[HN Gopher] Factorio 1.0
___________________________________________________________________
Factorio 1.0
Author : Akronymus
Score : 1508 points
Date : 2020-08-14 09:12 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (factorio.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (factorio.com)
| NKosmatos wrote:
| It would be good to watch managers, CEOs, CTOs or other higher
| management playing Factorio. I would pay for a Twitch/Youtube
| stream with Elon, Bezos, Mark, Nadella, Gates and other "famous"
| people to see how they play such games. On a second thought, that
| would make a good documentary/interview, seeing how high profile
| managers and engineers handle similar games, what they enjoy in
| their spare time :-)
| hypnotist wrote:
| At least Shopify CEO Tobias Lutke plays Factorio, Starcraft
| etc.
| lreeves wrote:
| Shopify employees can even expense Factorio :-)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I've seriously thought of using Factorio for programmer job
| interviews, as a way to really get inside of somebody's
| head and see how they solve problems.
| AdamGibbins wrote:
| I'm not spending 20-30 hours on your interview ;)
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Wow that would be cool. Playing a similar game or an RTS
| to see how the candidate would perform.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| That's super cool.
| nabilhat wrote:
| It would be a game changer for anyone involved with
| manufacturing layout for solid objects at any level of
| business. I've personally used my own perspective from playing
| Factorio to influence real world factory design. It's a great
| way to strengthen intuition that complements knowledge and
| theory.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Phil Salvador wrote an article about the long lost
| SimRefinery by Maxis Business Simulations, and somebody who
| read it was able to dig up a floppy disk with the original
| game!
|
| When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business
| Simulations and SimRefinery
|
| https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/
|
| SimRefinery recovered
|
| https://obscuritory.com/sim/simrefinery-recovered/
|
| A close look at SimRefinery
|
| https://obscuritory.com/sim/simrefinery-analysis/
|
| The sprawling, must-read history of Maxis' former "serious
| games" division
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/05/the-sprawling-must-
| re...
|
| A lost Maxis "Sim" game has been discovered by an Ars reader
| [Updated]
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/06/a-lost-maxis-sim-
| game...
|
| SimRefinery EXISTS! Let's play it!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ6Cqn5rTfs
| nikanj wrote:
| Musk would load a factory built by someone else, then sue his
| way into owning it (re: https://meaww.com/elon-musk-tesla-
| cofounder-lawsuit-settleme... )
| loco5niner wrote:
| FYI - Web of Trust marks that site as potentially harmful...
| hirundo wrote:
| Since Musk and Bezos are actually building rockets I'd think
| they'd find a simulation to be less fun in comparison. But
| maybe they'd enjoy it the way a chess grandmaster enjoys
| playing blitz as relaxation during a break in a tournament
| game.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Musk is already playing a game; it's called "the simulation",
| and we're all in it. I'm not joking; according to him, we are
| most likely in a simulation. [0]
|
| [0]: https://www.space.com/41749-elon-musk-living-in-
| simulation-r...
| slimginz wrote:
| Musk has joked in the past in some Reddit AMAs that he models
| all his rockets in Kerbal Space Program first so who knows.
| halfFact wrote:
| This is more likely to be marketing than reality. If he
| really works 100 hours a week.
| sujinge9 wrote:
| Maybe modeling rockets in Kerbal is part of that 100hrs
| of work.
| drivers99 wrote:
| I like to look at my factory in terms of the Theory of
| Constraints. Improving anything besides the bottleneck is a
| waste. Find the bottleneck and fix that one thing, then figure
| out what the new bottleneck is. Avoid creating excess inventory
| (buffer chests).
| Symmetry wrote:
| That's The Goal.
| chillacy wrote:
| Yup, not unlike how actual factories operate apparently. It's
| also a never ending process because once you unblock one
| bottleneck, a new one is revealed somewhere else. That the
| primary challenge in the game is an emergent phenomenon of
| producer/consumer systems is what makes it so beautiful of a
| game.
| jeremyis wrote:
| This is one of the most clever and engaging games I've ever
| played. When myself and some friends discovered it, it ate up
| hundreds of hours of our time in the matter of a few months ....
| per person. It's basically visual programming with monsters.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Most of that website works without JavaScript!
| anilnayak wrote:
| http://ghdsports.club/
| drhodes wrote:
| Sounds like Danny Elfman wrote the music to the 2 minute video :)
| has strong resemblance to the simpsons / beetlejuice / men in
| black, couldn't imagine a better fit.
| aljungberg wrote:
| Great game. Without being critical of the team's awesome
| accomplishment, I do wonder if there's something to be learnt
| here about software development productivity. How did the Coffee
| Stain guys develop Satisfactory apparently so much faster than
| the Factorio guys?
|
| Factorio started in 2013. Satisfactory started development in
| 2016 and released 2019. At the time Satisfactory was released it
| seemed already more advanced than Factorio -- and after only
| having been developed for half as long. (The visual complexity of
| Coffee Stain's game is off the charts compared to Factorio.
| Factorio has a board game style whereas Satisfactory is a modern
| 3D game. Look at the launch trailers.)
|
| Coffee Stain has about 25 employees working on 2 games (Goat
| Simulator and Satisfactory), Wube Software has 15 employees
| working on 1 game (Factorio).
|
| Having read Factorio's dev blogs I feel like there might have
| been a bit of not invented here syndrome. They wrote their own UI
| toolkit for instance. Maybe they kept inventing technologies
| while Coffee Stain found ways to reuse existing tools?
| Deestan wrote:
| The comparison isn't completely valid.
|
| Satisfactory is not yet released, and still in Early Access.
|
| Factorio was in EA and enjoyable by 2016.
|
| The Factorio team has slowly grown to its current size - for a
| few years it was just one or two people and no funding.
|
| Coffeestain was a fully formed team with some funding.
| aljungberg wrote:
| At the point of comparison in 2016, both games were in early
| access, and, I think, both games were enjoyable. Factorio had
| a more complex late game in terms of available structures and
| they had liquid pipes which is a major feature. But
| Satisfactory also had some things Factorio did not like
| varied terrain, automated trucks and some interesting first
| person elements.
|
| You're right about the early funding. Factorio started out
| with just EUR21,626 of crowd funding. But after a while they
| do seem to have reached similar levels given the comparable
| staffing levels they have now.
| maxpro wrote:
| I don't think you can really compare both of these games...
| both are about building factories, but that's it. Factorio is
| another world of complexity comparing to Satisfactory
| aljungberg wrote:
| I'm not sure how one could measure the complexity in terms of
| game mechanics, but there is definitely a large amount of
| overlap in that complexity I would say. Both games have
| machines to mine, assemblers of increasing complexity, belts
| to connect them, a variety of possible inputs and outputs.
| There are things in Satisfactory that's not in Factorio and
| vice versa -- Satisfactory has a space elevator, Factorio has
| rockets. I'm no expert on these games but from the outside it
| doesn't look like one is twice as complex as the other in
| terms of mechanics.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| Having played both, Satisfactory doesn't come close to the
| scale Factorio has. Especially when it comes to late game
| scaling, I have 20k assemblers on my longest running save.
| justin66 wrote:
| > How did the Coffee Stain guys develop Satisfactory apparently
| so much faster than the Factorio guys?
|
| The games are not even remotely comparable.
| munchbunny wrote:
| Factorio's engine has an absolutely staggering amount of
| performance optimization able to support factories that are
| orders of magnitude more complex than endgame Satisfactory
| setups. Factorio started out using the Allegro engine and then
| rolled their own because Allegro couldn't handle the huge
| factories that players were creating.
|
| I think the detail you're missing is that Factorio didn't start
| with all of these pieces being homegrown. It became that way
| because over the years players kept pushing the boundaries, so
| the dev team decided to put in the extra effort to support it
| by optimizing like crazy. The game's engine got several revamps
| over the last several years just for performance. In this case
| the effort was informed by real community desire for it, not
| premature optimization.
|
| Having played both games, Factorio started to choke on co-op
| multiplayer at the scale of mid-10^5 entities. Satisfactory
| started to crack (lag artifacts and desyncs) at mid-10^3.
| leddt wrote:
| Having played both, my opinion is that they are very different
| games. Satisfactory is much simpler in its mechanics.
|
| Factorio is built on a custom engine and heavily optimized. I
| doubt you can build a factorio-style mega base in satisfactory
| and keep things performant.
|
| Factorio has procedural map generation, enemies that build
| bases and attack you, blueprints, construction and logistics
| robots, logic circuits, incredible mod support, and you can
| play with dozens of people in multiplayer and things stay
| performant and enjoyable.
|
| In the the two games chose a very different development cycle.
| Factorio released early and often and listened to their
| community by adding and changing what players were asking for.
| Satisfactory first released a game that was pretty close to
| finished, and released, so far, very few updates.
|
| I will say that I enjoy both games, but for different reasons.
| fs2 wrote:
| Looks like fun and it's a game that's been on my watchlist for
| years. But I've reached an age where I'm pretty sure that once I
| finish the rocket and escape the planet (that's what seems to be
| the main goal) I'll never play it again. Just can't be bothered
| anymore by endless grinding and optimizing. Addictive games like
| MMOs and building games stopped being addictive for me once I
| figure out how it works.
| Dahoon wrote:
| That doesn't mean it isn't worth playing the games. Time you
| enjoy wasting isn't wasted time.
| lucb1e wrote:
| I don't know anyone who launched their first rocket faster
| than most story-based games that you pay EUR60 for and get
| one or two dozen hours of content if you're lucky.
|
| Factorio is half the price for more hours of entertainment,
| even if you never touch it again after your first rocket
| launch (assuming you do enjoy it until the first rocket
| launch and don't put it away before then).
|
| A minority of players (like me) likes to continue expanding
| and optimizing after the first rocket launch, but indeed most
| people go play something else first and start another map
| later, perhaps with friends. On your second run, you'll build
| a much better factory. Not necessarily because you like
| optimizing so much, but now that you know the game you can do
| things much better and most people enjoy seeing that they
| really made progress in learning how to play a game.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > But I've reached an age where I'm pretty sure that once I
| finish the rocket and escape the planet (that's what seems to
| be the main goal) I'll never play it again.
|
| It'll still probably take you a good 40+ hours to do that.
| Which is fantastic entertainment value for $30.
|
| Looking at the steam global achievements, 16.1% of people have
| finished the game at all (mid-game achievements are sitting
| around ~40-50%). There's then 2 other achievements - finish the
| game in under 15 hours, and finish the game in under 8 hours.
| Only 2.1% and 1.6% have those achievements, respectively.
|
| I'm also a "finish the game & put it down forever" type of
| person, but I've come back to Factorio multiple times. Helped
| tremendously by the map generator settings letting you
| basically "skip" parts of the game you don't like, or double-
| down on ones you do like. Enjoyed the trains? Make the ore
| patches more spread out, but larger so that your train installs
| are both more necessary and are more permanent. Enjoy being
| forced to improvise base layouts? Ramp up the cliff generator.
| Hate cliffs? Disable them. Feeling stressed from the external
| pressure that enemies provide? Disable them. Etc...
| chillacy wrote:
| If it helps I found the addictive driver of factorio to be very
| different than MMOs. It's more like the feeling of cleaning and
| refactoring code, but more enjoying than frustrating. Hard to
| explain but their game design is quite good.
| wadkar wrote:
| If you want to see how complex and yet beautiful this game can
| get, checkout Nilaus' Factorio Master Class on YouTube:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLV3rF--heRVu2xlDGZiRb...
|
| He also made those designs with community participation on his
| Twitch stream if you're into watching old streams. I believe he
| is one of the best Factorio content creator.
|
| I also want to mention about how Factorio developers have been
| continuously blogging their weekly updates, FFF - Friday Factorio
| Facts throughout the development. They're really interesting and
| show how the game evolved and it's history.
| anilnayak wrote:
| https://oreotv.xyz/
| rgoulter wrote:
| I played one game of Factorio that took about 30 hours; I
| 'almost' finished then decided I was done with that.
|
| Then, when I was between jobs, I thought "oh, I see how I could
| do a better job; I'll just play one more game.." and my playtime
| quickly went up to 120 hours. I was writing TODO-lists in a book,
| etc. (The "craft no more than X items by hand" achievement was
| fun).
|
| I mean, +1 to both "if you're on here you'll love it" and "if
| you're on here, be careful you don't spend too much time on it".
| ecmascript wrote:
| Recently, my gf found me still awake at 05:00 playing factorio.
| Had completely forgot the time and thought it was closer to
| 02:00. That's when I realized that I had to stop playing the
| game because it is so addictive. I simply can't play that game
| in moderation.
| andrewjrhill wrote:
| Oxygen Not Included has the same sort of effect for me and my
| experience with that game has kept me from picking up
| Factorio. Once you start getting into ONI's automation tools
| and design optimization; time just ceases to exist.
|
| It remains the first and only game I have ever fully removed
| from my Steam library (not just uninstalled) after purchase.
| nomercy400 wrote:
| ONI is great, yet one 'game' is much longer than Factorio.
| I bet you can launch a rocket much sooner in Factorio than
| in ONI. Also, I found Factorio easier and less stressful
| than ONI. There's no real 'lose' case and the progress
| feels faster.
| Mangalor wrote:
| +1 ONI. Truly a black hole that manages to warp time
| itself.
|
| Also maddening being an early fan in beta, then repeatedly
| throwing out whole designs, plans and game files as they
| kept adding new things in the game and changing them.
| mNovak wrote:
| However I've found ONI nukes my modest computer much more
| rapidly than Factorio. That was disappointing, coming from
| massive sprawling Factorio bases.
| Bedon292 wrote:
| I have played the game to completion once. I was utterly
| addicted and could not tell time while playing. I would say
| something like "Ok, just 5 minutes to finish this and save."
| and an hour later still be playing. I have over 60 hours in
| the game and I played it for like a week. It was bad. I have
| not let myself go back.
| hypersoar wrote:
| This is why I've never played Factorio and do not plan to. It
| sounds like exactly my kind of drug.
| lucb1e wrote:
| I have two friends who said the same... it's kind of weird
| to think there are games that can just be too good or
| dangerously good.
|
| But then, some other friends just don't like it. Still a
| personal thing I suppose.
| secondcoming wrote:
| I only discovered factorio a few weeks ago, bought it immediately
| after playing the demo. Great stuff.
|
| What's especially impressive is how little CPU it uses and my
| GPU's fans don't go mental.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Meanwhile my decent laptop runs a base producing 1000 science
| per minute at ~40fps... enjoy 60fps while it lasts ;)
| secondcoming wrote:
| I hope I get that far!
| [deleted]
| xiaodai wrote:
| the blue print feature confuses me
| Aeolun wrote:
| It just gets your robots to build stuff for you so you don't
| have to.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Or design things without committing to actually building it
| yet.
|
| Or hint/show others how something could be built.
|
| Or remind yourself of how you set something up last time.
|
| (I use blueprints extensively.)
| lebed2045 wrote:
| unpopular opinion.
|
| I've spent several hundred hours playing this game and I think
| this game should be treated as an addictive drug. I know it's my
| own psychological problems but there's whole Reddit thread about
| how it ruined people's plans etc and wasted hundreds of hours of
| their lives. In contract, real "prohibited" substances like LSD,
| MDMA didn't make any negative impact on my life nor addiction.
| How is that?
|
| I feel like all these additive games (especially one which uses
| psychological tricks like Skinner box) are some equivalent of
| brain exploits and should be treated with great caution. Maybe
| labeled somehow and have a reference where all these "exploits"
| and risk properly explained. Can anyone explain what tricks it
| uses to become so addictive?
| Dahoon wrote:
| >real "prohibited" substances like LSD, MDMA didn't make any
| negative impact on my life nor addiction.
|
| I'm sure you are different (or at least think so yourself) but
| I have never heard anyone who use drugs that says otherwise
| before they have stopped using them completely. Also "ruined
| plans" versus "ruined lifes" is quite a difference. It cannot
| be a big surprise that someone who gets addicted to a game
| might also be a drug user. Addiction is not really about the
| drug itself but the person.
| avalys wrote:
| Since the game costs a straight $30 up front and has no in-app
| purchases, subscriptions, or ads, there's really no incentive
| for the developers to use "tricks" to make it addictive. It's
| just what I'd call an old-fashioned "good game."
