[HN Gopher] The Factorio Mindset ___________________________________________________________________ The Factorio Mindset Author : Ariarule Score : 307 points Date : 2022-02-11 15:35 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.thediff.co) (TXT) w3m dump (www.thediff.co) | hathawsh wrote: | I own a copy of Factorio, yet I never play it. Whenever I think | about playing Factorio, I think what I really want to do is | emulate biology, not industrial machinery. I want a game that | lets me alter genomes slightly and try out several branches to | see which ones are better for the world I'm trying to create. I | want to fast forward through time so that evolution can run its | course, then if I don't like the outcome, I want to be able to go | back and try something else. I also want to be able to share | evolutionary steps as code (in text form, not graphical!) with a | community. The steps should be expressed in a functional | language. Effectively, I want my quasi-biological world to take | on a life of its own and I want to be able to run reversible | experiments on both my worlds and other people's worlds. | | That's probably too much to ask. :-) | zethus wrote: | Think you're looking for a game like Spore or the older | SimLife, both by Maxis. | cwkoss wrote: | Early in my software development career, I tried building | something like this. It's a really interesting problem, highly | recommend trying it yourself. Even with a simple system and | very modest skills: it was able to create results that | surprised me, which was very rewarding. Copying previously | written comment (you might also be interested in the "ALiEn - a | GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program" topic of | the thread or other similar projects in the comments) | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27476768 | | --- | | When I was learning to program, I tried to make a toy | artificial life evolution simulation. Particle organisms on a | 2D plane had 'dna' which was a list of heritable traits, like | size, speed, number of offspring. Bigger organisms could eat | smaller organisms, but they burn energy faster. 0 energy = | death. When two organisms of opposite gender collided and had | sufficient energy, they'd give some of their energy split among | the offspring, with each offspring's 'dna' values set to one of | the parent's +/- 5%. As I was developing this, I hadn't figured | out how I wanted to do food yet, so as an easy first step, I | just had a constant amount of energy that was split amongst all | organisms on the screen. Lots of little dots buzzing around, | was kind of neat but nothing too special. I left it to run | overnight. | | When I came back I was very surprised: previously i was running | at about 30FPS - now it was running at about 4 seconds per | frame. The screen was filled with dense expanding circles of | tiny slow organisms emanating from where organisms had mated | and nothing else. | | My simulation evolved to outsmart my simple food algorithm: | when food is divided equally among all organisms, the best | strategy is to use minimal energy and maximize offspring count. | I had populated the world with a default offspring count of ~5 | and they had evolved to the tens of thousands. The more | offspring an organism had, the greater the amount of the energy | pool would go to their offspring. | | It was a very cool "Life, uh, finds a way" moment - that such a | simple toy simulation of evolution was able to find an | unanticipated optimal solution to the environment I created | overnight was very humbling and gave me a lot of respect for | the power of evolution. | chinchilla2020 wrote: | There is an old game called spore that sort of did this. | lordnacho wrote: | I'm literally playing Factorio right now, with my kid. Got into | it over Christmas based on HN talking about it all the time. Good | game to multi because I don't have to pay attention all the time. | | It really reminds me of software in many ways. You fiddle with | tiny little things like balancing a belt, and then move on to | building belt balancers. You then move up the abstractions to | where you're not really placing inserters all the time. Maybe you | make some blueprints and you're placing a whole set of nuke power | plants in one go, or looking at trains. | | The kid loves it, but you can (luckily) tell the difference | between what he makes and what I make. That engineer keep-stuff- | organized thing takes a bit of time to hone, but he's getting | there. He also understands how to find root causes now, based on | looking at where there's a blockage in production and tracking | back along the chain. | | One thing that's interesting is that the game is a bit, you know, | dark. I mean we've built hell and the kid doesn't mind. Literally | paved paradise with concrete. The air is black with robots, 100k | of them at the moment. There's furnaces all over the place. We | got rid of the steam power generation but there are huge areas of | nukes all over. The natives are getting atomic bombs thrown at | them constantly, it takes a while to even get to the nearest | spawner. Or water that isn't green. | | And yet he doesn't ask about how we destroyed all the cliffs and | filled in the lakes, and chopped the trees. | | "How should we make it bigger, dad?" | serverholic wrote: | I think that's a bit of a weak point. When I play a violent | video game I don't want to kill people in real life. He | probably just knows it's a game. | SigmundA wrote: | I kind of like that its dark, the aliens attack because of the | pollution you create, and yet still the factory grows and I | clear the hives with better weaponry. | | Its has some connection to reality that cuts deep and yet I | want to play more get my SPM to go higher, it feels like | everything wrong with modern life depressing and fun at the | same time. | MattRix wrote: | Dyson Sphere Program is a great Factorio-like that feels more | optimistic and less dark. It's still about harvesting every | last resource though. On the other hand there's Terra Nil, | where the goal is to clean up a destroyed landscape and then | leave it without a trace. It's more of a puzzle game than a | factory game, but still worth playing: | https://vfqd.itch.io/terra-nil | and0 wrote: | DSP is excellent. I beat it before Factorio, and liked it a | lot more, but I then went back to Factorio to scratch the | same itch and after beating it think it's a bit better. The | modding support and multiplayer, especially, | | DSP is prettier, grander in scale, and also has a lot of | niceties that come with being part of the second generation | of the genre. Absolutely worth playing if you enjoy Factorio. | mdemare wrote: | Anything for iOS? | bduerst wrote: | Mindustry and Shapez IO (browser) are pretty good. | xondono wrote: | There's builderment, that is kind of a simple factorio but | without creeps (or main character for that matter) | gallegojaime wrote: | On the multiplayer side - Eco. An incredibly underrated game. | You have a month of playtime to extract resources, develop | your society, and be advanced enough to stop an asteroid. | Leaving minimum impact is heavily encouraged, and it has the | most sophisticated economic system I've seen in any computer | game. | nohr wrote: | Can you play Eco with 2 people? | kroltan wrote: | Not really, the game is really made for the "10s of | people scale". | | But thanks to how it works, it doesn't need 10s of | _coordinated_ people, you can certainly just join some | existing server with a friend and have an equally good | time. | [deleted] | kroltan wrote: | This, I have joined a small server and it is just a good | game. | | I went in expecting it to have "cringeworthy levels of | hippy idealism", but no, it is actually a reasonably sane | game. It is the first game since Wurm Online that I have | felt like part of a community thanks to the game mechanics | themselves, and not just incidentally. A lone person will | need inordinate amounts of time to go far into the tech | tree, so instead people specialize, and soon after I was | running a delivery company that moved orders of resources | between players, with people greeting eachother when | passing by at the trade district. | bduerst wrote: | Yep, currently playing through DSP myself, as a factorio | veteran. | | DSP is a great successor, even more than _Satisfactory_. It | 's amazing how well the DSP devs have figured out how to | scale from small factory plots to inter-planetary supply | chains to galaxy-wide economies, all to build a mega project. | | The only thing that's really missing (and same with | _Satisfactory_ , IMO) is the punishment for expanding too far | too fast, the way the bugs in Factorio operate. DSP is | supposedly adding combat later though, so we'll see how it | pans out. | enraged_camel wrote: | I'd like a greater focus on externalities, honestly. | | Oxygen Not Included does that really well IMO. Almost every | production process has inputs and outputs, and a lot of the | outputs are waste that you need to figure out either how to | utilize as input in another process, or to dispose of | safely and in a scalable way so as to avoid negative | repercussions. Waste isn't just in the form of products | either. For example, one of the challenges that sneaks up | on new players is that heat is also a type of waste, and if | you don't take steps to manage it (for example, by | insulating your power generators), it can wreck your | colony. | jeffrallen wrote: | Speaking of that... When people talk about limitless | cheap energy from fusion reactors in 30-50 years, I | wonder about goal warning from water great from all that | energy consumed and turned into waste heat radiated into | Earth's atmosphere. | sudosysgen wrote: | That will be a problem in a few hundred years of our | energy consumption continues growing at this rate; I've | done the math on this website a year or two ago. | kuschku wrote: | At the rate our energy consumption is growing, even if we | avoid climate change wrecking our society today, the heat | waste of our energy production will start to eclipse the | effects of climate change in only a few centuries, at | most a millenium. Which isn't that long of a time. | fennecfoxen wrote: | Factory Town is my current go-to. Rise of Industry has its | points, as does Voxel Tycoon, but Factory Town is cheery and | fun and it brings back the Factorio-style logic networks (and | be prepared to use them, as it takes away Factorio-style | train-routing -- though you gain tagging support.) | foobarian wrote: | Satisfactory had even more of that effect on me and the kid | when we played it. Perhaps because of being 3D and having all | sorts of native flora and fauna that was very good at being | annoying and getting in the way of construction. | | It essentially made it fun to destroy the native environment | and replace it with concrete. It's not even that we didn't mind | doing it, it's that we enjoyed it. It was kind of unsettling, | since it made me think that is how I would feel if I were a | 19th century British colonialist bringing "order" to various | native lands. | and0 wrote: | Satisfactory was fun for a while, and I want to try the v5 | features still, but even as an FPS vet I get headaches and | frustrations trying to do accurate placement of buildings, | let alone tightly optimal. | | Amazing graphics optimizations, considering the dynamic | lighting and how many objects are rendered. | outworlder wrote: | The 'zooping' or whatever they call that allows you to | build multiple things at a time is outstanding. Enormous | time saver. | | With a few exceptions, I think building placement is | outstanding. Hold alt and it snaps, even if the other | building is far away, with audio cues. Conveyor belts give | a dopamine hit every time I place a long one. That is with | foundations of course. Without them you get the spaghetti | mess. | | What is more difficult than Factorio is that there are no | blueprints or robots to build stuff for you. Also, the | terrain doesn't help, we can't just destroy cliffs. But | that's also interesting. | psyc wrote: | Satisfactory is in my top 3 of all time, just ahead of | Factorio. 