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Comment by AnotherGoodName | Hacker News Reader

Briefly mentioned in this and rendered: space exploration is an incredible factorio mod and the deepest game I've ever played.

In Factorio you launch a rocket and win. Space exploration takes that and continues. You end up developing a base across multiple worlds in the solar system. After developing the solar system from the different unique resources on each planet you expand to interstellar space and then other solar systems. The game has a 'quarter of the way through' victory screen but there's another victory screen as you explore a mystery that spans the known universe and takes a reasonable amount of math knowledge figure out.

It's 100s of hours of gameplay and really well done. They modified the game so that you can fly spaceships between planets with a star and solar system maps and it all works really well.

Just make sure to turn the biters way down. The mod requires a level of patience and the intensity of combat runs counter to that (in fact the mod itself has a popup telling you to turn biters down on start).

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Yeah, but I'd only pick up Space Exploration if you've played through the base game a few times and just want more. What I've found is that it rebalances the game so the 'base' takes less parts (i.e. for modules), but it goes harder on complexity. Like, the number of factories / production lines you have to build for the next stage just goes up and up.

I think I got to a point - probably nearly 100 hours in - where I finally had two lines of products coming from other planets to do the next tier of science.

Another tip that I'd add is that you should increase the science cost, I found it easy to run out of things to research while it still took hours to expand things for the next tier, which in practice meant your factory just stops doing anything because it doesn't need to do anything.

> Another tip that I'd add is that you should increase the science cost, I found it easy to run out of things to research while it still took hours to expand things for the next tier, which in practice meant your factory just stops doing anything because it doesn't need to do anything.

That's not a wrong way to play, but the intent of the default balancing is that you make those expansions smaller and faster. If a new resources has 5 steps to make, you can slap down 2-5 buildings per step with absolutely minimal planning/routing and feed it into a launcher. There's no need to spend hours on an expansion until your science production needs that much. And an orbital base can go very far with one assembler per recipe.

I think a lot of people in the community recommend Base game -> Krastorio -> Krastorio+SE.

I've done the first two, and I'm quite early into SE. Just an incredible amount of complexity and I'm loving it.

I thought most people recommend not to combine Krastorio with SE?

Nah I never recommend krastorio

I actually prefer to completely turn off biters. They’ll still be there on other planets, but the anxiety on the home world is gone

Agreed. The difficulty creep that was demanded by vocal experienced players has made Factorio much harder for newcomers to get into.

Factorio is a brilliant Zen garden and an absolutely terrible real time strategy game. Since the beta there's been more and more biter types and a gradual ramp up in how frantic you have to be to keep up. It's tremendously off-putting and completely opposite to what makes Factorio what it is.

Hopefully the developers realize this at some point and knock it off. Make a 'frantic mode' toggle for the experienced players but don't make it the default. I can handle needed a turret or two at key points but I can't handle needing to race the tech tree to keep up. I don't get why they made the defaults so hostile to new players. I'm not even that new to Factorio but it's still waaaay too frantic with default settings.

I actually liked having the biters on my first couple of playthroughs of the game. It added a sense of urgency and a feeling that this was a dangerous alien world.

After that I started playing mods that in and of themselves increased the difficulty of the game, and having the biters on top of that was just way too much.

Also, in a vanilla game, once you're more or less invulnerable to the biters they become just an extra annoyance, and I'd rather just focus on building.

On the other hand, without the sense of urgency that biters give the game can become kind of boring...

I agree. It adds pacing, as you can't simply dive down one branch of the technology tree. You're forced to always be developing your offense and defense, pushing you down branches you would have ignored otherwise.

I second this. Played with a friend some 150hrs and eventually started a new game with more mods and crazier biter levels ultimately increasing complexity and build formulas.

It was so nerve wracking I felt like progress was so much slower due to all the fighting. After maybe 50 hrs in we realized the krastorio mod want being called correctly, so when we fixed that we learned all the new complex recipes were obsolete and all our defense were useless due to the restructuring of ammo types

So I guess my point is. Bitters have a time and place and I'm over them.

