Friday Factorio Facts #381 – Space Platforms | Hacker News Reader

Friday Factorio Facts #381 – Space Platforms

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If you enjoy factorio give Captain of Industry a try, it’s an awesome game and the creator is a regular here.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1594320/Captain_of_Indust...

Sigh... because I have all this spare time to devote another thousand hours into this game, right? ;-)

So much of my potential productivity would be lost if Dyson Sphere Program or Captain of Industry ran on macs.

DSP... Hours and hours... The satisfaction when it was finished... This was great. Played it on GeForce Now

I'd love to, but I need to finish my Space Exploration run first! 200h in and I'm not done with the four sciences (and I'm still using bots in space for the majority of them).

I understand the idea to go with belts as they are a core and fun feature of Factorio gameplay, but... conveyor belts really need gravity to work.

Perhaps a funner way to do this would be to play with inertia in space, where stuff just travels in a straight line, so you could just have launchers and catchers that just hurl material along.

Fair point, lol; for now I'm imagining it's magnets. The other thing they could do is pneumatic pipes. There's the Space Exploration mod, it had special space belts, but they were still just belts.

you suspend your disbelief and just say the conveyors have little buckets on them, or are sticky!

I could suspend my disbelief, or you know, the Factorio team could actually just draw the buckets :D

Keep in mind that these are the same conveyor belts which somehow work even before you built your first electric power plant. If they're magic enough to transport items without any power source, they can be magic enough to transport items in space.

> [...] so you could just have launchers and catchers that just hurl material along.

Take a look at this mod: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/RenaiTransportation

That is a hilarious mod.

Electroadhesion could be used to hold objects on belts. Here on earth electroadhesive conveyors are sold as a way to move objects up steeper angles[0]

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJu9hzZA-p0

Also to hold the paper down on the HP plotters of old.

Thanks for sharing, that looks really cool!

Do you happen to know if that company is still in operation, or if some other company took over their tech? Neither their official site[0], twitter account[1] nor crunchbase[2] have any updates about them since 2018. Oh, just found a press release about some restructuring they went into just before covid hit[3]; I suppose they didn't survive that. Still interesting to see if some other company picked it up.

[0] https://grabitinc.com/company/

[1] https://twitter.com/Grabit_Inc

[2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/grabit

[3] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/grabit-inc-enters-i...

I think I'd go with velcro.

All they need to do is a graphical update that adds buckets/zip ties/etc.

It's probably already planned.

I tried Space Exploration and honestly it became rather tedious; it looks like this is a lot more ergonomic. I'm itching to play Factorio again but I know if I pick it up now I won't want to play when this expansion is released.

Similarly,a combat update for Dyson Sphere Program will be coming out in a month or so. I've found DSP to be satisfying in the same ways as Factorio but with some unique flair all its own. Particularly just how beautiful the game is, you'll just be minmaxing some component of your supply chain and you will happen to witness a sunrise filled up partially with your own contraptions. It can be stunning.

It seems like a certain kind of person can just hop between Factorio, Satisfactory, and Dyson Sphere Program to scratch whatever that itch is called. :D

Dyson Sphere Program is a genuine work of art. The scale and beauty can be genuinely astonishing. I wish it was more approachable only so more people could experience it.

I've got a lovely screenshot of a polar sunrise behind the mammoth research towers, all going full bore (so they're glowing with the current research).

Truly a beautiful game.

Could you send the screenshot? It sounds awesome

Using inserters to dump trash into space is a brilliant and seamless mechanic. Yet another example of care in the Factorio game model.

The world would look very different if software was generally developed like this.

curious to hear you elaborate on this

I think OP is referring to the fact that the Factorio devs are fucking awesome, they listen to the community, fix bugs in record time, add fun things to the game and even fix bugs that affect third party mods, which is unseen in any other modded game. If software development could be something near how the Factorio devs carry their game, we sure would live in a better world.

Also their test automation is pretty sweet: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-62

I love that the space platform mechanics basically reward super dense spaghetti.

I've unknowingly been training for years for this.

I do honestly find that the most enjoyment in the game is when you leave yourself one or two tiles too little and you end up trying to spaghetti your way to success anyways.

I love how when asteroids are destroyed, they break apart into smaller asteroids just like in the old arcade game.

I fully expect that in the distant future when humanity is (hopefully) moving, mining, and colonizing asteroids. Video game asteroids will still break into smaller asteroids when shot with lasers.

Those thrusters look awesome.

The animation is wonderful

All of it looks awesome. The level of detail in the Factorio art style is absurd.

What a beautiful game. It's not my preferred style of gameplay, but I love to watch it in action.

OT: Anyone here know of any mixed-reality/AR games like Factorio? I think it'd be fun to build a virtual thing on my desk and bolt it on to a factory (say, in another room, or just behind me).

Someone at factorio has been playing Galaxy Trucker.

Yeah the engines on back, guns in front is super Galaxy Trucker-esque.

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