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Plus the code is ROCK SOLID and always has been -- it hardly
| ever crashes. Yet it's like a pinball machine with 5 million
| balls in play, and still amazingly fast.
|
| Also the beautiful hires Czechnological artwork.
|
| It's top-notch design, execution, and graphics.
| octorian wrote:
| And starts reasonably quickly. And runs really well on
| Linux, with no quirks or hicups.
|
| (As someone who uses a Linux machine as the "primary"
| desktop, only switching to a Windows machine for games and
| other things that need it, I find it really nice to have a
| quick-to-launch game that runs perfectly on Linux.)
| _jjkk wrote:
| AND allows you to easily spin up a dedicated server for
| multiplayer, WITH easily synced mods between all players.
|
| AND well-defined mod migration for updating mods to new
| Factorio versions without breaking them or your maps.
| tomashubelbauer wrote:
| I think you meant to write Skinner box. I wasn't familiar with
| the term and noticed the typo while looking up what it was.
| lebed2045 wrote:
| yes, my bad. Fixed it. I like this video explanation
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c
| lucb1e wrote:
| I watched the whole thing and still have no idea what
| Skinner boxes are beyond that it has something to do with
| making people want to push a proverbial button one more
| time. So how do you actually do that? What ways do games do
| this? They mentioned some loot drops but I never played a
| game with loot drops and so don't know what that means
| either. (The only gaming context I have for the word loot,
| aside from the dictionary definition, is loot boxes, a word
| which doesn't make any sense to me: what did you plunder to
| get that loot---other than your wallet, that is?)
|
| Looking at Wikipedia instead, the Skinner Box page says
| about games:
|
| > Slot machines and online games are sometimes cited as
| examples of human devices that use sophisticated operant
| schedules of reinforcement to reward repetitive actions.
|
| So I guess it's just about wanting to play the game more
| because it's fun and it's not some magic method that game
| designers use to get more eyeballs for a not-so-fun game
| (the way that the linked video explained it)?
| aaanotherhnfolk wrote:
| People watch over a thousand hours of TV per year so if time
| spent was sufficient criteria for addiction we would be a
| pretty afflicted population. Think of how addicted I'd be to
| showering! I do it every day!
|
| I would encourage you to be less hard on yourself. Think of a
| good game like a hobby. People play hundreds of hours of golf
| too and still find the time to lead productive lives.
| Dahoon wrote:
| Watching television for hours every day is at a minimum a bad
| idea and often an addiction. Many people would go crazy
| without a signal. Just look at how many people can't even
| function under COVID! As if being alone with your thoughts or
| with your family could ever be a problem for a healthy
| individual or family.
| rgoulter wrote:
| I mostly agree with this, but.
|
| Watching 100 hours of TV a year is probably not excessive.
| Watching 100 hours of TV a week would be unhealthy. If there
| are people who lack self control such that playing games
| adversely affects their personal lives, then (without
| accusing the developer of malicious intent) something
| unhealthy has gone on.
|
| I can't say I really agree with "x hours on entertainment
| like games is x hours wasted".
|
| I think the comparison "it's more detrimental than illegal
| drugs" is thoughtless rhetoric. Maybe a better comparison
| could be 'empty calories'. -- I would agree I enjoyed playing
| Factorio more than I've enjoyed many other games, though.
| swebs wrote:
| I hate Skinner box games too, but Factorio is definitely not
| one of them. The entire game aside from uranium processing is
| completely deterministic.
| munchbunny wrote:
| It's clear what you meant, but I just wanted to touch on a
| nuance: Skinner boxes can be deterministic. "Skinner box" in
| the context of games generally just refers to the game design
| feeding you a steady drip of reward cycles.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
|
| _Loot box_ mechanics (aka gambling, or randomized reward
| systems) are what the worst offenders are usually exploiting.
| lucb1e wrote:
| I'm curious actually, is uranium processing not
| deterministic? Does it not depend on the seed? Or is that
| seed only for the map and does it not influence other random
| events like biters and uranium?
|
| The first multiplayer versions basically synchronised with
| each other and then ran independently, just executing the
| keyboard input from other players basically. No central
| server calling the shots. This was hell development-wise, but
| I think that concept hasn't changed too much actually: you
| may have a central server that tells your client whether you
| can really pick up an item from a chest or whether it's
| already gone, but the local simulation is still local (it's
| not as if there is an incoming video stream or stream of all
| entities that have moved; far from it, it's a handful of
| kilobytes per second). The random engines almost have to be
| synchronized as I never noticed more data traffic during
| biter attacks or such.
| db48x wrote:
| Of course it's still deterministic. It's a computer
| program, so it has to be deterministic. Multiplayer still
| uses a lockstep simulation, so all clients must compute the
| same random outcome.
|
| But it does introduce an element of randomness that isn't
| present anywhere else in the game. Every other recipe in
| the game has fixed inputs and outputs with known ratios,
| and often very nice ratios. Put in two iron plates and get
| out a gear. Put in one copper plate and get out two copper
| wires.
|
| The randomness in uranium processing is used to simulate
| the cascades of centrifuges used for isotope enrichment
| without having to track the enrichment of every single lump
| of uranium, and without having to introduce a hundred
| different types of uranium ore items. Instead you have a
| 0.7% chance of getting a lump of uranium-235 every time you
| process some uranium ore; the rest of the time you get
| uranium-238. 235 is used for fuel, 238 is used for ammo and
| for further enrichment.
| db48x wrote:
| Ironically I don't think there are any underhanded tricks in
| Factorio to make it more addictive. There are certainly no loot
| boxes or randomized rewards. What it does have is a series of
| tasks that escalate in complexity. Completing these tasks well
| gives a feeling of great satisfaction, and the result is a
| single enormous machine of your own individual design. If
| that's a bad thing, then we'll have to make engineering itself
| a controlled substance.
| lebed2045 wrote:
| isn't the same for lets say an app development?
| munchbunny wrote:
| You mean in the sense that programming can be addicting?
|
| Factorio doesn't do the loot box stuff that F2P games are
| famous for. I think the best way to describe the game's
| addictiveness is that it's programming, but simpler, and
| gamified, with much more immediate emotional payoff.
|
| The thing Factorio does do is that it evenly spaces out its
| achievement moments so that you get a steady stream of
| goals and accomplishing goals. That's what makes it so
| addictive: you feel like you're constantly overcoming
| challenges. And you are, but it's in a game and doesn't
| translate into real life.
|
| It's definitely addicting. No denying that. I just think it
| Factorio does a good job of giving you enjoyment for the
| time you put into it rather than resorting to gambling
| mechanics like _some games_. (The list is rather long.)
| db48x wrote:
| In many ways. In Factorio, your factory can have
| concurrency, parallelism, race conditions, bottlenecks,
| deadlocks, resource starvation, etc, etc.
|
| Looking for those types of problems and solving them is a
| very fun feedback loop. You can spend a few hours just
| walking around a large factory, making small incremental
| improvements as you go, and your entire factory will be
| visibly better off. The only thing preventing you from
| doing this to your application is the lack of visibility
| into the problems. There's a bottleneck in your code right
| now, but can you find it? They're almost never detectable
| by simple inspection of the source code, so it takes
| specialized tools. I would say then that building a large
| factory is like an optimal form of programming where
| nothing is opaque or hidden from you.
| chillacy wrote:
| Yup, Factorio is addictive in the same way that reaching flow
| (the psychological state) is addictive. It's a game to
| experience the joy of problem solving.
| Majromax wrote:
| > Can anyone explain what tricks it uses to become so
| addictive?
|
| Good game design.
|
| In particular, I see a few broad strokes of good game design
| here:
|
| * There are always a variety of tasks to accomplish of varying
| scope and complexity. If a player doesn't feel like adding on
| the next stage of the factory, they can perform other
| maintenance tasks like cleaning up local bottlenecks or
| aesthetic optimization (e.g. straightening out a section of the
| power network).
|
| * Almost every single problem is directly caused by the
| player's own actions, through a logical chain of events that's
| obvious once the player becomes familiar with the game. Why is
| the widget facility starved for inputs? Because the player
| previously split off 3/4 of the bolts for other production. The
| resulting challenges (see the point above) become meaningful
| because of the history, giving the game a level of intrinsic
| motivation that is usually reserved for sim games like city
| builders.
|
| * There's no single "right way" to win. Some players treat the
| game as a size/speed challenge, to produce the most stuff in
| the fastest time; others look towards the most efficient or
| compact layouts; still others are content to reach the basic
| "win" condition (launching a single rocket) with a bare minimum
| of facilities and a lot of patience. The game doesn't
| condescend to the player to explain at them that their
| playstyle is wrong.
|
| * The game separates "doing something" and "doing something at
| scale," but it makes the player progress to the latter
| eventually. As a more concrete example, the player can build
| the first few science packs (progression tokens) in their
| inventory, Minecraft style, but they very quickly need to set
| up automation to produce the ever-increasing required number in
| a timely way. Over a typical game, the most central aspects of
| production will go through three or four wholesale renovations
| as the player designs around different bottlenecks. It's a kind
| of intrinsic progression that I've seen _no_ other game
| replicate -- even if you had access to all the whiz-bang
| shinies at the start of the game, the fixed costs of using them
| would still push the player to a "starter base -> big base"
| progression.
|
| In some ways, it might be better to treat Factorio not as a
| single game that is 'won' or 'lost' through arbitrary rules,
| but instead as a hobby. "I've spent several hundred hours
| playing with model trains" doesn't sound outlandish.
| sbergot wrote:
| This is an excellent answer. When you read their blog you
| realize that all those points have guided the current design
| of the game. There was multiple iteration of the tech tree to
| invite the player gently into the different "phases" of the
| game. (see https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-275).
|
| They carefully thought about the name of things, the cost of
| things to communicate clearly to a new player what he is
| supposed to do next (manufacture new thing, ramp up the
| production of old thing, etc).
| cwkoss wrote:
| Will Wright has a great quote on game design that I can't
| find, but it's something like "What makes games fun is when
| the player has as many choices as possible, and all of them
| are good choices."
|
| I think factorio succeeds in this well: there are always many
| things to do which will improve things, so you have to try to
| optimize which is is the best decision to advance furthest
| with a given amount of time.
| zokier wrote:
| As someone who tried it 5-6 years ago when it first popped up in
| my bubble, reached end-game and got bored, is there some summary
| of how the game has changed since? Of course listing every single
| change doesn't make sense, but any big changes to the core game?
| db48x wrote:
| The early prototypes really nailed the core gameplay loop. The
| biggest changes since then have been to smooth out the
| complexity of the various subsystems, vastly increase
| performance so that you can have a vastly larger factory, and
| to introduce new types of puzzles such as the nuclear reactors.
| Blueprints were added fairly early on, followed by straight-up
| copy and paste a few years later, and they really changed the
| game. In the earliest prototypes, doubling the speed of your
| research required manually placing down all the belts and
| assemblers in order to double the size of your factory. With
| blueprints doubling the size of your factory is a much higher-
| level puzzle of cloning the pieces and plumbing them together,
| rather than the lower-level grind of placing a thousand
| machines. Trains were added at some point as well, which gives
| you a long-range transport capability. The circuit network was
| added so that your factory can make automated decisions without
| your direct involvement. And the UI has been greatly improved
| as well.
| lurker458 wrote:
| in addition there are several mods that increase the depth of
| the production tree and materials used
| db48x wrote:
| True! I've been playing Space Exploration
| (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/space-exploration) recently.
| osipovas wrote:
| If you'd like to increase the depth of the production tree,
| consider checking out Pyanodon's mods:
|
| https://mods.factorio.com/user/pyanodon
| dragontamer wrote:
| Endgame options have grossly improved. Overall, combat has been
| automated at endgame (artillery trains automatically destroy,
| and automatically explore the map for you). Nuclear bombs can
| be used to one-shot endgame biter bases.
|
| "Alien Tech" has been removed. All technology options are built
| traditionally, and now have 7-tiers with names. Red, Green,
| Grey, blue, Purple, Yellow, and White (aka: Space/Infinite
| research).
|
| Infinite research are ~7 or so techs at endgame which go on
| infinitely. +Weapon damage for the most part, but there is also
| +Productivity (which makes mines last longer and mine faster).
|
| In effect, the core gameplay loop has been extended into an
| infinite endgame loop. The late game techs are extremely
| powerful and automate everything that was boring ~5 years ago
| (ie: killing biters became boring. So its now fully automated
| with artillery trains).
| suyjuris wrote:
| > Nuclear bombs can be used to one-shot endgame biter bases.
|
| Forget biters, nuclear bombs quickly remove large numbers of
| trees, which are the _true_ enemy!
|
| On a more serious note, there have also been countless
| quality of life improvements, like high-resolution graphics,
| reworked UI, or copy-and-paste (literally just Ctrl-C /
| Ctrl-V, I have used it even without robots, its so
| convenient). If you have radar coverage, the map allows
| zooming in fully (rendered just like the normal view) and you
| can place blueprints and issue deletion commands anywhere on
| the map without moving.
|
| Incidentally, you can also order artillery strikes to play a
| 'prank' on your unsuspecting friend who is standing
| motionlessly. (Which is why I made a habit out of standing
| close to the most expensive thing in the vicinity.)
| karpathy wrote:
| Addicting and dangerous. When I was in the thick of it my nights
| were restless as my brain continued to spin on my factory and
| various ideas for its refactoring. I also suddenly can't not see
| our global economy and its gradual automation as a massive
| ongoing MMORPG game of Factorio. The end state then becomes as
| clear as the state of my final factory - we'd feed raw renewable
| energy into the system and automatically manufacture an abundance
| of all goods that people desire. Maybe they all just pop out of
| the automaton and we gradually lose ability to understand it, fix
| it, improve it, etc. Depressing. :)
| dluan wrote:
| Fully automated luxury gay space something.
| akozak wrote:
| It's sort of that way today, except there are disempowered wage
| workers powering it all and not-so-clean energy.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Why would the people who own the factories just give the output
| to people?
|
| What could people possibly offer, when all the things they're
| capable of making can be produced at zero cost?
|
| I'm not being snarky, this is something I genuinely worry
| about. I think Universal Basic Income is the only reasonable
| answer.
| cheez wrote:
| You had the answer yourself. Legislation. Government-run
| factories for the benefit of the people.
| negamax wrote:
| You mean governments nationalize the factories?
| cheez wrote:
| either/or. History is full of these types of tradeoffs.
| In the completely hypothetical example from above, it
| would be worth it to figure something out.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| Build new ones.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| I'm starting to see that UBI is becoming the "answer" to many
| things in the same way that crypto is the "answer" to many
| things.
| rokobobo wrote:
| I disagree with the other answers to your question. There's
| no guarantee that "the masses" would be able to lay claim and
| ownership on these automated factories. I very much think the
| world will move in a darker direction, where the owners of
| these factories ensure their perpetual control over the rest
| of us. As for what they get from it? The feeling of power and
| superiority.
|
| As for the forms of control they will exert, I can think of a
| few options: media, access to healthcare, and employing you
| to be a useless drone just so you don't rebel--or to stroke
| their ego by beating you in a video game, like the link
| below:
|
| https://www.wired.com/2017/02/clive-thompson-future-of-
| work-...
| didibus wrote:
| > Why would the people who own the factories just give the
| output to people? What could people possibly offer, when all
| the things they're capable of making can be produced at zero
| cost?
|
| The answer is simple, protection from them taking it by
| force. This is literally the reason for liberal democracies.
|
| Dictatorship, feudalism, and other forms of authoritarian
| structure always come with the downside that the ones at the
| bottom are trying to get the ones at the top. Thus if you are
| at the top, you live in worry and fear of a rebelion,
| revolution, a coup, from your family or friends to betray
| you, etc.
|
| In that scenario, your day job becomes maintaining your power
| and authority at all times. Which like any other job, is
| taxing, tiresome, and hard work. So even though on paper it
| seems you've got all the goods and services at zero cost,
| there's a tremendous cost to yourself to maintain that
| position when others are trying to steal it from you.
|
| That's why, the "right to property" is fundamental. You want
| a society which can guarantee that right, and give you piece
| of mind that what you own is yours and no one is going to
| take it by force. So you can relax and enjoy the fruit of
| your labor (or inherited factories output).
|
| One solution for this is to create a system that is governed
| by the rule of law, where no players is in such a bad state
| that they could be willing to risk it all to steal your piece
| of the pie. Thus a balance must be struck, where everyone can
| find satisfaction, even if some get to have a lot more than
| others.
| kukx wrote:
| "and give you piece of mind that what you own is yours and
| no one is going to take it by force" except for the
| government that takes stuff by force eg by collecting taxes
| etc.
| didibus wrote:
| That's one solution to not have people take it by force.
| You agree to a taxation scheme, which trickles down, yet
| you still retain most of it yourself, and it satisfies
| everyone. You know exactly how much to give, and you can
| achieve the right balance of just enough to keep everyone
| content.
|
| So its way better to willingly agree to participate in a
| tax scheme, than being at risk of beheading from masses
| or poison in your drink.
|
| There are other schemes, but it's always the same idea,
| you need to keep people happy enough and satisfied so
| they don't come for your stuff. That way, you can enjoy
| it in peace.
|
| Edit: Well assuming a liberal democratic taxation system.
| Otherwise taxes can be a way to take even more from
| people at the bottom, like in feudalism, where land
| owners tax their labourers for the right to use their
| land.
| jiofih wrote:
| You just discovered utopian communism, the end game - the
| solution is that the people "owning" the factories are the
| same who receive its output!
| wjmao88 wrote:
| If the people who own the factories can make everything they
| want, then they have no incentive to expand their factories
| beyond what is necessary to give them what they want, and,
| unless their factories takes up all available resources, then
| what prevents other people from making their own factories?
| So everyone will just have enough factories to be self
| sufficient on their own.
|
| However, there are two conditions for that to happen: 1. That
| there are enough resources to build factories for everyone 2.
| Everyone have access to the knowledge and means to create
| those factories.
|
| The way I see it, space exploration is vital in guaranteeing
| the first condition, and having an open forum of knowledge
| sharing and research is needed guarantees the second
| condition.
| ummonk wrote:
| Art (with factory owners patronizing artists), luxury
| restaurants, sex industry, etc. There is plenty of room for
| unautomated work to redistribute money from rich people to
| ordinary people in the absence of government action. There
| would be extreme levels of socioeconomic stratification, but
| I don't think people would just starve or whatever due to
| lack of jobs.
| philwelch wrote:
| > The end state then becomes as clear as the state of my final
| factory - we'd feed raw renewable energy into the system and
| automatically manufacture an abundance of all goods that people
| desire. Maybe they all just pop out of the automaton and we
| gradually lose ability to understand it, fix it, improve it,
| etc.
|
| This is the premise of E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops".
| louwrentius wrote:
| I've clocked ~2300 hours on this game. It's called 'cracktorio'
| for a reason.
|
| The scaling up is so fun. When you launch your first rocket,
| that's just the start.
|
| The goal is to build an enormous base, to try and launch a
| rocket every minute or even faster.
|
| It requires elaborate multi-lane train/rails networks to
| sustain a base like that and it is awesome.
|
| But you can build your bases any way you like and use any
| technology you want.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Great game and it has come a long way. Even the early versions
| were quite addicting. For me this is one of the best games in the
| last 10 years along with Kerbal Space Program (there may be
| others, time is in short supply these days).
|
| If you are not into computer games, I would still recommend to
| visit their site. They have "friday facts" where they describe
| the work they did over the week an what challenges they had to
| solve. It is very well written and poses interesting problems.
| Really interesting for software devs, even if you are not in game
| development.
| seer wrote:
| Oh if only I was not a programmer!
|
| KSP has taught me so much about subjects I was interested in,
| but afraid to put in the time in - rocket science/engineering,
| orbital mechanics etc.
|
| I've not tried Factorio myself but I'd wager it will try to
| teach me stuff I mostly already know - queue theory,
| concurrency, automation...
| Aperocky wrote:
| KSP's kOS mod package is what made the game 10x more fun for
| me. Everything is automated now.
| me_me_me wrote:
| Factorio is much easier. (Cracktorio a running joke)
|
| Its base appeal/game loop is building new system and then
| doing optimization and refactoring. As you progress through
| game you itch to improve things and do them better at bigger
| scale.
|
| You build a small setup to produce a wire.
|
| Wire is used to build next thing. Next thing is used as input
| for another thing, and so on.
|
| But you now need ton of wire. So you have to go back and
| create more wire production, but there is no space there...
| so you refactor or build more wire production elsewhere...
| but how do you connect it... and copper ore is low, need to
| build train to ship more ore from somewhere else... and so on
| and on until you realize it Sunday 10pm. Where did my weekend
| go?
|
| KSP forces you to learn how things work if you want to go
| beyond mun. Transfer orbits and plane equalization done by
| feel doesnt work outside of Kerbin SOI. At that stage KSP has
| a huge step for player to take in order to progress in game.
|
| But also you now understand a lot about rocket science.
| Factorio doesn't really do that. You might learn some at
| intuitive level like: planning for future, leaving room for
| expansion, don't do everything at once, don't forget to build
| automated death traps outside you home xD
| lsaferite wrote:
| > until you realize it Sunday 10pm. Where did my weekend
| go?
|
| It's much worse really, it's Sunday, two weeks later.
| bregma wrote:
| Railroad signalling.
| munchbunny wrote:
| Factorio only sort of deals with queuing theory, concurrency,
| and so on. Probably to the same extent relative to the actual
| depth of these subjects as Kerbal Space Program deals with
| aerospace concepts relative to what aerospace engineers do.
|
| But IMO that's not actually the hardest part of Factorio. The
| hardest part of Factorio is the same as for software
| engineering: how to build something that scales and where you
| can still reason about it. One of the big challenges after
| just "beating the game" is hitting specific scale targets
| (the community calls it megabase building), and the factory
| sizes needed to do that definitely reach the complexity
| limits of human brains, so many of these players start
| establishing design conventions and start writing down notes
| and documentation and calculations for themselves.
|
| I've definitely done things like using a stopwatch to measure
| roundtrip time for a train in order to calculate
| latency/throughput numbers for a supply chain in Factorio.
| But you rarely need to do more than back of the napkin math
| to be effective.