The other harsh lesson biters teach you as a new player is to restart with what you're learned so far.

Your second or third base always goes so much smoother

I've never felt the desire to turn off biters. I'm in it for the building, not the fighting, but taking out biter camps combines well with exploration, and it's often a nice change of pace between all the thinking about logistics.

I'm currently playing with the Krastorio 2 mod, where the ridiculous range of the anti-material rifle makes killing biter camps a bit too trivial.

IMO the bugs add some needed entropy. If you’re not paying attention your bases will eventually be demolished. Makes me more thoughtful about my planning and design rather than just plopping some half assed shit down.

they're also the entity that gives "bite" (pun intended) to the pollution mechanic, which complicates lots of tradeoffs in the game. with biters/pollution, trees are both an inconvenience and a helpful pollution buffer. it's not trivial to decide whether to build your starter base in the open desert or nested between forests. additionally, the tradeoffs between solar vs steam and the effect modules are shallower when you ignore pollution.

I understand some people just aren't really into the tower defense side of factorio. that's okay, and it's a good thing that the settings can be adjusted to suit a wide range of playstyles. but if that's you, I'd recommend at least trying a low pollution / efficiency-focused playthrough. the game gives you a lot of tools to manage pollution, and the biter threat can be pretty minimal if you use them. imo this preserves the balance better than just turning off biters.

I rarely defend. Factorio is a great example of a good offense being the best defense. Just take out any biter camp that comes close to the edge of your pollution cloud, and you never really have to bother with defense.

> the game gives you a lot of tools to manage pollution

The popular Krastorio 2 mod adds even more: wind turbines from the start, more efficient ways to produce energy between steam and nuclear, and it even has air purifiers that reduce pollution. That's almost cheating. On top of that, taking out biter camps is a lot easier with the anti-material rifle.

There's a lot of important details in this : when, how and where biters expand, how much less killing settlers rather than nests increases evolution, &c.

Good point. I often play train worlds and the normal settings there is to not have biters expand at all. I often change that to having them expand slowly, but much more slowly than they normally do. Having new biter camps pop up in your cloud will require some defense of course.

My understanding is that the purpose of biters is to prevent you from building too big too fast and also as a resource sink to get rid of excess iron. There is a FFF they wrote about it and Katherine of Sky has a great video about why you should bet biters IIRC because she was against them when they got buffed as well but changed her tune. I can't seem to find either though.

I'm not sure I agree. I gave up on my first sandbox game of Factorio mid-way through, because I realized that biters were a pushover against my new tank... (not realizing that biter settings or mods existed)

Many of my fun memories of Factorio do involve biters though, both defending against them, and attacking them by building power lines and quickly building and then un-building laser towers near their bases (and later just by having super strong armor and a shotgun).

But I guess a toned down offense on your base, while still allowing the same kind of attack, would work just as well.

Also, the biters are somewhat boring at end of game, it's just the whole world map full of the exact same evolved bases everywhere.

I don't recall thinking the biters were at all frantic on default settings. They shape your play, but they don't really push things hard in my experience. I get why people play with them off (though I reckon a lot more it's because people wind up finding them boring after the first few runs), but I don't think it's obvious that it's something that should be the default for new players.

> needing to race the tech tree to keep up

Is that actually how it ends up going? Unless your base is extremely small, then going slower means less pollution reaches the biters and they evolve slower.

If you won't have 20 drills going after several hours, "play the tutorial" is probably the best advice.

"Don't start in the middle of a treeless wasteland" is also important advice.

> "Don't start in the middle of a treeless wasteland" is also important advice.

Don't people just take whatever starting position the game gives you? Sometimes the starting position simply is a treeless wasteland. As far as I understand, moving to start far away from your starting position is a bad idea, because there's more biters there and the resources you need are much further apart.

