Mindustry – Open-Source Game | Hacker News Reader

Mindustry – Open-Source Game

mindustrygame.github.io

600 pointsgigel82135 comments

A few years ago we played this for a few weeks at the office over Christmas break when things were otherwise slow. We had maybe a dozen players, and played in Survival mode which I believe is infinite with difficulty ramping up.

We split into four teams, with one providing power, one providing ammo, one building defenses, and the rest just running around trying to help out where we needed it the most.

There was a ton of potential. I had to keep adjusting the difficulty as the match went on to keep us alive and then to finish us off when we were running out of time.

I'd love a multiplayer coop game like this but with the potential to have fifty or a hundred players. Right now the office plays CS:GO once a week, with the settings changed to allow max players, but it still caps at thirty. CS:GO is hard for new employees to get in to so I'd love something where everyone has fun. We also did TF2 for a while, which was better because the newbies could be medics and still feel like they were contributing, but the hard-core player base loved the challenge of CS:GO.

As an aside, it's a wonder to read casual accounts of office work where teams will play with toys rather than be allowed to go home to their families or other interests

I have a family and a great work life balance. Some of the fondest memories I have of team building at work is playing video games or doing activities like paint ball or volley ball. So go ahead and judge.

No judgment on you and I’m glad to hear it

I was commenting on the owners, who restrict freedoms unnecessarily and with consequence even if many people are able to make a happy way through it

OK I can agree with that.

> rather than be allowed

This seems like a particularly uncharitable interpretation from the context of the post.

it’s the industry standard to expect defined working hours presence regardless of the work at hand. whatever workers want to do in the lulls or otherwise, that’s great for them. I was commenting on their owners

I think it's taken for granted that finding even three other people to play couch co-op is very difficult, much less enough people for a 30-person LAN match. Work seems to be a reasonable place to meet people who want to partake in extracurriculars.

Yeah being forced by owners to pass time together would enable that

Ooh, can I play? "It's a shame you dislike your coworkers so much that you'd like to spend as little time with them as possible."

Be careful not to fall for the "we're a family here" corporate tropes and then have an existential crisis once you get fired or laid off. Work is work. Your customers are not your friends and your coworkers are not your family.

Coworkers might not be your family, but it doesn't mean you can't be friends. Some of the people I'm closest to I met at work, however to ensure our interactions aren't constrained to the workplace, we've made deliberate attempts to meet up outside of the office.

Worker friendship and solidarity is fantastic and should be encouraged. I was commenting on their owners

The friend I'm closest with I met at a previous job and we continued talking and seeing each other after I quit that job. Your coworkers are not your family, but they can be your friends if you let them, and that relationship doesn't have to end when the professional aspect of the relationship ends.

We don't know anything about their business -- for all we know they could be required in the office to provide availability, but with large downtimes in actual work.

that’s the line given for every instance of it at scale

Not every office is 100% full of people with kids and a relationship.

You clearly need Eve Online

And you clearly need to use sarcasm in a way that is not invisible to everyone but people familiar with the subject matter.

According to the OP, CS:GO is too hard for their new employees to get into, so Eve, which is famous for its brutal learning curve [1], would be a terrible choice for them. After playing it for four years and having created dozens and dozens of notes, I still felt like I understood only 70% of its mechanics.

[1]: https://www.flickr.com/photos/23579228@N04/2335016192

Why?

I can recommend Teeworlds (CTF modes) for casual office gaming. I've organized a tournament once and got my ass kicked in the final matches (2v2 CTF) as people improved really quickly.

Hope this helps: https://teeworlds.leaningtech.com/

Factorio.

I play it with my kids (10 and 16) and my father (70) and brother. Everybody finds something to do and everybody has a lot of fun.

I really like Mindustry.

One place where Mindustry is clearly better than factorio is the feel of trying to build things quickly. It's very satisfying to lay something down fast. A stumble there is that the keyboard combinations are chorded but not overlap-free. So you hit like 1-3 for one thing and 3-1 for another, which means if you change your mind you can't abort a chord by starting another. Quite frustrating in the moment.

Another "so close to greatness" problem is that the campaign doesn't allow you to trust your friends to run separate parts of the planet. You all have to be on the same map at the same time.

> the campaign doesn't allow you to trust your friends to run separate parts of the planet

I think this is more of a technical issue, not something the campaign is designed to prevent.

Besides, what would be the fun in playing by yourself on separate maps?

Last we played, the "send from one base to another" building (I forgot the name) worked much faster when you were in the sending base instead of the receiving one. So when topping off resources before launching to an adjacent map, it would usually be most efficient for everyone to hop to the resource-sending base for a minute and then hop back to the (now fully-supplied) bridgehead, then finally launch to the new map.

