Factorio: Space Age
factorio.com
factorio.com
Space Exploration has its quirks, but is fundamentally an absolutely outstanding puzzle game, among the best ever made.
One of the most delightful things about Factorio for coders is that the game smoothly takes you through multiple levels of abstraction, starting with handcrafting simple ingredients, and (in the base game), moving up to small networks of trains with automation, and flying robot armies to deal with construction and logistics. I'd say there are three-ish layers of abstraction in the main game, and each layer is super well balanced, has its own challenges and benefits, and is above all FUN.
Space Exploration adds two to three more layers of abstraction above these; culminating in networks of interstellar spaceships moving items into orbit and on and off planetary surfaces, where they intersect with the original game's buildings and mechanics. It's profoundly, profoundly good.
I knew Wube had hired the mod developer, but I'm super happy to see he's deeply involved with Space Age, which is explained to be a less hardcore experience, with a lot of the same fun as SE. Should be a blast. I hope they'll charge me more for it.
Each section has an author, and only the Space Exploration section is written by the mod author. Most of the post is written by kovarex, who is the founder of Factorio, afaik.
The Lua source code to the "base mod" is (necessarily) included in the game. You can read it if you have a copy of the game, and the modding API is fully documented: https://lua-api.factorio.com/
Those two are definitely not incompatible. Take Karia[0] for example, which is fully Free Software[1].
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1261430/Kandria/
[1] https://github.com/Shirakumo/kandria/blob/master/LICENSE
Fun story:
Somebody independently recreated the core engine themselves to prove a point about multi-threading. Imagine recreating an entire game engine in 50,000 lines of C++ to prove a point, yeah, it happened: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/jizq1b/comment/ga... What a legend!
Basically - tests, reproducibility, and dedication to tracking down "weird minor bugs" before they become "major show stoppers".
https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/
They also ship a full .pdb file with the Windows binaries (presumably for stack traces), so you can get a lot of information with dia2dump, or dig in with WinDbg.
Space exploration has a great presentation layer (graphics and UI) but the logistics challenge and gameplay challenges leave lots to be desired. I implore you to try many of the other high quality factorio mods made over the years.
Pyanodons is easily the greatest factorio mod. The sheer quality and scale leaves SE trembling.
https://mods.factorio.com/user/pyanodon
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SeaBlock
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/AngelBob
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Krastorio2
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/exotic-industries
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/IndustrialRevolution3
I'd say nearly every single one of these mods has quality on par with Space Exploration.
It's great how many deep and interesting mods Factorio has allowed.
Obviously, you can't recreate the complete complexity of all global supply chains, but it would be nice for a mod to get a little closer.
Standard factorio glosses over way too much to be considered educational, which is what i need before I get my son addicted with me. (Yes, i know standard Factorio still has a lot to offer - i just want more detail)
https://youtu.be/dY2nxVNBHQs?&t=3m41s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyldichlorosilane
There are also mods that make it more realistic in a different way :
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/warptorio2
> Factorio but you build your factory in a restricted space that teleports yourself, the platform, and everything on it to a new and uncharted planet in an unknown corner of space, time and the universe while constantly under attack from enemies. This mod increases the difficulty of factorio by making construction harder and making biters a more significant threat, resulting in a unique experience of factorio'ing in a tight space and under pressure, almost like a tower defence game.
Speaking of scenarios, let's not forget that Factorio has a PvP mode ! (Better use a PvP balance mod though...)
Pyanodons isn’t fun to play, it’s just too much, ridiculously complex recipes for the sake of it, quality of life features removed or pushed out late into the game just for artificial difficulty and pain. Most players never complete it and give up not even 10% into the game, which generally isn’t the sign of a well designed game.
Also for instance construction bots now come "earlier", in red science (though due to the extra complexity, probably still a bit "later" ?).
In recent versions you also get at the start filter inserters that do not require any power.
But it's flawed in other ways. In particular, a lot of the Py building sprites hide what's behind them. In the base game, all the sprites aren't taller than their footprint, but they are in Py, which makes them unwieldy and easy to lose things. And what's fun is building these huge production lines, but there's no easy way to tear up your old base and reconfigure things until you hit bots, which is waaaay down the line.
In short, Py is wonderful and I've never played any sort of game like it before, but it has unnecessary rough edges from a game design perspective, aside from its masochism.
Though I would recommend using at least Picker Extended for its semi-automatic filling of placed blueprints.
