feeling for me.