Mineral patches are farther apart, but much richer. The starting patches will have a few thousand units, ones that require a train ride to get to will have millions of tens of millions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqJ3Vx6tdbc

One build style has you rushing to decent weapons, then walking far from spawn to set up your main base, so you don't have to bother with trains to get up to rockets. (The patches are randomly placed and don't have exclusion zones, so it's not impossible to see a 10M iron, copper, coal and oil all next to each other.)

I will note that getting to the rocket launch stage only requires 3-5 patches outside the starting area and you can very easily reach that with belts. Trains are for going big or simply because you like them.

I simply like them. I always play a train world, rush train tech, and have my trains handle everything. Much more fun than belts.

This RSO is specifically a mod that uses its own resource generation system. (Also incompatible with map preview !)

The random map generation is not the ideal experience for new players. Most of them are fine, but sometimes you get accidental hard mode from no trees or cut-off starting resources or oil being super far away. And the solution is hitting the new seed button.

Not sure about resources being further apart, and agree about new players. However it's well known that your starting area can have an immense impact on the game difficulty.

There are games where there needs to be some investment, something at stake, for the game to be fun. Playing such a game on easy makes it less fun and eliminates the satisfaction of overcoming challenges. I wondered if this might be the case with factorio, so in my second year of playing it, I launched a deathworld map. Nope, it was just tedious as I thought it would be. Launched the rocket and never played with biters again.

The obvious missing piece is biter-clearance automation. The game is about increasing levels of automation. The next level after we get laser turrets and we get flying bots should be reaper drones with lasers that automatically patrol and eliminate biters within a large range. Also, I've put several thousand rockets into space (4K SPM baby), but I can't fire a nuclear weapon more than 54 meters?

That's what the train artillery (and now spidertrons) are for.

Of course there are also mods, like M.I.R.V., by one of the devs :

https://youtu.be/k56fS2XygxM

Train artillery requires a base. Artillery agros biters, so they navigate to the location of the train. If the train is still there, it gets destroyed. If the train isn't there, the tracks get destroyed. And in any case, the train isn't automated: it doesn't drive out to where they are and kill them. The train artillery just makes more sense than stationary artillery: it has the same range, and it is the most effective way to transport artillery shells. Think about that for a minute: the most effective way to transport artillery shells to stationary artillery is to send it in a train artillery wagon. Why the fuck would you build stationary artillery! LOL!

Spidertrons are also not automated. They don't patrol. They don't run away when they are out of ammo, come back and reload.

Love the MIRV: like the too-short-range nukes on the spidertron, they are a great way to bomb yourself back to the stone-age. The video nicely shows how it's first missile on automatic mode blows up his own base. Brilliant.

1.) Biters don't attack tracks.

2.) You can totally set an artillery train to patrol between outposts, not to mention that there won't be much biters left after the first cleanup.

3.) I guess you might want stationary artillery if you want to be extra-sure the nests are taken out ASAP ?

4.) I didn't get the opportunity to use a spidertron yet, is there really no patrol functionality, like the AAI Vehicles mod has ?!

I mostly play for the engineering side of it, so in all my bases over the years, I always always play on "peaceful" mode. It makes part of the tech tree useless (no need for better guns if there's nothing to shoot) but I find I enjoy the game much more that way.

I haven't played mods, but in vanilla Factorio I have never felt rushed at all by biters.

The vanilla biters are brain dead simple to deal with if you’re at all competent.

Same, but that's true for most base building and RTS games, the base building / turtling is more fun than the attacking / combat part.

I've found the other planets to be the real PITA that got old quick. Biter asteroids in particular.

I love Space Exploration, but when you hit late game man it starts to get tedious fast. I've gotten to naquium and the higher end space sciences, but I get bored with the logistics of keeping it all running and have quit both times I've reached this point.

Can confirm; I've gotten two (multiplayer!) SE games stalled out on Naquium now.

