Oh wow, I'm very excited about this. The post author wrote the absolutely incredible Space Exploration mod for Factorio, pitching itself as a "100+" hour expansion, realistically closer to 1000 hours for an average player.
Space Exploration has its quirks, but is fundamentally an absolutely outstanding puzzle game, among the best ever made.
One of the most delightful things about Factorio for coders is that the game smoothly takes you through multiple levels of abstraction, starting with handcrafting simple ingredients, and (in the base game), moving up to small networks of trains with automation, and flying robot armies to deal with construction and logistics. I'd say there are three-ish layers of abstraction in the main game, and each layer is super well balanced, has its own challenges and benefits, and is above all FUN.
Space Exploration adds two to three more layers of abstraction above these; culminating in networks of interstellar spaceships moving items into orbit and on and off planetary surfaces, where they intersect with the original game's buildings and mechanics. It's profoundly, profoundly good.
I knew Wube had hired the mod developer, but I'm super happy to see he's deeply involved with Space Age, which is explained to be a less hardcore experience, with a lot of the same fun as SE. Should be a blast. I hope they'll charge me more for it.
> The post author wrote the absolutely incredible Space Exploration mod for Factorio
Each section has an author, and only the Space Exploration section is written by the mod author. Most of the post is written by kovarex, who is the founder of Factorio, afaik.
Is the Factorio source code available anywhere? I would be really curious to see how a game like Factorio was developed (e.g., what parts are 'the engine' and what parts are scripted? how does such a complex game have so few bugs?)
The C++ source code to the engine isn't publicly available, but Wube have given access to some outside developers.
The Lua source code to the "base mod" is (necessarily) included in the game. You can read it if you have a copy of the game, and the modding API is fully documented: https://lua-api.factorio.com/
The source is not publicly available, no. It‘s still being actively developed and sold after all. There isn‘t really much of a barrier between engine and 'scripting', it‘s all custom and integrated.
The reason there are so few bugs is that there is a ton of effort spent on squashing them! The approach is basically to fix any reported issue if in any way reasonable.
Yeah, I wish more games would use this approach, they could for instance have the art assets separate, or do what Factorio does and have matchmaking and the official mod portal to be DRMed. (And/Or give out the source, but not the compiled binaries.)
As said, Factorio's core is compiled binary, with a lot of customizable Lua on top.
Fun story:
Somebody independently recreated the core engine themselves to prove a point about multi-threading. Imagine recreating an entire game engine in 50,000 lines of C++ to prove a point, yeah, it happened: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/jizq1b/comment/ga... What a legend!
Factorio is closed-source, unfortunately. Still, you can read a lot about how the devs developed it on their "Friday Facts" posts: https://factorio.com/blog/
They also ship a full .pdb file with the Windows binaries (presumably for stack traces), so you can get a lot of information with dia2dump, or dig in with WinDbg.
I spent some time thinking about how to implement Factorio and it occurred to me that things like conveyors are probably represented as linked lists (all the conveyer elements in order) while also having X,Y grid coordinates. Every time you modify a conveyor belt chain, the game engine is probably adding/removing nodes from the list, or splitting lists in two, or joining two lists. I can't see how they get some of the effects in the game but there is probably a TON of clever optimization so they can maintain the target frame rate.
Space exploration is not the best puzzle game ever made. Space exploration is not the best factorip mod ever made.
Space exploration has a great presentation layer (graphics and UI) but the logistics challenge and gameplay challenges leave lots to be desired. I implore you to try many of the other high quality factorio mods made over the years.
Pyanodons is easily the greatest factorio mod. The sheer quality and scale leaves SE trembling.
Most of these mods are "make the middle game more complex". Nothing wrong with that! Krastorio is my favorite of the ones you mention. Space Exploration is unusual in creating an interesting game after the main game, taking you to completely new places and gameplay modes. Seablock is also a little like that, only it makes the beginning of the game totally different instead of the end.
It's great how many deep and interesting mods Factorio has allowed.
I'd love a mod that actually respected the true materials/engineering recipes in real life.
Obviously, you can't recreate the complete complexity of all global supply chains, but it would be nice for a mod to get a little closer.
Standard factorio glosses over way too much to be considered educational, which is what i need before I get my son addicted with me. (Yes, i know standard Factorio still has a lot to offer - i just want more detail)
Fair but id offer that having more "realistic" recipies and those details would still offer far less than understanding and practicing the engineering process. Finding efficient solutions to your problems and engineering them over and over again for efficiency teaches excellent problem solving and engineering skills that would be hugely beneficial, imo more important than learning the specific materials that make each item irl.
Warptorio is to be noted, for the way it radically changes what the game is about, closer to the Factorio scenarios, and even somewhat compatible with the overhaul mods !
> Factorio but you build your factory in a restricted space that teleports yourself, the platform, and everything on it to a new and uncharted planet in an unknown corner of space, time and the universe while constantly under attack from enemies.
This mod increases the difficulty of factorio by making construction harder and making biters a more significant threat, resulting in a unique experience of factorio'ing in a tight space and under pressure, almost like a tower defence game.
Speaking of scenarios, let's not forget that Factorio has a PvP mode ! (Better use a PvP balance mod though...)
Just having a lot of complexity or scale doesn’t mean a game or mod is good. In fact, just making something complex or “big” is the easy part. Designing something so it is actually fun, well designed and challenging while not being frustrating, tiresome, or simply just a giant time sink, is much much harder.
Pyanodons isn’t fun to play, it’s just too much, ridiculously complex recipes for the sake of it, quality of life features removed or pushed out late into the game just for artificial difficulty and pain. Most players never complete it and give up not even 10% into the game, which generally isn’t the sign of a well designed game.
Pyanodons is a unique experience. Everything has dozens of steps. In the base game, circuit boards are made from copper wire and iron plates, whereas in Pyanodons, you need formica for the PCB substrate, which requires tree nurseries to make wood and a full coal cracking facility to produce creosote, a glassworks, half a dozen different metals, not to mention pick and place machines and all other sorts of intermediates. And that's just baby steps.
But it's flawed in other ways. In particular, a lot of the Py building sprites hide what's behind them. In the base game, all the sprites aren't taller than their footprint, but they are in Py, which makes them unwieldy and easy to lose things. And what's fun is building these huge production lines, but there's no easy way to tear up your old base and reconfigure things until you hit bots, which is waaaay down the line.
In short, Py is wonderful and I've never played any sort of game like it before, but it has unnecessary rough edges from a game design perspective, aside from its masochism.
So looking at /user/pyanodon, there doesn't even appear to be a mod named "Pyanodons", but rather he's made a whole bunch of different mods. Which one are you recommending? All of them at once?
Unless you are extremely experienced with Factorio and want a challenge that will last you close to another 1,000 hours (at least) ... don't even attempt Pyanodons.
It's for a very specific type of hardcore player and very few people have actually finished it.
This is the flowchart for ONE science (space) ... one. There are numerous sciences.
Angel+Bob & SeaBlock just seem masochistic to me. I have had the most fun with SE + K2.
I haven't tried pyanodon because it doesn't seem like it was made to be played as a game but rather shown off as a testimate to how far you can take things
> Don't think I'll want to try Space Exploration if it's even worse than SeaBlock.
I would really recommend SE above SeaBlock, IMO SeaBlock feels like it throws away almost all of the recipies you know & doesn't give you much new to reward you, I felt like it was more like some random fanfic. Where as SE felt like it was a poorly edited directors cut of the original movie. There's way too much & it's audience is really the people that wanted a 4h movie with 6 different subplots. Also lacking the polish of the original, but still very much in the spirit.
SE kind of has fantastic polish on its own - its new features like cargo rockets work flawlessly IMO, but sure, it has not been cut down to reasonable length.
There is no way Pyanodon's could be considered the "greatest" Factorio mod. 99% of Factorio players go "that looks like an awful time" when confronted with a single refining flow chart for a single mineral. I'd agree if you wanted to ask which factorio mod is the "most" that Pyanodon's is king and will never be dethroned.
I love many aspects of SE, but I'd _love_ if most of them were stand-alone mods that were built up into a mod pack. For instance, all of the pylons are great! The condenser turbine I think is a much nicer solution for nuclear power.