2200 hours vs 1600 in the latter. I like it for | the 3D exploration and hand crafted map. I love that (if | you don't cheat yourself out of it by abusing ramps) you | can spend hours on expeditions through treacherous terrain | to get to the next resource. | | However my gripes are the same as yours. Placement is an | unwanted meta-game that they ought to remove via better QoL | features. The existing alignment, snapping, picking, and | repeating features are inadequate for a game like this. | Dobbs wrote: | A lot of recent changes to the game have been quality of | life changes to make it easier to align things. | aarmenaa wrote: | I got sucked into Satisfactory a while back. After about 100 | hours in the game, I was standing at the top of a cliff | looking at my creation and said to myself "I'm the worst | ecological disaster this planet has ever seen." | | I'm planning to start a new save soon, and I think I'm going | to try playing with some self-imposed rules, like not | removing vegetation. Not as much, anyways. I'm not exactly a | budding architect; where I bothered with buildings at all | they're mostly giant boxes filled with machines. But I've | seen some pretty creative, inspiring buildings on the | Satisfactory subreddit and I think the game is flexible | enough that I could create a factory that incorporates the | nature around it rather than just smashing everything flat. | kortilla wrote: | >myself "I'm the worst ecological disaster this planet has | ever seen." | | Really? Worse than an asteroid strike, a massive volcanic | eruption, a massive flood? Blights and other naturally | occurring diseases that have wiped out entire species are | much worse ecological disasters than building an entire | Manhattan. | | If you building was the worst thing that ever happened to | that planet, it wasn't modeled as a real planet in the | first place. | danbolt wrote: | Trying to plan things with only solar panels has this Puritan | work ethic feeling for me. | jamesgreenleaf wrote: | If Factorio took place on Earth, that would be pretty dark. | But, remember the backstory is that you've crash-landed your | spaceship on an alien world filled with giant hostile insects | who will attack you when you get too close, even if you build | nothing and never pollute. Hardly a paradise! | deathanatos wrote: | On the subreddit, I once read a good argument that perhaps | the backstory is actually more sinister. Supposedly you're | crashlanded ... but you launch a satellite? (Instead of ever | escaping?) The poster supposed that, what if the narrator is | a faulty narrator, and in reality, our character has been | sent as a sort of advanced terraforming agent send to prepare | the planet for colonization or such. After all, the engineer | needs no sleep, no food, never seems to tire, can somehow | research a wide range of complex technology on his or her | own. Perhaps the PC has simply been led, or programmed, to | _believe_ that he 's crash landed (or perhaps that's even the | truth, just the crash landing was on purpose, to deliver him | to the planet), and programmed such that he can't recognize | the cognitive dissonance of getting to a rocket but never | leaving, always expanding ... | hermitcrab wrote: | Wouldn't you be a bit hostile if aliens landed on your world | and started exploiting it? | avereveard wrote: | it's quite easy to put a dent in the "poor good alien" | narrative: stand around doing nothing. once enough time | passes, biters will kill you irregardless. mind it does | take a while for them to come get you, but they will come: | https://i.imgur.com/GFxUvu4.png | | so the engineer motive is clear: survival, not invasion. | | besides, the aliens are an infestation, not part of the | ecosystem; as a matter of fact, alien left to their own | device will expand and kill the planet biomass. aliens are | there to consume, no less than the engineer. | 8note wrote: | Is that not a description of colonial America? | totoglazer wrote: | Doesn't that make it even worse? You invade, destroy the | environment, and the beings that lived there don't like it. | So you commit genocide and unilaterally decide to destroy the | planet. | vaylian wrote: | > And yet he doesn't ask about how we destroyed all the cliffs | and filled in the lakes, and chopped the trees. | | I guess it's because he knows that it's just a game. And | there's nothing in the game's rules that allows you to befriend | the natives. There's simply no other choice that is rewarded | other than expansion and domination, because the natives will | always be hostile when you get close to them. Plus: The natives | expand too. From time to time new biter bases spawn. | aftergibson wrote: | Anyone else really want to get into Factorio, but an hour into it | realised it just felt like work and quit? | jugg1es wrote: | One of my top gaming moments ever was launching the rocket in | under 6 hours. I launched it at 5:59:40. Then I realized the | "There is no spoon" achievement was for 7 hours (and it's now 8 | hours after 1.0 launch). | | Love this game. | metalrain wrote: | I think game like Factorio shows that level of automation is kind | of quantized. | | First there is no automation, then one resource is automated but | others are not, then several are automatized, but combining them | is not. There are gaps where building the next thing doesn't make | sense even if it makes sense when you have little bit more | resources. | | I think this is true in business as well. It's hard to tell when | you have crossed the threshold where building the next level | makes sense. | | You tend to use a lot of time and money to build the next level | of automation and only then you can measure if it was worth it or | not. | SamPatt wrote: | "Step 3 | | Rip up large fractions of the setup and lay them out again with | more straight lines and sensibility" | | Newb. | | You don't rip the first spaghetti base up and rebuild, that's a | waste of time. | | The first base only exists to get you to the point where you can | build a main belt line and then make everything nice and straight | and coherent. | | The old base just sits abandoned, until the new belt line | eventually encroachs, and then you just unceremoniously raze it. | leptoniscool wrote: | Dyson Sphere Program is a similar type of game, with prettier | graphics. | saddestcatever wrote: | Shoutout to Satisfactory. I've seen many players that resonate | with Dyson Sphere Program also enjoy Satisfactory. Not quite as | in-depth as Factorio, but an amazingly, amazingly well designed | game in both over experience and gameplay. | bloqs wrote: | Satisfactory - even prettier | bentcorner wrote: | Satisfactory is IMO a superior Factorio in that it drops the | Tower Defense and resource-depletion mechanics. It's also in | 3d. | | I can understand that Factorio is balanced differently but it's | annoying to build up a factory and then need to do non-factory | things when a resource runs out or aliens attack your base. | bcrosby95 wrote: | Aliens are just another automation problem, and are really no | different than working on the factory itself. | pwillia7 wrote: | The feeling when you get coal setup for the first time... | depaya wrote: | For what it's worth, the aliens are a completely optional | part of the game. I almost always play with them disabled now | so I can focus on the more fun parts of the game. | | Also some mods can counteract resource depletion if desired. | 0xffff2 wrote: | I actually think the resource depletion mechanics are the one | thing missing from Satisfactory. Constantly adjusting to keep | the raw materials flowing in is one of the things that keeps | Factorio from getting stale for me. | kllrnohj wrote: | > Satisfactory is IMO a superior Factorio | | Early game I agree, but mid/late game I couldn't disagree | more. Satisfactory desperately needs a construction bot or | blueprints or something to help you build at the scales it | starts pushing you towards, or you just afk forever. Also the | ticket loop as the endless resource sink is far less | interesting than factorio's endless research paths. | vkou wrote: | The logistical puzzles in it are... Unfortunately, a lot less | interesting (And these games, by design, are all about | logistical puzzles. Feeding stuff into an assembler isn't | interesting - getting your stuff to the point where you can | feed it into an assembler is.) | | The logistics network is too powerful, pilers don't really | change how items move around, and fluids/gases/solids are | treated the same. | julianeon wrote: | I often encounter this issue when it comes to programming-like | games. I'm wondering if I should adjust my thinking here. | | 1) Hmm, this game is a lot like programming. A lot like it. | | 2) Maybe I should just program? That is real work & I can get | done more work done, be more productive. | | 3) [stopped game, started programming] | bregma wrote: | Factorio has trains. Also, at my programming job they frown on | the use of shotguns, flame throwers, explosive rocketry, and | the use of tactical nuclear missiles to solve problems. | alpaca128 wrote: | That's also the reason I don't play games like these. | Programming scratches the same itch for me and has fewer | limitations. | | Still I enjoy the absolutely insane creations of some people in | those games. I'll never forget the Doom-style 3D engine[0] | someone created inside Factorio, with (iirc) a clever | configuration of trains as a huge graphical display. | | [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bAuP0gO5pc | martincmartin wrote: | What other games are like programming? | wccrawford wrote: | Also "Satisfactory", Factory Town, Human Resource Machine, | Kubifactorium, and at least one more that I can't