In this case it's more the game design that's questionable (why does stuff behave so differently based on whether or not we are in the map?), but there simply are occasions where you have to check or fix something real quick, and requiring everyone to more or less stand by in those situations is pretty dull.

There are often cases where some small thing needs to be dealt with in one map, like flip one switch, and it's hugely disruptive to have to drag everyone to get it done.

I also disagree that it can't be fun to work together separately. One person working on getting thorium working while another works on plastanium and then they ship to each other sounds appealing to me.

Factorio is quite deliberately designed so that you gradually progress from somewhat tedious manual construction to conjuring blueprinted designs out of thin air with fully upgraded robots. It's very satisfying.

That's always something I found unsatisfying about factorio, actually. I always use mods like construction nanobots so that I can start copy pasting from the start. The manual precise placement of early buildings is so tedious otherwise.

I also thought that the belt laying automation added in factorio 1.0 (that made it stay in a straight line as you dragged and added undergrounds as needed) was a massive improvement to the game feel.

Also available on Steam[1], I wonder why they don't link to steam on that page nor their GitHub readme.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1127400/Mindustry/

edit: nevermind it's in there, leaving this comment for others that block 3rd party iframes.

I like this game a lot, I did not know it was open source! After playing Factorio I find this refreshing. I am happy I paid for something Open Source <3

You get much easier multiplayer when you buy it on Steam, so it’s not like you paid for nothing :)

Both Mindustry and Freeciv made it to the frontpage of HN today so I feel it's necessary to share the OS Game Clones site in case people haven't yet looked through it:

https://osgameclones.com/

Some of those listed are remakes of games which are still being developed and sold by their original independent developers (e.g. Baba Is You, Stardew Valley…). Is this acceptable?

Stardew Valley is itself either homage to or a ripoff of Harvest Moon, depending on your opinion.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants, almost nothing is really new, we've all seen it somewhere before. Everything is inspired by, iterated on, or grown from something else.

If clones weren't OK, we'd only have one company owning each genre of game. That'd be no fun at all.

I see where you’re coming from, and I guess I’m still undecided on the issue. I’d have to re-examine in a specific case if such a rip-off were to be more popular.

Aren't rules to a game considered facts, and therefore not copyrightable? The art, story, and names are trademark or copyright friendly.

> Is this acceptable?

Why wouldn't it be acceptable? As long as you don't steal assets you should be free to write any computer program you want.

I don’t think that’s right. Assets aren’t the only aspect of a program which can be protected under IP law. (Not that I take the law to be the paragon of ethical guidelines)

Game = assets + code. Of course you cannot copy-paste copyrighted code, but if you write it from scratch you should be fine.

Ethics aside, the law is apparently pretty clear. The American Bar Association has an article discussing board game copyright[0], and here's what they say:

> Therefore, the systems or processes that make up the core of a game—generally referred to as the “game mechanics”—are not subject to copyright, even though the written rules, game board, card artwork, and other elements—often referred to as the “theme” of the game—may be. Game mechanics can be as simple as “roll dice and move a token along a track,” or far more complex. Regardless of the complexity or originality of a given game’s systems and processes, its game mechanics will likely not be protected by copyright.

[0] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_property_law...

What about patents? Surely if Amazon can patent a one-click shopping experience than game companies could manage to patent much more complex systems? Then again if they could then some of them probably would have by now.

Software patents aren't a thing where I live, but besides even in USA they don't apply to gameplay AFAIU.

The "clone" label isn't always used by the developers and often times these projects are just heavily inspired

The link between Veloreon and Cube World, for example, seems really shaky to me. I definitely wouldn't call it a "clone" but it definitely fills a niche Cube World left

People who enjoy this may also love the Creeper World series of games: https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/1984/Knuckle_Cracker_U...

Been playing the creeper world series since it was a wee little flash game. Underrated game. Tho, relevant to this thread, it's worth noting it's not open sourced afaik

Same here and I was super sad when the newest version was released windows-only. One day I'll build a gaming VM or maybe get a steam deck so I can play it. I still go back and play through all of those games every year or so.

First thing I thought when I saw the screenshots. I played a lot of Creeper World and I will at least play a bit of Mindustry.

After finishing shapez.io (another open source game similar to Factorio) I went looking for more and stumbled upon this masterpiece that's been occupying my evenings for the past weeks - thought others would want to check it out too.