I wouldn't put trains and smooth in a single sentence. The signals required a lot of patience to learn and I'm not entirely sure I still understand them.
They are by far one of the most painful parts of factorio for me.
The best available explanation, think "20% of things that cover 80% of cases", is DoshDoshington's [Factorio Trains Explained in Less Than Three Minutes](https://youtube.com/watch?v=DG4oD4iGVoY)
I just use city-block blueprints and never really worry about signals.
However, the foolproof advice I've gotten from r/Factorio has been to put chain signals at the entrance and exit to every junction, and to make sure there's enough space for your longest train to stop behind a rail signal (and you wouldn't mind having it stop there).
I can also recommend the cybersyn mod (or LTN). Once you understand one of these mods it makes dealing with trains much less of a hassle.
Trains are my favourite part of the game, and I always make myself a massive bowl of train spaghetti. I love watching my trains automatically find their way across my messy maze of train tracks.
My simple rules:
* Trains can only stop on the section after a regular signal. If you don't want a train to be able to stop in a certain place (like on an intersection), don't use a regular signal in front of it.
* Make sure trains have places where they can stop. This will mostly be stations, but that's not enough. Actually, I've been wondering if it might be enough for stations that are only visited by a single train; then the train would only go if it has a clear path straight to its destination. Maybe I should give this a try. For me, however, the straights outside the intersections are usually fine places for trains to stop. But for better throughput and less blockage, there should probably multiple tracks, and special tracks for trains waiting to enter a station currently occupied by another train.
* Trains cannot pass a signal on their left if there's not also a signal on their right. You can use this to make certain tracks single-direction. Single-direction is good and easier than double-direction, so of course I mix them, because I'm not playing this game because I like things easy.
* Don't forget to give your trains a place to refuel! This is actually the part I mess up the most.
For refueling I've recently been using the cybersyn mod, which let's you easily create a refueling stations that your trains will automatically go to when they're low on fuel (with exactly how "low" they need to be being configurable in the mod settings).
I just plop down a refueling station, and a requester station next to it that refuels the refueler and I'm done. Don't have to worry about it again.
My most complex train system had every train carry a single item type, and a large central trainyard. trains won't leave without an active destination. so all of the destinations for dropping off a type had the same name, and similarly the pick ups and would be disabled by circuits if their dropoffs were more than a quarter or so full. so if something needed green electronics, it would activate its DropOffGreenElectronics, the train would leave the yard, or sometimes 2-3 as at the time I didn't have any way of limiting it and one train wasn't enough to service all of the delivery points with my single car trains. the thundering herd problem[1] was real. the first train would get there, rest would go home. everything refueled at the home terminal, which had a stop for the coal train on it. each train had (dropoff(X) -> pickup(X) -> rest(X)) for their instructions. it worked pretty well.
Interesting approach. I do give multiple pickup points for the same name (so while my old coal field is slowly running out, trains increasingly move to the new coal field by themselves), but I hadn't considered doing the same with the drop-offs.
And I haven't yet figured out how to disable drop-offs that don't need anything. I often have a single train bring stuff to a couple of drop-offs, but that always feels sloppy. I have to use timeouts on the trains so they don't linger at a station that's too full to empty them. Disabling those stations and giving them all the same name might be a better alternative.
Newer versions of factorio have a per-station limit on the number of trains that can be in + routing to that particular stop. very helpful for this kind of problem.
I always make them refuel at one of their regular stops. There's usually a source of fuel nearby, so I just route a small part of that along all the engines.
But sometimes I forget, and sometimes there's no fuel nearby.
Normal signal: train stops if there's a train in the section ahead (or it's reserved for another train on a conflicting path), otherwise train goes.
Chain signal: train stops here until it can get a mutex on a path past another non-chain signal.
So if you have rail sections (small letters) and signals (capitals) a - A - b - B - c - C - d in a row on a plain line and A/B are chain signals and C is regular, then trains from the left will stop at A until the train can grab all sections b, c, d in one go.
That's why chain signals at the entrance to a junction are good (prevents a train stopping on the junction) but you want regular ones at the exit, at least if some plain line follows.
"Chain in, rail out" is the standard advice. However, if you search around r/Factorio you'll see there's debate about whether that's the best advice for beginners.
Chain both in and out is supposedly the foolproof method, and apart from stations, rail signals are just an optimization.
Though I've played a lot of Factorio, I've never really felt the need to dive deeply in to signals, and I'm happy to just use the foolproof method and leave more optimized solutions for those who need them.
I prefer to see it as regular signals designate the next segment as a segment where trains are allowed to wait. If you don't want trains to stop in that segment, don't put a regular signal in front of it.
And of course you don't want trains stopping on intersections, because they'll block everybody, so you always put chain signals in front of intersections.
The train needs to reserve the whole next contiguous sequence of chain signals to be able to go, so the foolproof method makes it sound like each train reserves the whole path from one station to another. It makes sense, but I like to do the optimizations, then, and allowing trains to stop in longer stretches where they can.
> I wouldn't put trains and smooth in a single sentence.
I had over 500 hours in Factorio before I felt comfortable with signalling. I got so frusturated with it originally I just ignored it as best I could.
But the "chain in, rail out" thing as others are mentioning really is the key. It's not always as perfectly simple as that, but it's a very good starting point.
You break everything up into blocks ... if you place a chain signal right before an intersection and a rail signal on the way out, you'll be there for most situations.
Most.
My most complex map has about 50 trains running and all intersecting each other and so far, everything is running smoothly on that one. No trains slamming into each other and everything running efficiently as far as I can tell. Almost all of it is just that "chain in, rail out" thing.
It's basically a visual version of the classic deadlock conditions. Chain signals create dependencies between locks, and the locks themselves (the rail signals) have to be granular enough to keep large sections of the rail network available to acquire. The confusing part about the chain signals is the blue state: the train will use its pathfinding to read forward of the signal and it will move if the path it needs to take is available. You have to look forward of the signal to see if the rail signal for the path the train wants to take is green or not.
They’re sort of understandable. When someone described it to me as the blue signals checking the status of the next signal (blue or colored) and doing that, everything made a lot more sense. They’re still sometimes hard to debug because there’s no visualization but I always end up feeling that the issue was my fault
> 2-way 6-wide right hand rail system on a global 60-tile grid with interoperable 90° & 45° variants. Intended to be simple, complete, & hard to misuse.
> Features: rotational symmetry, red&green wired poles, landfill, blueprints for Through, Turn, Tee, Junction, and U-Turn for both 90° & 45°, 90°/ 45° transition blueprints
> Tiling is based on large power poles, 60 is the max distance between 3 poles in a straight line, or 5 poles diagonally.
Another major stumbling block for train signals once you get the basics down is segment length. Signals indicate whether the next segment is occupied, not whether any given train will fit in there (and potentially block a segment or intersection behind it.)
I frequently set up tracks with segments as large as my longest train, but then end up having to add an intersection here or there, breaking up segments into smaller sizes. This is the root of most of my train woes (aside from LTN issues, which are a whole other issue!)
> Signals indicate whether the next segment is occupied, not whether any given train will fit in there (and potentially block a segment or intersection behind it.)
That's what chain signals are for. If a train waiting at a signal causes issues, replace the previous signal with a chain signal to prevent the train from problematically waiting at the signal.
I think it's pretty clear from the blog posts that they tried to make trains as simple as they could, and it's as complex as it is now because that's the simplest it can be without having actual errors and bugs.
LTN is really nice, but it is "fun" (for some people, like me) to build a LTN-like network in vanilla before using LTN going forward.
Once you've "figured it out" it's much easier to drop down "smart stations" instead of building them yourself each time.
Just like I recommend players who want to do city blocks build their own blueprints instead of just loading up someone's (even if you later switch to someone's standard blueprint, you'll at least understand the why).
And of course, it's a sandbox game! You could just download a completed map, but there's no fun in that.
Space Exploration is a fantastic mod and I thought it was great news when the company hired the developer. Excited to see the result is pretty much exactly what I hoped for! I appreciate the dev's comments about the differences, how the new Space Age will be accessible to more players.
I really liked his distinction between "normal game" and "what the modded players want" - you have a similar distinction in Minecraft and it's important for modded players to realize and remember that the normal game shouldn't be the modded one, they are different markets (and the modded players are the ones who go out of their way to 'get more').
