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Comment by dexwiz | Hacker News Reader

Balancers are probably one of the most common but least understood parts of Factorio. Most players copy a blueprint book from the web, and don’t think about it. They are very tricky to build by hand without a deep understanding of belt mechanics and high attention to detail. Also without testing it’s easy to build one that looks correct but fails under certain conditions.

Same lane balancers and powers of two aren’t bad, but anything else usually requires loop backs so the network becomes cyclic.

Also every belt in Factorio is two independent lanes. Splitters will move items between belts but always preserve lanes. A 4-2 splitter should compress 4 left-only lanes across 4 belts to 2 belts of 2 left and 2 right lanes. The naive splitter setup wont do that.

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You'd think that with as many hundreds of 4-4 balancers I've built, I'd remember the correct arrangement of splitters, but no, I somehow always flip the input or output splitters and end up with a subtly wrong balancer that I won't notice until a hundred hours and many dozens of copies later. I've totally given up and just resigned to using a blueprint book.

Oh yeah, splitters are the one thing I haven’t tried to build myself because they’re so tricky. I’ve done a ton with circuit networks and trains, but belt balancers are far less intuitive to work with.

One of the biggest reasons I’ve never dove into optimizing for factorio is the lack of tests. But then again if it had tests it’s probably feel too much like real work.

You can set up test suites in the editor put it’s a pain, because you have to build things like clocks and counters with in game mechanics or use mods.

But half the fun of the game is you can test in production because you’ll only cause downtime for yourself. I surveyed Reddit once and most people play with no or only minimal planning.

Too much like real work was exactly what I felt after only a few hours of Factorio.

As someone who’s never played factorial it sounds incredibly boring and tedious from the outside.

It’s built for engineers that are nerds at heart and love building because they love building. There are certainly engineers that love making engineer money, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But what one finds boring and tedious another may find pleasure in.

I would say given how loved factorio is a reasonable position is to assume they’re not all entire idiots that can’t distinguish between fun and tedium and give it a try!

Factorio, Satisfactory and Oxygen Not Included (very different games) all have this thing of building something while it's running, debugging and expanding it, and give you fairly meaningful rewards in terms of new challenges and removing tedium.

To compare:

* Satisfactory: the lowest stress, best guided, the prettiest and the easiest to analyse. A lot of the challenge involves figuring out how to best use 3D space. 1.0 is coming this year.

* Factorio: Biters provide a base level of threat making your factory breaking a potential problem. But you can switch it off. Much more complex tech tree and routing. But building railways is pretty tedious compared to Satisfactory (which is a pity when they're essential.)

* Oxygen Not Included: Everything you try to do has side effects. The game physics matters _a lot_. Mess up and everything dies. Easily the most stressful of the three. Has the shallowest tech tree of the lot, too.

All are good, although I cannot recommend Oxygen Not Included if you want to relax while playing.

I'd say Satisfactory is primarily an exploration game, Factorio is about building, and ONI is about constantly living on the knife's edge of limited and rapidly dwindling resources. It's a brilliant, intricate design but yeah it's stressful.

Building trains is my favorite part of Factorio :) Satisfactory trains are fun because of the 3D designs for the railway you can do (stations, bridges, etc.) I think Factorio 2.0 (with the new space age expansion) will fix all this. The most tedious parts of trains (odd curve/placement limitations) will be fixed, and we’ll get more features like bridges and schedule interrupts

For me the tedious part of trains is that you pretty much have to use blueprints, and preferably a blueprint book of intersections. And creating your own intersections is very easy to make mistakes. I love how flexible the system is, but I don't like when a game forces you to use out of game resources like third party blueprints.

One does not need to use third party blueprints for train intersections at all, and it is easy to make designs where the intersections are robust. Not necessarily the highest performance, or most compact layouts, but a little reasoning goes a long way.

(They’re handy for the stations where you’re loading the train, though.)

If you could actually build them effectively with a personal port it would be a lot less painful. As it is, slapping down a huge ghost rail isn’t as useful as it should be.

Mindustry is also good, similar to Factorio but with a little more focus on the threat and a little less focus on the base building.

> * Oxygen Not Included: Everything you try to do has side effects. The game physics matters _a lot_. Mess up and everything dies. Easily the most stressful of the three. Has the shallowest tech tree of the lot, too.

ONI is a thermodynamics simulator disguised as a colony simulator.

Tossing two more into the ring:

* Mindustry: Free casual episodic tower defense factory sim. Level based instead of infinite build, levels take about an hour.

* Dyson Sphere Program: Build factories that span start systems. Best looking game of the bunch, imho. Go from punching trees to a Kardashev type II/III civilization.

If you're into Factorio or Satisfactory, I highly recommend checking out Dyson Sphere Program.

Yeah that is why most players just copy blueprints for balancers that have been vetted by people who do enjoy it. There are also mods that trivialize the task by creating oversized item chests that you can hook many inputs and outputs to. But the belt system is very optimized so a belt based balancer is almost always better for cpu usage. Also I think balancers are overrated and most of the time when you need huge balancers you should actually be using trains.

If that sounds boring, you should hear about a first person shooter. You just click on heads.

I get that this is a humourous and offhanded comment, but it's the equivalent of saying that basketball is 'just bouncing a ball'. A surprising amount of complexity emerges from putting teams of humans into a competitive sandbox environment with conflicting goals to, in each example, 'put the ball in the other team's basket', or 'click on the other team's avatars until they die'. They also overlap in that both are ultimately based on entering a skillful kinesthetic flow state, of becoming one with the ball, or your digital avatar, and gliding seamlessly, through muscle mechanics you've trained over hundreds of hours, through situations which are dynamic and non-identical because they involve opposing humans capable of interactivity and learning.

I've never really understood why FPS games are considered 'dumb'. All video games leverage our innate capacities of entertainment to fix our attention on unreal worlds, often to distraction, even addiction. Given that, it's difficult to transpose ideas of high and low brow onto the medium. The whole enterprise is dumb by design.

I agree actually, I just went with the maximally reductive description to make a point.

Think of it like Minecraft-like top-down 2D survival game (fun) with crafting (fun!), but which lets you automate away all the tedium of crafting, and then lets you automate all the automation, and...

It's fun for some.

You don't have to actually do any optimization at all, you can beat the game (launch a rocket) with inefficient spaghetti designs.

It's a great test for what type of engineer you are. -- 1) Loves optimizing their belts: An engineer's engineer -- 2) Loves getting it to barely work and moves on: Hacker/Prototyper -- 3) Loves closing the game: Product Manager

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