If you think you’ve finished shapezio, install the shapez industries mod and enjoy a bunch of extra mechanics.

shapez is really great, I've been following the development of shapez 2 with great interest. I like shapez because it removes a lot of the grindiness in Factorio, resulting in a more relaxed experience. Shapez doesn't require you to do anything but build factories to process shapes - there's no real resource limitation. (Technically there are one or two mechanics, but once you have a sufficiently good blueprint factory you won't really be in situations where you don't have enough of something).

There's a great free demo online at https://shapez.io/, and since the game is open source, you can technically download and build it yourself to get the full version for free (it's 10 bucks, which is well worth not having to figure out one more JS build process in my free time)

That page has no real info on what the game is actually about. Lots of people here compare it to factorio. So how does it compare to factorio? Is it a factorio clone, is it better or different in some way?

Tower Defense + Factorio

So Factorio.

Different though because you never really end up with a mega base.

In Factorio you put down a big wall with turrets behind it. In Mindustry you build a maze with towers and bottlenecks. You can't build it off completely and always need to leave a path for the enemies. The production line is all about feeding your towers.

No, because like in a tower defense game, there are stages, and every stage has its own base to build and a different level of technology available to the builder.

Short 1-2 hour games with a focus on wave defense, with somewhat factorio-like resource gathering and defense.

Factorio is a factory with some tower defense to mix things up. Once you get your defenses up a bit, the biters are never really a big threat again.

Mindustry the opposite. It’s actually either a tower defense or an RTS (depending on if you’re playing the campaign or against other humans).

In Mindustry campaign, waves are timed and if you don’t pause, you’re going to be building frantically trying to keep up with the increasing difficulty of the upcoming wave as the clock counts down.

Also unlike factorio, space isn’t unlimited. You have to be very efficient to pack as much stuff into the limited space as possible. Enemies aren’t just limited by walls and a boss flying overhead is a force to be feared.

Each sector is its own factory. Once you get far enough along (spoiler alert?), your older sectors will start getting attacked by enemies again (much more powerful ones). A lot of locations are lacking some resources necessary to create top tier weapons, so defending these means managing how you send these resources to them from other sectors.

Then as you get that worked out, five sectors all get attacked at once. You try as hard as you can, but the more you build, the more they attack. Then the conveyor break and it’s publishers clearing house day!!!

In Factorio, my defenses are usually pretty weak, because they can never keep up with the growth of my factory. Instead, I take out biter camps before they become a threat. So there's not much tower defense about it for me.

It sounds like in Mindustry, taking out camps to prevent an attack doesn't work?

On the other hand, building very compact comes naturally to me. My Factorio journey had been mostly about learning to use more space so the factory stays scalable when it needs to grow. But I'm very bad at that; everything eventually turns back into super cramped space-efficient spaghetti.

> It sounds like in Mindustry, taking out camps to prevent an attack doesn't work?

No, it's a more traditional tower defence format where there are set waves that spawn on a timer, there's nothing you can do except build defences to kill the enemies that spawn

For many levels the enemies come from "off screen" so there is no base to attack. There are some levels where you are supposed to send troops to destroy the enemy base, but once you beat that level if your base there comes under attack the enemies come from "off screen" again from what I remember.

The enemies spawn into a restricted area when the spawn counter finishes.

There are some maps that require you to invade the enemy base too, but they also spawn invading enemies and those bases have defense towers like yours does, so you aren't just going to walk in and deal with it.

Destroying biter camps in Factorio makes them evolve faster. Maybe that’s why you’re finding the enemies hard to keep up with?

I haven't really had any problems with that. Sometimes there's a brief period where some camps are too powerful for me to engage with, but soon enough there's a new technology that gives me an edge against them again (modular armor, tank, artillery).

And it's open source, which is a pretty good selling point for some people.

Everything is derivative. Factorio was built out of love for the industrial games that came before. How does factorio compare to Gregtech 4? Is it a Gregtech 4 clone, is it better or different in some way?

https://web.archive.org/web/20171021012424/http://www.minecr...

My point is to not be dismissive of new things. There is likely missing context.

Parent comment was sincerely asking for information, not being dismissive.

He/she was just asking how it compares to Factorio. It's a valid question, since I already own Factorio...

I love the Wayback machine. We really are risking losing historical sites and data like this but I'm happy there are active people working on archiving like this like the Internet Archive.

Were they being dismissive? It seemed like they were after more information to see if it's something that works for them. The opposite of dismissive if anything

I think this one's a bias in your ingress filters rather than their intention

I'd like to join the chorus of warnings. I've had this on my phone for about a week and I've already had dreams of arranging conveyor belts.

This is the worst. If I’ve been overthinking something like that my entire nights rest will be disrupted, very much akin to a fever dream.