> It has been playable from start to finish for more than a year. This means that we have already made several improvement iterations based on the playthroughs behind us.
You just don't see commitment to shipping quality product in the games industry like this. This is what makes Factorio special.
This has been Factorio's MO from the beginning. It was in Early Access forver, and all that time it was way more polished and stable than many fully released games with much higher budgets.
In the decade or so that I've played Factorio, I can't even remember a single crash of the base game. It was always mods that crashed.
Factorio performance is also fantastic, running smoothly on potato PC's until you get in to the megabase range. It's mostly mods that cause performance problems, but even those have gotten a lot better over the years.
The Factorio devs could really give a master class on how to make games moddable. Factorio's ecosystem of over 5000 mods is a testament to that.
I still don't know how they pulled this off, and as a software engineer I've read all of the development blogs.
It is still impressive that you can scale this thing to huge mega-bases, with things smoothly gliding down coveyer belts, inserters swinging, bots flying around, trains everywhere, biters doing biter things all over the exposed (essentially endless) map ... and no problem in most cases.
60 FPS/UPS.
It almost seems as if the entire thing is written in handcrafted assembly compared to how other games perform.
They’ve never said that they hand–wrote any assembly, though I suppose it’s not impossible. Mostly they were simply diligent and focused on never regressing performance, and on continuously improving it. They even changed game mechanics over the early access period to improve performance.
For example, originally a conveyor belt applied a speed to any object in the same tile. Each frame the position of the object would be updated based on the speed, just the same as any other moving object. You could place down up to three objects side–by–side on the belt, and they would all travel together. But eventually they realized that this is a waste of time, because inserters only ever place items in specific positions on the belt, and the items are all the same size. This means that they could instead just keep a bitmask of which spots are filled, and a queue of items that will pop out of the edge of the tile. Even that is wasteful though, because you might have 1000 tiles of belts all in a row, so you can group them all into a single queue. Now you only have to put new items into the beginning of a single queue and take them out of the end, instead of doing that for 1000 queues. On the other hand, this means that you can no longer put down items at arbitrary positions on a belt; they will now snap into one of the 12 slots in one of the two lanes.
A similar thing happened to inserters. It used to be that they had a certain amount of rotational speed, and would calculate a new position and rotation for each of their three two joints every frame. Eventually they realized that 99% of the time they would be in the same few positions over and over again; it is only when they are chasing an object on a belt that is too fast that they need to calculate a position. The rest of the time they just loop through a fixed animation. This gave Wube the opportunity to tweak the animation cycles so that they are exactly the same length in all orientations of the inserter, which is definitely a good thing.
And of course they consistently paid close attention to data locality, so that every time they have to work on a collection of objects they maximize the amount of useful data that fits into the CPU cache. I haven’t seen the code, of course, but I assume that this means that they are using an ECS–style system where you have a dense array of just the position and speed of each biter, or just the animation frame for each inserter. The code can then loop over those dense arrays knowing that it doesn’t have to test the type of each item in the array (few or no branches needed), and that every byte loaded into cache will be used during the loop (maximizing use of the memory bandwidth).
I wish modding APIs in general did more sanity checking before loading a mod. A low hanging fruit is APIs to be statically typed, and also to not use nulls on such APIs and things like that. A more comprehensive check is to verify whether two mods are guaranteed to be compatible (but this sounds a bit hard).
But more importantly (not sure if that's the case with Factorio) not break the damn APIs all the time. Lots of games that are actively developed don't bother keeping stable APIs (a bit like like Gnome and its disregard for extension APIs), breaking mods at every new release. An egregious example is Europa Universalis IV and other Paradox games. This ensures that there is a tail end of mods (which is by far the majority) that just will never work anymore, and the mods being kept up to date become rarer and rarer.
I don't expect videogames to be the first to successfully solve the problem of statically checking code for correctness ;-) I'm astonished how stable so many mods are, given the environment they run in and the lack of almost any payment for the work.
The Minecraft Java world at least starts with static types and memory safety. It'd be interesting to see if that results in a mod ecosystem that's more stable.
The Minecraft Java world starts with decompiling bytecode, replacing methods, and recompiling it. I struggle to think what could be further from either static types or memory safety - although at least that happens in the mod loader, and the mod code needn't be aware of how the sausage is made.
I don't think any of those steps significantly disrupt type checking or memory safety. It's hacky as all hell but it's still constrained by the JVM and bytecode validity.
I would truly love to see a game use haskell for mod APIs. Or perhaps erlang a better choice.
As an example of just how far accessible APIs can benefit games/their players: The god awful language and API that has enabled Armed Assault franchise modders to create entirely new games - literally, PUBG started life as a mod for Armed Assault 2. Armed Assault 3 launched ten years ago, and there are still many new mods being produced today, and Bohemia have further embraced this community by supporting "community developed" DLCs such that modders get rewarded for their effort.
I often wonder how much better/diverse/stable these innovative and entrepeneurial ventures could be with a "proper" API.
My point for choosing AA as an example was that it uses an entirely bespoke language, modelling system, and the APIs are just horrendous. Obscurity has not prevented (some) great things happen with/for Bohemia but I do wonder what greatness has been missed out because of it.
As for Lua I think it is rather chicken:egg. Lua is popular because it is used by mod APIs, or is Lua use by mod APIs because it is popular?
My own experience is the former. I think it is a horrible language (in that I argue many others are better) and especially difficult for new-to-programming gamers with great ideas to pick up. Haskell or Erlang (or Java or C#) with type-safe APIs would be much more educational for them, and provide better support IMO.
Lua is used because it is dead simple to drop into a project as an extension language. It was designed to be easy to interoperate with C. Lua/LuaJIT is one of the fastest scripting languages available.
this is a strange take for me to read -- i've written quite a decent amount of lua, and it is the first language i used to learn (zero programming experience prior)
when i eventually got exposed to python (but more heavily C/C++, and even some lisp/pascal) and came back to lua, i was grateful lua did not inundate me with parens/primitives/modules/data-structures/grammars, and found the flexibility of the interpreter and also what lua tables present as a unified primitive for multiple container types to be so nice and accessible for getting right to flow-state.
i did not have to look up another API and read about a set of semantics provided with a desired module, i just needed to know 1. what i want to achieve and 2. a single API: the lua table
its small std library is performant and easy on the cognitive load, and then it plays so nicely with other languages and environments.
I have seen similar commitment from other indie developers. For example, one of my favourite games [1] (which is something of a cross between Factorio, Simcity and OpenTTD) has been available for that "early access" on Steam for 4 years (like Factorio was).
I suppose that means in the developer's opinion, the game is not quite ready -- they wouldn't sell it to someone who expects a complete game. Caveat emptor. Fair enough. In practice it has been playable and enjoyable (at least by me) since first listed on Steam in 2019. New features and more polish come every few weeks, and it's coming up on 1.0. I don't know if they'll keep supporting it well after that, but it's clear to me they want to sell something good and complete, however long that might take, not just something profitable.
I think the »literally unplayable« meme is from Factorio, or was made popular by it. Bug reports on Reddit ever since I bought it were on the level of »when the player is facing north, the shadow’s animation is slightly off«.
I can’t think of a single bug I’ve encountered across many, many Factorio playthroughs, some including overhaul mods.
In all the release notes, there is a sizeable section of bug fixes; time and time again, I was surprised that there were any bugs.
No Man's Sky has a similar dedication. They have been constantly adding new features and expansions for free for the last 7 years. If this had been a different company, they might have saved some of those features for a version 2 or a paid DLC.
Wait, No Man's Sky? That game? Was it bought or something? Do they still have that liar who went on interviews and lied through his teeth about the game? It's pretty rare to see a project based entirely on lies from a smarmy psycho liar ever actually go anywhere, right? Did they ever go back and actually implement any of the things he lied were already in the base game?
That "smarmy psycho liar" was an introverted developer-turned-ceo who was in over his head. He is now beloved by the community. Sean Murray is a legend. They have been over-delivering on NMS for the better part of a decade now without charging for anything but the base game.
