Factorio is coming to Nintendo Switch
factorio.com
factorio.com
I am at very high risk for Factorio addiction, and the only reason I haven't played it yet is because I don't play PC games anymore. But I do have a Switch, and having Civ VI on there was enough of a problem, thank you very much.
Goodbye everyone!
Is there a 12 step program for infrastructure maintenance survival horror games?
I sold my Switch today. I had to do it. I'm devastated, but it was my only choice - I had to protect myself, my career, and my marriage. It was the right call, but I can't believe I didn't even get to say goodbye to all my Animal Crossing villagers. I feel like I betrayed them, but if I kept it, I would have been betraying myself...
I'll never forget you, Lord Bootycheeks. Please forgive me.
Nb: 'higher powers', are not necessarily 'religion'.
/
I think you need to plan your cities more like a small country town, and expect less density per meter of road than the game actually lets you put down. Rather than playing to the games metrics of population and income, just expect less of the city and spread it out more.
Every time I come back to it I have another dig through the menus, thinking I must be missing something, but there’s no “car-free city” option. As far as I understand, the new Plazas & Promenades DLC does not actually address this either.
Am I missing something? Why does the end-game always have to be traffic? Seems like a wasted opportunity.
I now have 32GB just to play that game. I'm also considering buying another machine with 64GB for the same reason.
Please, help me.
Well, first step: get a desktop with 4 RAM slots so if you need to upgrade memory, you don't have to buy a whole new machine, just new RAM sticks.
Personally I'll always prefer mouse+keyboard, but it's also fun to play games in the living room.
I’d like to find a good tutorial on it, but it seems like one of those games that you either get it or you don’t, like Civ (also utterly failed to get anywhere in Civ 6 multiple times)
If you want a shorter "just tell me where things go at the start so I can copy it" this one is a strong and easy layout for a city
Also I'd recommend playing a few cities with the unlimited money option enabled.
Tho from what I remember was mostly due to unmanaged item growth just making your fortress have to calculate more and more and more stuff. With some game knowledge and management you can run few hundred years (Longdeath being one)
Also, never play Dyson Sphere Project. It ruined me worse than Factorio. Jokes aside, it’s a fantastically beautiful and well done game.
Now, Workers & Resources, Soviet Republic still stays challenging...
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/784150/Workers__Resources...
I assume its more of a macro type game vs micro? I am thinking in terms of RTS type games here (which do not directly translate obviously). I always loved Total Annihilation for example but could never get into Starcraft at all.
When it came to developing nuclear powered infrastructure, it was going to take a huge refactor of my factory in order to not have "spaghetti infrastructure" criscrossing my factory. I started estimating the time to abstract resource production and modularize the delivery network, I was looking at a good few hours of focused work to get it done. Maybe I could split it into sub-tasks and approach it that way? Gosh, that sounds a lot like my job. So I stopped.
/s
This is something I wrote a few years ago and has been sitting in the drafts of a blog... https://gist.github.com/shagie/696b98749b7978444a267e5e02c6a...
Factorio is such an addictive, amazing game. There’s always one more thing to automate. “What if I could automate my nuclear reactors to keep fuel consumption low … oh, but what if I could automate the fuel production itself?” On and on. It’s kind of like KSP if you play it in hardcore where you can’t do anything except through kOS.
How many people must we lose before the government does something??
If that sounds appealing to you stay the heck away from Zachtronics.
Also, I disagree that it's easy to complete in 20 hours. The speedrun currently sits at 1h25m and while <20hr is quite possible for anyone to accomplish, it's pretty unrealistic for a first run where you'll likely hit a few progress snags.
Though, unlike some other games, the progress never slows down - misallocating early skill points in some games causes serious pain making up the same points without the proper tools at an exponentially increasing cost... in Factorio a tech is always the same cost so researching out of order simply delays how quickly you can become more efficient.
Given the availability of blueprint imports and YouTube, I don't think 20 hours is unrealistic. There's just too much content out there now on exactly what to do and when -- jump start base, main bus, bots, modules, launch, trains. When I originally got the game, Nilaus hadn't started doing megabase tutorial videos.
It sucks, but over time the Internet spoils games completely. Mods improve the situation because the content can be too niche for mainstream creators to profitably monetize. Kr+SpaceX is basically impossible to cover outside of Discord.
I repeat, MAN DOWN!
This is addressed on the post, and it looks like decent Deck support should happen in the near-to-mid-future.