What's the best faster-start mod? I want to start with robots instead of remaking my base midway through.

Haven’t tried it, but this seems like something you can customize ingame at any time with the builtin map editor.

See the “setting up research” on the editor wiki page:

https://wiki.factorio.com/Map_editor#Setting_up_research

Edit: you’d probably have to give yourself the necessary modular armor, roboport and initial bots.

Try Companion Drones (don't have a link to hand) - gives you a pair of very capable personal drones that can attack/defend as well as filling in blueprints.

I’m playing Space Exploration right now and it is epic. But beware, a professional YouTuber Dosh Doshington who seems to be one of the best Factorio players in the world (in my opinion) took 300 hours to complete SE with some help. I think SE is amazing but it’s an incredible time sink. I’ve gotten 3500+ hours in Factorio, I think I have a problem.

Anyway, seeing Factorio in 3D was amazing though, really cool

Yes that's why I think you should turn biters waaaay down or off for SE. It's a game that can take a few years to play through if you have a full time job+other things. Still a worthy distraction, just understand you'll be playing for years.

Yes, as part of SE you are already strongly encouraged to turn down the evolution factor growth if I'm correct.

I myself do keep on playing with biters as I feel personally no enjoyment if there would be no biters.

If “interplanetary Factorio” is your thing, also consider Dyson Sphere Program: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Prog...

I actually prefer it over Factorio, spent a fair bit of time in both.

another modpack that should be mentioned here is pyanodons [0]. similar to space exploration it also extends the game significantly after the rocket launch, but it also adds additional content before (in fact, the rocket launch itself becomes rather unimportant and is an at first optional blue science tech)

pyanodons adds very realistic ore processing chains, petrochemical processes (the main developer, pyanodon, is a chemical engineer by trade), energy generation mechanisms, electronics overhauls, and also farming components including both plants and animals.

overall, a full py run will easily take 1500+ hours. it's probably not particularly enjoyable for most vanilla players, but if you liked mods such as space exploration or nullius, you might find some enjoyment in py

[0]: https://mods.factorio.com/user/pyanodon

> another modpack that should be mentioned here is pyanodons

For the sake of anyone's sanity, I wouldn't mention that.

1500 plus hours.... people sure have different philosophies on life

What, you'd rather spend that time working "for the man"? ;)

To be honest, I used to be much more critical about how people spent time - particularly how I spent time ... Then I learned to stop worrying and love the reality: there is no 'purpose' (which is, itself, open to as many interpretations as you're able to and comfortable entertain[ing])...

pyanodons really does seem like grind for the sake of grind. It's great if you're basically a utility monster for factorio's core gameplay and want as much of it as possible without any regard for repetition, or you really get a lot out of the satisfaction of achieving ridiculous goals, but most people are not likely to find it very fun, even if they liked seablock or SE.

pY is very much not repetition of vanilla, not only it pushes Factorio to its limits in terms of features and of course PC load (if not in the same way than the new SpaceX), part of the fun is to have MANY alternative ways to produce most of the things, then decide which one you want to use.

>1500+ hours

Ahh, so if I start a game now, and play a reasonable (dedicated, honestly) 2 hours a night, every day, I'll have completed it in 2025.

Wild. Not for me!

Py is as hardcore as it gets, and a lot of even experienced players don't pick it up for that reason.

That being said, the Factorio crowd I rub shoulders with 1500 hours is not a lot. Heck, i myself am about 4-5k hours of gameplay and mine are rookie numbers :D

Factorio allows for an extremely wide ways to play it, multiplayer is it's own world entirely if you find a decent crew to play with (there are many communities around Factorio).

And then there's Clusterio that opens a whole new dimension of what's possible.

Think of it as a zen garden.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_dry_garden

You spend a small amount of time each day meticulously crafting the factory/garden to unwind. The time it takes isn't a problem. The goal isn't to 'win'.