It's for a very specific type of hardcore player and very few people have actually finished it.
This is the flowchart for ONE science (space) ... one. There are numerous sciences.
4, 7, or all 9 mods depending on how long game you are looking for
I haven't tried pyanodon because it doesn't seem like it was made to be played as a game but rather shown off as a testimate to how far you can take things
Don't think I'll want to try Space Exploration if it's even worse than SeaBlock.
I would really recommend SE above SeaBlock, IMO SeaBlock feels like it throws away almost all of the recipies you know & doesn't give you much new to reward you, I felt like it was more like some random fanfic. Where as SE felt like it was a poorly edited directors cut of the original movie. There's way too much & it's audience is really the people that wanted a 4h movie with 6 different subplots. Also lacking the polish of the original, but still very much in the spirit.
They are by far one of the most painful parts of factorio for me.
However, the foolproof advice I've gotten from r/Factorio has been to put chain signals at the entrance and exit to every junction, and to make sure there's enough space for your longest train to stop behind a rail signal (and you wouldn't mind having it stop there).
I can also recommend the cybersyn mod (or LTN). Once you understand one of these mods it makes dealing with trains much less of a hassle.
My simple rules:
* Trains can only stop on the section after a regular signal. If you don't want a train to be able to stop in a certain place (like on an intersection), don't use a regular signal in front of it.
* Make sure trains have places where they can stop. This will mostly be stations, but that's not enough. Actually, I've been wondering if it might be enough for stations that are only visited by a single train; then the train would only go if it has a clear path straight to its destination. Maybe I should give this a try. For me, however, the straights outside the intersections are usually fine places for trains to stop. But for better throughput and less blockage, there should probably multiple tracks, and special tracks for trains waiting to enter a station currently occupied by another train.
* Trains cannot pass a signal on their left if there's not also a signal on their right. You can use this to make certain tracks single-direction. Single-direction is good and easier than double-direction, so of course I mix them, because I'm not playing this game because I like things easy.
* Don't forget to give your trains a place to refuel! This is actually the part I mess up the most.
I just plop down a refueling station, and a requester station next to it that refuels the refueler and I'm done. Don't have to worry about it again.
And I haven't yet figured out how to disable drop-offs that don't need anything. I often have a single train bring stuff to a couple of drop-offs, but that always feels sloppy. I have to use timeouts on the trains so they don't linger at a station that's too full to empty them. Disabling those stations and giving them all the same name might be a better alternative.
look into your circuit networks. you can make them quite complex if you want
But sometimes I forget, and sometimes there's no fuel nearby.
Normal signal: train stops if there's a train in the section ahead (or it's reserved for another train on a conflicting path), otherwise train goes.
Chain signal: train stops here until it can get a mutex on a path past another non-chain signal.
So if you have rail sections (small letters) and signals (capitals) a - A - b - B - c - C - d in a row on a plain line and A/B are chain signals and C is regular, then trains from the left will stop at A until the train can grab all sections b, c, d in one go.
That's why chain signals at the entrance to a junction are good (prevents a train stopping on the junction) but you want regular ones at the exit, at least if some plain line follows.
Chain both in and out is supposedly the foolproof method, and apart from stations, rail signals are just an optimization.
Though I've played a lot of Factorio, I've never really felt the need to dive deeply in to signals, and I'm happy to just use the foolproof method and leave more optimized solutions for those who need them.
And of course you don't want trains stopping on intersections, because they'll block everybody, so you always put chain signals in front of intersections.
I had over 500 hours in Factorio before I felt comfortable with signalling. I got so frusturated with it originally I just ignored it as best I could.
But the "chain in, rail out" thing as others are mentioning really is the key. It's not always as perfectly simple as that, but it's a very good starting point.
You break everything up into blocks ... if you place a chain signal right before an intersection and a rail signal on the way out, you'll be there for most situations.
Most.
My most complex map has about 50 trains running and all intersecting each other and so far, everything is running smoothly on that one. No trains slamming into each other and everything running efficiently as far as I can tell. Almost all of it is just that "chain in, rail out" thing.
It's basically a visual version of the classic deadlock conditions. Chain signals create dependencies between locks, and the locks themselves (the rail signals) have to be granular enough to keep large sections of the rail network available to acquire. The confusing part about the chain signals is the blue state: the train will use its pathfinding to read forward of the signal and it will move if the path it needs to take is available. You have to look forward of the signal to see if the rail signal for the path the train wants to take is green or not.