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| I think it'd be cool if a "joint mod" was created between
| factorio and KSP. You use factorio to get raw materials, the
| R&D tree is shared between the games, and when you want to
| launch something, your available parts are whatever you've
| manufactured and loaded into the assembly building.
|
| I'm an industrial engineer and have thought about how to
| teach manufacturing concepts through the game. Tons of great
| lessons such as one piece flow, problems when you build up
| inventory, correctly balancing different production rates
| between machines, factory layout, etc.
|
| And as another commenter pointed out, sometimes you're
| "refactoring code" and paying your technical debt.
| munchbunny wrote:
| At one point there was definitely a mod where you built the
| rocket in Factorio and launched it in KSP.
| flixic wrote:
| It's the game to teach people what technical debt and refactoring
| is.
|
| When you start building your factory, you think about how to get
| first steps just done (ship it!). Over time complexity and scope
| of your factory increases, but old code, I mean old machines, are
| still there, getting in the way.
|
| You can choose to ignore it and work around it using underground
| belts and similar solutions, or you can take on a proper
| refactoring, limiting your progress in the short term.
| halfFact wrote:
| That's quite a take. The upgrades gives you totally different
| options.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Programmer crack!!!
| snicky wrote:
| For me the game got so much easier when I started to construct
| drones. There was almost no need to build belts any more! Not
| sure what it says about me as a developer though...
| JakeTheAndroid wrote:
| I have built an entire no belt factory. It works for the most
| part but damn it's slow. I do transition a lot of the
| technical debt from the green and red sciences so I can
| properly support the rest of the science development.
| vsareto wrote:
| You can also use the internet to find solutions to all of it!
| bransonf wrote:
| It's for this reason I personally dislike factorio as a game.
| Don't get me wrong, the game itself is fantastic, but I don't
| have the patience for it.
|
| Rather, I find myself trying to build a factory top down. I
| write a bunch of sticky notes with material requirements and
| calculate backwards "how many labs do I need?" "How many gears
| do I need to make the beakers?" "How much do I need to mine to
| match that hourly throughput of gears?
|
| It's the perfect candidate of a game to write an algorithm for.
| Assuming a known seed, it's trivial to design the most
| efficient system based on those parameters.
|
| And at that point it just becomes work. It's really designed as
| a bottom up game, but I think about problems top down and for
| that reason factorio drives me nuts.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| You really need a combination of top-down vision combined
| with bottom-up implementation, mixed together with a healthy
| dose of pragmatism.
|
| It's enough to know that you'll need lots of gears and to
| know that you'll need high-capacity mining eventually. But
| there's no great harm from having a few extra or from having
| not quite enough to max out beaker production; just start the
| process, get some gears, get some beakers, and refine as
| needed. Without a little top-down vision, you'll end up
| severely overproducing some things and underinvesting in
| others, which is no good, but you'll never be able to build
| an optimal factory without first building a suboptimal one.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| There's still plenty of room for creativity even with an
| extreme top-down approach, like this series does:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ8QDQmOoys
|
| > Over a few months I designed an entire Factorio base
| without testing any of it. The goal is to create a mid-sized
| base capable of building a megabase. A secondary goal is to
| not break down or rebuild anything ever.
|
| The challenge isn't that it's hard to figure out the ratios
| or math out the machines you need, it's in getting to having
| the production to make that base without falling asleep
| waiting on things. Continual bootstrapping towards that end
| goal is the gameplay.
| dom96 wrote:
| This is actually what ruins the game for me. I get to a place
| where I need to recreate large chunks of the factory and it
| just feels too much like work.
|
| It's one of those games that I wish I could love, but whenever
| I attempt to start it now I just remember that feeling of "ugh,
| why don't I instead code something, at least I'll create
| something".
| outworlder wrote:
| > This is actually what ruins the game for me. I get to a
| place where I need to recreate large chunks of the factory
| and it just feels too much like work.
|
| Are you using drones and blueprints?
|
| Once you unlock drones, you can create huge swaths of
| factories in seconds. You just need to come up with a design
| that works, and then replicate it.
| simias wrote:
| I feel the same way, although it's even worse with Zachtronic
| games (like SpaceChem for instance). At first I enjoy them
| because "it's just like coding" but then after an hour or so
| I think "well, it's just like coding" and I realize that I
| could be doing something more productive. I guess it must be
| like playing Guitar Hero if you're a professional guitarist.
|
| I think these games are great at teaching people about
| concurrent programming, race conditions and locking though.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Kind of how all games are.
|
| I could sit here and get virtual levels and virtual
| money... or go raise my actual human fitness level, or go
| work on my actual business for actual money.
|
| Games are an easy win to feed you nuggets of feeling like
| you did stuff, but a poor substitute for real life.
| the_af wrote:
| There is more to games than _videogames_ where you raise
| levels or virtual money (which are, in turn, a very
| specific class of videogames).
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| Eh. Time and place. People need downtime and even though
| I don't game much these days, I think fondly of all the
| hours of Starcraft and Starcraft 2 I played. And beating
| Xan on Godlike in Unreal Tournament 2004 (and totally
| cleaning up when we had lan parties) was just so fun.
|
| Real life is fun too. But games are part of life.
| vlunkr wrote:
| Would you say the same thing about fictional books?
| They're generally regarded as being worth the time, but
| aren't they also "a poor substitute for real life." You
| could be having your own experiences instead of reading
| made-up ones. I don't see why games should be different.
| Certainly not all games are created equally, and some
| exist only to suck away time and money, but it's obvious
| when that's the intention.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Recreation is important and one form is not more "real"
| than another. Notwithstanding the fact that some games
| feel like work (and therefore suck, in my view), for
| those that are enjoyable, that provides value, whether it
| be chess, team sports or a video game.
|
| Maybe there's something to be said for opting to lead a
| more creative rather than consumptive lifestyle.
| Ultimately though, something only matters if you think it
| does. My work is largely bullshit, and I can't think of a
| business I'd want to get into that also wouldn't feel
| like bullshit. I think the value I'd extract would
| precisely be in the connections made and the problem-
| solving itself. How important is another piece of
| enterprise software to extract money from people that no
| one thought they wanted until it exists?
| ehnto wrote:
| Have you considered changing your line of work, and
| perhaps seeing if you can use your existing skills to
| help you in a new career?
|
| I'm eyeing off a few avenues, I wouldn't mind not writing
| software for money anymore but it would also be cool to
| use my hard earned experience to my advantage. One avenue
| I thought of was music composition, because there are
| ways to automate some of it with code that I could use to
| provide some extra value, but it's also enough of a leap
| from my current career that it would be a wildly new
| endeavor.
| twicetwice wrote:
| What about a B2C app that solves a real problem for real
| users in a new or better way than existing apps? That
| seems like an easy way you can deliver real value. That's
| what's gotten me moving on all my personal projects so
| far--though granted, I haven't published/monetized them
| yet, just shared them with friends and family. But I get
| value from them and my friends and family get value from
| them, and that makes me feel good.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Value to someone, sure. I wouldn't necessarily see the
| value in it.
|
| I do have personal projects, one to do good, others out
| of curiosity. Mostly out of an urgency to be creative. I
| don't think this carries more meaning than pure leisure.
| limomium wrote:
| Eww, games trying to substitute 'real life'. Realism is
| boring. Games should be ART. Something you CAN'T
| experience in real life.
| OOPMan wrote:
| Nonsensical argument unless you generally spend time you
| _should_ be working gaming or spend time you could be
| relaxing working.
|
| If you want to be a workaholic and spend your free time
| working, go right ahead.
|
| But you will end up like my father, mid 70s with no real
| relationships with your family, obsessed with "completing
| your legacy" and a general inability to enjoy anything
| that isn't "work".
|
| If that sound like fun to you, go right ahead.
|
| Me, I'll continue to work at work and spend my free time
| on relaxation.
|
| You only get one life, spending it chasing dollars and
| dimes is a poor life plan
| clinta wrote:
| I work on programming projects I find fun. What makes it
| recreation is that it's something I want to work on, I
| don't have others imposing deadlines or requirements.
|
| A mechanic can enjoy working on his own project car in
| the off time.
|
| Both of these things are productive in a way that playing
| games isn't, but they're still recreational. It's not
| spending your life chasing dimes. It's looking at the
| different recreational things you could be doing, and
| choosing the ones that also intersect with being
| productive and have a side-effect of helping you
| professionally.
| the_af wrote:
| Games and play -- of the "unproductive" kind -- are a
| fundamental and valuable human activity. Not everything
| has to produce something beyond mental well-being. Plus,
| of course, children _learn_ by playing.
| ehnto wrote:
| We can keep learning by playing as we get older, we just
| change the scope. You have to tend to your curiosity to
| keep it fit and capable.
| the_af wrote:
| Sure. You don't have to convince _me_ of this! I 'm
| already a believer :)
| clinta wrote:
| Nobody said your hobbies must be productive. But some
| people prefer it to be, and I don't think it's right to
| shame those people as if they're just chasing dimes or
| denying part of what it is to be human.
|
| Productive is all relative anyway. Children learning by
| playing is productive, the productive part is the
| learning that is a byproduct. Working on a project car is
| fun in itself. It doesn't become less fun if the person
| doing it is a professional mechanic. Would you tell a
| person who plays games professionally in an e-sports
| league that they must do something else for fun?
|
| I think it is a sign of good life when you find a way to
| get paid for doing what you enjoy. And if you enjoy it,
| then it is still fun when you do it outside of work. The
| productive benefits of it do not make it less fun.
| [deleted]
| flemhans wrote:
| Your father got a child, so he's clearly not obsessing
| enough about work.
| smaddox wrote:
| I agree with both of you, to a degree. Playing a single
| player video game is unlikely to help you build
| relationships with others. And yet never stopping to
| enjoy life in all its variation leads to a pretty empty
| life, too.
| vlunkr wrote:
| > Playing a single player video game is unlikely to help
| you build relationships with others
|
| I disagree. I have fond memories of discussing Zelda on
| the playground as a kid. Similarly, online communities
| are formed around basically every notable single player
| game. It's still a shared experience, even if it's not
| shared at the same moment.
| Koshkin wrote:
| Yeah, most games should stay in a fantasy land... Like
| where you mostly kill your enemies.
| nico_h wrote:
| But there is only so much time that you can be effective
| at running a business or running. Some people need to
| relax from the stress of work and tiredness of exercise
| by playing games for example.
| [deleted]
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| But is it all that relaxing to build and run a complex
| virtual factory? Sometimes if the level of difficulty is
| too high it can become stressful.
|
| I understand that there's satisfaction in it. That
| satisfaction can be hard to get at work sometimes. At
| work, you can be asked to work on things you don't like,
| that sometimes feel even more pointless than a game.
|
| Part of the reason why I have programming side-projects
| at home is because they're an outlet to get the
| satisfaction of building software the way I want to.
| devonkim wrote:
| The consequences of messing up a make believe factory is
| essentially nothing except one's own time loss. The
| consequences of messing up a real factory are obviously
| substantial. What games or side projects let us do
| sometimes is to explore and enter a more diffuse mode of
| thought which has some tangential benefits to other
| activities. Spending too much time "being productive" can
| be counterproductive because one can get tunnel vision
| too busy executing tasks instead of reimagining or
| optimizing those tasks. Too much time questioning the
| work and nothing materially important gets done either.
| xyzal wrote:
| Anecdote: I got my first programming job while in the
| middle of a SpaceChem run (previously, I was just a hobby
| coder). I quit the game in a few days after starting that
| job, as I found it required the same "brain juices" I had
| already depleted at the office.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| Yes, my greatest lament about life is that "brain juice"
| appears to be a limited resource
| dentemple wrote:
| Sometimes referred to as Spoon Theory
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory
| barkingcat wrote:
| maybe replenish "brain juice" by drinking it from another
| brain?
| thih9 wrote:
| If you're into that kind of metaphors, you may like the
| game 'Carrion'; warning, lots of pixel blood. It launched
| not long ago and does a great job in creating an 80s
| horror atmosphere. At the same time it's a relatively
| easy metroidvania platformer, so I find it a genuinely
| good activity to recover "brain juice" after coding.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Emotional, mental and physical energy are all limited
| resources.
| joquarky wrote:
| We've been calling it mana among my group.
| dwighttk wrote:
| What is it?
| kortex wrote:
| I'd tell you all about it, but I'm currently all out of
| it ;)
|
| Look into Ego Depletion. There's academic disagreement
| over just how "consumable" willpower is. My assessment of
| SOTA is:
|
| - ego/willpower is finite/depletable
|
| - Most people have more or less the same amount of it as
| the average. People with "more willpower" typically are
| more efficient with it
|
| - non-neurotypicals and those that "don't fit in society"
| (ADHD, ASD, bipolar, trans, nonbinary, anxiety, OCD)
| often spend much willpower on "passing"
|
| - it's linked to everything from blood sugar levels,
| insulin levels, brain blood flow, dopamine levels, D1/D2
| activation ratios, and probably gut microbiome
| hutzlibu wrote:
| But I believe, there are different types of "brain
| juice".
|
| I run out of the one required for nasty bug finding, very
| soon, but when that one is gone (and after a short break
| to clear the mind) I can go on creating new
| code/architecture for hours.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| I didn't really see these nuances until I was diagnosed
| with ADHD and prescribed stimulant medication. It
| basically gives me a large tank of "rainbow juice" that
| works for any task and lasts 4-6 hours.
|
| Going back to the parent comment, one remarkable effect
| of this is that I rarely desire to play video games like
| I used to. It seemed like I always had enough juice for
| video games but rarely for other life obligations, but
| with the rainbow juice I am just as motivated to do all
| that other stuff as I am to play video games.
| felbane wrote:
| I see comments like this and seriously start to wonder if
| I'm an almost 40 year old man with undiagnosed ADHD.
|
| If only my insurance covered mental health...
| nouveaux wrote:
| There are online tests you can take. If you score high
| enough, its worth the few hundred dollars to get an
| official diagnoses. This is coming from someone who was
| diagnosed ADHD as an adult.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| I would not feel comfortable needing a drug to be
| productive.
|
| I do struggle a lot at times with focus, but I rather try
| to balance it with good and healthy livestyle. Lots of
| sleep. Exercise, meditation ..
|
| But I have a toddler boy, who can mess with sleep and
| rhythm a lot, so having the possibility of a "rainbow
| juice" is definitely tempting.
|
| Have you noticed bad side effects? Do you allways take
| ritalin(?) for work? Or just on special occacions?
| jjj1232 wrote:
| I'm probably on a very similar drug to OP. I take it
| monday-friday.
|
| Common side effects of ADHD drugs are loss of appetite,
| difficulty sleeping, and increased heart rate. It
| basically puts you into fight or flight mode for 6 hours
| a day. More blood to your brain + muscles, less to
| everything else (digestion, immune system for example).
|
| One weird thing about it is the first few times you take
| it you'll get a feeling of euphoria, like you're on
| cocaine. This is _not_ the way the drug is supposed to
| feel, it goes away if you stick with the same dose for a
| while. Some people keep going up because they think the
| euphoria is part of it, and that's really dangerous.
|
| It really does work incredibly well for me. Especially
| for programming, where you're most productive when you're
| not pulled out of a flow state. I went from a B average
| to straight A's when I started taking it in college. It
| made it so easy to oranize my schedule, I just
| worked/studied from 8-6 every day. No late nights, no
| procrastination.
|
| Personally, I have no feeling of withdrawal when I go off
| of it for weeks at a time. Though I have developed a bit
| of a psychological dependency around work, where I kind
| of tell myself I won't work well without it, which
| becomes self-fulfilling.
|
| It's not all good, not all bad. Hopefully this helps!
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Yes, that was a really helpful shared experience, thank
| you!
|
| Basically, it enforced my point of view to only try it
| out, if I really think it is neccecary.
|
| I never done cocaine, but weed.
|
| With the right time and settings it can help me get into
| a flow lasting for 10+ hours. But weed really does not
| help mid or long term, my productivity goes into steady
| decline after couple of days.
|
| And coffeine I never liked, so I prefer the natural
| rhythm, with varying success.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| I most definitely have mixed feelings about it. Granted,
| I wasn't diagnosed until my mid-30s, and I like to think
| I accumulated a respectable pile of life accomplishments
| beforehand (along with some dramatic failures) so I have
| a pretty thorough understanding of my own performance
| baseline. By the time I had a career and family, my
| problem was no longer failing to be productive, but
| rather failing to be productive at the right things at
| the right times. The modern world is built around
| consistency, planning and schedules and these things
| cause major problems for me, as for most of us with ADHD.
|
| Stimulants (Vyvanse in my case) are blunt instruments;
| they alleviate the specific behavioral problems that
| plague those of us with ADHD but also enhance performance
| in general. The biggest danger that I see in my own
| behavior is the tendency to forget about all the self-
| management practices I learned before my diagnosis. With
| stimulants, you can do irresponsible things like stay up
| late for no good reason, get four hours of sleep, and
| still be fairly productive once the medication kicks in.
| I have to be really honest with myself on a daily basis
| about whether I'm using it to overcome a deficit caused
| by ADHD, or a deficit caused by bad behavior.
|
| The second biggest danger is developing unrealistic
| expectations about what I am capable of accomplishing.
| For example, I am currently pursuing a PhD in computer
| science, and the decision to do so was made by the
| medicated version of myself. I don't regret the decision
| one iota, and it's a goal I've had for many years, but I
| already had a long list of projects and goals when I
| signed up for this and I definitely deluded myself about
| just how many of those other commitments I'd have to set
| aside for a while (or forever) in order to get a PhD.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "my problem was no longer failing to be productive, but
| rather failing to be productive at the right things at
| the right times. "
|
| That is my problem right now, too. I am just scared, that
| medication really does not help me long term, for all the
| reasons you mentioned.
|
| Thank you, for sharing.