I've played Factorio (and Satisfactory, and DSP) and I understand that you can just do a bit here and a bit there but still. And I've spent 1,500 hours in some games (with a couple of hours a night, most - but not all - nights) too. Even so, it's intimidating to start such an endeavour.

Space Exploration moves the rocketship even earlier (considering the extra complexity, still earlier than in vanilla).

The biggest issue with biters, IMO, is that their density continues to ramp beyond you capping out your ability to efficiently eliminate them.

In my (normal level biter) space exploration run, my buddy and i didn't run into any problems clearing out a large swath of space to build by rushing artillery and flamethrower turrents. The problem became the tedium of expanding our territory to keep the pollution cloud contained by manually firing artillery.

IMO, the problem should be solved by giving the player better tools for artillery automation. The auto-firing artillery is both too short range, and has a tendency to anger a bunch of nests at once. Instead, it should focus on eliminating one nest cluster at a time, and maybe allow for circuit-controlled timing of when to move into the next cluster.

With SE you don't need that much space on Nauvis. You should be targeting 10-30SPM in your first playthru; you will get bottlenecked on extraterrestrial resources as soon as you try to ramp up space science. There are people who beat the game off of a single core drill on Nauvis - what makes this mod take so long is designing all the solutions, rather than waiting for the science to trickle.

Artillery (as well as basically everything from the base game) should be considered early game tech: you will later unlock stuff that would make Palpatine salivate.

If anything, you very suddenly run out of things worth shooting at.

> [...] maybe allow for circuit-controlled timing of when to move into the next cluster.

You can achieve that in the vanilla game by blueprinting the artillery outpost (which would include all the necessary supporting defences, like walls/turrets/roboports/etc). Train rolls in, unloads gun+flamethrower ammo, once ammo buffers are ready set a signal to load ammo into artillery, which will start shooting. Set a timer, every time you load a shell reset it, once timer runs out + there are still shells left - you can set off an alarm that the outpost is done. Use a filtered deconstructor to pick the pieces up and move it all over.

Bonus: use a blueprint deployer (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/recursive-blueprints) to automate the "move to the next sector" part. Check out this guy on Reddit to get some ideas: https://old.reddit.com/user/Drogiwan_Cannobi/submitted/

I got pretty far into a Seablock run before eventually giving up (I think it was around the 4th or 5th science color). I ended up stopping because the factory design started getting tedious. I had all the requisite ingredients coming in on neat belts (city blocks / LTS delivered) and the lines were modeled in Factory Planner, but just assembling them for each science pack was a larger and larger amount of tedium: not any new challenge, just tons of belt weaving and inserter adjusting.

I'm willing to be told I'm just doing it wrong, but does vanilla + Space Exploration have a different sort of challenge curve, or would it end up being pretty similar to Seablock (which includes SpaceX, dunno if that's the same or different).

It has tedium in the science imho but it's low enough bandwidth that I solved that with logistic chests without ever falling behind on science.

The larger aspect is effectively restarting repeatedly on new worlds which have unique new resources until they too are shipping rockets of stuff into space. Each new world has different properties. Some have almost no solar, others no water, some have no bugs, but others have bugs dropping in from space anywhere on your base so it's not the same thing each time. I don't mind this aspect. It is a bit like playing Factorio on repeat but it has reasoning behind it. And each restart you get to bring a cargo rocket of stuff with you and the ability to build anything you've already researched.

My outpost worlds are often messy and do the bare minimum to send up rockets of stuff to space. But it works. I'm finding it fun but I'm only a couple of hundred hours in.

> I'm willing to be told I'm just doing it wrong, but does vanilla + Space Exploration have a different sort of challenge curve

Completely different. The SpaceX mod used as an endgame in Seablock has no relation to Space Exploration.