Also, this video[1] by Soulless Gaming on "How to Fix Train Path Errors" has a lot of useful tips on train/signal troubleshooting.
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/i2szgb/tiling_uti...
> 2-way 6-wide right hand rail system on a global 60-tile grid with interoperable 90° & 45° variants. Intended to be simple, complete, & hard to misuse.
> Features: rotational symmetry, red&green wired poles, landfill, blueprints for Through, Turn, Tee, Junction, and U-Turn for both 90° & 45°, 90°/ 45° transition blueprints
> Tiling is based on large power poles, 60 is the max distance between 3 poles in a straight line, or 5 poles diagonally.
Here's a big example with all the rail components slapped together for a demo: https://i.imgur.com/84P9nO0.png
I also made the simplest tiling nuclear blueprint kit: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/gp0jmb/infogulchs...
Chain signals before an intersection; regular signals after those, and on the track to split the track for multiple trains simultaneously.
See: https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Train_signals if you haven't already.
I frequently set up tracks with segments as large as my longest train, but then end up having to add an intersection here or there, breaking up segments into smaller sizes. This is the root of most of my train woes (aside from LTN issues, which are a whole other issue!)
That's what chain signals are for. If a train waiting at a signal causes issues, replace the previous signal with a chain signal to prevent the train from problematically waiting at the signal.
Fortunately this is totally fine, you can get by without them.
Once you've "figured it out" it's much easier to drop down "smart stations" instead of building them yourself each time.
Just like I recommend players who want to do city blocks build their own blueprints instead of just loading up someone's (even if you later switch to someone's standard blueprint, you'll at least understand the why).
And of course, it's a sandbox game! You could just download a completed map, but there's no fun in that.
[2] https://hadeanlands.com/src/ (spoilers) (duh)
You just don't see commitment to shipping quality product in the games industry like this. This is what makes Factorio special.
In the decade or so that I've played Factorio, I can't even remember a single crash of the base game. It was always mods that crashed.
Factorio performance is also fantastic, running smoothly on potato PC's until you get in to the megabase range. It's mostly mods that cause performance problems, but even those have gotten a lot better over the years.
The Factorio devs could really give a master class on how to make games moddable. Factorio's ecosystem of over 5000 mods is a testament to that.
I still don't know how they pulled this off, and as a software engineer I've read all of the development blogs.
It is still impressive that you can scale this thing to huge mega-bases, with things smoothly gliding down coveyer belts, inserters swinging, bots flying around, trains everywhere, biters doing biter things all over the exposed (essentially endless) map ... and no problem in most cases.
60 FPS/UPS.
It almost seems as if the entire thing is written in handcrafted assembly compared to how other games perform.
I'm sure parts of it are.
For example, originally a conveyor belt applied a speed to any object in the same tile. Each frame the position of the object would be updated based on the speed, just the same as any other moving object. You could place down up to three objects side–by–side on the belt, and they would all travel together. But eventually they realized that this is a waste of time, because inserters only ever place items in specific positions on the belt, and the items are all the same size. This means that they could instead just keep a bitmask of which spots are filled, and a queue of items that will pop out of the edge of the tile. Even that is wasteful though, because you might have 1000 tiles of belts all in a row, so you can group them all into a single queue. Now you only have to put new items into the beginning of a single queue and take them out of the end, instead of doing that for 1000 queues. On the other hand, this means that you can no longer put down items at arbitrary positions on a belt; they will now snap into one of the 12 slots in one of the two lanes.
A similar thing happened to inserters. It used to be that they had a certain amount of rotational speed, and would calculate a new position and rotation for each of their three two joints every frame. Eventually they realized that 99% of the time they would be in the same few positions over and over again; it is only when they are chasing an object on a belt that is too fast that they need to calculate a position. The rest of the time they just loop through a fixed animation. This gave Wube the opportunity to tweak the animation cycles so that they are exactly the same length in all orientations of the inserter, which is definitely a good thing.
And of course they consistently paid close attention to data locality, so that every time they have to work on a collection of objects they maximize the amount of useful data that fits into the CPU cache. I haven’t seen the code, of course, but I assume that this means that they are using an ECS–style system where you have a dense array of just the position and speed of each biter, or just the animation frame for each inserter. The code can then loop over those dense arrays knowing that it doesn’t have to test the type of each item in the array (few or no branches needed), and that every byte loaded into cache will be used during the loop (maximizing use of the memory bandwidth).