remember | the name of at the moment. | | Some are more programming-like than others. | Firmwarrior wrote: | I've been on the fence about Satisfactory, but I just | checked Notch's twitter and the dude is STILL sitting there | playing it all day | | The man's rich enough to be swimming with whales or | partying in space and he's sitting in his basement playing | Satisfactory.. there must be something to it | voidfunc wrote: | I picked up Satisfactory a week ago and have been playing | online with brother and one other friend... it definitely | sucks up time. | | It's a lot of fun. I'm not much for optimizing every | little detail of production, but its a lot of fun to | build and work out supply chains. | [deleted] | bee_rider wrote: | There are a couple games from Zachtronics that literally have | a programming component to them (TIS-100 is almost all | programming, but with a weird computer). | | Mindustry has a little programming if I recall correctly -- | mostly it is tower defense and resource gathering, though. | | EDIT: As you can see, everybody was excited to bring up | Zachtronics. Really neat developer. | andrewzah wrote: | As mentioned, zachtronics games. spacechem is more fun for me | because it's not literal programming like TIS-100 | | minecraft (redstone/technical farms get quite sophisticated) | | astroneer | FumblingBear wrote: | One thing I don't see mentioned on here often is actually | rather surprising. Modded Minecraft! There are a lot of | highly technical mods that are focused on providing resources | that enable mass automation, and many modpacks that push the | limits of that concept. | | Some of my favorite modpacks are Enigmatica 2: Expert, | Omnifactory, and one I just started recently, Divine Journey | 2. | | They all have a similar process of starting with nothing but | a book full of quests to guide your progression, and end up | with you automating everything from farms to quarries to mob | grinders in order to produce items that have comically | difficult "recipes" to craft. | | Scratches the same itch as Factorio, Zachtronics games, | Satisfactory, etc. but often has some fun side goals such as | making your factory look beautiful, exploration, fighting | bosses, and best of all, getting your friends hooked on the | game and playing on a server in a group! | FreeFull wrote: | Pretty much any Zachtronics game, for one. | Twirrim wrote: | Mindustry, Dyson Sphere Program, most games by Zachtronics | (Spacechem, tis-100, opus magnum), etc. | sjmulder wrote: | Zachtronics games. They're all about processes and | optimisation but in quite different ways. | egypturnash wrote: | There is a fine line between "this game exercises the same | parts of my brain as my day job, but with a vastly different | set of restrictions and consequences" and "I stare at a screen | exercising this part of my brain all goddamn day and the last | thing I want to do in my leisure time is stare at a screen | using this part of my brain even more". | | I am an artist; I flirted briefly with Minecraft for a while, | then looked up from a flawed first attempt at an underwater | glass dome at 3AM, decided I would much rather exercise my | creativity in a realm where I can show it to other people and | maybe make some money from it, and uninstalled Minecraft | forever. | iszomer wrote: | These games were my mobile companion during brief writer's | block while learning C. | | The Sequence, The Sequence 2, by One Man Band: | | https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=640940791858937636. | .. | organsnyder wrote: | I've found myself following a similar thought progression. For | me, the difference is that in Factorio I can decide to | completely refactor my base and not have to deal with any angry | stakeholders or teammates that disagree with my direction. | zethus wrote: | inb4 someone makes an angry stakeholder mod that spawns | biters unless you hit some arbitrary metric in a set amount | of time :) | organsnyder wrote: | The biters do make refactoring a bit more tricky. Got to at | least keep base defenses up and running. That could be seen | as the equivalent of keeping existing users happy. | jnwatson wrote: | Factorio is just different enough from programming that it | doesn't trigger that reflex for me. | | It is more about physical layout and queuing than programming. | KaoruAoiShiho wrote: | Exactly, I only played Factorio and Dyson Sphere Program when I | was depressed. Every other time if I feel bored or burned out | enough to try to play a session I think about my list of | backlogged greenfield great ideas and immediately end up doing | one of those. They are honestly just as creatively rewarding | and fun in the greenfield stage at least. | tomlor wrote: | I don't think you're alone there. This was EXACTLY my mindset | as well. | | I have the same problem with the various Japanese logic puzzles | (Soduku, Nurikabe, Hashi, etc): 1) This is fun! 2) Hmm, I'm | using the same algorithms to solve every puzzle 3) I could | probably write a solver 4) Don't write solver. Move on to | something else. | zethus wrote: | If your life goal is to optimize for "productivity", then you | will of course encounter your issue. I imagine the vast | majority of people seek out leisure activities. What I've found | that Factorio does for many programmers is that it hits the | same dopamine receptors that productive programming does, just | in a non-work context. A professional football player should be | able to enjoy playing basketball in their off-time because it's | another athletic activity and not feel the guilt of improving | their football skills. | hhmc wrote: | > it hits the same dopamine receptors that productive | programming does, just in a non-work context. | | Plus without the inevitable bullshit that's coupled to any | real work. | electroly wrote: | Factorio is right on the cusp for me. SpaceChem, too. TIS-100 | was a bomb for me; if I'm literally writing code, it better end | up in a GitHub repo. | | With Factorio for me, I always reach a point where I know how | I'm going to scale up, and then I lose interest in actually | doing so. Just knowing that I could do it is satisfying enough. | ansible wrote: | > _... TIS-100 was a bomb for me ..._ | | I started it, but never finished it. | | On the one hand, it is a _vastly_ better debugging | experience. You can see the entire state of the machine, and | easily step through the execution. | | In contrast, with my day job, I'm dealing with incomplete | documentation, poorly designed and very large libraries | without adequate comments or organization, subtle bugs that | only occur in unidentified situations, etc. | | But at the end of the day, TIS-100 felt more like work or a | hobby project, so I'd be better off doing one of those. | 0xffff2 wrote: | I love construction/management games but I very rarely | "finish" them for exactly this reason. The moment I can see | exactly how I would go about making it to the end goal, I'm | done. | outworlder wrote: | I haven't identified with a HN thread in quite a while. The | moment I understand how to do something or that it's | possible, I'll drop it. That includes my personal projects. | Aeolun wrote: | I have this feeling often, but I still go back to games. To see | any fruits of my efforts doing real programming would take days | or weeks at this point, and I want to do something that more or | less immediately rewards me for my efforts. | averagedev wrote: | My experience was similar. I tried Factorio once, and gave up | because it was very tedious, and too much work to consider it | fun. I would have liked to enjoy it, but it's not for everyone. | bloqs wrote: | Please please try Satisfactory. It's a beautiful, 3D equivalent. | Holds a coveted Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam. | jerry_tk wrote: | There is also Dyson Sphere Program with similar reviews. | TheMerovingian wrote: | I found that it didn't scale as much as Factorio. I'm the type | with over 3K hours in the game, who likes to build absurdly | massive bases. | Aeolun wrote: | I like Satisfactory mostly because you get to enjoy the native | flora and fauna without it constantly trying to kill you. | ascagnel_ wrote: | More than just the native flora and fauna, Satisfactory dumps | you in an area that's largely pleasant to be in. Factorio has | a very desaturated, green-and-brown "videogame" look, and | it's not all that pleasant to look at after a while. | stackedinserter wrote: | Thank you for yet another reminder that it sucks to be a mac | user :-) | neogodless wrote: | A "mac user" isn't who you are as a person. It's who you're | being in a moment of time. If you want to play PC games, buy | a machine that handles playing them and use it for those | instances. In this case, it looks like they only released | Satisfactory on Windows, with mostly good results playing on | Linux using Proton. | | https://www.protondb.com/app/526870 | | Factorio seems to run on macOS and SteamOS + Linux. | vsareto wrote: | I just don't get this. I feel like people back port their | learning experiences to games that have a similar enough | structure. A nice observation, but you can't go in the reverse | direction by playing Factorio to learn something tangible. | Factorio doesn't have the same failure granularity as the real | world and so the usefulness of the analogy/mindset just doesn't | do it for me. | | Plus my skill can be replaced by roughly how well I can memorize | other peoples' factory patterns. | | Don't get me wrong though, it's a great game, and probably had | the same impact for its genre as Doom had for FPS games. | outworlder wrote: | > A nice observation, but you can't go in the reverse direction | by playing Factorio to learn something tangible | | What about Factorio circuits? :) | wink wrote: | I love programming and I hate games like Factorio where you're | (to a degree) doing the same thing with logical thinking and | optimization etc.pp. (I like games and I like puzzles, but this | feels like work to me, in a language I hate, with an IDE I hate | and with no undo). | | At least this article doesn't tell me I will love this and I | should play it, unlike all the others. So thumbs up for the | article :P | jimbob45 wrote: | I'm in the same boat but I wonder if that's just because we're | programmers and anything short of perfection is time wasted for | us. | | When you're first starting out, it feels _amazing_ to input two | numbers, add them together, and print them out to the console. | When you're a professional programmer, it feels like you're | wasting time if you're not defensively coding against future | concerns and potential feature needs. | | Likewise in Factorio, I can't enjoy success in any part of the | game because I feel that any investment in one level could | potentially be taking away from planning for the next level. | Level, in this case, being the current level of technology | researched in the game. | | I realize that this is