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| Seeing this comment makes me think that I should consider
| talking to a doctor about ADHD. I can't even focus on
| playing a video game for more than 30 minutes most of the
| time.
| DC-3 wrote:
| It helps to balance out the stress on different
| faculties. If you write code for 14 hours a day you're
| gonna burnout but if you balance a variety of activities
| it is possible to be very productive while not feeling
| exhausted.
| dgrin91 wrote:
| Wow never saw SpaceChem before. Thanks for the unintended
| recommendation :)
| simias wrote:
| I hope I didn't sound too negative, it's a good game and
| can be quite a bit of fun.
| chris_st wrote:
| I found with "Opus Magnum" that, yeah, it was programming
| of a sort, but since it was all these wacky physical
| devices, that it was enough _unlike_ coding that it
| switched back to being a fun puzzle.
|
| But, yeah, with "TIS-1000" it was just programming, and
| sort of unnecessarily (and unpleasantly) difficult
| programming at that.
| drzaiusx11 wrote:
| I really enjoyed TIS-1000, possibly because of the
| constraints the machine and assembly language posed.
| Finding clever ways to work within those constraints was
| fun. Same sort of fun I get when writing 6502 ASM for ROM
| hacks on my Atari 2600.
|
| In my day job at the time the game came out I was doing
| node.js microservices. So it was refreshing to work at
| the bit level again.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| I felt the same way. And then I think I want to automate it.
|
| I heard scripting is possible? Do experienced players use it,
| to automate things?
| humblebee wrote:
| Have you reached the construction robot tech? It removes
| the requirement to place items by hand, and the game
| largely turns into a "planner" game.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| No, I did not. But I played it 2 years ago and maybe it
| was not even there back then? Anyway, I might give it a
| try again ..
| alyandon wrote:
| Roboports chained together to form large logistics networks
| with construction bots and blueprints (whether of your own
| creation or easily downloaded) my friend.
|
| If recreating a portion of your factory "feels too much like
| work" to do it really sounds like you haven't availed
| yourself fully to the tools the game gives you to do it.
| [deleted]
| Forge36 wrote:
| I usually bootstrap a second base, make heavy use of trains,
| and ship materials back to original base. At this point I
| generally don't tear things down
| nautilus12 wrote:
| Lol this is what a company I worked at did and they spent
| almost a year trying to get version 2 to parity with
| version 1 and finally gave up short of parity
| mumblemumble wrote:
| And thus was born the service-oriented architecture.
| golergka wrote:
| No, that's multiplayer.
| dharmab wrote:
| Not sure why you're downvoted- that's how my friends and
| I would play multiplayer, with certain players taking
| "ownership" of specific raw material sources and shipping
| them to factories operated by other players.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| In the manufacturing industry that's basically drop
| shipping.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| The game has logistics drones that can transfer
| predetermined resources to keep a certain box at a
| certain level.
| nwsm wrote:
| More like if a manufacturer needed to make a new product
| so they built an entire new factory next door and ran
| electric and plumbing from the old building and abandoned
| it.
|
| In fact it's exactly like this because that's what the
| game is about.
| d4rti wrote:
| Yeah, bootstraps all the way: 1. Bootstrap "base 1" to
| Automation 1 (Coal etc.) 2. Bootstrap "Base 2" for
| Red/Green science, automate building components 3. Main bus
| "Science Base" maybe up to first rocket (maybe some train
| in resources) and later repurpose for module construction.
| 4. Train Base to goal SPM factory
|
| The game has some major transition points where refactoring
| makes sense, but often the correct solution is to
| tactically upgrade as much as possible, and get to the
| better point to rebuild.
|
| Seablock playthrough once updated for 1.0.
| flir wrote:
| "Build one to throw away"
| d4rti wrote:
| Somewhat, but also build a new one while letting the old
| one still perform useful work, decommission when it is
| beneficial.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Most players just build a new factory and then deconstruction
| planner their old one en masse once the new one is up.
|
| ...which itself isn't all that different from software
| development.
| pier25 wrote:
| Had the exact same experience with Satisfactory. When you
| need to scale production up it becomes like a real job. You
| need to plan, refactor, etc.
|
| When I now see those videos on Youtube with huge factories I
| wonder how many hours that person has wasted. I'm not against
| enjoying a video game, but when the activity is so similar to
| real work... why not do that instead and get something real
| in return?
| sneak wrote:
| The "guitar hero" vs "learning guitar" paradox.
| syspec wrote:
| Wow I often feel that way when I do most things! I think you
| just have a passion for programming and it is your hobby in
| addition to profession.
| amelius wrote:
| To me it's surprising how many games can actually be viewed
| like work.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| https://youtu.be/48slZc5ITK4?t=319
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I tried one of the truck driving simulators. Got stuck
| behind a slow minivan. Where is the fun in simulating the
| most frustrating part of my workday?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I turned off traffic violations in the options, bought
| the most powerful truck I could, and now make every
| delivery at 90-100 mph.
|
| Of course I'm also doing it in VR and with a steering
| wheel setup
| thdrdt wrote:
| The same with Train Sim. Waiting 5 minutes for a red sign
| is very realistic but there is no fun in it.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| You can use the 40T to remove the problem which could
| have slight repercussions in real life.
| twic wrote:
| According to some games theorists, all games:
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/10/dont
| -...
| jkhdigital wrote:
| I was not prepared for the length of that article but I
| couldn't stop reading
| [deleted]
| totololo wrote:
| So true! Super Mario games are basically a giant learning
| curve of controlling your character, where steps are well
| defined and cut into levels.
| JorgeGT wrote:
| I'm convinced that some games are actually Ender's games.
| Forklift simulator 2020? You're actually controlling a
| forklift somewhere in Germany and Hans is now out of work.
| the_af wrote:
| I guess the obvious thing to point out are the
| multiplayer modes for Call of Duty, Battlefront,
| Overwatch, etc.
|
| Short films have been made about this, and of course
| Ender's Game.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| And much like in Ender's Game, uncountably many are now
| dead by my hand.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/1897/
| kortex wrote:
| For those missing the reference:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forklift_Driver_Klaus_%E2
| %80...
|
| The wiki page is fine, but the video is quite literally
| Not Safe For Work. My German boss at the chemical company
| showed the whole team. Kinda gorey but in the Monty
| Python Black Knight sort of way, and similarly hilarious.
| Klaus' story is made up but it's based upon thousands of
| tales written in blood. Definitely gave me an enhanced
| appreciation for safety culture.
| OJFord wrote:
| Thanks - and for 'Ender's games':
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender%27s_Game
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Just in case you aren't at work:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C37MnfXD1z8
| pmoriarty wrote:
| When my factory has grown so big and unwieldy that I start to
| feel a massive refactoring is in order but that it's going to
| be too much work, I just start a new game and use the lessons
| I learned from the previous game to design a better factory
| next time.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| "Seagull contractor" :-)
| klyrs wrote:
| That sounds like a shitty sequel to the goose game.
| ehnto wrote:
| Likewise, and I spotted it early on so never really got into
| it. Systematic games are my favourite kind of game, but when
| it gets as raw as factorio is I suddenly snap out of
| immersion and realise I'm working but in a game.
| julianwachholz wrote:
| Yeah but you can have robots do all the heavy lifting.
| organsnyder wrote:
| I've found it actually heightens the enjoyment for me. Unlike
| work, I can completely refactor my base from the ground up
| and no one will yell at me.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| The fun is once you have the construction bots for me you can
| make them destroy segments and from then on you can just
| ghost build everything else.
|
| For example, I am playing on an OARC server, basically new
| players get their own base space, and I'm trying to get to my
| friend we both kinda picked 'far away' as options so we
| wouldnt clash with each other, so I've got blueprints I keep
| dropping that keep expanding my logistics network + power
| grid northward / westward as I make my way to him. The
| construction bots do all the work, my factory gets all the
| materials to them.
|
| I've taken a break since, but then once I can reach out to
| him I will probably build train tracks going to and from his
| base and mine. I'm also using the robots to build a massive
| base. I can just ghost place whatever I want where I want it
| as long as the robot tower can cover that area.
| trollied wrote:
| I've just got to the point where i can use robots. How do
| you go about ghost building stuff? Do you have to use
| blueprints? Can the constrution robots just build anything
| for you if the mats are in chests?
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| They build from the logistics chests, and yeah by
| blueprints. You can also have them tear things down as
| well, and they wind up in logistics chests. One thing I
| am doing is I have two separate logistics networks, and
| from my main I have conveyors taking things I want to the
| 2nd logistics network.
|
| You can also start a Sandbox game mode to explore
| everything you can do (note infinity chests are extremely
| useful, you pick a item in the game, and it will produce
| as many of them as you want perpetually, then your
| inserters can pull those out into conveyors simulating
| different parts of what you'd like your factory to look
| like). Definitely recommend this approach, you can
| explore as much as you'd like to explore.
|
| Also note, there are a few websites with prebuilt
| blueprints as well.
| winstonewert wrote:
| You should have gotten a tutorial presented when you got
| bots, that'll go over over how it works.
|
| You can just place ghost items by hand (press shift) but
| not much point. The advantage is being able to smack down
| whole bunches of machines in blueprints.
|
| They can build anything if the products are in provider
| chests. They have the exact items, they won't build from
| intermediate materials.
| sinfulprogeny wrote:
| It's possible to order bots to put out things for you
| without blueprints. You need a personal roboport, and
| some construction bots in your inventory. It's been a
| while since I played, so I don't really remember if you
| just place with left click, or some modifier and left
| click. It vastly increases the range you can reach when
| building manually and its an excellent qol upgrade. The
| more construction bots you have (up to the researched
| limit) the more faster it'll be, because they have to
| return to you to pick up the next piece.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I forgot to mention in my comment, if you hold shift when
| putting something down, it will ghost it. So you can have
| 1 of every item you need, no need for a personal robot
| port, and they will ghost it. The great thing about
| letting bots build is if you don't have all the materials
| they will drop it as it comes into the logistics network!
|
| Edit: fixed a typo
| KONAir wrote:
| It really feels like a time waster until you get the drones
| to do those chores. I had a huge sprawl just because teching
| up to drones again in a new map felt like too much work.
| Tyriar wrote:
| Drones are a lot easier to get to now after they tweaked
| the sciences/tech tree, you're now able to pursue drone
| science immediately after green. Mods are always available
| if you need it immediately though.
| oefrha wrote:
| Just add a quality of life mod giving you earlier access to
| precursor bots, e.g. Construction Drones[1] or Nanobots[2].
|
| [1] https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Construction_Drones
|
| [2] https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Nanobots
| MivLives wrote:
| This mod is great, really speeds up the early game to get
| to the more interesting middle and late games.
| kortex wrote:
| Watching AntiElitz speedruns and going for No Spoon taught
| me how to sprint through the early game and get to bots and
| a large amount of production quickly.
| eterm wrote:
| Indeed, and to explain for the audience, in speedruns the
| split to get construction bots up and runnuing is around
| 40 minutes.
|
| The WR time to launch a rocket and get 'space science',
| the final science is currently about 1hr46m.
| blktiger wrote:
| I mean, if it's too much work you didn't plan ahead well
| enough (and/or you need to get to the robots so they can do
| the work for you).
| laputan_machine wrote:
| Completely agree, refactoring your layout is too expensive.
| What I typically do is just start-afresh with all the
| resources I have accrued from my current factory -- still
| fun!
| koheripbal wrote:
| This isn't a problem with the game. This is a problem you are
| having with games in general.
|
| I have it too, and it's a consequence of growing up and/or
| having more responsibilities.
|
| I can either play Factorio, or I can spend time with my kids.
| Factorio, which I love, loses every time.
|
| The only games I play now are ones I can play _with_ my kids.
| ... so I set my daughter up with Starcraft 2 and am teaching
| her about strategy while still scratching that gaming itch.
|
| My dream is to have a multiplayer LAN based VR Elder Scrolls
| game to play at home with the family.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| There's multiplayer in Factorio.
| Lambdanaut wrote:
| I think it's a bit of both. I have that with all games too,
| though generally I have it less-so with games that don't
| take my creative energy which I would rather use for coding
| or arts.
|
| I have little to no problem getting myself to play
| Starcraft II or other strategy games which I love. Low-
| effort story-based games are also easy to get into.
| syspec wrote:
| Starcraft? Wow nice, what was the progression to that
| point, I assume it was not her first game
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| The people behind this game stream on Twitch, and you can see
| what their development process looks like.
| throwawayfac wrote:
| Do you have a link to the channel? I'm having trouble finding
| it.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| https://m.twitch.tv/rseding91/profile
|
| There are no past videos there but you can follow him.
| throwawayfac2 wrote:
| Thank you!
| cybrox wrote:
| It also impressively shows the other side of things, where you
| can keep your factory running on hotfixes until pretty much the
| end of the game.
|
| You can most certainly launch a rocket (i.e. ship your final
| product) with any kind of setup but if you want to build a
| sustainable rocket launching platform, you will most likely
| have to nuke production (as in, you can literally nuke your
| production) and re-build it.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Once you get logistics bots you can monkey patch anything
| with a requester chest.
| oefrha wrote:
| Nuking your starter base is silly unless you're on death
| world and have some impenetrable defense set up that's hard
| to attain elsewhere without significant work. Usually to
| start a fresh megabase you just load up a car and drive a
| couple minutes to a new location. Then you can keep supplying
| the construction materials of the megabase with your starter
| base. (To those unfamiliar: yes, "the end of the game" --
| launching a rocket -- is really the start of the game to
| seasoned players, so the initial base you launch the first
| rockets with is commonly called the starter base.)
| bregma wrote:
| The starter base is probably a UPS sink. Nuke that trash,
| it's not worth the flock of construction robots to
| disassemble it.
|
| The point of the late late game is to minimize UPS (updates
| per second). It becomes memory bandwindth bound at some
| point. It demonstrates what's possible with today's
| technology. In comparison, Microsoft Word can not keep up
| with my typing in a new, blank document.
| oefrha wrote:
| A starter base on the order of up to say 100-200 spm
| usually doesn't have much of a ups impact at all in my
| experience but I guess it could be on wimpier hardware.
| Or if you rely too heavily on logistics robots, but I
| think people usually don't go mass logistics until later.
| Rapzid wrote:
| I haven't played in a long while and never quite got a
| rocket launched(can't recall why). Any tips for getting to
| that point very fast without feeling like cheating the
| phase?
| epylar wrote:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/i9hwx9/factori
| o_s...
| nomoreusernames wrote:
| haha i love that. it just shows us that gaffa/silver tape
| hotfixes are the real deal.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| And the speed runners are the ones doing waterfall design
| rather than agile.
| blickentwapft wrote:
| Sounds like fun but only if you're not a programmer, for whom
| it would just be work.
| NextHendrix wrote:
| I thought that about TIS-100 and Shenzhen I/O until I played
| them, I recommend both
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I liked the idea of these games but I was the opposite. I
| couldn't shake the feeling that it was just work. I found
| myself procrastinating them. Wish I could enjoy the puzzles
| more.
|
| Though I already have weekend programming projects that are
| more fulfilling and work towards something more concrete
| than "yay, solved a puzzle", and the games just made me
| wonder why I wasn't putting this time into those hobby
| projects. Factorio made me feel this way too.
|
| On the other hand, I've been playing Morrowind lately
| (OpenMW) which gives me a nice mental break from
| programming. Apart from the fact that I couldn't help but
| write a parser for its game files once I saw how simple and
| documented the format was. Bit more fulfilling to have a
| `tes3_parser.go` at the end of my puzzle-solving session
| than to have solved some contrived TIS-100 puzzles for a
| fantasy computer.
|
| https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Tes3Mod:Mod_File_Format
|
| Factorio was fun at first, but then it quickly felt like a
| pencil and paper optimization problem for something that
| doesn't even exist. Whether that tickles your fancy or not
| is probably like whether cilantro tastes like soap to you
| or not.
| vaylian wrote:
| Factorio is like programming. But without management or
| customers messing anything up. You are in full control of the
| whole project and have fairly clear requirements. That makes
| it a lot more enjoyable.
|
| Plus, it has trains :-)
| pferde wrote:
| Sounds like you could get the same thing by writing a real
| software project to scratch some itch you have. Sure, other
| users might come eventually and, but you can just ignore
| those and keep building what you like.
| ClikeX wrote:
| Yeah but Factorio lets me nuke space bugs.
| LanceH wrote:
| > Plus, it has trains :-)
|
| Which will run over the programmer.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| To be fair, trains will run over bugs, too!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8SBp4SyvLc&t=1m17s
| raxxorrax wrote:
| You can quickly ruin some hours of programmers if you post
| the wrong link.
|
| https://regexcrossword.com/
| DCoder wrote:
| And if you thought that was not challenging enough:
|
| https://rampion.github.io/RegHex/
| roguas wrote:
| Exactly my review. I usually play it when work is slow to
| keep my brain entertained, but when I get proper work at work
| - factorio is no longer my friend. Game is like drugs - ill
| just do small updates to my fab - boom its 4am.
| qudat wrote:
| Agreed. This game was too much like work and quickly got
| burnt out.
| Akronymus wrote:
| Burning out on a game only happened with warframe for me.
| mFixman wrote:
| I'm a programmer because I enjoy programming. That's also why
| I enjoy Factorio.
| maps7 wrote:
| Yeah. I recently bought a game on steam where you create and
| manage a startup. You have to do stuff like research landing
| page, hire devs, ux people etc. About 10 mins in I was just
| thinking that my time would be better spent actually doing
| this stuff rather than doing it in a game.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| Sometimes, it's therapeutic to do something in a sandbox
| where there really isn't any adverse ramification to
| screwing up.
| roguas wrote:
| This. I would even suggest it might be good training to
| coop with the manager if it was a possibility. I bet
| manager would learn quickly whats a technical debt, why
| it shouldn't be ignored and that sometimes high level
| goals cannot be pursued directly. Also devs would learn
| quickly that sometimes we have to stop the crazy
| conveyors doing binary operations on the payload and just
| keep it simple.
| Nursie wrote:
| Depends - Some games like this are addictive and great fun
| for programmers too. I played "Spacechem" to death. It's
| effectively a two-thread, multiprocess, visual turing-alike
| machine with an organic chemistry theme. It's awesome.
| xondono wrote:
| I do PCB layout, which is _way more_ like factorio. Still I
| enjoy the game a lot.
| p_l wrote:
| Lots of programmers enjoy Factorio - personally I think it's
| because it's less annoying than work, so we do what we like
| minus management
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Several Zachtronics games are just "programming, but
| intentionally annoying".