In fact, it's probably in the Goldilocks zone: easy enough to play, but complicated enough to convey the kind of resource, energy and transport logistics involved in scaling a multi-step production process. It is like an illustrative toy model.
The aliens even give the game a satisfying environmental and political dimension, though the mechanics in this respect are more straightforward, i.e., just kill the aliens. Though emitting less pollution with solar also helps.
You can just go for it and make a production chain for a product, but if next one needs same intermediates you'd be re-doing it. i.e. doing a spaghetti code.
You can section off the each intermediate into separate factory and just chain them to eachother and have relatively nice order, but when you try to expand production of everything, there is no easy way to grow that complex, so the best you can do is just copy the same block around.
Lastly you can build a rail network and put each intermediate anywhere you want without much problems, but wiring everything up will take a lot more effort, you will have to go to various places to debug any problem, any problems are less visible at first glance and lastly if you don't plan for capacity you might have bandwidth and latency problems
Humans... or at least me... are so bad at this sort of multivariate optimization. Even if you cheat and give yourself infinite resources and all the technologies and set out to plan the perfect economy from the get-go, eventually something you forgot will throw a wrench into some tiny part of the supply chain, and the whole thing comes crumbling down. Then you try to build some redundancies into the system, but the overlapping networks create routing problems of their own.
I wonder, in general, if games like these are "solvable" via some sort of theory, or if you just have to iterate through a billion configurations before you arrive at a better one...
The real serious solutions are actually you versus your system resources. There solutions look awfully like low level performance tricks like inserter clocking (think SIMD) or belt compression (think fitting data in cache lines/reducing pages). Both of these things would take not just and understanding of the game, but understanding how the game is programmed.
It doesn't make suggestion, but knowing where something is wrong is a start.
I haven't tried doing that in particular, but you can set up a logistic rule (e.g. business requirement) and show red until it passes.
E.g. Measure Ore being produced and shoe red if it isn't a certain amount per time period.
And base designs on a map can even end up looking very similar to CPU designs.
I wish for a factorio clone that explores this more, rather than just an environmental hazard employ/enslave the local population, feed them, and so on.
Hopefully this is part of the Factorio expansion.
One I haven't seen documented widely:
Use a slow belt holding two science types (one each side) to feed the left side of a faster belt (which then has a left lane that alternates between the two colors). Repeat for the right side (your fast belt now has four colors). You now have a four-color belt to feed your labs, but it backs up when you use more of one color than another, so at the end you add splitters to extract the individual colors into four belts, and feed them back into the start (with priority, so they don't block).
For me the research was the only reason to keep playing as it gave purpose to the factory, otherwise it was just a factory for it's own sake. Same way a vehicle building game is a bit pointless without something to do with the vehicles, which Stormworks does a good job of solving by giving you rescue missions of different types to perform with your creations.
From the link:
Factorio was developed for 10 years with only keyboard and mouse in mind, so making sure the game is fully playable with controllers was no easy task. Playing with a controller is slightly slower, and will take some getting used to (just as it does when playing with keyboard and mouse for the first time). After becoming familiar with it, I find it very comfortable. I recommend everyone to play through the first levels of our tutorial campaign, as it's a great way to get acquainted with playing Factorio with a controller.
I'm sure a lot of this is familiarity, and if I force myself I will get more efficient with the Steam Deck, but I doubt I'd ever find it superior or even equivalent to keyboard and mouse.
The touch controls on the Steam Controller are excellent though, so I'm not sure how good it will be on the Switch which uses joysticks...
Whilst lots of games ignore it, the Switch screen is a touchscreen.
Regarding the ecosystem, the Steam Deck is a x86 PC. It comes with SteamOS, which is an open Arch Linux based distribution. You are free to install other operating systems like Windows on it. The out of the box Steam experience is quite good, with lots of games on the Verified list[0], and they play really well. People also install non-Steam games and software, including console emulators, and there are growing communities around that.
Elden Ring plays well. I don't plan on using my switch OLED until the next Zelda comes out.
I hope the Controller support been improved with this launch as I tried to play Factorio on my Steam Deck before but felt like it was just "emulated mouse" support basically which isn't nearly nice enough. I feel like Tropico-series did a good implementation of top-down+strategy controller for their games.
I wonder for how long Switch will remain as a popular platform and a part of me hopes for games that could run in a lower graphics mode for Switch in the future and a higher quality mode for Switch 2 or whatever might come after.
Personally, I just wonder why something like Genshin Impact isn't on Switch yet, because it seems like a great game for a platform like it!