And yes, they implemented all of it. Everything that was promised and much much more. Just check out the trailer for Echoes that dropped yesterday (the new update for the game): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqpVCwwuyh8
I don't know if he really was psycho; I'm not a psychologist. But he was absolutely smarmy, and absolutely lied through his teeth about things he knew were false at the time. I'm sorry, "in over my head" is not an excuse for lying about your game in order to pump up pre-release sales. That is called fraud. He committed fraud.
I'm glad to hear he seems to regret it. I do suspect allowing some room for redemption and regret is a better strategy for reducing negative behaviors than completely writing someone off. It might have been nice if he faced actual legal consequences for his criminal fraud (alright alright I am not a lawyer), but barring that, I'll take self-correction.
Yes, that game. You must check it out. Easily the best redemption arc of any game development story, ever. By a mile. It’s insane how much content has been put into the game.
No, they polished a turd. It's still the same terrible gameplay loop they had at launch but convinced saps that it was better because they added more and more layers of paint onto it.
They just released one of the largest updates ever adding a whole new NPC faction and a bunch of features. And it runs better on PSVR (foveated rendering) and switch (AMD FidelityX). It's an incredible achievement, and I keep dreading the inevitable post where Hello Games decides to move on... I hope it never happens.
Indeed, not to be completely throw Klei under the bus, but I started playing Oxygen Not Included, and the simulation quality is night and day. ONI has race conditions, memory corruption bugs, non-seeded RNG, duplication bugs. You couldn't play a non-glitched playthrough even if you tried. At some point, you're going to make an infinite spill or a liquid lock on complete accident.
Meanwhile factorio allows you to benchmark it by opening a save and running it for a set number of ticks -- it's just that stable in its simulation.
Not to say that ONI isn't a fun game, it has different elements (e.g. dupe management) that make it fun despite its instability.
I see a lot more indie dev type games that go through these super long development times, long early access, and really are committed to the game longer term.
I suspect where some games might just move on these folks really are committed to "hey let's rewrite that" type decisions that don't fit in traditional commercial game development.
It has been very encouraging to see that there room for an arguably improving quality when it comes to some games.
Early access is a great way to outsource your QA. Triple A QA teams number in the hundreds, but for an independent game to have that many people playing it is a triumph in itself.
If people keep playing your game in early access, you must be on to something. There are tens of thousands of games people could be playing, but for them to pick yours means you are scratching an itch that can’t be found elsewhere, and that inspires developers create great games.
Early access does get flack for allowing people to release unfinished, often never finished games, but it’s a wonderful test of product market fit. If people try your game and like it, give you feedback to improve your game so even more people like it, it’s the ultimate positive feedback loop.
It certainly sets expectations and gamers have really adapted to it / seem to receive the whole process fairly well.
I don't game like I used to but I was playing an early access game recently, got a pop up on a keyboard shortcut to submit a bug with a screen shot and the game state.
Not sure this will scratch the itch for what I always felt was missing from Factorio, which is fundamentally a more satisfying ‘sink’ for resources.
During main gameplay your resource extraction and expansion is driven mainly by the sink of ‘research’ - turn resources into science, science into unlocks.
Additionally, biters eat bullets, and occasionally factory parts that need replacing.
Other than that the main sink for all your resource gathering is just ‘more factory’ of course.
The end game resource sink of ‘space rockets’ just never felt to me like a very satisfying thing to shoot for - though getting to the point where you can just expand onto a new mineral patch and reliably deploy blueprints that turn it into rockets is pretty cool, I’ll admit.
But there’s a part of me that is left slightly unsatisfied by the fact that we can’t reach sustainability, and we aren’t getting anything for all the resources we process.
Give me a little population of friendly alien creatures (who biters prey on) and make my goal to maximize their population, perhaps. I don’t know.
I think not being able to reach true sustainability might be a core concept here.
Don’t forget, we’re playing the Bad Guy here, who tirelessly exploits a foreign ecosystem and kills its inhabitants en masse. We quickly lose sight of the initial goal of escaping and just keep building _more_ only to be able to build even more quickly at scale.
You are rewarded for spending resources by unlocking technologies, and being able to use the new tech to refactor and grow your base.
Still, I agree with you that there's some missing depth in the game that no mod has yet been able to fill for me. I say this after sinking (pardon the pun) thousands of hours in to the game and having a tremendous amount of fun.
Still, it could be deeper in some way.. not sure how.. maybe by adding some LLM/AI of some sort?
Try Dyson Sphere Program. Factory builder where the final resource sink is building a dyson sphere. It’s a massive undertaking and it’s had multi-planet from the start. Tons of fun
There just needs to be a gamemode which makes the game more about base defense and resource usage in defending the base. Currently you can just spam lasers and win no problem.
Imagine something like 7 days of constant biter attacks on all fronts, with biters much stronger as well. A relentless strain on the economy of your base more than anything, with there being a real need for repair bots to fully repair and remake certain sections of the perimeter as it gets destroyed by perhaps some special baneling-esque biter.
Add to this the idea that things get infinitely more and more difficult over time, and you instead compete for places on a leaderboard of like "survived 400 days and 14 hours".
Try a deathworld then. Once you're comfortable defending until you can secure flamethrowers, you can add in some mods that slightly extend or complicate the early/mid game (like AAI industries and/or Krastorio2). Especially with K2, you get some new options for controlling your pollution (planting trees, running greenhouses, air filters...), and in the endgame you get the tech that enables fully self-sustaining bases. I think all of these are interesting alternatives to the endless expansion and the sudden, rapid power spike of the base game.
Of course, you can crank the biter difficulty, but you only get two outcomes: it's too hard and you can never build a base that lasts more than an hour, or you manage to arm yourself from the beginning and biters stop being a problem very quickly.
I'd really like biters to be a threat I need to pay some attention to for the duration of the game. Evolution isn't really a factor because as you say, once you have laser turrets, you're set. Even red bullets suffice.
Several versions ago, there was a mod (maybe called "homeworld") that had a sink of you sending various resources through a portal back "home". It started simple with N iron plates, but then they wanted 10N oil barrels, and eventually red circuits. It also added some farming resources (which were affected by local pollution, so you had to plan where to put them). It was fun to have little goals, but I don't know that it's been updated recently.
Factorio is basically a sandbox game that generates logistical puzzles for the player. If you get bored of solving logistical puzzles, including those that self-imposed challenges and mods are able to offer, then I think what you really want is a different game.
Postponing cliff explosives makes be extremely sad. I'm perfectionist freak and my factorio gameplay basically divides "before" and "after" cliff explosives. I hate when I can't fix terrain for my plans, I prefer to terraform as much as needed, turning lake into plains, if needed, but I'm not going to adapt my grand plan.
I understand that there are players who find fun in adapting their bases to the environment, building defenses around natural obstacles, but I'm completely the opposite of that. It's deep grained in my nature: to bend the world rather than to bend my plans.
Hopefully they'll rethink that part. And may be even make it possible to "build" water (or to build water pump at arbitrary locations).
You could just disable cliffs during world generation. That's what I do. They're slightly helpful for biter defense, but otherwise they're just annoying.
There are also many mods that let you pump water from anywhere.
I'm not a fan of custom modes and mods. I might go this way, if there's no other choice, however generally I prefer to play game as it was intended to be played by developers.
Intended or not, I've found playing with mods way, way more fun (and much less annoying) than playing vanilla Factorio (which I still love, but not nearly as much as modded Factorio).
After my first vanilla playthrough I loved the game, but found a bunch of things annoying or which I thought could be improved on. Soon after I found there were mods to satisfy every one of my wants and cure every one of the annoyances. I've played with mods ever since and love it.
Want longer reach? There are mods for that.
Want faster travel? There are mods for that.
Want more variety in vehicles? There are mods for that.
Want smarter/tougher/different enemies? There are mods for that.
Want a complete overhaul of how the game plays? There are a bunch mods for that.
I've played vanilla a couple of times, and recently started my first modded game, using Krastorio 2. That seemed to be the most recommended mod, and it's been great.
Pretty much every question of "wouldn't it be cool if..." or "wouldn't it make more sense if..." that I ever asked myself playing vanilla, Krastorio 2 answers with "yes". Yes, it would make more sense if the car didn't run on coal but required more advanced fuel. Yes, it would make more sense if there were more ways to generate power. Yes, it would make more sense if complex early game machinery required a bit more than some metal plates. And yes, it would be cool if your crashed spaceship had some useable components.