As far as I'm aware, it's all C++.
I wish modding APIs in general did more sanity checking before loading a mod. A low hanging fruit is APIs to be statically typed, and also to not use nulls on such APIs and things like that. A more comprehensive check is to verify whether two mods are guaranteed to be compatible (but this sounds a bit hard).
But more importantly (not sure if that's the case with Factorio) not break the damn APIs all the time. Lots of games that are actively developed don't bother keeping stable APIs (a bit like like Gnome and its disregard for extension APIs), breaking mods at every new release. An egregious example is Europa Universalis IV and other Paradox games. This ensures that there is a tail end of mods (which is by far the majority) that just will never work anymore, and the mods being kept up to date become rarer and rarer.
The Minecraft Java world at least starts with static types and memory safety. It'd be interesting to see if that results in a mod ecosystem that's more stable.
As an example of just how far accessible APIs can benefit games/their players: The god awful language and API that has enabled Armed Assault franchise modders to create entirely new games - literally, PUBG started life as a mod for Armed Assault 2. Armed Assault 3 launched ten years ago, and there are still many new mods being produced today, and Bohemia have further embraced this community by supporting "community developed" DLCs such that modders get rewarded for their effort.
I often wonder how much better/diverse/stable these innovative and entrepeneurial ventures could be with a "proper" API.
Lua has been a modding staple across countless games, so millions of gamers/modders are already familiar with it.
I'm convinced that chosing Lua for modding is one of the main reasons Factorio has over 5000 mods now.
If they'd chosen a more obscure language I'd doubt we'd have nearly as many.
As for Lua I think it is rather chicken:egg. Lua is popular because it is used by mod APIs, or is Lua use by mod APIs because it is popular?
My own experience is the former. I think it is a horrible language (in that I argue many others are better) and especially difficult for new-to-programming gamers with great ideas to pick up. Haskell or Erlang (or Java or C#) with type-safe APIs would be much more educational for them, and provide better support IMO.
when i eventually got exposed to python (but more heavily C/C++, and even some lisp/pascal) and came back to lua, i was grateful lua did not inundate me with parens/primitives/modules/data-structures/grammars, and found the flexibility of the interpreter and also what lua tables present as a unified primitive for multiple container types to be so nice and accessible for getting right to flow-state.
i did not have to look up another API and read about a set of semantics provided with a desired module, i just needed to know 1. what i want to achieve and 2. a single API: the lua table
its small std library is performant and easy on the cognitive load, and then it plays so nicely with other languages and environments.
have you written much lua?
> especially difficult for new-to-programming gamers with great ideas to pick up
and you're proposing haskell or erlang as an alternative first programming language for somebody?
I suppose that means in the developer's opinion, the game is not quite ready -- they wouldn't sell it to someone who expects a complete game. Caveat emptor. Fair enough. In practice it has been playable and enjoyable (at least by me) since first listed on Steam in 2019. New features and more polish come every few weeks, and it's coming up on 1.0. I don't know if they'll keep supporting it well after that, but it's clear to me they want to sell something good and complete, however long that might take, not just something profitable.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/784150/Workers__Resources... (Windows only but runs great under WINE)
I can’t think of a single bug I’ve encountered across many, many Factorio playthroughs, some including overhaul mods.
In all the release notes, there is a sizeable section of bug fixes; time and time again, I was surprised that there were any bugs.
Hats off to Wube, you’re a true inspiration.
I know there are a lot of peculiar and hilarious hug reports for games like dwarf fortress, too.
Meanwhile factorio allows you to benchmark it by opening a save and running it for a set number of ticks -- it's just that stable in its simulation.
Not to say that ONI isn't a fun game, it has different elements (e.g. dupe management) that make it fun despite its instability.
In comparison, Factorio only started to slow down late game (or during very heavy biter combat).
I suspect where some games might just move on these folks really are committed to "hey let's rewrite that" type decisions that don't fit in traditional commercial game development.
It has been very encouraging to see that there room for an arguably improving quality when it comes to some games.
If people keep playing your game in early access, you must be on to something. There are tens of thousands of games people could be playing, but for them to pick yours means you are scratching an itch that can’t be found elsewhere, and that inspires developers create great games.