|
| I don't really see the appeal compared to ordinary
| programming. My favorite programming game has actually been
| a flash game where your goal was to transform binary
| strings (represented as sequences of blue/red dots) into
| other binary strings. You were still writing in Befunge,
| but the rest of it came off as trying to be helpful to the
| extent possible, rather than giving you a goal and then
| disabling the tools you'd want to use to get there.
| dEnigma wrote:
| Are you perhaps talking about Manufactoria?
|
| http://pleasingfungus.com/Manufactoria/
|
| Probably my favourite flash game.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Yes, one of my favorites too.
|
| It's even less of a game, but I also had a lot of fun
| with http://incredible.pm .
| detaro wrote:
| They're the line for me. Factorio is fun, Zachtronic not
| so much. And within those: Opus Magnum was better than
| others because the presentation appealed to me. Factorio
| I do not play "efficiently" because the "just plop
| blueprints and let bots handle it" style is boring - I
| much more enjoy organically grown chaos. Sometimes play
| challenges with artificial limitations.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| I see Zachrtonics games as just the fun part of
| programming. Programming, but you don't need to mess with
| build files, tooling, unit testing, deployment,
| maintenance, customers, PMs, etc... It's _just_ the
| puzzle solving part of programming, which is my favorite
| part of programming.
| scrollaway wrote:
| What do you think about Opus Magnum? I don't think that
| one is particularly annoying; the depth of it is rather
| interesting.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| It's one of the games I was thinking of as "programming,
| but intentionally annoying". Checking my installation, I
| seem to have completed the first three chapters.
|
| Some things off the top of my head that I find annoying:
|
| - Puzzles start feeling like they're asking more for
| busywork than for puzzle-solving. I enjoy thinking about
| "how do I do this?" I don't enjoy thinking "well, I know
| exactly what I want to do, but it's a huge slog to
| actually go through the motions."
|
| - You can't rotate the thing that accepts a polymer. So
| if you end up making the correct thing, but your
| orientation is off, you get to manually re-lay every part
| of your machine, instead.
|
| - Everything uses the same clock.
|
| - You can't even apply _purely mechanical_ fixes for
| everything using the same clock, like a three-arm grabber
| with one of the arms cut off. There goes the conceit that
| the rules are justified by the theme.
|
| I like that Opus Magnum scores you separately on time,
| space, and monetary cost. That was a good idea. I like
| working out fundamental minimums for how quickly I can
| produce something (based on the source pieces I'm
| allowed...) and designing something that can achieve
| that. The animation of a completed machine is fun to
| watch.
|
| I think the monetary-cost mechanic seems underdeveloped.
| glaberficken wrote:
| > Puzzles start feeling like they're asking more for
| busywork than for puzzle-solving. I enjoy thinking about
| "how do I do this?" I don't enjoy thinking "well, I know
| exactly what I want to do, but it's a huge slog to
| actually go through the motions."
|
| I think you will enjoy this puzzle game:
|
| http://qrostar.skr.jp/en/jelly/
|
| Don't let the cutesy graphics fool you, this is a
| masterpiece in puzzle design.
|
| In case you are not on Windows or don't want to download
| the exe for some reason right now, you can try this html
| simplified version
|
| https://avorobey.github.io/jelly/
| mattcdrake wrote:
| Wow, I just finished the first level and I can already
| tell that I'm going to love this game. Tightly crafted
| puzzle games are my favorite genre - thanks for
| mentioning this one.
| EtrianWizard wrote:
| Trying now... this is an astonishingly good puzzle game.
| sogen wrote:
| wow, great find!
| hinoki wrote:
| I much prefer Spacechem. Opus Magnum has the control
| separated from the machine, so it's easy to optimise all
| the timings. With Spacechem, you have to play with having
| the red Waldo control the blue, because the blue already
| has a command at that point.
|
| I guess it's like Harvard vs. Von Neumann. Harvard is
| more practical, but Von Neumann allows more fun hacks.
| billfruit wrote:
| Again Spacechems chemistry/physics seems too bogus that
| it killed all immersion for me.
| billfruit wrote:
| Yes, but its alchemy/chemistry seems to make no real
| world sense.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Intentionally annoying? I find it extremely fun to find
| the most optimal solution in those exactly because the
| toolset is so constrained.
|
| Finding the most optimal solution in real programming is
| impossible because the scope is always enormous.
| viraptor wrote:
| I feel like there are different types of constraints.
| Some are useful for creativity (limited number of
| specific resources), some are annoying (making you work
| harder to achieve known goal).
|
| I stopped playing exapunks because of this before the
| end. The limited instruction set, limits on movements,
| etc. are cool - they force new solutions. Not having
| functions or advanced templates is just annoying - I need
| to implement the same thing multiple times, by copy-
| pasting.
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| Very much agreed here. To me it's programming with
| limited scope, simple well defined goals, and no side
| effects.
|
| Pretty much everything programming isn't in the real
| world.
| eterm wrote:
| And feedback too. In the real world your program don't
| tell you if they're correct, or efficient without a lot
| of extra work.
|
| It's also much easier to find a solution if you know
| there is a good solution to be found.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Or alternatively take a Moore's law view: the original factory
| remains there forever, eclipsed by the much larger, more
| orderly and modular, one build next to it.
|
| Walk speed is a surprisingly big constraint on the early game,
| until you get various upgrades; you build a small factory
| because you don't want to walk round a larger one.
| LoSboccacc wrote:
| exactly, the original factory is likely the
| construction/logistic bot production center, it'd be slow but
| not necessarily inefficient, so it can stay while the bot
| build the modular factory elsewhere
| scrollaway wrote:
| Walk speed is a metaphor for the AWS budget.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| It teaches that if you wait a while eventually some magic
| technology (drones, trains, faster belts etc) will allow you to
| bypass technical debt and/or simply eliminate it with a single
| demolish command.
|
| And it teaches that humans can do whatever they want to a
| world, level all the forests, kill all the locals, because
| eventually we are going to fly away. Not our problem anymore.
| Space people are above the petty concerns of terrestrials.
| Aardappel wrote:
| Except it doesn't have very good refactoring tools. Sometimes
| you need to change just one small thing about some sub-graph of
| your factory, but circumstances require you to re-do most of it
| to implement that change. This is just busy-work, and not
| "fun", to me at least.
|
| I know later in the game more options open up, but that doesn't
| help me get there.
|
| I wish for a Factorio-style game where I can just drag (groups
| of) machines and conveyors around, and I just pay cost for
| however much just changed.
| melvinroest wrote:
| Or input/output, or scalability and to a limited extent
| security (aliens attacking weak spots).
| pulkitsh1234 wrote:
| Best game I have every played ! (source: trust me) 8.5 years in
| early access is no joke, the game is definitely something !
|
| Some of my favourite youtube videos on it:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF--1XdcOeM [Self expanding
| factory, recursive blue prints]
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feHq2Ken43M [Factorio Rocket
| ballet, for reference it took me 30 hours to launch a single
| rocket]
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KoV_Zk2IRs [Factorio base tour,
| this base looks like a CPU die when zoomed out]
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjtXHsv5E6M [Another Factorio
| base tour]
| sg47 wrote:
| Do you need a PC to play this game or does it work on any
| laptop?
| bregma wrote:
| Any x86_64 Windows, Mac, or Linux machine will play it.
| Bigger factories will bog down on lesser hardware.
| Transfinity wrote:
| Bigger factories being the kind of thing that takes
| hundreds of hours to build.
|
| The game is beautifully optimized and will run quite well
| on a potato.
| safog wrote:
| I find it kind of weird that programmers seem to like this
| game. I tried playing it for a bit and all I could think of was
| how much more efficient things would be if I could just write
| code instead of running around on a map to achieve the same
| thing.
|
| The whole game seemed like a forced distillation of programming
| into a form that can be consumed by the masses.
| MinusGix wrote:
| For example with Zachtronics games (very programming-puzzle-
| esque games), I doubt I could play it for long. It would be
| similar to messing about with an Esolang, but more
| structured. While I enjoy using Esolangs, I can only ever do
| it in short bursts, and I imagine the same would hold if I
| started playing a Zachtronics game. For Factorio, it is just
| barely different enough from regular programming (due to
| various parts, such as the grid based nature of reality, etc)
| that if I am in the right mood I could play it quite easily
| for several hours. Yet, if I am in the wrong mood/state-of-
| mind, then I will constantly compare it to what I am coding
| and likely stop playing after an hour. I will say that
| Factorio is far more distilled in it's problem solving nature
| than you'll usually get with programming, which can make it
| scratch that itch of solving something. While I still enjoy
| Factorio after playing it for some hours, I'm more likely to
| code now than I am to play it. Still quite enjoyable and
| worth the money and possibly the time, though.
| _jjkk wrote:
| Despite programming-adjacent elements it's just a sandbox
| game.
|
| If you don't enjoy the core idea of playing in a souped-up
| sandbox you probably won't enjoy it.
| avalys wrote:
| Do you like games at all? Almost any game would be "more
| efficient" if you could just write code to declare yourself
| the victor. Games - for that matter, pretty much any leisure
| pursuit whatsoever - are not about efficiency.
| safog wrote:
| Oh I do play a bunch of games. I have no problem enjoying
| strategy games like Civ, EU4 or base builders like
| RimWorld. Factorio is just too much like programming for me
| to find joy in it.
| Medox wrote:
| And mods. Lots of mods. Some very good, others also silly.
|
| A recently updated one is Renai Transportation, adding Train
| JUMP-tions:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/i5yoaj/train_junc...
| oefrha wrote:
| A recent video from Nilaus that some of the audience here might
| find amusing: Factorio real-time dashboard using Grafana.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91rxQfpqge8
| salzig wrote:
| o m f g. Hilarious and great at the same time.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Satisfactory is like a 3D version of Factorio, which lets you
| build huge multi-layer mega factories up into the sky. But it's
| not as deep and sophisticated as Factorio, and doesn't have
| drones or blueprints. (That would be a lot more difficult to
| accomplish in free-form 3D, than with Factorio's 2D tile grid.)
| It's kind of like the giant simple Legos for younger kids, as
| opposed to Factorio that's more like Lego Technic.
|
| Satisfactory is well worth playing if you yearn for a 3D
| version of Factorio, but I still keep going back to Factorio,
| which is more like "Dwarf Fortress" in its depth and
| sophistication. Satisfactory's world is breathtakingly
| beautiful, lovingly hand-crafted by artists instead of
| procedurally generated, which makes it all the more satisfying
| to despoil and ruin with huge mega-factories belching out smoke
| and radiation.
|
| This guy's videos stress testing and abusing Satisfactory are
| awesome:
|
| I Produced so Much Nuclear Waste the World Is Ruined Forever -
| Satisfactory
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh2oF-eZTD8
|
| I Built a 600 Meter Human Cannon That Ends All Existence -
| Satisfactory
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2X3wlvoShg
|
| I Made the Game Unplayable with This Gravity-Destroying Tractor
| Ball Pit - Satisfactory
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTvAmwnhIxM
|
| I Crippled the Game by Building to the Heavens - Satisfactory
| gameplay - Let's Game It Out
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X77MHTOEwXo
|
| What Happens When You Let a Maniac Build a Factory -
| Satisfactory gameplay - Let's Game It Out
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vYYhL9Vt8o
| willis936 wrote:
| I feel like if you want a 3D favtorio then going back to the
| mother: modded minecraft, is the best option. I have put
| multiple thousands of hours into industry games over the past
| ten years (few hours in the past two years though). Gregtech
| was what got me started and in some ways is still the best.
| GT6 is complete and a standalone game (Mechanatia I think) is
| currently being worked on. Factorio definitely wins on
| ability to automate and scale up, but it is very wide and not
| very deep. That is to say, there is no exponential growth
| power or resource requirements by moving up 5+ tech tiers.
| Combining many tiers with powerful automation would be a very
| fun combo. Modded factorio is probably the best place to look
| for this. For now, afaik, the biggest factorio mods are
| focused on going even wider.
| gen220 wrote:
| I haven't played minecraft in a while, but I really enjoyed
| Industrial Craft, and haven't heard of Gregtech.
|
| I looked into it a while ago, and noticed that IC hasn't
| been kept up to date with the latest minecraft versions,
| maybe it's a dying community. Would you say GT is a
| spiritual successor?
|
| Maybe it's time to fire up the servers this weekend :)
| Akronymus wrote:
| GT is to minecraft what angelbobs is to factlrio IMO.
|
| A good entry point for GT is, I'd say, Gregblock.
| Macha wrote:
| Honestly I used to hate Gregtech when it was in modpacks
| I used to play with my friends for making things grindy,
| but playing Factorio gave me appreciation for what GT was
| trying to do. More large scale automation, but at the
| time we were too used to magic box mods that let you
| upgrade to faster magic boxes to realise.
| Akronymus wrote:
| My personal biggest problem was with the conduct of Greg.
| But honestly, even that is in the past.
| Macha wrote:
| My feeling is the modding scene as a whole and the people
| in it were much less mature in those days. See also
| fights between mod authors breaking people's worlds for
| unsupported combinations or attempts to block use in
| specific modpacks etc. And the ubiquitious overly modular
| mod so they could put each component behind its own adfly
| link.
| Akronymus wrote:
| Yeah, with greg, neither side did well.
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| I just had a look at IC2 today. Their newest supported
| Minecraft version is 1.12.2.
|
| I decided to go with Thermal
| Expansion/Dynamics/Foundation instead though. Also for
| 1.12.2.
| willis936 wrote:
| GT was an add-on to IC2 and its development ran alongside
| IC2 during IC2's hayday. There have been six official GT
| versions, but the latest one is on 1.7.10.
|
| GT5 had an expansion to it made (GT5U) that was so great
| that it inspired the creation of GT New Horizons (GTNH).
|
| GTNH is the currently the most active GT community, but
| it goes a little off the grind deep end imo. There has
| been a large amount of effort to balance every recipe in
| a huge number of mods and it's great fun if you've
| already played through GT a few times.
|
| GT Community Edition (GTCE) is a fan recreation of GT5 in
| contemporary versions of MC. The last I saw, the
| maintainer had bad vision and was not receptive to
| feedback. It is not worthy of the GT name.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I love Minecraft, and have played waaaay many hours of that
| too. But I'm not up to date on the latest mods, so thanks
| for the recommendations!
|
| Both Minecraft and Factorio use grids, which make automated
| building with blueprints a lot easier.
|
| But I can't imagine a good way for Satisfactory to support
| reusable blueprints in an unconstrained 3D world, the way
| Factorio does in a gridded 2D world (or the way Minecraft
| could in a cubic 3D world), where a big part of
| Satisfactory is building around the landscape, natural
| artifacts, and threading tangled conveyor belts around your
| other machines and belts and architecture.
|
| When you're working with a 2D grid, it's easy to make
| reusable blueprints that you can systematically stamp out
| and plug together. (It's a lot like GPU programming,
| parallelizing tasks by spreading out the data to multiple
| processors, processing it in efficient units, making
| tradeoffs about bandwidth and buffering and transports, and
| merging it all back together again).
|
| But there is so much variation in Satisfactory's 3D world
| and degrees of freedom in construction, that everything you
| build is unique and not nearly as modular and replicable as
| Factorio's blueprints.
|
| On the other hand, Satisfactory's 3D building tools are
| fantastic (and it would be frustrating and impossible to
| play if they weren't so good): they make it really easy to
| connect up machine inputs and outputs with conveyor belts
| and pipes, and route them around like spaghetti code.
|
| Here's something I posted earlier, quoting Dave Ackley on
| why he didn't transform his Moveable Feast Machine from 2D
| to 3D, who said: "I need to actually preserve one dimension
| to build the thing and fix it. Imagine if you had a three-
| dimensional computer, how you can actually fix something in
| the middle of it? It's going to be a bit of a challenge. So
| fundamentally, I'm just keeping the third dimension in my
| back pocket, to do other engineering."
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22304110
|
| Dave Ackley, who developed the Moveable Feast Machine, had
| some interesting thoughts about moving from 2D to 3D grids
| of cells: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21131468
|
| DonHopkins 4 months ago | parent | favorite | on: Wolfram
| Rule 30 Prizes
|
| Very beautiful and artistically rendered! Those would make
| great fireworks and weapons in Minecraft! From a different
| engineering perspective, Dave Ackley had some interesting
| things to say about the difficulties of going from 2D to
| 3D, which I quoted in an earlier discussion about visual
| programming:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18497585
|
| David Ackley, who developed the two-dimensional CA-like
| "Moveable Feast Machine" architecture for "Robust First
| Computing", touched on moving from 2D to 3D in his
| retirement talk:
|
| https://youtu.be/YtzKgTxtVH8?t=3780
|
| "Well 3D is the number one question. And my answer is,
| depending on what mood I'm in, we need to crawl before we
| fly."
|
| "Or I say, I need to actually preserve one dimension to
| build the thing and fix it. Imagine if you had a three-
| dimensional computer, how you can actually fix something in
| the middle of it? It's going to be a bit of a challenge."
|
| "So fundamentally, I'm just keeping the third dimension in
| my back pocket, to do other engineering. I think it would
| be relatively easy to imaging taking a 2D model like this,
| and having a finite number of layers of it, sort of a 2.1D
| model, where there would be a little local communication up
| and down, and then it was indefinitely scalable in two
| dimensions."
|
| "And I think that might in fact be quite powerful. Beyond
| that you think about things like what about wrap-around
| torus connectivity rooowaaah, non-euclidian dwooraaah, aaah
| uuh, they say you can do that if you want, but you have to
| respect indefinite scalability. Our world is 3D, and you
| can make little tricks to make toruses embedded in a thing,
| but it has other consequences."
|
| Here's more stuff about the Moveable Feast Machine:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15560845
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14236973
|
| The most amazing mind blowing demo is Robust-first
| Computing: Distributed City Generation:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkSXERxucPc
|
| And a paper about how that works:
|
| https://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/papers/paper_tsmall1_11_24.p
| d...
|
| Plus there's a lot more here:
|
| https://movablefeastmachine.org/
|
| Now he's working on a hardware implementation of
| indefinitely scalable robust first computing:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1M91QuLZfCzHjBMEKvIc-A
| willis936 wrote:
| Buildcraft's builder can stamp complicated structures,
| but if you want to use it in factories then every stamp
| will need some hands on work. Ticking tile entities have
| fragile metadata that don't like getting placed by non-
| players. There may be workarounds, but then you need to
| implement a blueprint system that can handle arbitrary
| ticking tile entity metadata. It might not even be a good
| idea to do this even if you can. Anyway, assuming these
| are solvable problems and someone has solved them, then
| you could have a factorio-like experience.
|
| The thing is, factorio came out swinging with better
| automation than any minecraft mod. It is much easier to
| place things together and have them run free. Logistics
| bots are an absolute game changer in industry games. The
| bar has been raised.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I think there could be a whole book about designing
| reusable Factorio blueprints, like "C++ Template
| Metaprogramming".