Oh, and also why Nintendo treats the console IP like others do: where you can't just do export from game engines like Godot for it, like you can with desktop computers/phones, but instead have to go the proprietary route.
2023 will likely bring us the next Switch hardware revision. If backwards compatibility remains, the Switch line will remain relevant for years to come.
> Personally, I just wonder why something like Genshin Impact isn't on Switch yet
Leaks in August reported that Genshin Impact on Switch was delayed because of CPU limitations due to size and regularly updated content.
As for the graphics quality, that has always been a Nintendo mark that there is more to a game than how many tiles/triagles per second a console is capable of, which ironically means they are the only console vendor that doesn't sell consoles at a loss.
In addition, the Metro games (2033 and Last Light) seem to carry over the atmospheric environments from the other platforms nicely. Curiously, even something like the Crysis games (all three) have been ported over, as has Bioshock (1, 2 and Infinite) and none of them are dumbed down experiences like for the earlier handheld consoles either!
Then again, personally I still think that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a good looking game: a bit more simplistic in comparison to others, sure, but the art direction is good, everything fits together nicely and it's consistent in whatever it tries to do.
I think this is the crux of it: if "today's standards" means every leaf on a tree is an individual element that moves under its own logic in a forest of infinitely visible trees, or straight photorealistic graphics, the Switch won't be there.
But most games don't need to go these lengths, the latest Splatoon 3 has way simpler graphics than that, but visually there's nothing that feels odd or hurts the eye. It looks "good".
Sure, this will put a limit on megabases, but it should be performant enough for a pretty large factory.
IIRC few of their blogs go into detail, where data layout and way to access it was main limit, not actual computation speed for some operation
And multiple of those devs have posted blog updates about various optimizations they've done. So performance isn't one person either.
They have poured a lot of work into making their game run efficiently. No matter how much they do that, players will always expand their factory until the CPU cannot keep up.
They even have a chart of lines of code in Factorio over the years.
Indeed, the linked blog post addresses performance expectations.
It can run on just about anything when you base is "just finish the game in style" size
Anyway, your factory size is FPS-bound, but any reasonable computer will run it well enough all the way to victory.
Factorio is primarily bound by memory bandwidth, believe it or not. You need a healthy amount of memory for really large factories, but the limiting factor ends up being the fact that a significant amount of it gets accessed every frame.
There is no built-in limit on factory size.
> Anyway, your factory size is FPS-bound
Not at all. FPS is only influenced by the amount of stuff on screen, which is bounded by the size of your screen. The most expensive scenes tend to be dense forests, not factories. :)
In factorio frames aren't interpolated, so always FPS ≤ UPS. This means that while you're not technically limited by the rendering speed the FPS does bound the factory size.
...now, do players go wildly beyond achieving that victory condition in ways that play into the colonial-exploitation vibe? Perhaps.
I always kind of embraced the idea of being the bad guy in this game. I find the ease with which I (and others) just kind of shrug it off intersting.
A more stark example would be the movie Starship Troopers: superficially, you might feel like the "bugs" are the bad guys, but take a step back and you realize that the humans are the ones attacking them.
Also, is this planet like ten square miles large or something? How much damage is the character doing to the planet as a whole? We all willingly pollute our own planet in a much more severe way to do nothing more than make our own lives a little more comfortable, and I don't think that makes us evil, either. Short-sighted, maybe.
That same mod also uses a tech tree mod that actually makes the burner phase slower, so you pollute more in the beginning to boot.
I love the game and I usually like to play by minimizing my pollution cloud (rushing solar and nuclear) and trying to avoid the natives as much as possible trying to be "good" but still survive, but in the end you still must make a factory and eventually piss off and kill natives, ultimately its you or them, I know I am the monster not them.
But as creatures in Factorio don't have triggers that force us to feel empathy for them, what objective reasons do we have to take their side over a protagonist, who is clearly human? The only reasons I can think of are violations of private property — which the monsters don't see to actually claim — and non-aggression principle, which they usually break first, giving the protagonist the right to defend himself.
> Pollution attracts biters to the Player's factory. Biters who find themselves in a polluted area will attempt to reach the source of pollution and destroy it.
So you can say they are the ones in self-defense.
That said, the actual goal of the game is to build a tech tree, launch a rocket, and escape the planet.
(But once you get things going, most folks just keep building and launching rockets, elon musk style™)
Factorio is about the long game, and your designs have to be able to scale, especially if you're going for mege-base scale. It's more about complex designs and a very deep tech tree and dependency hierarchy. It's about factory automation at its core, with some PvE/tower defense (optionally) thrown in.