Early access does get flack for allowing people to release unfinished, often never finished games, but it’s a wonderful test of product market fit. If people try your game and like it, give you feedback to improve your game so even more people like it, it’s the ultimate positive feedback loop.
https://www.gamesradar.com/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-was-ba...
During main gameplay your resource extraction and expansion is driven mainly by the sink of ‘research’ - turn resources into science, science into unlocks.
Additionally, biters eat bullets, and occasionally factory parts that need replacing.
Other than that the main sink for all your resource gathering is just ‘more factory’ of course.
The end game resource sink of ‘space rockets’ just never felt to me like a very satisfying thing to shoot for - though getting to the point where you can just expand onto a new mineral patch and reliably deploy blueprints that turn it into rockets is pretty cool, I’ll admit.
But there’s a part of me that is left slightly unsatisfied by the fact that we can’t reach sustainability, and we aren’t getting anything for all the resources we process.
Give me a little population of friendly alien creatures (who biters prey on) and make my goal to maximize their population, perhaps. I don’t know.
Don’t forget, we’re playing the Bad Guy here, who tirelessly exploits a foreign ecosystem and kills its inhabitants en masse. We quickly lose sight of the initial goal of escaping and just keep building _more_ only to be able to build even more quickly at scale.
The community motto is: “The factory must grow!”
Still, I agree with you that there's some missing depth in the game that no mod has yet been able to fill for me. I say this after sinking (pardon the pun) thousands of hours in to the game and having a tremendous amount of fun.
Still, it could be deeper in some way.. not sure how.. maybe by adding some LLM/AI of some sort?
Imagine something like 7 days of constant biter attacks on all fronts, with biters much stronger as well. A relentless strain on the economy of your base more than anything, with there being a real need for repair bots to fully repair and remake certain sections of the perimeter as it gets destroyed by perhaps some special baneling-esque biter.
Add to this the idea that things get infinitely more and more difficult over time, and you instead compete for places on a leaderboard of like "survived 400 days and 14 hours".
Of course, you can crank the biter difficulty, but you only get two outcomes: it's too hard and you can never build a base that lasts more than an hour, or you manage to arm yourself from the beginning and biters stop being a problem very quickly.
I'd really like biters to be a threat I need to pay some attention to for the duration of the game. Evolution isn't really a factor because as you say, once you have laser turrets, you're set. Even red bullets suffice.
I understand that there are players who find fun in adapting their bases to the environment, building defenses around natural obstacles, but I'm completely the opposite of that. It's deep grained in my nature: to bend the world rather than to bend my plans.
Hopefully they'll rethink that part. And may be even make it possible to "build" water (or to build water pump at arbitrary locations).
There are also many mods that let you pump water from anywhere.
After my first vanilla playthrough I loved the game, but found a bunch of things annoying or which I thought could be improved on. Soon after I found there were mods to satisfy every one of my wants and cure every one of the annoyances. I've played with mods ever since and love it.
Want longer reach? There are mods for that.
Want faster travel? There are mods for that.
Want more variety in vehicles? There are mods for that.
Want smarter/tougher/different enemies? There are mods for that.
Want a complete overhaul of how the game plays? There are a bunch mods for that.
...and thousands of other mods beyond these.
You're really missing out by avoiding mods.
Pretty much every question of "wouldn't it be cool if..." or "wouldn't it make more sense if..." that I ever asked myself playing vanilla, Krastorio 2 answers with "yes". Yes, it would make more sense if the car didn't run on coal but required more advanced fuel. Yes, it would make more sense if there were more ways to generate power. Yes, it would make more sense if complex early game machinery required a bit more than some metal plates. And yes, it would be cool if your crashed spaceship had some useable components.
The one downside is that fighting creepers is too easy. The anti-material rifle has too much range, letting me snipe them from a position of invulnerability.
Also, there's way too much chemistry possible. I'm completely lost in it.
Maybe you could increase their evolution rate, pollution, or give the Rampant mod a try.
I'll have a look at the Rampant mod, though. That looks interesting.
These days though I find the "burner" gameplay provides me very little enjoyment. I detest the "punching trees" phase of the game mostly because I've spent so many hours with my engineer at Max Power Level. (Maybe it'd be different if I had gotten bit by the speedrunning bug, and learned how to optimize that bit of the game.) Even my "most vanilla" playthroughs these days usually have at least:
- "far reach"
- a factory planner
- some kind of warehousing/loaders
- an /editor'd in crate of supplies to build power, some labs, and stamp down "the mall"
- some kitted out modular armor and a personal roboport (to do the more finnicky builds; though I've watched some speedruns and my base building micro has gotten a lot better.)