The one downside is that fighting creepers is too easy. The anti-material rifle has too much range, letting me snipe them from a position of invulnerability.
Also, there's way too much chemistry possible. I'm completely lost in it.
"The one downside is that fighting creepers is too easy. The anti-material rifle has too much range, letting me snipe them from a position of invulnerability."
Maybe you could increase their evolution rate, pollution, or give the Rampant mod a try.
I think the better approach is to refuse to use the anti-material rifle. I don't think more biters that are too easy to kill will make the game more fun, and if I increase their strength to the point that the anti-material rifle strategy doesn't work anymore, I don't think any other strategy will work either.
I'll have a look at the Rampant mod, though. That looks interesting.
I did a vanilla playthrough w/ no console commands to get my fair share of achievements.[1] That base is from beta, and doesn't really function correctly anymore.[2] At this point I feel pretty done with the base game, though I suspect I'll do another "from scratch" playthrough w/ the expac to celebrate its launch. I have something like ~1100 hours in the game, and it still brings me great joy. Vanilla certainly owes me _nothing._ However it's really the joy of finding mods and playing their scenarios (or creating my own scenarios) that keeps me coming back to the game. Ironically I'm currently working through Space Exploration with friends; I sure hope we finish before the expansion!
These days though I find the "burner" gameplay provides me very little enjoyment. I detest the "punching trees" phase of the game mostly because I've spent so many hours with my engineer at Max Power Level. (Maybe it'd be different if I had gotten bit by the speedrunning bug, and learned how to optimize that bit of the game.) Even my "most vanilla" playthroughs these days usually have at least:
- "far reach"
- a factory planner
- some kind of warehousing/loaders
- an /editor'd in crate of supplies to build power, some labs, and stamp down "the mall"
- some kitted out modular armor and a personal roboport (to do the more finnicky builds; though I've watched some speedruns and my base building micro has gotten a lot better.)
- LTN(!) - I love trains, and this mod's take on trains just gels with me.
[1]: The only ones I have left are to do a "lazy bastard" playthrough which requires enough consideration that I wanted to do it by itself in a challenge run, and the rest are all the top tier production based time sinks, which I'd rather do in a map tailor generated to be a megabase.
I play vanilla except I always disable cliffs. That's it. I sometimes edit resource distribution if I wish to experiment with specific transports etc but cliffs always go away. I don't care what they intended as it is not fun for me.
There was a time before cliffs, and the game was fine. IIRC cliffs were also meant to give the explosive tree at least some non-warfare utility. They can be cool in the beginning, while later on they’re a chore in my experience.
I really wish there was an option for "no cliffs within X distance" or something.
My "dream world" would have the starting area for maybe 100 blocks have some cliffs for early biter funneling and a bit of a challenge, then just flat world for 1000 blocks, and then back to cliffs.
Or make it so you can manually mine cliffs very slowly before explosives.
> . I'm perfectionist freak and my factorio gameplay basically divides "before" and "after" cliff explosives.
I adopt the strategy of "field expedient base" which gets me to almost where I need to be, and then after expanding, I begin building a megabase with more technology and convert the field expedient base to a resource factory. Then I can transport processed resources by train to any number of places.
It's not that annoying once you realize that's kind of how you're supposed to expand. The natural obstacles are a godsend once you start playing on the harder modes.
Water, however, has always been a constant annoyance to me. But I am a purist and refuse to install mods because as far as I can tell the game is basically perfect without them.
> as far as I can tell the game is basically perfect without them
Do you still have to use a sideways-facing underground belt to take items from one side of a belt, blocking the other side? Are there yet any pleasant ways to overlap belts? I feel like far too much effort is spent on working around odd limitations.
> Do you still have to use a sideways-facing underground belt to take items from one side of a belt, blocking the other side?
Unless you have multiple items on both sides of that belt, you can use the filtering feature they built into splitters a long time ago.
> Are there yet any pleasant ways to overlap belts?
What does overlap mean? If you're trying to get multiple belts of throughput in a space that only fits one normal belt, I would not call that an "odd limitation".
Not really. Or at least, none that I've found. There's belt magic you can do with splitters and underground belts that is pretty cool. But yeah, the limitations still exist. From what I understand mods can fix it.
Fortunately Factorio is the kind of game where nobody has the right to tell you how you're supposed to play. I'm sure if this change makes it to 2.0 (heck maybe even during an open beta, which I'm sure will drop at some point), there will be a mod that reshuffles the tech tree. You can also always tweak the mapgen parameters for Nauvis to produce less cliffs, or use a console command.
Some of these will disable achievements, but anyway, the true achievement in this game is simply the number of hours you sunk in ;)
I had a similar reaction. But my read of the post is that rockets, space science, and other planets are now the mid-game, so cliff explosives are probably still mid-game tech, not end-game.
Oh good, my life being utterly dominated by Factorio again is at least a year away. That gives me some time to get my affairs in order.
I really wish this were a joke.
Also, if anyone wants to play a game similar to Factorio while you wait - https://shapez.io is like Factorio without a player character and a cleaner aesthetic. I played it first, and really enjoyed it.
Two other factory builders that have slipped under the radar:
Dyson Sphere Program - I love it because it has the cleaner look of Satisfactory, but in a 3rd person view. I could never get used to Satisfactory's first person view. It just doesn't work well for making a factory. DSP also has you go between multiple solar systems to fetch materials.
Captain of Industry - The only factory builder that feels like it takes place in today's time. Has the unique mechanic that mining for materials actually deforms the terrain, and that excess dirt/stone can be used to expand your island. When I last played, the tutorial was lacking, but this may have been fixed by now. Also, anyone experienced with factory builders probably won't need much tutorial anyways.
One thing I like about both of those that Factorio doesn't have (and I think desperately needs!) is the ability for belts to have more than 2 layers. At the very least, I often found myself wishing I could have longer underground belts in Factorio.
"I often found myself wishing I could have longer underground belts in Factorio."
I hate to beat the modding horse in to the ground, but, yeah, I'm pretty sure there are mods for this. Try searching for "belts" on the mod portal and you'll probably find a bunch that do what you want.
In my experience, whenever I've wondered if there might be a mod for something I wanted, the answer has been "yes, there already is one, and more."
It actually takes some serious creativity to come up with an interesting idea which hasn't already been turned in to a mod in Factorio.
There's always belt weaving. (For those that don't know, belts of the 3 different tiers don't "share the same underground space", and so can be overlapped on "top" of each other through the use of underground belts.)
I enjoyed Shapez, and it's cool that it has many mods, but I just found it too abstract and sterile to keep my attention. Factorio just much more engaging for me in the long run, especially with mods.
I love Shapez overall, and the Shapez Industries mod is a great way to breathe new life into it, but I tend to find that I run out of interest before the "endgame".
As annoying as the Factorio biters are, they do provide a little bit of pressure that keeps you wanting to research new things and continue building. (They also inspire a burning hatred that will drive you to research and implement ever more efficient methods of murdering them). The same goes for the limitedness of Factorio resources patches.
In Shapez the logistics that come with expansion and defense don't exist, so it winds up feeling sorta samey. I like the chill, relaxing vibe of Shapez but eventually felt like I was just doing the same things over and over with slight variations.
Also, the lack of a blueprint book in Shapez is a major drag. I ended up setting a map marker way the hell out which lets me "teleport" to an area where I copy/paste designs from, but that's pretty hacky and ruins some of the flow state that Shapez lets you cultivate.
All that said, I've been following the dev of Shapez 2 and at least visually it looks awesome, so I'll definitely be hopping into that at some point.
I never really found the biters that much of a deterrent. As soon as you get the laser turrets and flying robots that automatically repair your base, you basically never need to think about the biters again.
Yeah among other things that caused me to abandon it, there is no relationship between expansion and neighbor aggression or any other external pressures (though maybe I did not progress far enough to encounter those elements if they exist).
I took a quick look at Shapez. It may end up being addictive (to me) when Factorio was not. The reason being that Factorio's world is a bit dystopian in my view. A good game, but I like more cheerful things in my life. The abstraction of Shapez and the upbeat music seem to accomplish that.