Mindustry is mostly a tower defense game at its core that uses automation/factory building to accomplish that goal. It simplifies a lot of things that are more of a challenge in Factorio. E.g. not needing inserters makes optimizations much easier. Also, the way building happens almost immediately and you don't need bots makes construction much easier.
I like both quite a bit, but depending on what you're looking for, either game could be more enjoyable for you.
I loved that part of Satisfactory as well. The more I play with instant building, the more I think it just makes sense.
As developers of course we associate GitHub with FOSS, but would a layman? I guess the thinking is anyone who doesn't know to visit the repo and `git clone` probably requires the steam installation? $9.99 however is not cheap many places on Earth.
Like seriously, they made a game and made it open source and free (there's even a prominent $0 itch.io link just under the Steam one!), and allow people to pay them money for it using the most popular and successful game distribution platform in the history of mankind, and people are put off by it?
On the other hand, it is very programmer-elitist.
And I'm also extremely wary of any price point below $5. At that level, it's less likely that the game is just cheap, and more likely that it's a barely-playable asset flip. So is $9.99 a fair price for a game that's actually free? Maybe it's a little expensive, but it's not ridiculously so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladder_logic
Outside the game, Factorio also has full support for mods written in LUA. I am not a modder, so I can't comment on its relative power versus other mod systems, but Factorio has a handful of overhaul mods that change the entire game.
Since its moddable, people have created mods that allow you to write LUA logic for the circuits instead of the basic math operations/comparators.
You can do fairly complex stuff this way.
You can also write lua mods. I’ve done that for some stats/dashboarding.
ShapezIO has a better idea with an overlay to do that stuff (albeit with more restrictions).
A flow based system would be far better. It’s easier for non programmers (which is also more fair) and could visually look and function more like normal mindustry.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/05/game-with-hidden-ruby...
I wonder if this version of Factorio supports the console. You can execute LUA from the console, so I imagine it's disabled on the switch.
The only way to do this would be for the modders themselves to get sponsored by / work with Nintendo directly and probably the original dev team. You could then have some officially released "mods" (probably they would just call them DLC) and I they would very likely charge.
Sounds like you want a Steamdeck
I know they do some impressive work to port modern games on switch but even my state of the art computer struggles to run K2+SE at scale.
Agreed with the sibling comment that Opus Magnum seems like it'd be a good fit. But the economics of a port may not make sense. Infinifactory was Unity, while Opus Magnum and most (all?) of the other 2D games use a custom engine.
Zachtronics stopping game production is a painful loss.
But the iOS store is much harder to just “fire and forget” on.
Till then, I must look at these games, marvel at them, but resist the temptation to play.
I finished it once because a friend told me it was awesome and I had time on my hands. I remember trudging through the beginning, spending a lot of time calculating ratio in a spreadsheet, a lot of time spent lying belts and a huge sense of relief when I finally got the bots.
The whole experience felt like work to me. What am I missing?
In short: My brain likes to design systems.
The prospect of accomplishing a clear goal with an unclear path is something I find naturally enticing, as I automatically start to anticipate ways to accomplish that goal, but then I find theoretical problem with those ways, which makes me want to play the game to see if my mental model is correct. Sometimes, I'm just playing the game for hours because I really want to see if the design I came up with would work. Basically, Factorio gamifies the process of building systems, where you have to progress through multiple roles such as gathering resources yourself, building the factories that produce the resources you need, and then being an architect for your factory at a large scale, all while defending against the threat of the "biters". In every stage, I often feel like I'm in a trance like state, where I'm almost playing multiple games at once, trying to anticipate the long-term ramifications of my immediate actions, while balancing that with the need to get something working quickly.
Basically, to me, most of the game doesn't occur on screen. It occurs in my mind, as I try to design and optimize lots of different things, in a very similar way to the programming I do for work.
So, I can totally see why that might not be appealing to you, but I hope that helps you understand what I find appealing, and I hope others can chime in with their experiences :)
Edit: I also never really focus on the numbers directly, and I try to focus more on the rough proportions, because I find the game has a great system of not using up resources unless they're needed, so I'm okay with overproducing in certain ways. Taking the game too seriously can be tempting, but I do stop myself from micro-optimizing everything, and I focus more on just accomplishing something that's "good enough".
Clearly your brain lacks the "organising and optimising is GRRRREAT" -bit.