|
| The kind you can easily stamp out rows of, and then hook
| up easily to standardized busses.
|
| You can sacrifice some space and efficiency and cost for
| modularity and ease of building big banks of them with
| robots.
| tialaramex wrote:
| I more or less beat (I escaped but haven't gone back to
| do stuff in the "Real world") Compact Claustrophobia
| recently and one of the things that ends up teaching you
| is a 3D composability that wouldn't really apply to the
| real world.
|
| Compact Machines are pocket dimensions of fixed internal
| size (the first one you get is 3x3x3, the last you'll
| build is 13x13x13) that all exist as a single 1x1x1 cube
| on the outside. From inside you can reach any of the six
| sides of that cube with a "tunnel".
|
| So if you've got, say, a simple basic Minecraft furnace
| with fuel flowing in the left, and stuff input to the
| top, output from the bottom, you can replace that with a
| 5x5x5 Compact Machine, with three tunnels inside, and any
| amount of complexity that fits. Maybe inside the 5x5x5
| machine you turn fuel into electricity, you run four
| electric furnaces, and you parallelise the processing.
| Externally though it behaves just like the furnace...
| except both faster and more efficient.
|
| The limited space in Claustrophobia (before you escape)
| means you feel compelled to actually solve problems in
| place this way, whereas normally you'd be tempted to just
| be lazy and add a few extra pipes here, an extra hopper
| there and soon it's a vast sprawling mess. When 13x13x13
| seems impossibly large you cut that sort of nonsense
| right out.
| Teever wrote:
| I remember a comment from you a few months ago regarding
| factorio and you pointed out that it was "just" an
| implementation of a specific variation of a cellular
| automata ruleset.
|
| I enjoyed the comment but when I went back to find it in
| your history I discovered that you are a prolific
| commenter and that I was unable to find it.
|
| Do you remember it and if so can you link to it or expand
| more on which cellular automata rule set it is?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Factorio (and also games like SimCity) are not actually
| pure CA rules, but they combine cellular automata
| techniques together with many other techniques like
| system dynamics, etc.
|
| Will Wright gave a great explanation of how simulation
| games combine different techniques together in three
| intersection dimensions: Topologies (agents, networks,
| and layers), dynamics (propagation, growth, grouping,
| order, allocation, mapping, specialization, and nesting),
| and paradigms (cybernetics, system dynamics, cellular
| automata, chaos theory, adaptive systems, network
| theory).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdgQyq3hEPo&t=35m50s
|
| >Lessons in Game Design, lecture by Will Wright, Computer
| History Museum, November 20, 2003.
|
| Maybe the comment I posted about Factorio and CA was
| this, in the discussion of John von Neumann's 29 state
| cellular automata rule -- It is a pure CA, and a
| historically interesting one that he actually designed on
| paper and wrote about in a book. I compared it to
| Factorio, in the way Factorio uses conveyor belts in four
| different directions to direct the flow of items, and
| JVN29 uses arrows in four different directions to direct
| the flow of signals. But you can put a lot of different
| kinds of things on Factorio conveyor belts, but only ones
| and zeros on JVN29 arrows, since it was designed to be
| minimal and mathematically rigorous like a Turing
| Machine, not practical and convenient to program and fun
| to play like Factorio.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22727228
|
| >Von Neumann Universal Constructor (wikipedia.org) 90
| points by amjd 4 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 29
| comments
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_const
| ruc...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738598
|
| >[...]
|
| >Factorio players will recognize these tapes of
| construction instructions as 2D "blueprints" that
| construction drones use to build patterns of factories
| and conveyor belts, etc. In Factorio, after your drones
| have build a blueprint in the unpowered, unsupplied
| state, you can connect it to the power grid, hook up
| pipes to deliver fluids, and run conveyor belts in and
| out of it to deliver resources and products, and it will
| immediately starts doing its thing. Playing Factorio is
| uncannily like von Neumann 29 state cellular automata
| programming, not by coincidence. So it's a great way to
| get your head around cellular automata programming, gpu
| programming, parallel programming, queuing systems, and
| data flow programming in general!
|
| >Factorio Tutorial #20 - Bots, part 1 - Construction
| robots
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLOyk55uI2Y&t=19m32s
|
| >Factorio just doesn't have the ability to construct
| cells by spilling items off the end of conveyor belts, or
| destroy cells with conveyor belts, either. But maybe
| there's an extension for that! And John von Neumann's 29
| state cellular automata doesn't have swarms of
| construction drones that build and tear down blueprints
| in parallel like Factorio does, so there are some
| differences. But the basic idea of grids of cells with
| conveyor belts carrying items between factories is the
| same.
|
| Also I wrote some more about JVN32:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22737079
|
| >The Real Time Crossing (Buckley, p. 457, The real-time
| crossing organ) is like a road intersection that splits
| the two crossing lanes, then uses traffic lights to give
| cars in each pair of lanes alternating turns to cross,
| and then merges the lanes back together (since each
| intersection works at 50% throughput, you need to split,
| use two of them, and merge -- Factorio and Satisfactory
| players will get what I mean, in terms of conveyor belts,
| splitters and mergers, and conveyor belt throughput).
|
| Also I asked Alan Kay about Factorio and other games
| here, and he replied:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11807250
|
| >DonHopkins on May 31, 2016 | parent | favorite | on:
| Alan Kay's reading list
|
| >I've heard you say that Rocky's Boots was one of your
| favorite computer games. Please, off the top of your
| head, what's your top-n list of inspiring games that you
| think people learning to program should play?
|
| >I've been playing Factorio [1] [2], which I think would
| resonate with your love of Rocky's Boots, cellular
| automata, queuing theory, visual programming, system
| dynamics and distributed control systems. It's in the
| spirit of John von Neumann's 29 state cellular automata
| [3] and universal constructor. [4]
|
| >[1] Factorio: https://www.factorio.com/
|
| >[2] HN Factorio discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11266471
|
| >[3] John von Neumann's 29 state cellular automata: https
| ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_cellular_automaton
|
| >[4] JvN Universal Constructor: https://en.wikipedia.org/
| wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_construc....
|
| >alankay on June 1, 2016 [-]
|
| >Hi Don
|
| >I think I'm so out of context wrt video games here and
| now that I can't come up with a worthwhile reply. I liked
| Rocky's Boots because of the brilliant combination of the
| content and the idea behind the game play -- and they
| were well matched up. I liked the idea of its successor
| "Robot Odyssey" a lot, but advised the TLC folks to use
| something like Logo for the robot language rather than
| the Rocky's circuit diagrams (which were now not well
| matched up to the needs). As you know I really tried to
| get the Maxis people to make "Sim City" a rule based
| system that children could program in so they could both
| understand the generators and to change them (no luck
| there).
|
| >If I were to look around today, I'd look for something
| where the underlying content was really "good" for
| children -- I doubt that cellular automata would be in my
| top 10 -- and then would also have good to great game
| play.
| Kiro wrote:
| There are mods that add blueprints to Satisfactory. Kind
| of wonky but definitely works. I'm sure official
| blueprints will work fine. My gut feeling is that we will
| see it in Update 4 since it's the most requested feature.
|
| Best game ever btw and this comes from a seasoned
| Factorio player.
| waterhouse wrote:
| I have tears of laughter. These videos truly are awesome.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I'd sure hate to work on a product with that guy working in
| QA! Oh the bug reports he would generate! The Satisfactory
| developers must have a dartboard with his face on it.
| bregma wrote:
| > I still keep going back to Factorio, which is more like
| "Dwarf Fortress" in its depth and sophistication.
|
| If Factorio and Dwarf Fortress had a baby I would adopt it
| without hesitation and raise it as my favourite child and
| sole heir.
| benlivengood wrote:
| Factorio; the only game I've seen with timeseries, graphs, tiered
| alarms and notifications, and you get to automate yourself out of
| a job.
|
| It's like SRE 101.
|
| I love it of course.
| bbrazil wrote:
| I bought it for EUR10 5 years ago, in terms for gaming value for
| money I think only the EUR10 I spent on Minecraft beats it.
| sshagent wrote:
| There is a fun minecraft modpack inspired by this game
| https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/modpacks/manufactio
| bootlooped wrote:
| If you scroll through the Steam reviews it's not infrequent to
| see people with over 1,000 hours in this game. I've seen one
| person with over 11,000 hours in game.
| xrisk wrote:
| Great game and it gave me quite a few insights into how systems
| should be designed.
| gotts wrote:
| Can you share a take-away example please?
| acallaghan wrote:
| For me in Factorio you have to think carefully how to place
| your primary (mines, power, oil) and secondary factories
| (factory generation, batteries, plastics, ammunition etc).
| Some of this placement comes from the map, but in the early
| game you tend to place them too close to each other, which
| you then need to optimise later on when other tech (like oil
| & nuclear) become available.
|
| Just refinining oil into primary products in this game took
| me like a week of work and tweaking.
|
| You then get to the end of the game & build a rocket, but
| think to yourself -- "Yes, but I could maybe do all of this
| again but properly and without manually making things and the
| same mistakes". So you start another game and the whole
| process repeats!
| aminozuur wrote:
| Why is this Red Alert 2-like game on the top of HN?
| drchickensalad wrote:
| It's nothing at all like that.
| carry_bit wrote:
| If it's not clear from the other comments, Factorio is
| basically the closest you get to injecting pure engineering joy
| into your veins.
|
| Given HN's audience, there are a lot of fans here.
| LandR wrote:
| I love that when you click things on the site it actually
| responds to the click (like you've physically pressed a button).
| barbegal wrote:
| Up until circa 2006 all interfaces were made that way. Web
| forms and native interfaces all had inputs resembling real
| buttons. See 98.css https://jdan.github.io/98.css/ if you want
| to see what interfaces looked like in the early 2000s.
| reedf1 wrote:
| One of my favourite games of all time - sometime in 2018 I
| overloaded myself on it though. Designing systems at my job then
| coming home to design systems... well it might have been fun but
| I think I needed more variety in my life, ha!
| KuhlMensch wrote:
| Can we make this the UI for AWS please?
| lucb1e wrote:
| Reminds me of ps/kill/renice built in Doom:
| http://psdoom.sourceforge.net
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I had a co-worker who used to joke about that, but now that
| I've spent 4 weeks making a JSON template for basically just
| two VMs, I'm starting to take his idea more seriously.
|
| Fundamentally, the product is similar, but everyone far prefers
| the Factorio UX over fifty pages of serialised REST objects.
| novaRom wrote:
| Wish to have this on mobile phone...
| scrumbledober wrote:
| A huge congratulations to one of the best and hardest working dev
| teams out there on one of the most unique, challenging, and fun
| games I've ever played. I have put far more hours into factorio
| than any other single player game. It is an inspiring work.
| Reading the Friday facts blogs has also been one of my favorite
| development blogs.
| UK-Al05 wrote:
| This game looks appealing but when I start playing it, it feels
| like an extension of my job.
| bregma wrote:
| Yeah, I love my job, too.
| kissiel wrote:
| I think this game made me a better engineer. I'm not saying it
| was worth investing hundreds of hours, but it was fun playing.
| One of very few games I really enjoyed in the last decade.
| buixuanquy wrote:
| If you like this game, I suggest you can try "Oxygen not
| included"
| wcoenen wrote:
| I was a bit annoyed by photosynthesis not working as expected.
| In one of my first games, I used algae to create oxygen.
| However, this did not remove carbon dioxide, and the overall
| gas pressure in my base mysteriously kept increasing. I know
| it's not a physics simulator, but given the name of the game I
| expected a bit more realism around oxygen production.
|
| Overall the game is a strange mix of physics sim and quirks
| that don't make sense. For example, industry produces heat and
| heat spreads as expected. Solid, liquid and gas phase changes
| happen more or less as expected, leading to fun stuff like
| steam explosions. But then heat can be deleted in unphysical
| ways, heat can't be radiated away into space like in the real
| world etc.
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| The heat management is one of my biggest frustrations with
| the ONI gameplay loop. You go from gradually adding niceties
| to the base like lighting and plumbing to immediately needing
| some unholy water-cooled system that uses more power than the
| rest of the base combined, is stupid expensive in refined
| metals, and doesn't even permanently solve the problem
| because soon the heatsink waste pool is boiling and searing
| any dupe that walks past the general area. Oh and you have to
| do all this before the greenhouse gets slightly too warm and
| dooms the colony to starvation.
| fuoqi wrote:
| Heat management is super easy with aquatuner and steam
| turbine, you only need some steel and plastic, which are
| not so hard to get. Personally for me ONI heat-management
| is one of minor dissapointments, I think it would have been
| much more fun and deep if this system was more physically
| accurate.
| lucb1e wrote:
| ONI has me super frustrated but without the challenge and
| success part. I reached the surface once when setting the map
| to super easy and discovered that there was nothing fun there,
| either. It's fun for a little bit to get things running, but
| you can't make it a closed loop system (at least at first) and
| you'll run out of stuff fairly soon. I thought that with enough
| research you'd get there, and you might, but the way of storing
| liquids or gases for processing, the heat it creates, the
| meteors that destroy anything you put on the surface, the
| crappy power generation methods to pump it all around... I just
| didn't get that game. Factorio I played for thousands of hours
| and I'm still not tired of it.
| fuoqi wrote:
| In the planned DLS they plan to significantly rework space
| and introduce playable asteroids, so rockets will be use as a
| logistic system between your main base and space outposts.
|
| On your other points, it looks like you simply haven't
| understood game systems deep enough.
|
| >you'll run out of stuff fairly soon
|
| Geysers can support really large bases and other materials
| you can get from space missions, which are powered either by
| oil wells or water geysers. It's a great simplification that
| you can built self-powering oxygen generators, which consume
| water and produce oxygen with some leftover hydrogen.
|
| >the heat it creates
|
| Aquatuners + steam turbine setup solves all heat issues. And
| you cool metal refineries output directly inside steam rooms
| which power stem turbine (by using oil or petroleum for
| coolant).
|
| >the meteors that destroy anything you put on the surface
|
| Bunker doors + radars + a tiny bit of automation. I think
| that radar mechanics are unnecessary complex and not
| explained properly, but once you understand it, they are
| quite easy to use.
|
| >the crappy power generation methods
|
| Even without advanced sour gas/petroleum power setups it's
| really easy to get a TON of power generation. In mid and late
| game I usually sit on top of so much power generation and
| unfortunately game does not have any power sink game
| mechanics.
| Deestan wrote:
| Note that while they are both fun and share many features like
| logistic systems and machines, they are wildly different in
| approach.
|
| Oxygen Not Included is an inherently unstable system, and it's
| a frantic race to juggle all the spinning plates while your
| colony falls more and more apart. The better you get at the
| game, the further you can stretch it before it succumbs to
| starvation, disease, lack of air or death by overheating.
|
| Factorio (in regular mode) has a system that it is possible to
| keep stable at all times, and once you get a handle on the
| enemies you play the game at your own pace.
| javert wrote:
| You can achieve stability in Oxygen Not Included. It's not
| even that hard to do so.
| hu3 wrote:
| Yeah I've watched streamers with stable bases. Old and new.
| ffrtffff wrote:
| Fff
| LatteLazy wrote:
| This is like Heroin getting an upgrade. I might have to go break
| my computer now...
| lebed2045 wrote:
| would be interesting to learn the nature (or psychological
| tricks) the game uses to become so addictive
| simias wrote:
| You always have a next step, a next upgrade to look forward
| to. It's an uninterrupted treadmill from building your first
| mine to building you hundredth mega-factory. That's how even
| quasi non-games like Cookie Clicker can become addictive.
| It's effectively a Skinner's box.
|
| Gameplay-wise Factorio is a lot more interesting that Cookie
| Clicker of course.
| sbennettmcleish wrote:
| It's an uninterrupted treadmill cos you just spent 3 hours
| extra doing seventeen other things and realise you still
| haven't actually "fixed the copper" or whatever the heck it
| was you were meant to be doing :)
|
| 1600+hrs in ... still pushin' all my buttons.
| sbennettmcleish wrote:
| oh ... and the only game where i've regularly hit 2am and
| thought "one more thing..."
| rgoulter wrote:
| Yes.
|
| I don't think the developers intend it to suck up so much
| time. I think they want to make something that's fun.
|
| But I don't think there's anything to the game that malicious
| developers don't already know.
|
| I think, insofar as it's fair to call Factorio addictive,
| it's because there's a constant feeling of "just one more
| thing" (or "just one more game"). There's is constant and
| continuous frontier of optimization opportunities. But, at
| the same time, there's also effort/delay in getting the
| rewards of the effort. -- I think that feedback loop is what
| people loved about the 2012 XCom Enemy Unknown.
|
| I think it's possible to play in a healthy way. But, I guess
| if the feeling of "my factory isn't good" and "I suck" drives
| the behaviour, then that'd be unhealthy.
| PoissonVache wrote:
| You can look at the dev dayries https://factorio.com/blog/ They
| are very interresting, I've learnt a lot of technical things
| reading them. It's a well programmed game !
| louwrentius wrote:
| They are going to stop it now, no Friday facts anymore.
| spiral90210 wrote:
| One of the single greatest games for programmers ever written.
| Buy it.
| mdoms wrote:
| The problem with these very long early access periods is that I
| was deeply bored with this game well before the final release. I
| can't imagine I'm the only one.
| stormbeard wrote:
| I used to love this game, but stopped playing once I heard about
| Satisfactory. It just takes things to a different level.
| octorian wrote:
| I've spent some time playing Satisfactory, but the first-person
| view often makes it too cumbersome to actually organize/align
| everything properly.
| munchbunny wrote:
| Satisfactory scratches the same itches, but it's a less deep
| game than Factorio. That's not a bad thing (Rimworld vs. Dwarf
| Fortress comes to mind), but personally the transition to 3-D
| didn't do much for me, and the reduced complexity of production
| layouts in Satisfactory made it less interesting for me.
| atum47 wrote:
| it's very inspiring to see factorio in the first place on HN.
| It's been a while that I'm trying to publish a successful game. I
| read that the version 1.0 took you 8.5 years. Do you mind talking
| a little bit about that? Were you always funded? Did you had any
| investors?
| Insanity wrote:
| The comments here made it seem more interesting than anything on
| the webpage of the game. Guess I'll have to give it a shot :D
| lucb1e wrote:
| Note that there is also a demo and the binaries are DRM-free
| (for me the demo was a bit small to justify 30 bucks, but after
| playing on a friend's version for a few week it became quite
| clear that I had to buy this game).
| birisi wrote:
| For those who like this I would also recommend Mindustry, a
| similar game which is open source and available for mobile. I
| actually have spent quite a lot of time with it.