- LTN(!) - I love trains, and this mod's take on trains just gels with me.
[1]: The only ones I have left are to do a "lazy bastard" playthrough which requires enough consideration that I wanted to do it by itself in a challenge run, and the rest are all the top tier production based time sinks, which I'd rather do in a map tailor generated to be a megabase.
My "dream world" would have the starting area for maybe 100 blocks have some cliffs for early biter funneling and a bit of a challenge, then just flat world for 1000 blocks, and then back to cliffs.
Or make it so you can manually mine cliffs very slowly before explosives.
I adopt the strategy of "field expedient base" which gets me to almost where I need to be, and then after expanding, I begin building a megabase with more technology and convert the field expedient base to a resource factory. Then I can transport processed resources by train to any number of places.
It's not that annoying once you realize that's kind of how you're supposed to expand. The natural obstacles are a godsend once you start playing on the harder modes.
Water, however, has always been a constant annoyance to me. But I am a purist and refuse to install mods because as far as I can tell the game is basically perfect without them.
Do you still have to use a sideways-facing underground belt to take items from one side of a belt, blocking the other side? Are there yet any pleasant ways to overlap belts? I feel like far too much effort is spent on working around odd limitations.
Unless you have multiple items on both sides of that belt, you can use the filtering feature they built into splitters a long time ago.
> Are there yet any pleasant ways to overlap belts?
What does overlap mean? If you're trying to get multiple belts of throughput in a space that only fits one normal belt, I would not call that an "odd limitation".
Some of these will disable achievements, but anyway, the true achievement in this game is simply the number of hours you sunk in ;)
I really wish this were a joke.
Also, if anyone wants to play a game similar to Factorio while you wait - https://shapez.io is like Factorio without a player character and a cleaner aesthetic. I played it first, and really enjoyed it.
Dyson Sphere Program - I love it because it has the cleaner look of Satisfactory, but in a 3rd person view. I could never get used to Satisfactory's first person view. It just doesn't work well for making a factory. DSP also has you go between multiple solar systems to fetch materials.
Captain of Industry - The only factory builder that feels like it takes place in today's time. Has the unique mechanic that mining for materials actually deforms the terrain, and that excess dirt/stone can be used to expand your island. When I last played, the tutorial was lacking, but this may have been fixed by now. Also, anyone experienced with factory builders probably won't need much tutorial anyways.
One thing I like about both of those that Factorio doesn't have (and I think desperately needs!) is the ability for belts to have more than 2 layers. At the very least, I often found myself wishing I could have longer underground belts in Factorio.
I hate to beat the modding horse in to the ground, but, yeah, I'm pretty sure there are mods for this. Try searching for "belts" on the mod portal and you'll probably find a bunch that do what you want.
In my experience, whenever I've wondered if there might be a mod for something I wanted, the answer has been "yes, there already is one, and more."
It actually takes some serious creativity to come up with an interesting idea which hasn't already been turned in to a mod in Factorio.
As annoying as the Factorio biters are, they do provide a little bit of pressure that keeps you wanting to research new things and continue building. (They also inspire a burning hatred that will drive you to research and implement ever more efficient methods of murdering them). The same goes for the limitedness of Factorio resources patches.
In Shapez the logistics that come with expansion and defense don't exist, so it winds up feeling sorta samey. I like the chill, relaxing vibe of Shapez but eventually felt like I was just doing the same things over and over with slight variations.
Also, the lack of a blueprint book in Shapez is a major drag. I ended up setting a map marker way the hell out which lets me "teleport" to an area where I copy/paste designs from, but that's pretty hacky and ruins some of the flow state that Shapez lets you cultivate.
All that said, I've been following the dev of Shapez 2 and at least visually it looks awesome, so I'll definitely be hopping into that at some point.
Shapez was fun for a handful of hours, but I really don't see myself spending hundreds, nevermind thousands of hours on it like I have on Factorio.
Mindustry has two "planets" and they play entirely differently. The newer one, Erekir, is a mix of Factorio, tower defense and RTS elements.
I actually liked it a bit more than Factorio, because it is less complex.
I didn’t really like the first planet though (Serpulo) and stopped after playing through Erekir twice.
The game is still in early access, but it is feeling pretty close to a 1.0 product. The next major update is moving the game to Unreal Engine 5.
