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Comment by rft | Hacker News Reader

Honorable mention: tech-focused Minecraft (Java!) mod packs (don't laugh), if that floats your boat

The Factorio founder stated on Reddit that "Modded minecraft, mainly buildcraft/industrialcraft, was huge inspiration to create Factorio." (A link to that Reddit post is the first citation in Wikipedia's article on Factorio.)

The entire factory game genre owes its existence to Minecraft mods.

Java MC industrial mods have been the granddaddy of industrial games since 1.4.7. Nothing scratches the itch quite like a 4 story chemical plant with hundreds of regulated processes.

That sounds rather interesting. Link to some examples of said chemical plants?

I don't have any I can personally vet on the public internet. Most of what I've seen is on the GTCEu discord. Image searching "nomifactory" yields some stuff that looks about right. "Lawn base".

https://i.redd.it/dpcixz3z60d81.png

Back in the 1.4.7 days the biggest packs out there were kitchen sink packs like MindCrack with GT3 being the biggest single mod. The gregtech family tree has grown substantially and the largest branches are much more intricate than what used to be around. On par with Krastorio2.

Even unmodded Minecraft would belong on this list. Redstone contraptions and production automation can be part of base building in the basic survival game. The list has a section for Open-World Survival Sandboxes - Minecraft is one of the originators of that genre.

Yeah, the page says "The game that created the genre" about Factorio, which isn't really true - the factorio-style gameplay was preceeded and inspired by tech mods in Minecraft.

And the Minecraft mod packs have a much higher complexity than Factorio. See https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jYSfDcbY0w0

Thank you. Corrected this.

Included in most of the tech mod packs but deserving of a special mention is ComputerCraft, which allows you to program computers and robots in Lua that can interact with the Minecraft world!

CC is the reason I can write some Lua, at least after the initial intro when I was fumbling around in the TES 3 editor. I went down that rabbit hole and build some far too complex one-off things. One of them even called out to a PHP backend for a shared database. I think I started hacking on a system that could propagate updates between CC nodes in a sort of mesh network (wireless CC networks) before just using the database backend. Luckily I lost interest before writing a whole network layer.

The list currently only has Steam games, but maybe it shouldn't? Up for discussion right now: https://github.com/arcataroger/awesome-engineering-games/dis...

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