| singularvalue wrote:
| I've wanted to try this for a while but I'm a bit reluctant
| because I'm not sure that after an entire day of systems design,
| refactoring, building etc I need a evening game of it.
|
| Would it be too much or still refreshing? My favorite unwind game
| is battlefield 4.
| moviuro wrote:
| They have a demo version, that's free as in free beer. Try
| that, see if you like it!
| barbs wrote:
| Relevant Vice article: Why Do We Play Video Games That Feel Like
| Work?
|
| https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4x38aq/why-do-we-play-vid...
| [deleted]
| EndXA wrote:
| An interesting AMA with the founder of Factorio from a few years
| back:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/6e6tkw/im_the_fou...
| Havoc wrote:
| Factorio always looked appealing. From a distance though. Never
| played this for the same reason I don't do WoW and EVE online.
| Scared it would suck up every minute of my life.
| scrollaway wrote:
| I concur with moritonal; although you can easily spend hundreds
| to thousands of hours in Factorio, it is much, _much_ easier to
| put down. Unlike with MMOs, the game offers you no incentive
| for logging back in regularly.
|
| Try it and see how you feel after ~2 hours of gameplay.
| reificator wrote:
| > _Try it and see how you feel after ~2 hours of gameplay._
|
| Coincidentally "try it and see how you feel" is also how
| people sell heroin...
|
| They're saying they're concerned that they might get
| addicted, and you're telling them to try just the tip, just
| to see how it feels?
|
| I'm a big fan of Factorio but if you're concerned it could
| take over your life, there's definitely a chance it could.
|
| True it's not _as bad_ as an MMO. There 's no daily quests,
| no social features, (though multiplayer is fun) and most
| importantly no lootboxes or variable ratio rewards. Doesn't
| mean it can't addict you for a little bit though.
| bregma wrote:
| Factorio is like a Terry Pratchett book. It has no chapter
| breaks, no obvious place to stop for the night and put it
| down. It just keeps rolling along until the sun comes up.
| Akronymus wrote:
| For many people the "cracktorio" is just a joke.
|
| For me? I am actually serious about the addicting nature of
| the game.
|
| The gameplay loop is just so rewarding, so that addiction
| is easy.
| octorian wrote:
| Even when the game is boring, its still addictive. Kinda
| weird that way.
|
| Of course its mostly only boring when you haven't yet
| figured out the "design patterns" of an efficient base,
| and/or are too lazy to tear down what you have to build
| them out.
| scrollaway wrote:
| https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/11/26 ;)
|
| No, seriously though, I'm speaking with full experience: My
| main WoW character has a 4-digit days playtime (and that's
| from several years ago; I eventually did put it down for
| good).
|
| Factorio is addictive the same way that Civilization is:
| You want to keep going. Or like Tetris pro players, you
| might think about your factory when you're not playing and
| "see" it everywhere. But unlike WoW, you can put the game
| down at any time: there's no responsibilities you're taking
| on, there's no grind you must finish, no daily quests that
| reset calling you to re-do them tomorrow. The game world
| stops the moment you pause/exit the game.
|
| There's no comparison to a MMO.
|
| > _Doesn 't mean it can't addict you for a little bit
| though._
|
| Every good game will. Every good TV show will make you want
| to binge. It's up to you to manage your time. I believe GP
| is a reasonable adult and can manage 2 hours of a game
| without having to check into rehab :)
| oefrha wrote:
| Warning: unlike Civilization, Factorio UI doesn't feature
| a real-world clock, and AFAIK there's no mod that can add
| one, so unless you set an alarm or have a spouse it's
| really easy to get sucked up ;)
| joshstrange wrote:
| There are mods to add the time [0] but yes, it's very
| easy to lose track of time playing this game.
|
| [0] https://mods.factorio.com/mod/clock
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| Unlike say a first person shooter factorio is limited to
| 60fps, so unless the slightly reduce screen realestate is
| an issue just run it windowed and use the system clock.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > I believe GP is a reasonable adult and can manage 2
| hours of a game without having to check into rehab
|
| Two hours of _a game_? Yes.
|
| Two hours of _Factorio_? Not a chance. Unless they don't
| make it past 30 minutes in the first place ;)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I was SURE I felt like I'd contracted Coronavirus, but it
| just turned out that I'd been playing Factorio for so
| many hours straight without pausing to eat or sleep.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I got hooked on Factorio, but for me Satisfactory was far
| more addictive. It had that "explore and find goodies"
| element that has some sort of primal addictiveness in the
| sense of: "Must hunt, gather food."
| moritonal wrote:
| The difference is that you can put Factorio down. MMOs are very
| different beasts to single-player games.
| swiley wrote:
| Games like this and openttd are how I fail classes and lose jobs.
| lucb1e wrote:
| And make friends!
| samvher wrote:
| Does anyone know if performance/efficiency of the game has gotten
| better over time? I played it quite a bit ~2 years ago or so, but
| my 7 year old MBP got really hot and very slow by the time I
| started using blueprints. From what I read at the time the game
| was very dependent on single-threaded CPU performance. Maybe they
| found a way to make better use of multiple cores?
|
| I really want to pick it up again but am not excited to start a
| new factory if I know I won't be able to complete it.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Considering what factorio is displaying, I've always thought
| the performance is amazing.
|
| Then again, my computer is not 7 years old, but when I played
| it my desktop was running on an AMD Phenom.
| samvher wrote:
| Yes I definitely didn't mean for this to sound as a
| complaint, I think for what it is it's quite lightweight.
| It's just that it seemed to be using a single core and if
| they managed to make it multi-core perhaps it could be even
| more performant now.
| dmurray wrote:
| I think it's still largely single-threaded. They value
| complete determinism: you should never get a different game
| state one tick later based on a CPU race condition. This is
| for easier debugging, repeatable testing, accurate
| multiplayer simulation - and also just that it fits the
| theme of the game, players expect to be able to design
| certain systems to work deterministically. This design
| decision has a performance cost, of course.
|
| Still there have been major performance improvements,
| including parallelism-lite. And just the fact that it's
| mainly the same engine that ran on low-spec computers from
| 6 years ago means it should run very smoothly on modern
| machines - not all of the Moore's law improvements since
| then have been about parallelism.
| lucb1e wrote:
| I wouldn't say 'largely'. There are definitely single-
| threaded parts and if you have 64 really slow cores then
| you won't get 64 times as many FPS (or UPS, really) as
| with 1 core running at 64x speed, but that's with all
| software.
|
| If you have a _somewhat_ reasonable per-core speed,
| multiple cores should all be loaded with work. Personally
| I can 't say that I've noticed it helped, but that's
| anecdotal and I've seen the improvements as they came in
| incrementally rather than in one big jump from some old
| single-threaded version to 1.0.
|
| > including parallelism-lite
|
| What does that mean? When I look it up I get results for
| some other game with a similar name.
| dmurray wrote:
| > What does that mean? When I look it up I get results
| for some other game with a similar name.
|
| I didn't mean to refer to any established term. I meant
| parallelization by breaking the game up into systems,
| e.g. I believe the electrical system can run completely
| separately to the main thread without losing the
| deterministic guarantees, while I would think of full
| parallelization as allowing each assembler or inserter to
| be simulated in its own thread.
|
| Maybe there's a more established term for this?
| Parallelization through doing different types of things
| at the same time, rather than doing many copies of the
| same thing at the same time.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| Just opened up my largest base (21k/m copper) and it's using 6%
| of my 8 core cpu. That's around 108% of a single core, but the
| load is spread quite evenly with the highest cpu utilization at
| 28% with the rest hovering around 10%. I'd say it's very well
| parallelized currently.
| bregma wrote:
| They've made a lot of performance improvements, but it's still
| bounded by memory bandwidth and splitting updates across
| multiple cores would actually slow that down due to memory
| access contention.
| McDuglas wrote:
| The devs were constantly optimizing the game. They've added a
| lot of performance tunings, options for video compression, etc.
| You should give it a shot, maybe download a factory built by
| someone else to evaulate performance.
| avery42 wrote:
| I think it's fairly well-known at this point, but I find it
| interesting that the game will never be on sale [0]:
|
| > We state it on our steam page, but people are still asking
| about it so I want to state it officially. We don't plan any
| Factorio sale. I'm aware, that the sale can make a lot of money
| in a short period of time, but I believe that it is not worth it
| in the long run, and since we are not in financial pressure we
| can afford to think in the long run. We don't like sales for the
| same reason we don't like the 9.99 prices. We want to be honest
| with our customers. When it costs 20, we don't want to make it
| feel like 10 and something. The same is with the sale, as you are
| basically saying, that someone who doesn't want to waste his time
| by searching for sales or special offers has to pay more.
|
| I like their reasoning, and I think it helps to show how focused
| they are on the quality of the game (as well as, you know, 8
| years of early access).
|
| [0] https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-140
| OnionBlender wrote:
| Jason Rohrer said Castle Doctrine would never go on sale but he
| changed his mind in March.
|
| https://steamcommunity.com/games/249570/announcements/detail...
| renewiltord wrote:
| Minecraft has been the most successful use of this, I think.
| Minecraft price has only steadily risen over time.
| hinkley wrote:
| Also, for quite a long time the tradition was that a game only
| goes on sale after a successor has been chosen. Steam sales are
| a comparatively new concept.
|
| When Factorio 2 comes out, you will most likely be able to pick
| up Factorio for $10.
| eikenberry wrote:
| From what I've read sales are not about making a lot of money
| in a short period of time, but are instead about seeding the
| community for more word of mouth. That games do best over the
| long run when they hit a critical mass where they get most of
| their purchases from people recommending it and sales were a
| strategy to ramp that up faster.
| dasb wrote:
| AFAIK sale-based pricing is about squeezing consumer surplus,
| as described by Joel Spolsky [0].
|
| [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-
| rubber-...
| CameronNemo wrote:
| One alternative option is to offer rebates (or credits for
| subscription based products) based on referrals.
| munificent wrote:
| I don't have any moral problems with sales. Some people have
| money and less time. Others have less money and more time.
| Sales let each of those groups use the resources they have
| acquire the product. People with less money but more time can
| spend that time hunting for deals. Busy people with cash can
| pay full price.
| celtain wrote:
| My problem with sales is that time spent looking for sales is
| not at all socially beneficial, it's human labor that's
| completely wasted. If we want poorer people to have better
| access to the goods and services richer people buy, we should
| just give them more money.
|
| Edit: In a way it reminds me of mining cryptocurrency. It's a
| system designed to reward people who can prove that they're
| wasting some other resource.
| munificent wrote:
| _> that time spent looking for sales is not at all socially
| beneficial, it 's human labor that's completely wasted._
|
| A more "economically neutral" perspective (not that I claim
| it is a better perspective) is that there is labor that
| this particular human has available. Letting them _choose_
| to spend it on hunting down a sale is strictly better than
| removing that choice. There may be "better" things they
| could do with it _according to you_ , but ultimately it
| should be their choice.
|
| The irony is particulary deep here because hunting down a
| sale is surely no less wasteful to society than _actually
| playing Factorio which is a pointless videogame famous for
| being an addictive time-sink._ If the goal was to maximize
| societal benefit, we 'd remove Factorio from the market
| entirely.
|
| _> If we want poorer people to have better access to the
| goods and services richer people buy, we should just give
| them more money._
|
| I think you're jumping to a conclusion that these people
| are particularly poor. But my only claim is that people
| have different _relative_ distributions of money versus
| time, and that is probably true at all wealth levels. There
| are both idle rich and workaholics. There are poor folks
| working three jobs and raising three kids and others that
| are couch potatoes.
|
| Sales are a way to let consumers at any economic level
| reflect their relative priority between time and cash.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > A more "economically neutral" perspective (not that I
| claim it is a better perspective) is that there is labor
| that this particular human has available. Letting them
| choose to spend it on hunting down a sale is strictly
| better than removing that choice. There may be "better"
| things they could do with it according to you, but
| ultimately it should be their choice.
|
| Unless you consider the sale price as the base price, in
| which case you're forcing people to spend time hunting a
| sale to not get gouged, and it's strictly worse than
| having a fixed lower price.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| This is a type of price discrimination, which has highly
| debated morality and unequivocal efficacy.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
| s3cur3 wrote:
| Obviously people might not _like_ it, but can you summarize
| the moral arguments against it?
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Moral arguments against price discrimination center
| around fairness and inefficient outcomes.
|
| For example if a vaccine for an infectious disease was
| priced higher for people who are more likely to be
| exposed to that disease (because they have a greater
| willingness to pay), it could create an unfair burden on
| this buyer segment and even place the overall population
| health at risk. Just because a seller knows they have
| greater leverage over this vulnerable population.
| philwelch wrote:
| Classic price discrimination is when people who can
| afford to pay more, pay more. Most people consider this
| more just rather than less just.
| munificent wrote:
| I think medical care is a problematic example to use
| because health is already fraught with moral
| connotations, and medicine as a product category is not
| _at all_ conducive to an efficient market.
|
| Arguing, even correctly, that price discrimination is bad
| for healthcare does not necessarily imply that it's bad
| for other things. Healthcare is different.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Take education as another example
|
| Parents a and b are considering whether to enroll their
| children in a private school.
|
| Parent A lives in a nice neighborhood that can lobby for
| better funding for public schools.
|
| Parent B lives in a worse school district.
|
| The private school realizes that parent B has worse
| options, and that they can upcharge parent B. The private
| school knows that at a certain price point parent A will
| simply decide to send their child to the high quality
| public school in their district, so they charge that
| parent less.
|
| Parent B is disadvantaged because they have weaker
| bargaining power, and the price discrimination is simply
| exacerbating existing inequalities in the community.
|
| I don't think that price discrimination is inherently
| unethical. But the criteria used to discriminate can
| certainly be unethical. Look up "reverse redlining" for
| example.
| philwelch wrote:
| Except if you try and price gouge parent B, it doesn't
| work because they're poor. So instead you price gouge
| parent A because they are rich, by raising tuition and
| giving a charitable scholarship/discount/etc. to parent
| B.
| munificent wrote:
| Again, schooling is another example that is already
| heavily morally loaded (the opportunity we pass on to our
| children may be _the_ most important aspect of all of
| society) and where there is nothing even approximating an
| efficient market.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Reverse redlining has to do with housing. That is a
| market with many buyers and sellers, relatively good
| information symmetry, etc.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| Interestingly, the word "moral" doesn't appear at all on
| that page. The "debate" must be elsewhere.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-ethics-
| quar...
|
| https://econsultancy.com/what-is-price-discrimination-
| and-is...
| neves wrote:
| They already price discriminate. In Latin America Steam
| store you can by Factorio spending just US$9,00.
|
| Some people value the product differently. If I'd play it
| for hours, probably it is money well spent, but I'm a
| casual gamer. The game looks nice, but I wouldn't spend the
| price of good books in it.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| It's an interesting and strong technique I actually hope more
| games take on, even as a player.
| fileeditview wrote:
| I also like it. But I doubt that most games can afford to
| take a stand like that. Only the most well received can do
| this IMHO.
|
| There are always people only secondarily interested in a
| game. Maybe it's not their first priority genre or whatever.
| If the game company needs to convert as many customers as
| possible, staying with the same price forever probably won't
| work out.
| thendrill wrote:
| Exactly.... Making bad games and then making money off said
| bad games is just bad for everyone.
| Alupis wrote:
| I think sadly this mindset really limits their
| playerbase, and will ultimately expedite the decline of
| the game and online community.
|
| Steam Sales have a massive effect on games - thousands of
| new players try the game simply because it happens to be
| 15% off today or whatever. Even the "Free Weekend" play
| converts thousands of players that find the game fun. It
| makes trying out a new indie-type game feel less like a
| risk.
|
| Now that Factorio has real competition in this type of
| building game (Satisfactory - which I highly recommend if
| you liked Factorio), they might discover their principled
| stance against any Sale might waver a bit.
|
| To each their own I suppose. One day, Factorio will be on
| sale... once the playerbase dries up and they desperately
| try to inject life into the game. Or not... maybe they
| let it wilt away... which would be a real shame.
| maximente wrote:
| you're going to have an extremely hard time justifying
| that this attitude has or will "expedite the decline of
| the game and online community" given that they've been in
| early access for 4 years, continue to add sales, have an
| exclusive (and active) reddit, active modding scene, etc.
| 4 years is practically infinity when it comes to the
| uber-long tail distribution of indie video game success
| stories; not only that, but the game continues to add and
| keep players.
| Alupis wrote:
| Eh, Steam Early Release program has this effect with a
| _lot_ of games that, otherwise, would never see the light
| of day.
|
| You can play an ER game, get bored, stop playing for 6
| months, and then come back and tons of new content is
| available now. This keeps the player base around too.
|
| Usually though, once a game calls itself "1.0" or
| whatever, the new free features tend to stop shortly
| thereafter.
|
| (which is more than fair, it's a "completed" product now)
|
| Where will this game be in another 4 years, after little
| or no new content? All games have a shelf life.
|
| The developer could stick to their principles and ride it
| out, and shutter the game once enough people have lost
| interest. Or... they could have a Steam Sale and extend
| the life for years at a time. We'll have to see...
| gtaylor wrote:
| FWIW, I play Factorio and Satisfactory for different
| things. Factorio is where I go when I want to whip around
| quickly with my designs, flinging around blueprints and
| optimizing to my heart's desire. There's also that
| base/tower defense element that can be a different kind
| of thing compared to what you get with Satisfactory.
|
| Satisfactory is a more meditative experience for me where
| I enjoy building and exploring within a beautiful, hand-
| crafted world. I find myself building with cosmetics more
| so in mind over optimization.
|
| Sometimes I'm in the mood for one or the other, but they
| feel distinct enough for me to not substantially
| cannibalize my time. Though, mine is but one point of
| data!
| Akronymus wrote:
| I personally think that quite a large part of the HN community
| will find or have already found enjoyment in the game. So I
| wanted to share the release of the 1.0 version.
| slazaro wrote:
| I never played these kinds of programming games, I avoid them
| like the plague. I just know they would ruin my life. I don't
| even want to watch videos about them, that'd be like trying a
| drug just to see what it's like. Nope nope nope...
| gibagger wrote:
| It's odd. Personally, I take xanax for anxiety, and have
| never had the urge to take it for recreational purposes. I
| moderate my alcohol intake, and smoke up very sparingly... a
| gram lasts months to me.
|
| Certain videogames, on the other hand, can easily become a
| big problem for me. Weird stuff.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| In all honesty, I had to forcibly remove Factorio from my
| computer because it was too much of a productivity drain.
|
| I think I averaged like 60 hours a week.
| alexktz wrote:
| Your future RSI thanks you.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Ooh, I found 100ish hours of enjoyment over two weeks or so.
| Good thing I lost interest after I launched the rocket (the
| endgame), otherwise my productivity would have been gone
| forever.