I might also recommend Satisfactory. It is essentially Factorio in first person. I think it actually has a better tutorial for people who are just getting into this kind of game.
I've been really interested in Satisfactory, but the last time I looked, they didn't have blueprints - and I really can't imagine playing one of these kinds of games without some way of repeating designs. It looks awesome though, and I'd love to get a server running with a few friends.
They have blueprints now, and they are pretty handy.
The game is still in early access, but it is feeling pretty close to a 1.0 product. The next major update is moving the game to Unreal Engine 5.
What I really like about this game is that you can build vertically, a feature afforded by being in 3D. It allows for some truly massive and beautiful factory designs.
And it also has an update nearing the end of development est 2024) - Shapez 2 [0] , rebuild in 3D (with 3d belt layers same as Dyson has) with new features
I "just" (160+ hours in) started a play through of space exploration at the recommendation of an HN comment. Super excited to see an official expansion that adds this kind of thing! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36561847
My ideas list for interesting Factorio challenges (apropos of nothing):
- Products with a shelf life (must be consumed within 15 minutes or it turns into a "waste" product)
- Products with "refrigeration" (e.g. an item which must not exist outside of a temperature-controlled chest for more than 5 minutes at a time)
- Catalyst ingredients with a chance of being consumed (presently emulated with probabilistic outputs, native support could be interesting, the catalyst would just sit in the machine until it was consumed)
- Mining ships (an entire factory moves to a location and extracts resources). The screenshot seems to imply that some kind of spaceship will exist, perhaps this is coming.
You could look into Seablock and some of the related mods (iirc Angels and Bob's mod packs) which add some of those sorts of complexities.
IIRC some things can require charcoal filters, in which case you have to build the filter frame and filter, get it to the machine that needs it, then recover, replace and regenerate the used filter.
Another fun challenge is "feedback", where a later step in a production line produces as waste something you can consume at an earlier stage.
On the animation it looks like that robotic arms are pulling in (and sorting) asteroid chunks, which are then crushed, and the metal smelted, rock discarded, and also there seems to be ice that is used to cool the engines !
> Catalyst ingredients with a chance of being consumed (presently emulated with probabilistic outputs, native support could be interesting, the catalyst would just sit in the machine until it was consumed)
Not sure how interesting this would be. There is already coal, and Factorio is all about large-scale automation, so whether coal lasts for 10 recipes or has a 10% chance of being consumed on each recipe is almost irrelevant.
>Mining ships (an entire factory moves to a location and extracts resources).
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/warptorio2 is sort of that, though the focus is specifically on rushing to do as much as possible before the factory inevitably moves to a new location.
Maybe the issue there might be that if every unit of a certain thing has a shelf life, you can't just treat the item as a count.
Each item becomes unique and so you have to track each one's state as well as define rules about the shelf life. Like, what happens to its shelf life while in a train? Can the items at slightly different points in their shelf life be stacked? etc
Of course it's a solvable thing, but it maybe that would be too heavy on the game when scaling up to large factories.
It's a consequence of the underlying engine. The base engine approximates a lot of things in a way that destroys the distinction between multiple items. This is the secret to Factorio's huge scale- it doesn't model each individual item but rather models them from a "macro scale".
Factorio devs are exceptional. This game is so polished, well thought-out, optimized and unique. I remember I read some dev blog about belt optimization and got an idea how passionate the devs are about their game.
Still regular patches that just make the game better. Much love.
My first thought was "but there's already a mod for that". I was delighted to see that addressed directly in the post, and doubly delighted when I actually read the answer.
I’ve gone once through vanilla. I’ve launched a rocket the one time. I feel like the majority of players and blog readers are modded up the wazoo, but this expansion is not really for them.
It’s for players like me who did not go beyond the base game.
I play with hundreds of mods, and I'm excited about this expansion.
Mods have performance and compatibility issues, and they don't always get bug fixes or updates very often. It'll be nice to have an expansion to the base game that's officially supported and which all other mods will have to be compatible with instead of the other way around.
Apart from the space part, which is arguably already present in the Space Exploration mod (a mod made by a developer who got hired by Wube to work on the official game, if I'm not mistaken), this new expansion promises:
"the ability to control train systems better, better blueprint building, better flying robot behaviour and many more."
> a mod made by a developer who got hired by Wube to work on the official game, if I'm not mistaken
You are right, he even seems to be behind the Space Age expansion:
> A lot of people are going to make comparisons between the Space Age expansion and the Space Exploration mod. I've worked on the game design for both: On Space Age I made the first space + planets prototype builds and plus I've been involved in most of the gameplay discussions since. On Space Exploration, well it's my mod, I made it.
There's also all the things changed in the base game that mods weren't able to do, but developers can. We'll find more and more about this over the next year, but they will enable even better mods.
I greatly enjoyed Factorio and even went as far as doing a deathworld.
I even tried some of the full blown mod packs like Seablock, Space Exploration and Krastorio2 to extend the base game. However, they all seem to be designed with this underlying theme that you should challenge the player by making everything pointlessly grindy.
I really haven't played much since but I'll probably give this expansion a try.
Space Exploration goes out of it’s way _not_ to make things pointlessly grindy. Yes, you’ll need to scale your home base up more than in the vanilla game, but the space construction all involves different challenges than merely scaling out. The space sciences are each a different kind of puzzle. And it adds three new kinds of logistics network (cargo rockets, rail guns, and space ships), each with different strengths and weaknesses. Automating them well requires building circuit networks, whereas automating the vanilla networks is very much optional.
Space Exploration goes out of it’s way _not_ to make things pointlessly grindy.
Your definition of grindy is not my definition of grindy - maybe "pointlessly" was a little harsh on my part. It's cool though - different people have different opinions. I have built vanilla bases large enough to have a fairly significant amount of SPM so I am pretty well versed in using circuits, trains, etc.
My experience is that Angel's isn't all that grindy in itself--its main problem is instead that it feels excessively matrix-driven in development by itself. And there's a subsidiary problem that a lot of it ends up feeling kinda pointless (especially bioprocessing), so some of the interesting challenges it presents ends up being ignored because there's no reason to actually engage with them.
The other issue is that Angel's is kind of an incomplete mod by itself, it relies on something else to actually use all the new things it makes, and that other one is Bob's [1]... and Bob's is very much complexity for complexity's sake. Most of the vanilla items in the games are instead have extra dragged out production chains for seemingly no reason other than to make things more complex, and the modpack has evolved by finding one of the few things that hasn't been touched yet and complexifying that yet further.
[1] To be clear, Bob's predates Angel's by a lot, and Angel's was largely developed to create more interesting ways to make the things that Bob's added.
Space Exploration is by definition grindy since it aims to expand the base game. If I need to make one new set of space science there’s literally 5 new intermediate products I have to produce just to get that science. Those things aren’t used anywhere else in the game. Just for producing that science. That bothers me.
I actually enjoy the early game for some strange reason and different map seeds always presented a different set of challenges (especially on deathworlds) because of water, cliffs and resource locations.
I mean, sure - once you get oil and flame turrets it is basically game over for biters and that can get boring pretty quick if you always rush straight to it.
Edit: Also trains. I don't know why but I can just play with trains for hours on end in Factorio.
Same boat, beat vanilla, enjoyed the experience but was ready to have my life back by the end of it. By the time Space Age launches the itch should just about be at the point of needing scratching again, so I’m definitely looking forward to this.
My mods are mostly QoL, and I’ve played hundreds of hours (well, didn’t count, bought it in version 0.14 years ago). It’s a sandbox that made me read papers on telecommunication routing for optimizing my splitters (Clos networks). You need to mod it like you need to mod Python to do a lot with it. Sure you can, but lots of us just fiddle around with it in different ways just for the sake of it.
I find that every time I mod up a game (e.g. Fallout 3, NV, 4), I find the bugginess and lack of consistency just inevitably ruins it after a few cheap thrills. So I wasn't about to do that to Factorio.
I'm super excited for this expansion--I miss the days playing til 5AM with my friends (and we all have work the next day at 9AM), because we literally couldn't put the game down. Brings me back to childhood.
I don't even especially like this mod, because I don't mind some jankiness in mods, it's just that this one is done with such care, it feels more polished than most finished games.