irrational but I surely can't be alone | on this. | ojbyrne wrote: | Personally I feel like Factorio reveals a principle I also see at | my day job. Automation is exhausting. ;-) | mLuby wrote: | _Growth_ is exhausting, no? | easrng wrote: | maydup-nem wrote: | Wow, if it is true, I will surely stop playing factorio, | because, apparently, some prick on hackernews would think the | game's lead dev is not OK, and I am always quick to pigeonhole | a person based on his controversial opinion, which I happen to | disagree with. | capableweb wrote: | Is this based on anything at all or just border-line libel? | easrng wrote: | Aperocky wrote: | Going to give a shoutout to | | https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry | | and | | https://songsofsyx.com/ | | In particular, mindustry can actually run scripts within the game | to automate a lot of things. If you like factorio you're going to | like these 2 games. | valyagolev wrote: | Bitburner is a pure coding factory-must-grow game. it's like | your "run scripts to automate things in the game" without | anything else | fragmede wrote: | Also http://factoryidle.com. There's no "person" that you're in | control of and it plays different for other reasons, but it's | definitely in the same category. | | There's also Satisfactory if you like a 1st person view of | things. | Matheus28 wrote: | Thanks for the recommendation! I loved that game | qudat wrote: | I had more fun with mindustry than factorio. IDK why but I just | felt it more approachable | pwillia7 wrote: | Obligatory Zachtronics and Screeps links. TIS and Shenzen are | my favorites of the zachtronics series. I've never really | gotten into screeps but it always looks so cool. | | https://www.zachtronics.com/ | | https://screeps.com/ | iszomer wrote: | SpaceChem is where it started for me. | Malic wrote: | Let's add https://shapez.io/ to that list! | iliketrains wrote: | Me and my friend are actually working on a somewhat similar | game called Captain of Industry [1]. The game is less about | automation and scaling and more about realistic processes, | mining with excavators, trucks logistics, and taking care of | your workers. It's not done yet but we are quite close! | | [1] https://www.captain-of-industry.com/ | | PS: To my surprise, simulation games are a lot of very | technical work full of algorithms and optimizations, compared | to an average SWE work in a tech company. | Kaytaro wrote: | I mean this as a compliment when I say I hope this never gets | released. | eezurr wrote: | Just curious, if you're focusing on realistic processes, how | come that excludes realistic spacing/placement of structures | (based on your websites background video/image)? Wouldn't the | two go hand in hand for the feeling of the game you're trying | to build? | iliketrains wrote: | I am not sure what do you mean by "realistic | spacing/placement of structures", could you elaborate? Do | you mean that in reality you would not build a farm next to | a blast furnace? That's true, we did not implement any | mechanics regarding building proximity to others, but that | is certainly an interesting idea! | | When I mentioned our focus on reality, I meant that the | mechanics and processes are mostly driven how things are | done in the real world and by playing the game you can even | learn something new (e.g. steel production needs oxygen). | However, it is a game and this can be done only to a | certain degree, especially the early game has a lot of | "shortcuts". | | As an example of realistic mechanics and processes, you | build excavators that mine ores and coal, trucks haul | materials around the factory, terrain collapses as it is | being mined, iron and steel smelting produces slag that | needs to be disposed, fertilizer for farms is made from | ammonia (synthetic process) or from compost (natural | process), etc. (see our wiki for more https://wiki.captain- | of-industry.com/ ). | altairprime wrote: | In theory, finding the 'Factorio' aspect of production just- | enough management in other games is easy; Big Pharma is a lovely | example of this. But instead, I want to talk about Stardew | Valley, and the psychological effects of scaling up production. | | There is a very popular player mod for Stardew that allows | automation of all "click to perform" actions normally operated by | the player: Harvest fruit from a tree, Brew honey into mead, Cook | wood into coal, Age mead in cask, and so on. Essentially, it | introduces the conveyor systems of any production game -- Verb | Noun With Machine -- and uses footpaths as the invisible conveyer | belts. It is possible, with careful pathing, to build a farm that | is automated from harvest to sale, and generates an endless | supply of any product with minimum downtime. | | I found that when I applied this approach to Stardew, it was | really fun making it work, and once I had it all working, there | just wasn't anything left to enjoy. Not because the game doesn't | have a near-infinite list of things you can produce (especially | with mods), but because it turns out that the joy I derived from | Stardew is about doing things myself. And so my intricately- | pathed full scale production farm sits unopened. | | I point this out because in tech we often forget that capacity | and automation can, in some cases, be inversely proportional to | enjoyment. I could apply a photo editing ML algorithm to my photo | library and no doubt it would be nice, but I enjoy the act of | taking a photo and fiddling with it, even if I send exponentially | fewer photos to my friends. One of them has a complex multi- | device "ingestion pipeline" and it treats them well for their | purposes, and I've built one before, and it turns out I just | don't enjoy digital photography at that scale. | | I love playing games _like_ Factorio (though I haven't gotten | much into it yet) for their own sake, and I don't deny that it's | possible to enjoy the art of scaling and automating these things, | and that others feel differently. But my experience with Stardew | pipelines was a really useful lessons in learning what I enjoy | and when I enjoy it, and when that means I shouldn't scale it up | any further. | impalallama wrote: | > I used to be of the opinion that the computer game Factorio was | a colossal waste of talent, burning many billions of dollars of | GDP every year.... But since trying it out a bit more I'm | starting to suspect that Factorio is the rare computer game to | actually increase GDP. | | Hell of an opener that just makes me immediately dislike this | guys entire worldview. | | Kinda also backed up by the fact that he doesn't mention the very | unsubtle commentary of you basically strip mining an alien planet | clean mutating the wild life into a homicidal frenzy in desperate | attempt to stop you from killing their home with pollution. | kortilla wrote: | > he doesn't mention the very unsubtle commentary of you | basically strip mining an alien planet clean mutating the wild | life into a homicidal frenzy in desperate attempt to stop you | from killing their home with pollution. | | People who get hung up on this are pretty shallow though. It's | such a tiring trope of "oh no, look at how bad colonialism is". | There is a lot of good stuff to discuss about the game beyond | the sophomoric analogies with the native aliens. | | When people are discussing things like call of duty, | battlefield, etc it would be equally as idiotic to discuss "the | unsubtle commentary of the horrors of war". | pm90 wrote: | The game allows one to disable the wildlife, no mods | required, so it's possible to focus solely on game without | dealing with it at all. | | However. I do think it's a pretty amazing mechanic that the | game designers put in the game, and is a great tool to shine | light on the darkest aspect of the human race: our | unbelievable capacity to subdue and destroy. | | Factorio isn't just about being dropped in a war zone and | shooting the bad guys. It's about scaling up destruction to a | planetary scale. Often unintentionally (pollution) but also | intentionally (nukes). These are all very rich and | interesting things to speculate on, none of it is "shallow". | avereveard wrote: | Start a game, do absolutely nothing. Witness aliens killing you | nonetheless. Aliens aren't the poor good natives, and it's so | easily disproven I don't understand how it ever become to be a | thing. | sudosysgen wrote: | Drop into your local forest, do absolutely nothing. | Eventually witness a wild animal kill you. Does that justify | ecocide? | kweingar wrote: | In most of these colonization/industrialization games, the | entire point is the thrill of taming a wild land and | producing grand feats of engineering out of nothing. The | survivalist framing, with mindlessly hostile natives, is just | a narrative convenience to brush aside the ethical | implications of invasion. | hoelle wrote: | Might be overthinking it a bit. The biters are a game | mechanic to add time pressure to build your defenses up to | par with your factory expansion. Sort of a deadline to stop | you from navel gazing too much. | | You can disable them entirely at game start, completely skip | military tech, and your pollution cloud will still blight the | land, poisoning trees and lakes (and fish) around you. | serverholic wrote: | Some people legitimately think the purpose of life is | productivity. I see quite a few on twitter and I can't help but | stare and study them like some alien lifeform. | liaukovv wrote: | Purpose of life is reproduction Reproduction is easier in | engineered environment | brnt wrote: | They make for excellent employees. Promotion of this and | similar values almost seem like they were designed for | capitalists to exploit. | serverholic wrote: | For sure. I'd legitimately love to get inside their heads | and see what makes them tick because it's a completely | foreign mindset for me. | | I saw some recently on twitter who were discussing how they | run their relationships like a corporate business... They | have standups, 1on1's, scheduled relationship sync up | meetings, etc. As if doing this bullshit during their day | jobs wasn't enough. | valyagolev wrote: | Huizinga, the early theorist of games in culture, once remarked | about contact bridge: "The incredible amount of productive | social energy spent on this game could indeed be spent better, | but in fact most likely would be wasted on something way worse" | TameAntelope wrote: | Gah, this happened to me literally yesterday, where I started a | new Factorio map and had to close it after like an hour because I | knew a) how much time I'd be able to sink into the game and b) | how similar it was to my day job, which means I could just do my | day job and feel 90% of the satisfaction while also earning money | doing it. | | Rarely does an article online hit me as directly as this one | does, good work. | juice_bus wrote: | Shopify allowing Factorio to be expensed is really