So far that’s only happened for Factorio, but Mindustry is a good contender.

I remember when I was addicted to Factorio, I could vividly "see" conveyor belts everytime I closed my eyes.

I've experienced this effect with jigsaw puzzles, Tetris, and the pedestrian paths in RC Tycoon.

For me, in college, it was Age of Empires. We'd have late-night LAN sessions with roommates and friends and when I eventually crashed into bed, my brain would continue strategizing for battles, determine necessary resources to mine, etc.

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

I've had this experience with all of the Conceptis logic puzzle games

I once saw and felt myself biking when closing my eyes after riding a bicycle the whole day, so this isn't limited to computer games

Oh no, it's on mobile? I just assumed it was not on mobile because it's FOSS.

My productivity karma was trending up this week. Was.

If it helps, I advise avoiding it on mobile because it makes my RSI flare up like crazy. YMMV.

Had the same happen to me, but with Into the Breach. That game is very addicting and should come with a disclaimer for this :P

I haven't played it but it looks heavily inspired by the Creeper World series: https://store.steampowered.com/app/280220/Creeper_World_3_Ar...

I love creeperworld and factorio, definitely going to throw some time into this one :)

The coding aspect of mindustry is a lot of fun, having robots intelligently deliver resources and engaging enemies enable builds that use to be impossible.

Yes you can code in mindustry!

Anyone remember ROBOTS or whatever it was called for the TRS-80?

How? I have been playing the android version for some time and have yet to discover robots or coding.

mechs can be remotely controlled via logic processors (they can also remotely control basically everything in this game).

Mindustry is a serious bargain at $6. I just got into the game, and while it does stand on its own, it scratched the Factorio itch while I was away from my computer, as it runs on mobile (android). The maps I've seen so far are unique and interesting. I like the tower defense campaign. To me, combat in Mindustry is better than in Factorio. Would totally recommend.

Regarding putting it on Steam at a price tag. I've been thinking about doing the same for my game but on the other hand it feels bad that I take profit on something people contribute to for free without getting any share of it (even though I am the biggest contributor).

What's your view on it?

There are blockbuster Steam games which sell tens of millions of copies largely on the strength of an active volunteer modding community keeping them interesting, and no shortage of OS projects whose founding company profits from selling [derivatives of] that software to people that want paid software licenses.

Obviously it's less legitimate if you rugpull access to the existing base game or if your original OS project marketed itself as being always free everywhere...

I think it is fine if you keep an easy to install free version. And if you earn a significant amount, you could distribute some of that back to certain contributors if you wanted.

I think its more fair if you say your intentions from the start so nobody feels ripped off.

As long as you keep it open on GitHub, and keep it installable for people, I don't think there's any issue. In fact, I think it's a great thing! If it makes money, it incentivizes you to put more time and effort into development, which in turn benefits the entire community of contributors. Again, as long as you don't remove it from GitHub or make installation outside of steam a pain in the ass, it's win-win for everyone.

What game (out of curiosity)?

As long as the game is freely available to fulfill copyright license clauses, I don’t think people would mind.

Steam makes it easier for people to keep updated and allows them to support the creator. People who can’t afford that can still download independently.

This seems like a win for everyone.

As long as you honor the license you all agreed to and you own any IP not covered by copyright, I can't imagine what the complaint could be.

Plenty of copies of games get charged for by people with no connection to them at all. Asking for a non-required purchase as the creator of software shouldn't feel weird.

Plus you'll be providing and updating the Steam release de facto providing nominal support. That's not free.

Thank you for the reply!

> you own any IP not covered by copyright

How does this actually work? Game has a MIT license. I thought that meant that the brand and the art was also under MIT. I'm clueless about this stuff btw.

mindustry allows you to still get the game on github, you just don't get steam integrations. i think that's pretty fair.

However, even if that wasn't the case i think it would be fine. If I contribute to a BSD licensed project, i shouldn't be mad if someone ends up selling my code.

So as long as the license permits it, I think it's generally fine. Otherwise, what's the point of the license?

Make it obvious that whatever is sold on Steam is also freely available, and I don’t think anyone will have issues. The only thing Steam specific to Mindusty is the multiplayer logic (as far as I’m aware), and that wouldn’t work without steam in the first place.

As long as you have a free-to-play version available outside of Steam, you're fine. Keeping a game updated for Steam is extra work on top of the other free versions.

Think Dwarf Fortress, but your source code is open and always free.

As other people have replied, I think it's fine as long as there's a free version that's also available.