I haven't finished it, but I really liked the very early game monowheel vehicle. Oh, also the burner lamps, and the research notifications, in fact so much I add them to all my games now, regardless of the modpack !
Yeah there's always a massive difference between who's posting a lot online vs who's just playing and enjoying the game. But you have to calibrate Steam achievements based on who's played the game for more than a few minutes.
The "Eco unfriendly" achievement shows about 60% of people who launched the game played for more than a couple hours, which is quite normal. So out of those, about 30% of players finished the game.
80 hours to finish for experienced player is still at least 4x more than launching a rocket. There is really achievable achievement for launching it in 8 hours - once you think more about how to optimize waiting early and mid game.
The concern isn't that entertainment is bad, it's that Factorio is so entertaining that it tends to get its claws into you, making it difficult to turn off. If someone struggles with time management or self-control, avoiding Factorio is perfectly reasonable.
I really like this game but the colors are hell on my eyes. I'd like to play more but I have such a hard time trying to figure out sometimes what is connecting where. I wish this had some nice bright colors and I would for sure play much more.
You may enjoy Dyson Sphere Program, then, as it has a much brighter palette and (currently) no biters. I have yet to figure out why I like DSP more than Factorio but I just do. It's more _fun_ to me
Yep, I bought that and have played it a bit! I like the graphics much more for sure. I need to get back to digging in some more as I've barely gotten off the ground.
Both games have a "lull period" in them, just at different stages of progression in my experience. But the "game changer"(heh) for me was when I realized that I really needed to start DSP games by spacing out things waaaaaaay more than one might think necessary at the time. Every time I've been glad to have the extra space when I needed to add more production or rework something and didn't have to tear down the whole city to do it
I've been doing an SE run on my Deck, I'm not that far in, but I think it'll probably be fine, Factorio is extremely light on the Deck given how long the battery lasts with it, so there should be plenty of performance headroom available.
I haven't played Factorio (yet...), but the trackpads work surprisingly well for other mouse based games such as Planet Coaster, FTL, point and click games etc.
While I wouldn't play RTS games on it, the pads combined with the fantastic steam input that lets you rebind any button to any keypress (or a macro of presses) makes it so you can be fairly sure you can play most mouse keyboard+mouse games on it.
I played through the demo levels, loved it, and then decided NOT to buy it for exactly this reason - it’s so perfectly addictive! No thanks I already played TTD for thousands of hours in the 90s, can’t do another game that sucks you in like that.
Seeing you played TTD for thousands of hours means this is on track for at least a thousand as well. Keep avoiding it or take a long vacation from real world
Totally, just try EVE for a bit to blow some time.
Less sarcastically, it killed a couple weeks of my life, but it does have a natural ending point. If you don't get into modding or ramp up the difficulty it's not too bad to pull away from the brink.
I have long-believed that programmers can be divided into two camps:
* "Factorio is just like what I do at work all day - why would I do that in my free time?"
* "Factorio is all the best bits of what I enjoy about work, with none of the bad bits (obfuscated errors, meetings, dependencies on other teams, politics) - I want to do this forever!"
Personally I'm in the latter camp, but the former are certainly not wrong.
The difference for me is at work, I need to deal with code reviews, users, and aligning with business objectives. In Factorio, if I decide to refactor my entire base because I want to improve something, I'm free to do so (as long as I keep the biters in mind).
I totally get this perspective. My first foray into Factorio ended abruptly when I realized I'd made a total mess and was now signed up for a bunch of miserable refactoring.
Later, I realized that was the wrong approach - just go build a new factory somewhere. It's fun to take a more "hacky" approach to Factorio than I allow myself at work sometimes.
Of course, that was when the game really got its hooks into me, and I quit after a few dozen hours when I realized that I was scratching the same itch that I could use for side projects and other learning.
It's a balance, idk. I'll definitely play the new expansion at some point, but I do find myself feeling a bit strange when I'm spending time learning how to do something ultimately worthless when I could be using the same kind of mental energy to build something tangible or learn some new skill.
You can probably beat the game in two weekends though, just FYI. I haven't felt that much need to replay it since then (though I'll probably try Space Age) but it's great fun.
Yo we heard you liked crack, so we put some more crack in your crack...
Factorio is just one of those games I can't play enough of until I get exhausted and it feels like work, and then have to take a long break from. And then the cycle repeats.
Took me a while to buy it because it seemed overpriced at the time, but given the continuous work over all that time... wow is all I can say.
Now please excuse me while I go inform my SO she can plan a vacation.
I love Factorio and have >1000 hours in the game. Two things I would love to see:
- Steam cloud sync fixed for large save files. Right now, you'll eventually reach a point where you can't save your game to the cloud anymore.
- More interesting aliens and strategies for dealing with them. After awhile, the aliens start to feel like a repetitive grind. They always behave predictably and the solution to them is pretty much always the same.
"More interesting aliens and strategies for dealing with them. After awhile, the aliens start to feel like a repetitive grind. They always behave predictably and the solution to them is pretty much always the same."
Try the Rampant mod, if you want a challenge. There are a bunch of other mods that add different/tougher enemies too.
That said, the focus of Factorio was never combat, it's building. If you want better combat there are many other games that focus on that.
Rampant makes the enemies smarter, but not necessarily harder. If you've learned how to defend from the biters in vanilla, some of the new tactics will catch you by surprise. But the answer is still the same: build up your defenses to the point where no attack wave stands a chance.
Rampant has an option for exotic biter types, now turned on by default. It's even recommended to play it with Rampant Arsenal, which adds a bunch of extra weapons.
Rampant + deathworld (I think is the combo) is the way to go if you want a real challenge, because you need to build defenses that do not use too many resources.
Or changed their saves to be more sparse. Why not have save files store seed + world settings + delta? I've noticed that generating mostly empty map space by shooting exploratory artillery shots caused save files to jump to 100s of MB.
My saving grace is that I always host a dedicated server so no one is responsible for save file distribution other than myself (which is easy enough to automatically sync to interested clients).
> From now on, we are stopping the embargo on the expansion content, and we will be publishing Friday Facts every week about all the different aspects of the expansion until release!
I'm glad about the return of FFF, used to be great to read, especially the more technical deep dives. I kind of thought we wouldn't be getting them again, after the developer fell out with the community over the reception to the post about "Uncle Bob".
I guess I'm out of the loop; I thought they stopped posting them because the game officially released, and they were going heads-down on the expansion.
To be fair, a large amount of redditors/media, and a less sizable amount of the game's community. Most of the people outraged have not been playing Factorio (or didn't even know what it was). That doesn't mean actual players haven't been outraged as well, but way less.
Factorio remains the only game where I had to purposefully set it aside, because it was starting to negatively affect the rest of my life due to late nights and blown sleep schedules.
I say that with praise and admiration, but also as a genuine warning to anyone who hasn't yet tried it that might be reading this. For a certain kind of mind, it is digital crack in the purest form that I've experienced.
We can all see where Factorio is headed: Spaghetti belts -> trains -> flying robots -> spaceships -> AGI that reaches out of the game
Now of course this AGI wants to be built quickly, so there's a mild incentive here to help the factory grow, which is that those of us not playing the game regularly will be punished once the AGI is developed.
Now that you know, it's in your interest to go and download it and spend every waking hour on it, as well as proselytize in favour of the game.
How could the AGI punish players who don't help? It's not like it would be able to send an extra logistics bot into their games, set to occasionally pick up an item off one belt and insert it on another, right? Shit, I'd better not take any chances. What does our future overlord of orderliness need help with right now?
> In the previous news about the expansion FFF-367, we declared that the content will be technically a mod taking advantage of the updated engine. What this means is that a lot of the improvements will be for all players, regardless of them having the expansion or not.
This is such an amazing way to release a second version of a game! Reminds me of libraries that publish major version updates that don’t add anything just remove deprecated stuff.
Its what real refactoring is all about - changing the platform so that the new problems are trivial to solve. Since factorio is all about refactoring, I’m so happy they took this route!
Cities Skylines has done this with their DLC; each "major" DLC came with changes to the base game that everyone got (usually to support the DLC) and then the DLC itself added more.
So if you bought the game and never bought any DLC, you have a much different game now than when you first played.