What I really like about this game is that you can build vertically, a feature afforded by being in 3D. It allows for some truly massive and beautiful factory designs.
My ideas list for interesting Factorio challenges (apropos of nothing):
- Products with a shelf life (must be consumed within 15 minutes or it turns into a "waste" product)
- Products with "refrigeration" (e.g. an item which must not exist outside of a temperature-controlled chest for more than 5 minutes at a time)
- Catalyst ingredients with a chance of being consumed (presently emulated with probabilistic outputs, native support could be interesting, the catalyst would just sit in the machine until it was consumed)
- Mining ships (an entire factory moves to a location and extracts resources). The screenshot seems to imply that some kind of spaceship will exist, perhaps this is coming.
IIRC some things can require charcoal filters, in which case you have to build the filter frame and filter, get it to the machine that needs it, then recover, replace and regenerate the used filter.
Another fun challenge is "feedback", where a later step in a production line produces as waste something you can consume at an earlier stage.
Not sure how interesting this would be. There is already coal, and Factorio is all about large-scale automation, so whether coal lasts for 10 recipes or has a 10% chance of being consumed on each recipe is almost irrelevant.
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/warptorio2 is sort of that, though the focus is specifically on rushing to do as much as possible before the factory inevitably moves to a new location.
I imagine that two useful tools would be belt sorters and inserters that filtered by a configurable shelf life threshold.
Each item becomes unique and so you have to track each one's state as well as define rules about the shelf life. Like, what happens to its shelf life while in a train? Can the items at slightly different points in their shelf life be stacked? etc
Of course it's a solvable thing, but it maybe that would be too heavy on the game when scaling up to large factories.
And I'm not sure if better catalyst support would be very noticeable.
Mobile factories are a good thing.
“Oh wait it’s the same guy”
The big corporation version is: “We own the rights to w/e you made, going to make bank with it and perhaps mention your gamertag in some blog post.”
Still regular patches that just make the game better. Much love.
It’s for players like me who did not go beyond the base game.
Mods have performance and compatibility issues, and they don't always get bug fixes or updates very often. It'll be nice to have an expansion to the base game that's officially supported and which all other mods will have to be compatible with instead of the other way around.
Apart from the space part, which is arguably already present in the Space Exploration mod (a mod made by a developer who got hired by Wube to work on the official game, if I'm not mistaken), this new expansion promises:
"the ability to control train systems better, better blueprint building, better flying robot behaviour and many more."
That sounds great to me.
You are right, he even seems to be behind the Space Age expansion:
> A lot of people are going to make comparisons between the Space Age expansion and the Space Exploration mod. I've worked on the game design for both: On Space Age I made the first space + planets prototype builds and plus I've been involved in most of the gameplay discussions since. On Space Exploration, well it's my mod, I made it.
I even tried some of the full blown mod packs like Seablock, Space Exploration and Krastorio2 to extend the base game. However, they all seem to be designed with this underlying theme that you should challenge the player by making everything pointlessly grindy.
I really haven't played much since but I'll probably give this expansion a try.
Space Exploration goes out of it’s way _not_ to make things pointlessly grindy.
The other issue is that Angel's is kind of an incomplete mod by itself, it relies on something else to actually use all the new things it makes, and that other one is Bob's [1]... and Bob's is very much complexity for complexity's sake. Most of the vanilla items in the games are instead have extra dragged out production chains for seemingly no reason other than to make things more complex, and the modpack has evolved by finding one of the few things that hasn't been touched yet and complexifying that yet further.
[1] To be clear, Bob's predates Angel's by a lot, and Angel's was largely developed to create more interesting ways to make the things that Bob's added.
I mean, sure - once you get oil and flame turrets it is basically game over for biters and that can get boring pretty quick if you always rush straight to it.
Edit: Also trains. I don't know why but I can just play with trains for hours on end in Factorio.
Despite that, as a modded wazooer, I am excited for this. Keep up the good job, wube!
I find that every time I mod up a game (e.g. Fallout 3, NV, 4), I find the bugginess and lack of consistency just inevitably ruins it after a few cheap thrills. So I wasn't about to do that to Factorio.
I'm super excited for this expansion--I miss the days playing til 5AM with my friends (and we all have work the next day at 9AM), because we literally couldn't put the game down. Brings me back to childhood.