Personally, I started playing Mindustry using the free version. I enjoyed it and started playing it with a friend. Keeping my version up to date was _just_ annoying enough that throwing the developer $6 (USD) to not start each game session with 20 minutes of fiddling with software versions was worth it. I really liked that it's free and open source AND I really appreciated the easier to use option once I decided that I like this particular game.

So giving people the option (free & manual, or token payment and Steam makes my life easier) is actually a really nice, appreciated option for players. Or at least, appreciated by this player :)

I like games like this, but they suddenly become a time sink and I'm short on time. So glad that there's a bunch of OS games being show on HN.

I went through an obsessive period with this game on my iPad early in the pandemic.

Eventually the game mode shifted away from the more tower-defense factory situation into something else I found less fun, and so I bailed.

I don't really play games these days, but I was looking at non-bullshit games[0] one evening to see if there was something fun to put on my kids' tablets, and stumbled upon this. When I looked up from the screen because the dog was barking, five hours had passed. Caveat emptor.

[0] https://nobsgames.stavros.io/

This is a great link, thanks! My kids also have tablets and I find myself constantly having to get rid of bullshit games.

I have this on my phone and my computer and haven't played it in a very long time. Looks like I will need to give this game a second shot.

I find it very interesting that they link to the trello board for the project on the main site. I don't think I've seen that before.

Those screenshots are triggering my Factorio PTSD.

My 6 year old loves this game. Great creative fun.

Play it coop with them, it's great fun as a team with your kid if you have 2 computers.

Funny, I quit this game after a couple of tries because I found it too hard. So even 6 year olds are better than me.

He plays in sandbox mode, so he gets to control when and how the enemies attack

Best open source game I've ever played. Sadly it is written in Java.

This was too much for me - I had to uninstall it and literally hide it from my Steam library after clocking up 20 hours in the first week. And no, I'm not a youngster with time to burn lol.

This thread is an energetic littering of tongue-in-cheek warnings that this game is addictive. Not sure why, but that puts a smile on my face.

It is addictive, but it has an "ending". I played for 98 hours (steam stats) and reached the ending, and with that I reached the end of my mild addiction.

I am much more afraid of Factorio which seems a lot more open ended, and thus endlessly (ha) addictive

What ending have you reached? Campaign?

I assume he means launching the rocket.

indeed, the end of the campaign when you launch the rocket to the next planet.

I might pick it up again when v7 has matured a bit, but I'm happy to have more time to spend on life (and work)

Factorio let’s you keep playing after reaching a certain goal, which took me about 80 hours, but it was a lot easier to put it down afterwards.

They’re expanding to add extra planets with all new mechanics in the upcoming v7.

Factorio has a defined ending which is launching the rocket. Many people play to that point and then stop. It doesn't take that long to get there though as long as you don't get too distracted with efficiency.

The endless part is that launching the rocket is a necessary step for acquiring the endgame science pack, which unlocks the handful of endless research tracks. From that point on the entire game is focused on improving efficiency.

Many people feel that launching the rocket is just the end of the tutorial. I think this is the same crowd that installs power armor/roboport starting mods and sneers at Satisfactory because it doesn't have bots. There is a split here into the group that plays mostly vanilla and goes for extreme scale and the group that plays fuck you tech tree mods like bobangel, krastorio, or pyanodon if you really have a lot of time.

Now that Earendel was hired for the official expansion, I imagine a lot of concepts from their mods are going to be considered for addition to what will be “vanilla” after the DLC launch.

Space Exploration mod was a huge change, and I hope the core dev team can temper some of the crazier aspects.

I will say, this is why I love the JVM so much. Runs on everything, I can pull, compile and build this game easily without worrying about any kind of platform specific library issue unlike open source c++ games I've tried to compile

I have other reason why I love this being in Java, it makes the point that a fun game isn't about the language it is programmed on, rather the quality of its programming and the overall game design.

I'd like to give my kudos to the Mindustry developer because this game uses the same engine as the slay the spire but this game runs without a hitch, even when there is plenty happening while Slay the spire overheats my phone when I'm thinking what card to play next... -.-'

LibGDX is not so much a Java game engine as it is just a set of helper utilities and little libraries for building a game or engine out of. It is actually surprisingly efficient on the JVM, any inefficiencies will be built on higher levels above it.

Looks like Factorio.

Oh no no no no no, I need to work ....

…on your factory.

The factory must grow!

The factory must grow.

I flag this post, but to late - the game was already downloaded..

Uh oh! Your mind has been replaced by conveyor belts

I guess it's neat there is a game, but I am burned out on "industrial building type of games". It was cool back in the Starcraft era, but since then it has been wearing thin for me.

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