interesting. | | Someone higher up must really like it? | xal wrote: | I do :-) | midjji wrote: | Very cool you do this! Care to elaborate on why? | mynegation wrote: | That comment must be on some HN wall of fame next to "Did you | win Putnam?" classic. | Jalad wrote: | I didn't know what this was referring to, but after a | little bit of digging: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079 | midjji wrote: | A tech company focused on logistics has at least one boss or | founder who really likes factorio, the game for and by | programmers who like logistics? Who could have guessed^^ It is | cool if they let people expense it though, but motivating the | 20$ per employee cost is pretty trivial. Compared to similar | expenses like a yearly fruit basket, Id wager giving | programmers/logistics workers a free factorio probably has a | better impact on work performance. I think op is | underestimating how much people learn from games, but it is | also not exactly a high bar to pass, and Id wager factorio | teaches more than most. | sam0x17 wrote: | I agree that it's chump change. Many startups provide a | $100/month budget for "whatever" self tech expenses that can | be spent on things like games, etc. This isn't groundbreaking | by any means. Still cool that they do it though. | | Now comping employees for after-hours time spent playing | factario -- now that would be groundbreaking haha | jfim wrote: | > Id wager giving programmers/logistics workers a free | factorio probably has a better impact on work performance. | | I'd be skeptical of that claim. I'm sure there would be at | least a few engineers that showed up to work pretty tired | because the factory needed more iron plates. :-) | midjji wrote: | Yeah, think I'm less assuming that people wont let it | negatively affect their work, as much as assuming that the | people for whom it does would have been playing something | else with the same effect. | Aeolun wrote: | Not really. Factory/building games are the only ones that | keep me up until 2:35 AM (at least today). | | This was fine when I could just sleep in until 10, but | I'm fairly certain my little bundle of joy will need my | attention somewhere before 8. | | 3 years in and still trying to figure out how to combine | these things. | midjji wrote: | If you figure it out, there will be a lot of interest^^. | I kinda miss the "just one more turn" till sunrise | sessions, but half of that is me missing that the only | thing that happened the day after was a slight headache. | shane_b wrote: | Tobi the CEO likes it | deltaonefour wrote: | Every once in a while on the HN front page you get some article | about a programming analogy or an entrepreneurship analogy. | | "Here's why the game factorio is like programming or here's why | it's like life. yada yada yada" | | Yeah, AND this guy takes the next step and turns the analogy into | a "mindset." | | Great. Revolutionary. First off.. analogy is amazing. Second... | turning that analogy into a way of life blows my mind. Is your | mind blown too? This guy is a genius. | | The next step, (and I've seen plenty of this on HN), is to turn | that analogy into a full blown "theory" of some sort... complete | with diagrams. | dentemple wrote: | I mean, out of most of the analogy examples posted to HN, | Factorio is actually a good one. The observations that the | writer makes are all immediately apparent when you fire up the | game, and there isn't anything here that I'd call a "deep cut" | or a strained metaphor. | | Factorio can literally be renamed "Iterative Development: The | Game" and players wouldn't find anything confusing about any of | it. | deltaonefour wrote: | >I mean, out of most of the analogy examples posted to HN, | Factorio is actually a good one | | I think all the analogies I've seen are good. The problem is | they're obvious. They don't really bring anything new to the | table. | | Great you identified an analogy. Big deal? | dentemple wrote: | And yet, there's always at least one HN reader who makes a | comment in every popular thread that the original post is | irrelevant in some way. | | Still, it never seems to stop people from doing it despite | not "bringing anything new to the table" with their | comment. So why do it? | deltaonefour wrote: | What I'm bringing to the table, is helping everyone | notice that these posts bring nothing new to the table. | | That's the problem with these analogy posts. People like | them but they don't offer anything of substance. Think | about it. You identified a connection between two things, | yet nothing new was introduced. You get this artificial | euphoria of seeing a connection but that's it, it's just | an illusion. | ineedasername wrote: | It seems like this is merely someone's opinion that Factorio | may have some transferable skills, namely a mindset-- along | with the limitations-- of automation. | | I'm not sure why this would be so frustrating for you. It's not | like the author themselves went down your slippery slope to | full blown theory. If they had? Sure, that would be a bit of | the usually breathless attempts at "thoughtleading", but I see | no need for preemptive criticism. | | Also congratulations for being really tall. I'm about average | height. | deltaonefour wrote: | I'm frustrated because these types of opinions are | everywhere. Especially factorio: | | https://www.google.com/search?q=factorio+is+like+programming | | There are tons and tons of these. | ineedasername wrote: | I program, and I've played Factorio. It feels kind of like | programming, so it does not frustrate me that such an | opinion can be found everywhere. | | Is it your opinion that Factorio does not have elements of | gameplay that require (or benefit from) an approach to what | is used in programming? | deltaonefour wrote: | No it frustrates me when something so obvious needs to be | announced 50 million times as if it's some revelatory | discovery. | | Here a list of games that are unintentionally turing | complete: Dwarf Fortress OpenTTD | Terraria Minecraft Minesweeper | LittleBigPlanet Baba is You Factorio | Cities: Skylines Opus Magnum Portal 2 | Geometry Dash | | You can come up with approximately 10 analogy blog posts | for each game... written, of course, from a different | blog with each post presenting the analogy as if it's | some amazing idea. Then of course post it on hackernews | and flood the front page with this stuff. | ineedasername wrote: | Well, the world is full of people that have never played | Factorio. Some of them are programmers, and when they | finally play it they get excited about it and want to | tell people about it. Independent rediscovery. | | And I'll admit to bring irked sometimes when a recurring | theme or repost rears its head on HN pg1 for the dozenth | time, so I guess I understand your sentiment. But I | console myself with the knowledge that what is old and | cliche for me is likely to be eternally new for an ever | changing subset of readers. | | Also thanks for the list of games-- I had no idea some of | them were Turing complete, and will enjoy a bit of | dugging internet rabbit holes finding out the details of | why & how. | deltaonefour wrote: | Even CSS is turing complete. Have fun. | evmar wrote: | I love Factorio! | | If you've completed enough of the base game, I can recommend | Seablock (which includes AngelBob) and Space Exploration as two | mods that make the game dramatically larger. I played some of | Pyanodon (which is also sometimes mentioned as a big mod) but I | found it kind of gratuitously complex. | benlivengood wrote: | Factorio is an SRE game if there ever was one. It comes with | graphs and dashboards. You can create audible alerts. The QPS | (errr, biters) _will_ come and the factory better be ready. | Success failure is a thing. | jl6 wrote: | I feel compelled to repost a comment of mine from the simutrans | thread: | | -- | | So, this is totally pop-evolutionary-psychology, but I think the | relevant predisposition is towards hoarding. For 100,000 | generations, humans (and our ancestors before then) have had to | gather and store food and other supplies to see them through the | winter (or other hard times). We are wired to do this because we | would have died out if we didn't. | | Building games let you build up your hoard of stuff (whether | trains, rails, buildings, tiberium silos, green circuits, ...) in | a tight feedback loop that repeatedly triggers the "this is my | stuff, now I am safe" dopamine response. | | This also explains collecting hobbies, and goes some way towards | explaining the desire for wealth acquisition in general. | lawrenceyan wrote: | From the footnote: > In CS terms, expanding a poorly-specced and | unmaintainable Factorio base is O(log(n)) while expanding a | perfectly specced one is O(n), but the coefficient on the first | is massively higher. | | Shouldn't this be the other way around? Speccing out requires | higher upfront effort, meaning a higher coefficient, but | ultimately results in better long term results in overall | required effort, resulting in O(log(n)). | minihat wrote: | My friend has 600+ hours played of Factorio. | | He just beat the game for the first time. I bought it, we played | multiplayer. And I taught him the mantra "great is the enemy of | good enough". Our run took 14 hours. | | I also know many people like this at work, and wish they could | have the Factorio experience. | | If you refactor at the first sign of trouble, you remain blind to | totally new to problems just around the corner. | tstrimple wrote: | For me "beating" those type of games isn't the point. I've got | nearly 1,500 hours on Rimworld and I've never beaten the game. | It's more interesting to me to create different scenarios and | see where they go and what stories come from them than to try | to optimize for racing to the end. | hobomatic wrote: | Yeah an earlier poster mentioned something about there being | no black box problems and that all the information to do | anything is already out there to read. I think this is only | true if you are looking to beat the game in a prescribed way. | There is a massive amount of space for experimentation and | defining your own resource restrictions and goal state. | chrisfosterelli wrote: | I mean, some people just prefer to play the game more | leisurely. It's not a speed run or a business deliverable. I | have around 80 hours on my factory so far and it's pretty clear | to me I could have "finished" by now with a lot more corner | cutting but I'm enjoying the process of exploring each tech | tree discovery in depth and scaling things out "right". This | takes longer, but it's fun and I feel better about the end | result, and isn't that the point? | | Also -- playing the game over again gives a colossal speed | benefit. Probably half of my time spent on this game has been | ripping up everything I did that I realize clearly won't work | nicely once I reach the next tech tree item. Knowing what the | end game