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Comment by sibit | Hacker News Reader

I'm also too lazy to set up really intricate contraptions so I just grab other people's blueprints and I glue everything together. That's basically what I do at my day job and my title has "engineer" in it so I'm just going to keep on pretending.

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I think the thing that really made factorio fun for me was deciding early on to NOT look at anyone else's designs online. Having the "correct" or "most efficient" answers handed to you removes the design part of the game and turns your base into a carbon copy of everyone else's base. I spent days figuring out how to make loops with train signals that would allow a train to spin endlessly in a circle at full-speed waiting for the path to become clear. I could have just looked up how to do that, but then I'd get no sense of accomplishment.

Very few designs are actually that difficult to reproduce. The important thing is knowing the ratios of resources/buildings that need to be made to stay efficient. You can pretty easily calculate that by hand (but why would you) but there are tools online where you can do that.

There’s also the “aesthetics” of what you end up building. I like my factory to look a certain way. There’s sort of three phases of playing Factorio.

1) learning the game, making spaghetti

2) pulling in other blueprints, reaching the end game

3) creating your own blueprints, reaching the mountains of madness

Logistics Bots = Eventual Consistency, and that was good enough for me!

Exactly this. I use other people’s blueprints for balancers because I find those complicated and not particularly interesting, but for everything else I’ve deliberately avoided looking at other designs. Creating something mediocre and inefficient and then inventing better ways to do it is half the fun.

I also highly recommend playing with a non-engineer friend. It’s an interesting way to watch someone gradually develop an intuition for abstractions and service-oriented design.

One of the Factorio devs (kovarax?) has a blog post about regretting the introduction of copy-pasteable blueprints. I feel like balancers are where the devs become complicit in that cycle. They could have 3+ lane balancers as single structures in the base game, but by sticking with only two, they're forcing people to build their own higher order balancers. Few people have the interest or ability to design a 7-to-5 balancer, so we blindly copy designs - and build a habit of getting our designs online.

I submit that with more useable balancers, importable blueprints never would have made it into the base game.

Nah, you tool the actual fun out of it with looking at blueprints online

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