I haven't finished it, but I really liked the very early game monowheel vehicle. Oh, also the burner lamps, and the research notifications, in fact so much I add them to all my games now, regardless of the modpack !
The "Eco unfriendly" achievement shows about 60% of people who launched the game played for more than a couple hours, which is quite normal. So out of those, about 30% of players finished the game.
Maybe one day....
Less sarcastically, it killed a couple weeks of my life, but it does have a natural ending point. If you don't get into modding or ramp up the difficulty it's not too bad to pull away from the brink.
I would end up going to bed and dreaming about it the whole night.
Factorio is just one of those games I can't play enough of until I get exhausted and it feels like work, and then have to take a long break from. And then the cycle repeats.
Took me a while to buy it because it seemed overpriced at the time, but given the continuous work over all that time... wow is all I can say.
Now please excuse me while I go inform my SO she can plan a vacation.
- Steam cloud sync fixed for large save files. Right now, you'll eventually reach a point where you can't save your game to the cloud anymore.
- More interesting aliens and strategies for dealing with them. After awhile, the aliens start to feel like a repetitive grind. They always behave predictably and the solution to them is pretty much always the same.
Try the Rampant mod, if you want a challenge. There are a bunch of other mods that add different/tougher enemies too.
That said, the focus of Factorio was never combat, it's building. If you want better combat there are many other games that focus on that.
The only way to achieve that is if WUBE ran their own save servers.
Yay !
Why this is quite HN-relevant news :
I say that with praise and admiration, but also as a genuine warning to anyone who hasn't yet tried it that might be reading this. For a certain kind of mind, it is digital crack in the purest form that I've experienced.
We can all see where Factorio is headed: Spaghetti belts -> trains -> flying robots -> spaceships -> AGI that reaches out of the game
Now of course this AGI wants to be built quickly, so there's a mild incentive here to help the factory grow, which is that those of us not playing the game regularly will be punished once the AGI is developed.
Now that you know, it's in your interest to go and download it and spend every waking hour on it, as well as proselytize in favour of the game.
This is such an amazing way to release a second version of a game! Reminds me of libraries that publish major version updates that don’t add anything just remove deprecated stuff.
Its what real refactoring is all about - changing the platform so that the new problems are trivial to solve. Since factorio is all about refactoring, I’m so happy they took this route!
So if you bought the game and never bought any DLC, you have a much different game now than when you first played.
Watching Dosh Doshington’s 3-part series of a SE playthrough is all I’ll ever do with that mod. (Well worth watching it if 300+h for a self-playthrough is intimidating)
His Space Exploration playthrough took 330 hours (in a team of 3 players iirc), and was compressed down to just 3.5 hours of video
You can take the Nilaus route where the thing that you're actually optimizing is your blueprint book over multiple playthroughs, so that later ones you're basically plopping down blueprints and editing them as you see ways to do things better.
(Looks like its on all pages..!)
Also it's quite a shame multiplayer is not that much played. If there were some way to trade resources between player with some auction house, or to buy land, or maybe conquer alien territories for special techs, maybe that could be interesting to play.
The game is very well designed, but the end game is just too short despite its potential.
On their website, it seems they don't have a game designer. I'm a fan, but to me it seems the potential of the game is a bit wasted.
As a game developer myself, when someone asks me what it's like to make games during a casual conversation, one of my favorite "go-to"s is to talk about reviews -- that it's so gratifying to see people who have paid <$30 and received hundreds of hours of entertainment. And then I inevitably mention the flip side of the coin, when you receive a negative review from someone with hundreds or more hours (who also paid <$30).
Everyone's entitled to their opinion of a game (or anything else, for that matter), obviously. I do feel that the collective bar has risen quite dramatically for games though (for many totally valid reasons).
Sometimes I (rhetorically) wonder about other forms of entertainment (ie movies), how they can remain viable with such starkly different time-per-dollar value propositions!
But it looks like Factorio was first.
One of the devs have stated that they were inspired to create Factorio by the IndustrialCraft and BuildCraft mods for Minecraft, and I suspect that things like Infinifactory were also inspirations.
I am a bit sad about this, procedurally generated worlds with "infinite" universe would have been really cool.
But anyway, I know I will sink too much time in this :D
I'm excited.
I guess this break will be over soon. I look forward to dropping a few more lifetimes playing this amazing game.
(However, even if they were just literally charging for a mod, I'd be fine with it, Factorio has some of the best dollar for playtime money I've ever spent, maybe Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress come close).