looks like in advance saves a lot of time. | | I think I partly like this game because it reminds me of | programming before programming was work. Trying to get through | everything as fast as possible sounds like the antithesis of | that, but maybe that's just me. | m463 wrote: | I got to the point where I could copy-paste walls with lasers | around an area and then develop inside it at my leisure. Then | the game was no-worries building therapy. | DerArzt wrote: | No worries until the next bitter wave comes, and oh my god | there are 20 behemoths and holly crap this drawing a lot of | power, wait why am I experiencing a brown out? Oh no.....my | coal mines are electric powered on the same grid as the | turrets and the buffer is low......They made it through the | wall.....They are destroying the base including the coal | mines......Time to start over! | sudosysgen wrote: | Always good to keep a few coal powered inserters, hehe | fennecfoxen wrote: | This is why you have a separate defense grid, and a | capacitor farm to serve defense demand, and when the | capacitors run low you have a logic network to read the | value of `A` (accumulator fill %) and turn off everything | that isn't critical (mining, etc). (Of course, you'll | need this switch at any satellite installation too.) | | You may need to shift-click some electric poles to | disconnect them from other poles, and use copper wire to | connect them exactly how you want. | | Add a lowkey alarm buzzer (the speaker) to let you know | this is going on. Try to have a second, louder one that | detects whether it's failed and the factory is still on | because of a short circuit. Conduct tests by wiring in a | constant combinator outputting a fixed value of A | (possibly negative). | FeistyOtter wrote: | In what situations did this mantra help? I am the same as your | friend, I have like 100 hours and I have never reached the | endgame, always unsatisfied with my factory. | leetcrew wrote: | as you unlock more technologies, it becomes increasingly easy | to refactor/maintain a large factory. ex: bots are a major | inflection point in the game. you could scale up petroleum | processing and red circuits before getting bots (you need | these two things to make them), but that involves a lot of | manual effort. it's usually better to do a barely sufficient | (but tileable!) petroleum and rc setup, then immediately fix | it after making a few construction bots. | | more general tip: clean interfaces are more important than | massive capacity up front. in the long run, you will always | need more steel/circuits/etc than you can serve with a single | production line. but even if the internal layout is a mess, a | functional unit with a clean interface can be scaled | horizontally forever. | dragontamer wrote: | Cleanliness doesn't really matter, because space is | infinite. | | ----------- | | So long as you've unlocked enough military (ie: shotgun in | the early game, or tank in the mid-game), you can just | clear out more room and then build there. (Shotgun has | significant pierce-damage, enough to kill the alien bases. | Tank also has significant pierce damage and impact-damage, | allowing you to win against small / medium aliens through | the midgame rather easily and cheaply) | | Don't even "tear down" your oldbase. Just fully abandon it | and move elsewhere. Even without bots, there's no penalty | to "just leaving". | | --------- | | Bots / deconstruction planner is more of a thing if you're | tired of cleaning out biter-territory and want to "recycle" | your old areas. | storyinmemo wrote: | Hi, it's me your local site reliability engineer. I care | about things like latency, monitoring, and being able to | understand the overall moving pieces. Scaling things in | appropriate ratios is also relevant to me. I'd put you in | a storage box and nuke if I could, but let's go have this | conversation standing on these train tracks. | dragontamer wrote: | > I care about things like latency | | Good luck bootstrapping your first Kovarex U235 units! | | A properly done Kovarex U235 takes about 2-hours to | bootstrap itself. By this point in the game, you need to | be able to "predict" how the factory will work in 2+ | hours of latency and make sure things work as expected. | (Or I guess you can blueprint copy/paste from an internet | forum... but I find that "my own designs" are what make | Factorio fun) | | ------ | | Once you're able to "predict" how the factory works in 2, | 3, 4 hour scales, a lot of good designs open up. You | focus on throughput and *eventual* designs... willing to | wait 3 hours to get things done. | | And by "wait", I mean go play somewhere else for those 2 | hours. There's always more work to do, a design that | takes 3 hours to complete _AUTOMATICALLY_, but only 5 | minutes of manual / human input is superior to a design | that takes 10-minutes of human effort but completes in 15 | minutes. | | The #1 resource in Factorio is player-attention. You | should be laying out designs, and then _LEAVING_ in most | situations. You let the bots complete the area and come | back to "verify" when they're done. | leetcrew wrote: | maybe we are talking past each other, but I'd say clean | interfaces and bots are very important even if you don't | want to tear down the original factory. you want to be | able to double production of high volume products with a | couple copy-pastes. can't really do this if you have some | gnarly IO setup. | | I agree clean layouts _inside_ of functional units is | unnecessary. land is cheap; just make something that | works and cp it everywhere. | dragontamer wrote: | > you want to be able to double production of high volume | products with a couple copy-pastes. | | In my experience, no. | | Any high-volume production needs to be built from the | ground up from smelters (or even miners) on downwards. | | If you have 1-belts of iron feeding your factory and then | want to expand, the easiest way to do so is to build a | parallel +1 belt of iron (including the 70+ smelters and | 50+ miners somewhere else) somewhere. | | The terrain and issues of that other area (ie: water, | cliffs, trees, etc. etc.) will be different. You can only | legitimately "copy/paste" designs if you have an advanced | set of terrain modifiers: landfill to erase water, cliff- | explosives to erase cliffs, and flamethrowers to erase | trees. (Chopping by hand takes too long. Even bots take | too long in many situations to erase trees, especially at | low-bot speed levels). | | ----------------- | | If you try to "logically" add it to your factory | (originally designed for only 1-belt), you end up with | non-obvious starvation points everywhere. | | Its far easier to declare the entire "logical belt" | region to be a cohesive design (from mines to smelter to | assembly machines to science to labs: beginning to end of | the entire process). | | There's an additional bonus to this: belting the "end- | product sciences" is very easy and low-throughput. | Instead of "moving your factory" around, it makes far | more sense to "move your science belts" around. | | ------- | | Its very hard to turn a "1-belt of iron + 1-belt of | copper" factory into a "2-belt of iron + 2-belt of | copper". Very very difficult, you really shouldn't be | trying to find space for the extra belt or smelters. | | Just "soft abandon" the base, and build your 2nd belt of | iron + 2nd belt of copper elsewhere. Then build 2-belts | of your red+green+blue+purple science (or whatever | outputs your old base were doing) to lead to the new | science center. "Abandon" the old science center as well | (since the "old science" center won't have the extra | science to advance forward). | | "Abandoning" the science center means that all that space | opens up for you to move your science-belts to the | necessary location towards the new science center. Maybe | you need to plow through some old areas but it'd be | easier to do this from an "abandonment" mindset rather | than a "cleanup" mindset. | | --------- | | The only way you "cleanly" have room for that 2nd line of | copper or iron, is if you magically remembered to leave | room for the 70-smelters before you built the base. This | is unreasonable. | | EDIT: I guess you use yellow/red belts in the early game. | 24-smelters per yellow belt of production. 48-smelters | per red belt of production. 72-smelters per blue belt of | production. | | How do you grow 24-furnaces into 48? Doubling the size if | you upgrade from yellow to red? (Or upgrading from 1x | yellow to 2x yellow?). Its non-trivial to run that many | lines through the middle of already-built factory areas. | | And unless you planned for it, 24-additional furnaces is | a non-trivial amount of space. | leetcrew wrote: | before I have bots, I usually put down a minimal | production line that doesn't saturation a belt. I place | them perpendicular to the main bus, so they can be 2x'd | or 4x'd before saturating an output belt or fully | consuming an input. in the early stages of having bots, I | scale them a couple times as needed. | | but once I have a good number of bots and a couple speed | upgrades for them, I try to switch to remote train-served | factories for bulk items. so doubling steel really is as | simple as copypasting the original smelters and train | stops. with current train mechanics, you don't even have | to rename the stops. from here you can either fully | transition to block architecture (probably overkill for | vanilla) or widen your original bus at the end by | injecting materials via train. | | if you do it right, the only manual effort for scaling is | adding new trains to prevent starvation. | dragontamer wrote: | It sounds like you're inadvertently benefiting from an | advanced concept called "compression". | | A yellow iron-belt can send at most, 15-iron per second, | towards the factory. The player can spend this on 3-steel | per second, 15-green circuits per second, 7.5 gears per | second, or any such combination of intermediate | materials. | | However, "steel" has an interesting property, every "1 | steel" you send down the factory is equivalent to sending | 5-iron down to the factory. | | --------------- | | This means that your singular steel belt sending only a | partial belt (maybe 6-steel/second, which is only 40% | capacity) is "equivalent" to sending 2-iron belts | (30-iron per second). | | "Compression" means that you only have to think about | running 40% belt of steel, rather than 2x 100% belts of | iron. This takes up 1/2 the space and is far simpler in | the overall picture, and even leaves room on the belt for | up to 2.5x expansion later. (Your 40% yellow belt can | "expand" to 100% capacity in the long-game, ultimately | reaching the same throughput as 5x yellow belts of iron | at 100% capacity). | | Playing with "compression" can lead to simplified | designs. Similarly, green-circuits are great at | compression (1-iron + 1.5 copper per circuit), as are | gears (1-gear == 2-iron). But