| awalton wrote:
| The achievements in the game are a lot of fun to go after -
| they're mostly the right amount of painful/challenging and
| interesting to make you actually want to try for them.
|
| That being said, I've put more than a few thousand hours into
| the game over the past few years and I think the base game
| finally got stale enough for me to move on to something else
| right as they're reaching 1.0, but that's okay. (The big
| problem for me is that I've been sinking a lot of time into
| mods like Seablock and after nearly 100 hours into this run I
| can't see starting over from scratch again just to be on 1.0.
| I'm not even sure I want to finish this run either knowing
| I'm unlikely to see bug fixes in the Seablock mod packs, and
| they definitely could use some work.)
| cybrox wrote:
| I think the "Lazy Bastard" achievement is probably the
| worst in the beginning, it's quite an interesting one,
| though, since you later notice how much easier your life
| has become because you had to automate every little thing
| properly in the beginning.
| awalton wrote:
| I can't lie - this was one of the harder ones for me to
| figure out. I eventually found the speed running
| community to be quite good at this, as rain9441 would
| stream his 100% runs (that is, getting all of the
| achievements in one go), and it gave me a good hint on
| how exactly LB was supposed to work - I kept on screwing
| up saving the necessary crafts for oil refineries, since
| the way the game was setup before you literally couldn't
| build oil refineries in the machines you had, so you
| _had_ to save a certain amount of crafts for them.
|
| But yeah, it's just a good balance of "wow how the _!#(_
| does this work " to "ohhh I'm so glad it works this way."
| Dahoon wrote:
| Did you find anything good to move on to?
| awalton wrote:
| Honestly no. I really want to like Civ 6 but it's such a
| departure from earlier installments that I can't see
| myself pouring much more time into it. It's a fundamental
| design change where you're almost forced to play the same
| in a certain way that I just _really_ don 't like,
| combined with lots of nitpicky problems that earlier
| installments just didn't have due to being better
| balanced and better designed. (I think my comment on
| Twitter still stands - it feels like 2K really Sims 4'd
| this game right up.)
|
| Played Satisfactory and couldn't get into it - it's just
| worse Factorio, capitalizing on the popularity of that
| game with good 3D assets but trading it for terrible
| planning, crafting and perspective.
|
| I've considered using some of my funemployment time to
| write one of these kinds of games as I think I have a
| unique angle that hasn't been explored to death as of
| recently, but haven't committed to it.
| cybrox wrote:
| I assume you will not be happy if we tell you that there are
| mods that drastically increase the granularity of production
| processes and will make you easily work 200h on a single map
| before ever launching a rocket..?
| StavrosK wrote:
| I think my loss of interest was more about discovering the
| entire tech tree, I don't think making things harder will
| be enough to draw me back. I know there are mods that add
| technologies, though, maybe those are worth trying.
| dkersten wrote:
| Well, it sounds like you got plenty of value from the
| game so maybe moving on isn't the worst thing. I love
| Factorio, but there's so much out there demanding my time
| maybe it's best that I also lost interest eventually.
| bregma wrote:
| Given the tech tree is infinite, that's impressive.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Infinite how? Seemed pretty finite to me.
| duskwuff wrote:
| There are some numerical upgrades which can be repeated
| indefinitely at increasing costs -- robot speed, mining
| productivity, damage for various weapon types, etc.
| awalton wrote:
| It's 'infinite' on a technicality. Having your last few
| technologies on repeat all so your investment in tech-
| making infrastructure doesn't completely go to waste just
| barely qualifies, nothing more.
|
| It feels like the only reason they even left it in the
| game was that it became a bit of a measurement of how
| well your design scales past the end game - I cannot tell
| you how many otherwise meaningless 'X000 science per
| minute' base videos there are on YouTube, but the number
| is not insignificant. Most of the time it's just 'bot
| speed++' over and over again, since that's how many of
| those bases work without running into extreme update per
| minute (UPM) problems.
| Akronymus wrote:
| Pure angels alone is quite amazing. Especially if you
| enable the overhauls too. (Industries and technology)
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| I was the same, as soon as I launched a rocket I was done.
|
| 3 years later I played a multiplayer once a week with my
| buddies during COVID lockdown, as soon as we launched again I
| got bored. They are going again with more friends and I just
| join the discord for the chat, I don't open the game up.
|
| I don't like solve the same fundamental problem over and over
| again so, I launched the rocket, done.
| sbergot wrote:
| I think it is good design for a game to give a sense of
| closure to the player. You have reached the major goal of
| the game. Now you can move on to other things and it feels
| good.
|
| I still boot the game from time to time when I want a low
| energy activity. I go through the moves. Bootstrap base,
| then smelting arrays, etc. I try to innovate on some
| designs a bit (mainly to make things more modular/scalable
| and avoid having one big resource bus). I find it relaxing.
| billfruit wrote:
| I did take a look at it very early on in Early Access. I sort of
| did not like that it was so deterministic, like many games of the
| type.
|
| If there was randomness like machines churning out defective
| parts, machines ageing due to wear and tear etc it would have
| been more interesting, would even perhaps lead to more
| interesting tradeoffs. Some type of risk vs reward decisions were
| not there, which to me is generally a fun component of games.
| otr wrote:
| I'm sure there are mods (https://mods.factorio.com/) like that,
| and if not feel free to write one
| (https://wiki.factorio.com/Modding#Creating_mods).
|
| edit: now that I think about it factorio is purposely
| deterministic because otherwise it would break multiplayer
| almost totally.
| billfruit wrote:
| May be possible that it can be modded in, but I get a feeling
| would likely break the game, and things will go out of
| balance, since the core game perhaps was not designed for
| such probabilistic behaviour.
|
| Actually some amount of probabilistic behaviour including
| variation in the quality and rate of outputs of machines,
| even atleast variability between the different instances of
| the machines of the same type would have made it vastly more
| interesting is my view.
| lucb1e wrote:
| That's exactly why I like Factorio more than, say, prison
| architect. Where in Factorio you make your items move over
| conveyor belts, in PA prisoners/guards/etc. move in really
| stupid ways and you constantly have hallways clogging up on the
| rightmost tile while otherwise being empty (for example; there
| are many more aspects that are yolo in PA versus 'exact' in
| Factorio). Heck, one of the silly parts of Factorio is having
| to move your miners when the mine runs out. That's kind of
| "breaking down", though it's also predictable, and even that
| feels like re-doing work I've already done! It's really not my
| thing.
|
| Seeing your perspective, I'm not sure this is unifiable into a
| game that both sides would like. I guess we just like different
| kinds of games.
| markdown wrote:
| Must be getting lots of traffic: https://i.imgur.com/TNIeMoj.png
| Cyphase wrote:
| For anyone who doesn't know about it, Mindustry is a similar game
| with a more tower-defense angle. Linux, macOS, Windows, and
| Android.
|
| https://mindustrygame.github.io/
|
| (I have no connection to the project, I've just enjoyed playing
| it.)
| parliament32 wrote:
| Mindustry is an amazing game once you get tired of Factorio but
| want something similar. I much prefer Mindustry's timed-wave
| combat to Factorio's, but Factorio is more in-depth in the
| industrial processing/logistics side.
|
| In Steam I have roughly the same amount of hours in both.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| Also iOS!
| Cyphase wrote:
| Whoops! It's not mentioned in all the places. Thanks for the
| correction.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| The best part about Mindustry is that at some point you can
| stop fiddling with the map and just launch with the resources
| you have. A playthrough for a map is a few hours tops, maybe
| 3-4 if you're grinding some mineral or want to try something
| fancy.
|
| Factory on the other hand... I uninstalled after my first quick
| playtest ended with my SO waking up and wondering why I'm
| already awake at 8 in the morning (trick is: don't go to sleep
| and optimize the factory just a little bit longer).
|
| The last game that did this for me was Civ3 and I almost lost a
| job then, never played a Civ game since =)
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If you can tolerate building the same infrastructure from
| scratch every level, with a need to max out production and/or
| do levels multiple times to get the unlock points you need.
|
| At least that's the impression I got from a couple hours of
| time into the demo before I threw it away in disgust. It was
| like minutes 15-30 of factorio on loop, plus tower defense. The
| tower defense was good but not enough to make up for the tedium
| of setting up drills.
|
| Also if I'm remembering right the conveyors were unreasonably
| finicky for such a core mechanic.
| anchpop wrote:
| I actually much prefer their conveyors to factorio's
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| I like both. Factorio certainly has a lot more depth to it,
| but Mindustry feels more streamlined. Less focus on the
| minutia of optimizing the factory and logistics, and more on
| getting everything set up as quickly as possible so you don't
| get overwhelmed by waves of enemies.
|
| For Factorio players, here are the biggest differences:
|
| 1. No inventory. All structures get automatically crafted as
| they are built and the resources taken from your central
| storage core.
|
| 2. No inserters. Structures that output resources output them
| directly into adjacent belts or other structures. This
| simplifies construction and can allow for amazingly compact
| designs if you put sufficient thought into them, but can also
| lead to accidentally mixing the wrong items into your belts
| and clogging up your production lines if you're not careful.
|
| 3. You have blueprints and the equivalent of construction
| bots right from the start of the game. In singleplayer, it is
| normal and expected that players will pause the game, queue
| up a bunch of things to be built, then unpause and let their
| ship handle the construction automatically.
|
| 4. Belts are streamlined and much faster work with. 1 lane
| per belt, and the UI for constructing belts includes a
| pathfinding algorithm allows you to easily construct a belt
| between two points in seconds provided you have enough
| resources on-hand. Crossing two belts automatically creates
| an intersection so resources don't mix.
|
| 5. More focus on combat. Lots of different turret options,
| each with their own specializations, logistical requirements,
| and types of enemies they are good against. The PVP and
| attack modes are also quite fun.
|
| 6. More arcadey. Unlike with Factorio, you aren't expected to
| keep growing and expanding your factory forever. There is
| limited space and sooner or later you're either going get
| overwhelmed, or retreat back into space with the resources
| you collected. You can finish most stages in an hour or two.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > You have blueprints and the equivalent of construction
| bots right from the start of the game. In singleplayer, it
| is normal and expected that players will pause the game,
| queue up a bunch of things to be built, then unpause and
| let their ship handle the construction automatically.
|
| > Belts are streamlined and much faster work with. 1 lane
| per belt, and the UI for constructing belts includes a
| pathfinding algorithm allows you to easily construct a belt
| between two points in seconds provided you have enough
| resources on-hand. Crossing two belts automatically creates
| an intersection so resources don't mix.
|
| Blueprints, belt pathfinding, and automatic intersections
| did not exist 11 months ago when I played it.
|
| Thanks for letting me know, because that makes a huge
| difference. I'll give it another shot some time.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| Man, playing it on android phone makes my head hurts. It's
| small...
| chillacy wrote:
| I got into playing Mindustry on plane rides sometime last year
| and it has the amazing ability to make a 5 hour cross
| continental flight go by in an instant.
| Cyphase wrote:
| I first started playing it on a laptop during a long train
| ride late last year, after having briefly checked it out on
| Android at some prior point. It definitely passed the time
| well.
| grensley wrote:
| I always find I start running out of patience for the game once I
| get to fluids.
| bregma wrote:
| I'm stuck on 0.18 until I reach 1000 SPM. Real soon now, I just
| need to improve my iron throughput to relieve a bottleneck in
| flying robot frame production then I can turn to working out the
| rocket control units not meeting production quota.
| McDuglas wrote:
| 0.18 was just Release Candidate for 1.0 - the only feature
| added on release is Spidertron, the rest is just fixes. I think
| you should update.
| Coincoin wrote:
| They even made 0.18 mods to be 1.0.0 compatible this way the
| game releases with all mods already up to date.
| TheMerovingian wrote:
| I just finished a 10K SPM base. Finishing a base that big is
| like finally releasing a product that was in development for a
| year. I don't know what to do with myself now that its all
| finished.
| itchyjunk wrote:
| Games can help you figure out parts of your personality in weird
| ways. I used to do swimmingly with the early game with all the
| hack and slash building techniques all the way up to ~500 spm.
| Then the whole set up for trying to get to mega base got me
| anxious and such. I found most of my bottleneck to be
| electricity. Since I played on deathworld, placing solar was
| tedious.
|
| I knew a few different people who struggled early on a lot. They
| would be stuck handcrafting too much and rarely have those hack
| job factory setup. But once they got their early base with ~50
| spm and robots going, they would start scaling up with neat
| little blueprints and what not.
|
| Then there were the speed runners who launch the rocket in a few
| hours.
| Deestan wrote:
| > Then there were the speed runners who launch the rocket in a
| few hours.
|
| It's even below 2 hours now:
| https://www.speedrun.com/factorio#Any
| awalton wrote:
| > I found most of my bottleneck to be electricity. Since I
| played on deathworld, placing solar was tedious.
|
| If there's a major criticism to be had over Factorio, it's that
| power generation in the game is rather boring, and the Power
| poles and Light classes are designed somewhat poorly. Solar
| just doesn't scale in Vanilla - it costs too many materials for
| too little power, when really it should be one of the easier
| scalable techs (but should still require lots of research since
| it's a no-consumable power technology).
|
| You can get through an entire game of Factorio on nothing but
| coal power if you're diligent about when you expand, but most
| seasoned players will just burn the excess oil as power, since
| it's rarely a real bottleneck and oil's one of the most
| economical resources in the game to get setup - you build it
| once and... you're done. Forever.
|
| And then there's the super ridiculous late gamers who _have_ to
| build nuclear because once you start talking in tens of
| gigawatts, there 's just no way to squeeze that out of anything
| else and remain even close to efficient; the nukes take an
| absurd amount of concrete, but you're usually swimming in
| excess stone anyways. Trying to get there on solar is an
| exercise in actual pain, since you'll mine most of the map just
| trying to build panels and batteries... so you have energy to
| mine the map... The bootstrapping never ends.
|
| Some of the mods have done real work to make this better.
| There's a mod that has fusion as a late game tech which feels
| like cheating, but then there's modpacks like Seablock where
| you're forced to continuously rebuild power through your tech
| generations as there is no coal, your starting wind turbines
| don't make enough to get you past the first 10 hours, and each
| successive science step unlocks a new power generation
| technology that roughly feels in scale with that level of
| technology (from harvesting low grade algaes for biomass, to
| growing trees, to farming alien plants and extracting oils, and
| then to nuclear in the latest parts of the game).
|
| But no amount of modding can fix things so you can have a power
| pole that is also a lamp, so you can use Brave New World and
| see things through the stupid unfixable dark night without also
| spamming the map with build-wrecking lamps (since that mod
| removes your character and thus your ability to build night
| vision goggles).
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| You can install the mod that merges lamps and power poles or
| the one that makes it always day.
| tech2 wrote:
| I never got in to Factorio, though I'd been tempted several
| times. I recently bought the early-access Satisfactory though
| which is a similar game type, mostly to support the developers
| (Coffee Stain) who make another game I quite enjoy (Deep Rock
| Galactic).
|
| The refactoring bit hits hard, how do you structure your factory
| to minimise time/cost/space, can you increase throughput, do the
| outputs line up where you need them, how do you ensure a
| sufficient power supply, etc.?
| cshenton wrote:
| Coffee Stain is the publisher for Deep Rock Galactic, Ghost
| Ship Games are the developer.
| dunefox wrote:
| I bought it with a friend and found it quite boring. I guess I
| like rimworld or dwarf fortress style games much better.
| mosiuerbarso wrote:
| Same here. I'm a former engineer and thought Factorio would
| be the perfect game for me, after all I do enjoy problem
| solving. But it just seemed like an extension of my workday.
| However I love Rimworld. It's a game I keep going back too
| again and again. It's a great game for relaxing and
| unwinding. It's certainly in my top 3 list of best games of
| the last 10 years.
| Dahoon wrote:
| They (Coffee stain) collect data and send it to Epic (even on
| the steam version and even if you opt out) and doesn't reply to
| GDPR requests. I'd stay clear.
|
| https://steamcommunity.com/app/526870/discussions/0/24515950...
| lawl wrote:
| > The refactoring bit hits hard, how do you structure your
| factory to minimise time/cost/space, can you increase
| throughput, do the outputs line up where you need them, how do
| you ensure a sufficient power supply, etc.?
|
| There are different 'designs'. I'd recommend a main bus design
| for your starter base. Basically you take key materials, like
| copper plates, iron plates, steel etc. and then run (multiple)
| full belts of them down a long line. and build your factories
| to the side of it, taking your input materials from the main
| bus.
|
| See here: https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Main_bus
|
| Alternative designs (for much later in the game, if you want to
| buiold a megabase) are e.g. rail grid, sometimes called city
| block design. Looks like this:
| https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1as3oMAgOy4/maxresdefault.jpg
|
| You have a grid of rail tracks with standardized squares and
| standardized input/output locations. Then you automate input
| delivery/output collection to them either by pure circuit
| logic, or of you don't hate yourself quite that much using the
| Logistic Train Network mod:
| https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Optera/LogisticTrainNetwork
| tech2 wrote:
| A lot of these rules/ideas likely apply to Satisfactory,
| though there are additional concerns like rate-of-climb for
| ramps and placement of objects is not (by default without
| using base-plates) fixed at 90 degrees but works in (iirc) 15
| degree increments. It makes things differently challenging.
| munchbunny wrote:
| Once you play Factorio enough times you find that there are
| some general rules of thumb you can follow, in terms of
| resource consumption at various stages. Once you know those,
| it's partly just a matter of figuring out your scale
| milestones.
|
| I do three stages, a main bus starter base which is enough to
| fill out the tech tree and launch a rocket, and then once
| I've automated most things, then comes the first megabase,
| which after enough time I rip up and build the modularized,
| distributed megabase (mostly solving the problem of keeping
| train traffic spread out and avoiding long multilane belt
| busses). The interesting thing is that building a megabase
| isn't necessarily just 10x-ing your start base, it's actually
| doing things differently because how you move resources
| around starts to become a problem in ways you didn't
| encounter at the smaller scales.
| Koshkin wrote:
| But, do you get to destroy other people's factories? (If not,
| where's fun?)
| lucb1e wrote:
| Sure, pvp exists. It's not the most popular mode (co-op is the
| default and most popular way to play), but there is full
| support for this kind of scenario or mod: each object in the
| game is of a 'force' and you can't do things like open chests
| or mine (pick up) objects belonging to other forces (enemies).
| That's also how biters and player-built objects work. There is
| even a pvp scenario built into the game if I'm not mistaken and
| setting up a server is very easy (either with the in-game GUI
| or, if that's more your thing, with the dedicated server on
| Linux).
| rvdca wrote:
| For anyone who has wondered what would Factorio would look like
| in 3D, the game Satisfactory from Coffee Stains Studio would be a
| good idea.
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