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Comment by outworlder | Hacker News Reader

It is like crack for programmers.

> that my time would be better spent working on a personal software project, where i get reasonably similar enjoyment, more satisfaction, and presumably more transferable skills.

Sure. Maybe your time would be better spent working overtime too. Factorio is a game, and focus on the fun parts. Battling NPM dependencies after a full work day is not fun, it's just more work. There are some days when you are just cranking out code and not worrying about much else, but those days are not necessarily the norm.

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I felt the same way for a while (this is FUN, this isn't work!), but at one point I came back to the game after a few months off, started a new factory, got to something like "automate green circuits", and immediately felt like I was back to battling some NPM dependency. It had lost all its magic and suddenly felt like work again. This was after about 300 hours of playtime over a few years, but I haven't really been able to get back into it since then. It's really unfortunate because it was one of my favorite games when I was still enjoying it.

I had a similar experience but the Space Exploration mod has made it feel like a brand new game again. I haven’t even reached space yet, but lots of the recipes have changed in ways that are more interesting (e.g. the introduction of glass, stone plate, the extension of the burner phase, etc) than a straight replay would be.

The biggest hurdle for me getting back in is just getting past the bootstrapping phase to where you can automate the construction of things from blueprints. Luckily the game is made overwhelmingly with mods in mind, so there is a mod for my issue.

I'm with your parent. For me there was a progression.

First playthrough I was anxious to get to the automation parts. This continued as I explored more of the game, more of the automation possibilities, blueprinting, trying to make an all solar, all steam or all nuclear factory etc.

At some point and I don't know when exactly it turned. I like the initial bootstrapping phase and at varying points I just get this "ugh, really? This pre-requisite, then this, then this and then finally I can build what I really want?" and then I shut it down and play Dungeon Keeper 2 or something like that instead.

Sounds like the honeymoon phase of starting a new software project. The second you hit a problem there’s no beautiful solution to, the magic is gone.

I would agree with you if this happened during the first playthrough. But it didn't. Not even the second or third or soon after that. It's on the n-th playthrough where a certain tech-tree part just feels like a wall now. Everything up to that is still fun but then there's that wall now that's not worth breaking through.

As for beautiful solution to software development: Personally I am somewhere in the middle. I like beautiful solutions. I advocate for clean and maintainable code. But I have no patience for dogmatic "this the only good way to solve this" BS any longer. There are many ways to solve the same problem. All have their pros and cons. I'm not gonna let my people spend another week refactoring this to some staff engineer's liking, keeping it out of the hands of customers ;)

Yeah, I had basically the exact same experience. Haven’t launched a rocket yet.

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