Comment by jameshart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jameshart | Hacker News Reader

Not sure this will scratch the itch for what I always felt was missing from Factorio, which is fundamentally a more satisfying ‘sink’ for resources.

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.

I think not being able to reach true sustainability might be a core concept here.

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!”

You are rewarded for spending resources by unlocking technologies, and being able to use the new tech to refactor and grow your base.

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?

Try Dyson Sphere Program. Factory builder where the final resource sink is building a dyson sphere. It’s a massive undertaking and it’s had multi-planet from the start. Tons of fun

Friendly aliens trying to reach sustainability is such an awesome idea for a mod! (or Space Age feature @devs???)

This happens in the Pyanodon mod pack, among others; you farm alien creatures and make little habitats for them.

There just needs to be a gamemode which makes the game more about base defense and resource usage in defending the base. Currently you can just spam lasers and win no problem.

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".

I've always craved something like this too.

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.

You're looking for the Warptorio2 mod. "Build your base on a platform that warps from planet to planet and escape biters before they overwhelm you."

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/warptorio2

Sounds a bit like the Wave Defense scenario. It is available within the game: https://wiki.factorio.com/Wave_defense

Try a deathworld then. Once you're comfortable defending until you can secure flamethrowers, you can add in some mods that slightly extend or complicate the early/mid game (like AAI industries and/or Krastorio2). Especially with K2, you get some new options for controlling your pollution (planting trees, running greenhouses, air filters...), and in the endgame you get the tech that enables fully self-sustaining bases. I think all of these are interesting alternatives to the endless expansion and the sudden, rapid power spike of the base game.

Several versions ago, there was a mod (maybe called "homeworld") that had a sink of you sending various resources through a portal back "home". It started simple with N iron plates, but then they wanted 10N oil barrels, and eventually red circuits. It also added some farming resources (which were affected by local pollution, so you had to plan where to put them). It was fun to have little goals, but I don't know that it's been updated recently.

This is exactly why I liked Dune. it had this concept where you had to pay regularly the emperor to maintain "peace"

Factorio is basically a sandbox game that generates logistical puzzles for the player. If you get bored of solving logistical puzzles, including those that self-imposed challenges and mods are able to offer, then I think what you really want is a different game.

Slimsounds akin to the paperclip optimizer

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