Space Exploration makes pervasive changes throughout the game, and adds the ability to launch yourself into space, build a space station, build colonies on other planets, and mine resources on other planets (and elsewhere) which aren't available on the starting planet. The research required for the first rocket launch is reduced, and there are multiple tracks of research unlocked once you get into space.

yes, space exploration (which is a different mod entirely), aims to introduce new automation challenges instead of simply extending the same kind of challenges as in the base game (though it also does a little of that: it'll probably take you a bit longer to launch a rocket than in vanilla and that's more or less the start of SE, but it's nowhere near as slow as seablock). It basically requires use of the circuit network, for example (though the required use is relatively simple, it benefits from more advanced usage).

The old and the new SpaceX are completely different mods, by different people.

> takes a reasonable amount of math knowledge figure out

hard pass. I do not enjoy when a video game makes me feel like a failure because I don't know trigonometry or calculus.

Weirdly I actually like games that make me alt-tab and then look up some equations and open excel for a bit.

(No, I will not try EVE)

You don't even have to alt tab out to use Excel, they've added to the game. Seems like it doesn't fit your criteria for games you'd like anymore so there's no reason to try! :P

https://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-us/articles/816520777052...

(I mean this in jest)

Oh my goodness.

... wait, how hard would it be to do something similar for Factorio?

there are likely mods which already do the calculations for you.

Max Rate Calculator mod

And then there are whole planner mods too.

Amazing, but why not something open source like LibreOffice instead ?!

EVE is bookkeeping disguised as a game.

you no longer have to manually calculate transverse velocity and tracking speeds of turrets in Eve, unfortunately.

No trig or calc, every formula is linear. There’s some very non-integer factors in there, but if you take “time” as an input you can do it all with algebra.

Honestly, I think the feeling of not wanting to have to bust out a spreadsheet to play a video game is entirely reasonable and shouldn't be downvoted. but this is HN in 2023, so he'll get downvoted, while, who does use a spreadsheet will get downvoted when I admit that the spreadsheet I use is from Microsoft. =)

You don't have to though. Base facrorio does not require any spreadsheets or math (other than production lines for efficiency, but that's kind of the nature of the game.)

It's a mod, and so not required and already something you decided to optionally add to your game.

And for production lines, you have plenty of mods that can do the math for you : Helmod / Factory Planner, Actual Craft Time, Rate Calculator...

There are some geometry and rate problems such as multiplexing resources on a belt.

I just absolutely despise the (lack of) visuals in Factorio.

Satisfactory might only be 80% as deep but it being in 3D and gorgeous more than makes up for it.

If Factorio looked anything like this model visualizer I’d take it seriously.

Try Dyson Sphere Program then.

Not as repayable as factorio but still good fun.

Or add Shapez2 to your wishlist.

It hasn’t been released yet, but the team is publishing a highly interesting devlog: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2162800

After initially bouncing off of Factorio and then having a lot of fun with shapez, I tried Factorio again and got totally addicted for a while. Shapez is a perfect entry point and is different enough to be worthwhile for its own sake. I also just love the chill nature of Shapez, it's a lot less stressful than Factorio since there are no senemies and resources don't run out. I have high hopes for Shapez 2, which, from the dev logs, looks great and will hopefully have some extra QOL stuff to eliminate some of the original's minor annoyances.

I had such a fantastic time with DSP. Has some clunkiness which will hopefully be refined with time, but absolute blast in going from nothing to dominating a star. Count me as one of those people who see zero need for the game to incorporate the upcoming combat/enemy mechanic.

Yes! I was hoping someone mentioned this already. I had soo much fun with DSP, ended up needing to track all my shipments in a spreadsheet. I really hope the upcoming combat system works out so I have an excuse to play it again.

I agree Factorio does not look the greatest. It looks like a giant smear of muddy washed out colors. I've tried to watch some content on YT and its so hard to tell whats going on or to see anything as a newcomer.

> I've tried to watch some content on YT and its so hard to tell whats going on or to see anything as a newcomer.

That might have more to do with YT's encoding and color grading. I've had the same experience when watching videos, but not when playing the game.

Ah, thanks, I was completely puzzled by OP's experience...

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