I can't play any Civilization-type games or - as I discovered - Factorio-type games. It rubs some primitive part of my brain just the right way and I can't stop.
Literally my first "let's see what kind of game this is" attempt at Factorio stopped when I saw the sun come back up. And with Civilization I almost got fired for playing "just one more turn" way too many times and turning up for work groggy, tired and late.
Now I only play games with plot that has a beginning, middle and an end and very little replayability.
While some people do enjoy this, it is absolutely not necessary and can take a lot of fun away.
Might not be for everyone though, even if you like those elements. I personally love Factorio, one of my most favorite games of all time.
After a while I wanted to optimize my base, and so like you mentioned, I also tried calculating ratios, making my base modular, etc. At that point it was no longer fun.
Valve woke up a little bit too late
Sony made a mistake to abandon the Vita
And Microsoft was stupid to not try, or maybe too scared
Steam deck is too big for me, the switch is the perfect size, I'm still waiting for a proper Switch alternative
I'll probably build it myself
Valve recently released a promo booklet for the Steam Deck [1]. Page 14 of that booklet describes how each of their products have iterated in various verticals for their platform to make one cohesive device.
Namely:
* The Steam Controller: Produced the Steam Input system, one of the most flexible input systems in existence.
* The Steam Link: Produced Remote Play, which to my knowledge has no relative competition on other platforms.
* The Steam Machine: Produced SteamOS and Proton.
* The Valve Index: Produced the first premium product from Valve, and the lessons learned from manufacturing, shipping, and support.
All of these devices combined gave us the Steam Deck. Considering the pandemic's impact, Valve has made more rapid progress than Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony since 2015 in the gaming space. The usual market players have had years to make small iterations. Valve caught up in approx. 7 years, and with an open platform that provides more innovation to come.
Don't get me wrong - the Nintendo Switch is a fantastic device, and sparked a new form factor and experience that others only hope to emulate. As usual, they define the handheld gaming market. But Valve shot for the sun and came very close.
1: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1675200/view/3401926...
One of the first questions you might ask is how does the game perform. We worked on many optimizations to make sure the game performs as well as possible. You should expect 30-60 FPS (both in TV mode and handheld mode). As for UPS, the average player should be able to go through all of the content and launch a rocket, while staying at 60 UPS. But don't expect to be able to build mega-bases without UPS starting to drop, sometimes significantly.
Edit: I guess the client also has to run the simulation, never mind. It seems like overall, Factorio is well under-optimized though. For a game that has been out forever, it still has a huge ceiling.
https://www.resetera.com/threads/the-director-of-factorio-sh...
Official controller support on the PC would be more than welcome though.
Anyway it's a great game + I'm so impressed with how it was programmed.
From what I read elsewhere, steam deck support was much more limited - meaning the experience should be very different on Switch vs. steam deck.
Hoping the devs will make the controller bindings available on the PC too.
EDIT: That said, you can hook up a keyboard and mouse to the steam deck...
You need notes and specific study time. Steam controller configs can be way more information than you can fit in your brain.
One caveat is that Steam achievements are only granted to players who don't have any mods enabled. There's probably a nontrivial number of players who have only completed the game with mods.
Needless to say the Switch won't fare well for mega bases with it's 2 MB L2.
[0]: https://factoriobox.1au.us/results/cpus?map=d3c52cb60a225a29...
While I didn't work on the port itself, the effort that went into the Doom Eternal switch port paid off pretty well. https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2021-doom-eternal-s...
I'm hopeful that working with Nintendo would provide the time, money, and expertise needed to put the effort into making this a solid port.
The gameplay experience is so similar to what many developers do in their dayjobs, that this leads to one of two responses: "...and I am not constrained/bound, it's so fun!" or "...but with Factorio, I get no tangible output from putting in effort."
But it hasn't happened with Factorio. It just have that perfect blend of everything that I don't mind it being basically what I do for my day job.
Oh lord, I'm doomed...
Nintendo didn't make any money from the PC sales, so it needs to have revenue from this launch.
And for Factorio itself, the effort of porting to the Switch, and then the effort of going through validation with Nintendo. Even if they didn't want to charge you again, the company would need to cover the cost of dev kits, extra engineers, and a whole extra channel for development/release.
I don't care. Factorio devs can have my money.
Once you see a full factory in action, the mind will boggle at the amount of entities and actions being performed. I'd be impressed if someone could pull that off in a regular piece of (modern platform) software, let alone in a game context.