steel is among the best | (5-iron per steel). | | -------- | | If you work at the "steel" level and plan around a | "future steel belt", you end up benefiting from | compression and leading yourself towards simpler designs. | | But that's an advanced concept. This isn't something I'd | expect a beginner or intermediate Factorio player to get. | The beginner/intermediate player would try to brute force | the additional iron-lines using iron plates directly, and | have a difficult job of doing so. It takes multiple | playthroughs before you realize that belting-steel has | benefits over belting-iron from a factory throughput | perspective. | | ----------- | | The recommendation I put above, to belt your science to | new locations, is the ultimate answer to this | compression. A blue-science pack consists of 1.5x adv. | circuit + 1x engine + .5x sulfur | | That is to say: one blue-science pack is 7.5 copper + 12 | iron + 3 plastic + 1/2 sulfur, or roughly 23-resources | per blue-science pack. That's a compression ratio of | 23-to-1, superior to steel. | | This makes "belting" blue science around a relatively | efficient endeavor from a human-labor perspective. (True: | the factory has to work 23x harder to "fill the belt", | but if we're talking about "eventual consistency" | measured in the scope of hours, its not really that big | of a deal to wait for the belt of science-packs to fill | up to its steady state level. | | And by "wait", I mean, "play the other elements of | factorio while waiting". I know its going to take 3 or 4 | hours to happen, but I know it will happen with 100% | certainty because I have confidence in the design. So I | do it, and move on to base expansion / building more | train outposts or other manually-intensive jobs. | | -------- | | In any case, "just expand steel" turns out to be one of | the easier tasks. I don't know if you knew steel was | specifically a high-compression item worthy of attention | like this, but... that's an explicit strategy. One that | took me many, many playthroughs to understand and take | advantage of. | dragontamer wrote: | Construction Bots can automatically "tear down" your trash | areas, and unlocks the "copy" and "paste" buttons, meaning | you rebuild the areas much faster. | | Bots are roughly blue-science, or the ~halfway point of the | tech tree. | | --------- | | So everything "Before" construction bots can be basically | seen as a "prototype" or "throwaway" factory. Everything | "after" construction bots is also a prototype, because you | can just hit the "deconstruct planner" and tear everything | down automatically and reconstruct from scratch whenever you | want. | | If everything is a prototype, then perfection doesn't matter. | Instead, you're "pursuing" perfection, teardown whenever you | think you have a better grand plan, and copy/paste the design | back if you make a mistake (or Ctrl-z / undo your decisions | as needed. Etc. etc.) | [deleted] | skipants wrote: | That's been my takeaway from these games, too. It really helped | with my perfectionism because it makes the negative effects of | it tangible; you notice how much more time you lose by trying | to be perfect rather than just getting your supply of materials | up and running. | cwkoss wrote: | The factorio dev team are such fantastic software engineers, | I wonder if this was an emergent feature of building what | they want or if there was actually intentionality in making | this a common takeaway from playing the game. | | If you haven't, read their blog! It's a master class in | release notes and development communication. | fennecfoxen wrote: | > great is the enemy of good enough | | One-man Factorio is a lot different than big-team Factorio. As | a single factory-developer, you need to be startup-like and | remember that your time _in the present_ is the most valuable | resource. | | So _always_ automate everything the first time, because you | WILL need more of that component. But do it in a quick and | dirty and unscalable manner so you can move on to something | else. Start with box-fed production lines; when you 're sick | and tired of refilling the boxes, it's time to re-do it better. | | Build a system to support this throwaway development, where you | can tear things down later and replace them and it keeps | working. Start with a narrow bus, not eight lanes each for iron | and copper -- but keep it open for expansion downstream. When | you run out of space near the start of the bus, don't just move | things a few tiles to squeeze in an incremental upgrade: build | a much bigger production line further downstream. You'll have | more and better components to do it right. | | And always, always, always, keep your interconnects separate | from your production components. You don't need a single | straight-line bus like some people think, right angles and | parallels and grids are fine, but if your belts are snaking | through something else, it's real hard to tear down that | something-else, and it's real hard to scale up. Encapsulation | is important. | | And when you're finally scaling up like crazy, ready for the | big leagues, use a high-throughput component someone else | developed and have your robots install it. | shane_b wrote: | In software dev, my team has a "naive, naive, refactor" rule | for this problem | rustyminnow wrote: | Could you elaborate on this rule? | gknoy wrote: | My guess is, it has to do with how you handle 1, 2, N. The | first time we write something, we write it just for that | specific case --- no point overengineering if you don't | know you'll need it. (Hence the "YAGNI" advice that is | common.) | | Now, there are two things that code has to handle. You | could put in a simple bit of special-case logic, or a case | statement, and move on, OR you could instead spend time, | codes, and tests making it robust to handle many different | types of input, with a type-specific config system that | makes it easy to add new type-specific behavior. | | Our predilection on many teams is to skip the middle part, | and write robust automation the first time we hit a special | exception. ("This used to be about ordering burgers but now | we want to also order shakes, and they don't have a cook- | time.") It seems like the OP was suggesting that we do a | "crappy" good-enough solution to that intermediate phase of | complexity, as there's a chance you might not need more | than that. | shane_b wrote: | Exactly, great explanation | shane_b wrote: | The first time you implement, the default is to over | abstract. The second time even more. By the third, you have | a good enough idea of what you need to then build something | robust. Each phase is faster. | | Second iteration is almost always copy and paste of first | with small tweaks. I'd rather that than some kind of | conditional. | | The best UI almost never fits the most convenient technical | solution so we optimize for UI and then technical. | mceachen wrote: | It may be a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule | _of_three_(computer_progra... | | The idea is that you grit your teeth and let code be | deduplicated twice (but no more), rather than immediately | DRYing up code, so you'll (hopefully) have a better sense | of what the common code should look like. | | (I personally think it's too hard in practice, as common | code can be written sufficiently differently to not be | recognizable as common by the Engineers Of Tomorrow). | caycecan wrote: | Recently discovered Satisfactory. It's roughly GTA2 vs GTA3 when | compared to Factorio (2d top down vs 3d open world). I'd love to | hear peoples thoughts on the two games and what one does well vs | the other. What people get out of either. | benlivengood wrote: | Satisfactory is smaller scale (resource patches far apart, most | of the build being about transport and linking a few buildings | together, power being harder to achieve, and overall feels | resource constrained) and Factorio feels like a blank canvas to | paint factory on. | kllrnohj wrote: | Having sunk vastly too many hours into Factorio, and recently | just about 'completing' Satisfactory, I think Factorio is the | far richer factory game. | | Satisfactory's unexpected joy is in exploration, such as | finding all the alternative recipes. However mid game starts to | be a bit of a drag, and late game is borderline miserable (the | Smart! mod helps _tremendously_ but I 'm talking vanilla-only | experience here). In particular in satisfactory you never out- | tech problems. You never get tools to help you start | abstracting away details like you do in Factorio with | construction bots, beacons, modules, and substations. | | Satisfactory makes me want to design & build pretty or well | laid out factories. But since it doesn't give me any tools to | help with that, I end up with just floating slabs in the sky of | endlessly repeated simple connections. | | Factorio feels far more rewarding when you come up with clever | layouts for things, as you can then copy/paste it. Or design it | to be modular for later expansion. There's the metagame there | if making things tileable for rapid expansion later on. | Satisfactory largely doesn't have that. It's too painful to | expand anything, so it's all one & done stuff | polski-g wrote: | The copy/paste/blueprint feature of Factorio has ruined every | other logistics game for me. Used to love the Anno series | until I got Factorio. | AnotherGoodName wrote: | Satisfactory is more designed for social interaction. That | alone makes it worthwhile. | | I suspect this is part of my own mindset. Satisfactory is all | about watching the sunset over your factory as you goof around | with good friends after a real world hard days work. There's no | frantic action to be had by design. The factory is slower. | | I really didn't like Factorio at all. It's either too frantic | with enemies or just a grind with no enemies. I'm always down | for Satisfactory and beer with friends though. That game has a | relax and chill factor like no other. | m463 wrote: | > (it should probably be renamed "Refactorio") | | great observation :) | DiabloD3 wrote: | I have over 5000 hours in Factorio. I am part of a group where | several of us are over 5000 hours. Some of us have Autism. Some | of us have ADHD. Some of us have both. The majority of us are in | the tech industry. | | The companies we work at have been made to understand that the | factory must grow. | toomuchtodo wrote: | Factorio should be the interview test ;) Tech's Ender's Game. | | (factorio fan, but with little time to enjoy it) | TameAntelope wrote: | If you could figure out how to hook up Factorio to AWS APIs | and get kids to build/maintain your org's infrastructure... | kozziollek wrote: | There is psDoom [1] to manage *nix processes in Doom. There | is Dockercraft [2] to manage docker containers in | Minecraft. Managing AWS in Factorio seems like next logical | step! | | [1] http://psdoom.sourceforge.net [2] | https://github.com/docker/dockercraft | polski-g wrote: | There are docker instances for Factorio, I think I made | my own at some point. | | But someone should figure out how to simplify the | Clustorio installation into a docker-based one. Then | everyone could enjoy 60k SPM giga-bases. Even better add | auto-scaling to spin up a new EC2 instance when UPS drops | below 60 on any node in the cluster. | temp0826 wrote: | Here's a Terraform provider for you- | | https://registry.terraform.io/providers/efokschaner/factori | o... | TameAntelope wrote: | "Sorry about that brief outage, the biters got closer | than I realized and I had to scramble to rebuild the | defense system before they overran our Aurora cluster." | pbhjpbhj wrote: | >Tech's Ender's Game // | | Spoilers!?! | | Playing Factorio is actually doing some sort of real-world | silicon design, or when you I'll the aliens you're really | killing aliens... ? | | Not read the book, only watched the movie. Probably someone | will come and tell me I misunderstood it. | cultofmetatron wrote: | > Tech's Ender's Game. | | I think the last starfighter would be a more apt analogy | toomuchtodo wrote: | Touche. | cwkoss wrote: | I would love to see ~ "Factorio - 524 RPM base, trains only | no drones" on a resume | | Or heck, even completing either Angels or SpaceEx mods show a | serious amount of dedication, "self-starter-ness" and | competence in reading documentation. I've put 5000+ hours in | and fell off spaceex in the green space science - so much | depth. | rkuykendall-com wrote: | Honestly yeah, I'm gonna add a link to my 1k SPM | walkthrough to my resume. Down downside seems very low and | the upside very high. | cwkoss wrote: | I think that low downside could be a useful company- | screening mechanism. Any company who takes that as a | negative would probably be somewhere with a poor | engineering culture that I wouldn't want to work at. | Could certainly be neutral or an eyeroll at some good | places, but I'd guess anyone who counts it against an | applicant probably isn't a great place to work. | quirkot wrote: | Been playing Space Exploration mod with some friends for a | little over a year on the same map now. Mabye ~300-400 | hours into it and just starting to get naquitie feeling | solid. Absolutely enormous scale to it | Teknoman117 wrote: | I started playing Timberborn, which is kind of like Factorio, | but with adorable little beavers. | | One faction is focused on harmony with the environment, the | other is heavily focused on modifying it. | pram wrote: | When I play a new game of Factorio I literally stay up for like | 14 hours every day until I get a lot of the rocket launch | automated. It's insane, it impacts my health for a month or so | after lol | CyberDildonics wrote: | I think most people literally stay up for more than 14 hours | a day. | markedathome wrote: | Wait until you see the speedruns; nefrums and wargerr are | currently 100% achievements in 6hrs and 5hrs27 respectively | (see speedruns.com/factorio #100) Launching a rocket is down | to about 90 mins without using imported blueprints. | Johnyma22 wrote: | Worth mentioning AntiElitz too :) | | Thanks for the wargerr recommendation! | BenoitP wrote: | AssemblyStorm weekly? | gmadsen wrote: | honest question, but is factorio not a similar itch to | programming? I always feel with these type of games, that my | time would be better spent working on a personal software | project, where i get reasonably similar enjoyment, more | satisfaction, and presumably more transferable skills. | waynesonfire wrote: | You have the right intuition. From my point of view, I can | easily find higher level ways to scratch my building, | thinking, tinkering itches. | | I'll have cycles where I'll choose lower levels. For example, | most recently I purchased a classic hp rpn programmable | calculator and have had fun working through the manual, doing | exercises, solving problems with it, and of course, learning | to program it. | dkersten wrote: | Its a similar itch as programming _for fun_ , but often that | becomes less fun after spending the entire day programming | _for money_. Factorio is just different enough to still be | fun and relaxing, even though its similar. | | Programming also comes with baggage that Factorio can do away | with (eg sibling comment mentioned build tools, I've given up | on an evening of personal programming before because setting | up the build environment was too much effort... looking at | you cmake you piece of garbage... Or because I hit a bug that | was too much effort to find/fix. Factorio "debugging" is much | simpler, its about finding blockages or optimizing things, | not figuring out why undefined is not a number in some deeply | nested code where the value couldn't possibly be undefined | but it turns out some async code changed it without you | realizing...) | [deleted] | benjaminbachman wrote: | In factorio, you have all the information and tools right in | front of you. Everything is transparent. There are no black | box failures. If there's a problem, you can and will find the | source of it and be able to fix it. It satisfies the | building+problem solving itch without the painful parts of | programming, eg broken dependencies, slow build times, | putting an = instead of a ==. | | So, yes, programming is of course more productive, but that's | not really the point of leisure time. | bregma wrote: | It's like a software project with complete and correct specs | and no users. Everything you love about programming and none | of the things you hate. | vineyardmike wrote: | Yea, but its def a game, and that is more relaxed than actual | programming. And you can do it with friends who may not want | to code. | outworlder wrote: | It is like crack for programmers. | | > that my time would be better spent working on a personal | software project, where i get reasonably similar enjoyment, | more satisfaction, and presumably more transferable skills. | | Sure. Maybe your time would be better spent working overtime | too. Factorio is a game, and focus on the fun parts. Battling | NPM dependencies after a full work day is not fun, it's just | more work. There are some days when you are just cranking out | code and not worrying about much else, but those days are not | necessarily the norm. | tgarv wrote: | I felt the same way for a while (this is FUN, this isn't | work!), but at one point I came back to the game after a | few months off, started a new factory, got to something | like "automate green circuits", and immediately felt like I | was back to battling some NPM dependency. It had lost all | its magic and suddenly felt like work again. This was after | about 300 hours of playtime over a few years, but I haven't | really been able to get back into it since then. It's | really unfortunate because it was one of my favorite games | when I was still enjoying it. | udp wrote: | I had a similar experience but the Space Exploration mod | has made it feel like a brand new game again. I haven't | even reached space yet, but lots of the recipes have | changed in ways that are more interesting (e.g. the | introduction of glass, stone plate, the extension of the | burner phase, etc) than a straight replay would be. | DerArzt wrote: | The biggest hurdle for me getting back in is just getting | past the bootstrapping phase to where you can automate | the construction of things from blueprints. Luckily the | game is made overwhelmingly with mods in mind, so there | is a mod for my issue. | tharkun__ wrote: | I'm with your parent. For me there was a progression. | | First playthrough I was anxious to get to the automation | parts. This continued as I explored more of the game, | more of the automation possibilities, blueprinting, | trying to make an all solar, all steam or all nuclear | factory etc. | | At some point and I don't know when exactly it turned. I | like the initial bootstrapping phase and at varying | points I just get this "ugh, really? This pre-requisite, | then this, then this and then finally I can build what I | really want?" and then I shut it down and play Dungeon | Keeper 2 or something like that instead. | ExtraE wrote: | Yeah, I had basically the exact same experience. Haven't | launched a rocket yet. | Otek wrote: | It is, which is why i stopped playing after ~40hrs. | "Refactoring" my factory was too similar to refactoring my | code, so playing this game after work (and my work makes me | tired sometimes) is not a relax I'm looking for on evening | after work. | lowbloodsugar wrote: | Winter 2020 I started learning factorio. Winter 2021 I | started learning Rust. Same level of frustration at times, | same level of joy =) "Bah I'm doing it all wrong! .... Ah | that's way better" | Taylor_OD wrote: | I can only speak for myself but factorio is a little bit | easier to zone out and enjoy than a side project. It's not a | transferable skill but neither is reading sci fi but I enjoy | and spend quite a lot of time doing that. | tekno45 wrote: | whimsy makes learning a lot more bearable. | cgdub wrote: | The factory is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding | factory. | daenz wrote: | If you want to add more of the human dynamic to resource | management and refactoring, I suggest FrostPunk. While Factorio | feels more like managing and scaling code, FrostPunk feels like | running a startup. It's rewarding, but very stressful. | | 0. https://store.steampowered.com/app/323190/Frostpunk/ | buscoquadnary wrote: | My understanding is that ForstPunk is more like a Grimdark | dystopian climate nightmare than running a startup. | daenz wrote: | You're right, the theme is a dystopian climate nightmare. The | resource management, regular sacrifices, and dealing with | growing human problems make it feel like a small company that | is struggling to grow and succeed, which is more relatable to | me. | annoyingnoob wrote: | I think that a Factorio style interface for datacenter layout | would be great. Saastorio. | | Layout your process and point it at your cloud service(s). | Monitoring built in. | seanhunter wrote: | Factorio is my favourite game of all time by a country mile. The | thing that is so amazing to me is when you first play it and | suddenly you realise that what you thought was the goal of the | game (to launch the rocket) is literally completely irrelevant | and the goal has at some point just become "to play more | factorio". | | The factory doesn't have to grow to feed the rocket. The factory | must grow because it must grow. And you're there to make it grow. | | Then pretty soon you've launched hundreds of rockets and you're | still thinking "if I can just get my trains working a bit better, | remove _this_ bottleneck then I can expand over _there_... " | wilg wrote: | I famously only play video games that increase GDP. | thisiswater wrote: | Free exploration, experimentation, self-expression, fun?! - | only in the name of GDP! ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-02-11 23:00 UTC)