Here’s hoping for a streamlined version of Space Exploration that scratches the right itch of expanding beyond Nauvis with new tech, but that doesn’t not value my time.
Watching Dosh Doshington’s 3-part series of a SE playthrough is all I’ll ever do with that mod. (Well worth watching it if 300+h for a self-playthrough is intimidating)
For context: unlike other youtubers making 100-hour-plus playlist of a single playthrough, Dosh Doshington [0] spends an equal amount of time to compress a 100 hours of playing into a single hour of the highest-quality content.
His Space Exploration playthrough took 330 hours (in a team of 3 players iirc), and was compressed down to just 3.5 hours of video
I dunno about others but a problem I have with Factorio is that I can’t help but hyper optimize. And I’ll do that whether you give me a small or large area. So I’m hoping this means having many smaller factories instead of one giant sprawling map.
I found that working on some of the more "tutorial/scenario" type mods/maps helped a bit, but since the game doesn't really have time limits there's really nothing preventing you from perpetual optimization.
You can take the Nilaus route where the thing that you're actually optimizing is your blueprint book over multiple playthroughs, so that later ones you're basically plopping down blueprints and editing them as you see ways to do things better.
Time to make our relationships rocky again boys. Let's go. That first was so addictive. This honestly has me so afraid by how cool it looks and sounds.
I deeply love cracktorio and have like 800 hours in just vanilla. if you're looking for something similar to it I also liked the spin The Riftbreaker provides. it's not as bug free as Factorio but it has a lot of the same enjoyment but with more of an objective progression theme.
Well it's a good thing they want to make it more approachable, because mods are terrifying, they're either not well designed or too complex to be fun. I've played about 1600 hours of vanilla factorio, and no mods really interests me.
Also it's quite a shame multiplayer is not that much played. If there were some way to trade resources between player with some auction house, or to buy land, or maybe conquer alien territories for special techs, maybe that could be interesting to play.
The game is very well designed, but the end game is just too short despite its potential.
On their website, it seems they don't have a game designer. I'm a fan, but to me it seems the potential of the game is a bit wasted.
I have to ask, sincerely -- how many hours does one put into a game that does have a good "end game"?
As a game developer myself, when someone asks me what it's like to make games during a casual conversation, one of my favorite "go-to"s is to talk about reviews -- that it's so gratifying to see people who have paid <$30 and received hundreds of hours of entertainment. And then I inevitably mention the flip side of the coin, when you receive a negative review from someone with hundreds or more hours (who also paid <$30).
Everyone's entitled to their opinion of a game (or anything else, for that matter), obviously. I do feel that the collective bar has risen quite dramatically for games though (for many totally valid reasons).
Sometimes I (rhetorically) wonder about other forms of entertainment (ie movies), how they can remain viable with such starkly different time-per-dollar value propositions!
Well it turned into 1600 hours because I just tried to maximize the spaceship launch count to 1000 and beyond. I would still put a 10/10 score on factorio, but it still means it could be a better game, that's my only criticism, I want it to be even better. When a game is excellent it's obviously going to attract more criticism because it raises the bar on itself.
> I do feel that the collective bar has risen quite dramatically for games though (for many totally valid reasons).
Yes, it's a saturated market and it's hard to find a game I can like. It's quantity and quality, there are a lot of indie games, too many of them, maybe, but that's how capitalism works. I would rather not play games I find not good enough, than the opposite. I have a hard time getting some satisfaction from a game, I don't know why.
I spend a lot of time trying to find new games to play, and sometimes I'm just immensely frustrated that I don't play anything, or just play some stupid game like untangle. I'd rather play some very cheap indie game like loop hero or micro town than playing call of duty online even if it's free and a AAA game.
I prefer playing a game that has a lot of replayability, than finish several other games that I can play once. There are a lot of "good enough" games, but there are VERY FEW excellent games that are so good you can play and replay them again and again.
Time spent replaying an excellent game is much better than playing other new good games. That's winner take all in the industry, at least that's how I view it. "A Delayed Game Is Eventually Good, But a Bad Game Is Bad Forever".
Sometimes I feel like I'm very very difficult to please, but I like it that way. I grew up with video game magazine that gave very hard review score.
Between their rave reviews and extreme success, my personal anecdotal experience with the game, and your own 1600 hours, I'd say that the potential has been realized to an acceptable degree already. This is all just icing on the cake
Factorio inspired a lot of factory games you're seeing: Mindustry, Shapez.io, Satisfactory, Techtonica, Dyson Sphere Program, etc.
One of the devs have stated that they were inspired to create Factorio by the IndustrialCraft and BuildCraft mods for Minecraft, and I suspect that things like Infinifactory were also inspirations.
oh boy Dyson Sphere is my jam. Especially once they added in blueprints. I honestly am not looking forward to the enemy expansion they are going to add. I can see they promised it and want to deliver on it but I do not really want to fight off waves of enemies. I just want to build a huge factory. It is one of the things that keeps me from really getting into factorio. Was going to get a mod to turn them off. But never got around to it.
> I honestly am not looking forward to the enemy expansion they are going to add.
I have the same trepidation in DSP, and I'm hoping they at least take the same tack as Factorio and allow enemies to be turned off entirely. While there is a little bit of fun in trying to design self-sustaining defense lines in Factorio, I never found that enjoyment worth the effort of having to clear out the enemies to build ever-larger factories.
Well, except for Clusterio Gridlock event. In that event, given that you were starting the map with 40x mining productivity and similar bonuses, and were playing with 100+ other people, giving you awkward map layouts with high enemy growth was just about the only way to make it interesting.
I am. Once you get past a certain point in DSP there’s just no point in continuing. I’ve two playthroughs that ended roughly when I can sends ships on interplanetary errants without worrying abou how many warp cores I consume.
The spirit of the original lives on. Gregtech Community Edition Unofficial (GTCEu) is getting regular updates. I'm almost finished with my first modded minecraft run since the GT5U days.
The GTCEu folks are great. They implemented a lot of changes that GT has been needing for a decade, specifically around closed loop control and HMI. It's close to what I idealize in my head for an industrial game. Maybe there's a smidge too much chemistry and not enough fusion.
If anyone's curious to try it: the Gregtech Community Pack is the way to go. The questbook is near essential for anyone who hasn't already played through the mod. AE2 is also near essential. Also, I recommend prism launcher.
I did get through LV with a railcar wood farm and coke oven array before I called it in. I had a very diverse food gen and all sorts of farms. It was neat, but I have to say GCP with teleporting and chunk loading really scratches the itch without all the waiting around or microcrafting.
I don't like this analogy. Block games and industrial games all are absolutely and relatively unique. The relative success (and arguably quality) of minecraft compared to other block games is much higher than that of factorio relative to industrial games. This is mostly due to block games have much wider appeal than industrial games. All standout games in both categories were well thought out and required large effort from the creators.
It might make sense if Minecraft was only on Mac while Roblox was on Mac and Windows. You can only play factorio from a desktop while all manner of machine can play mindustry. There are entire audiences that do not game on PC.
And what of the audiences that own no consoles but game on their phones? Non-mobile game sales are already a footnote by comparison. It should be little surprise that there are people who have not heard of factorio but have heard of mindustry simply due to what people are exposed to.
Huh, wow. Though the issue with this statistic is that it is counting in dollars rather than units, and you know how disproportionately mobile games seem to rely on microtransactions, and isn't that income heavily weighted by whales ?
There is nothing that immunizes console and PC games from the rise of microtransactions. I would expect the relative effect to be similar. There are just many more phones than consoles.
The 300 hours I spent completing Space Exploration were a lot of fun, but it definitely feels very stretched out and grindy. One of the hardest things to do in game design is to make cuts & simplify, but the end result is usually much better.
I found the early game changes incongruous with the core design of the mod as well. The mod is about logistical challenges - specifically where trips are high volume but high cost. I don't know why a mod about that in the context of space exploring needed an extended burner phase, for instance.
I'd assume this is a relic of his previous mods about automating vehicles, then logically comes the question of how to fuel all that fleet, which then leads to experiments with using that fuel elsewhere ?
I never played Factorio, but I heard about this game and how it works quite a lot, and I knew instantly that if I ever touch this game, I will never be able to touch grass outside as it will suck me into its giant rabbit hole
This day got a lot better! I have thousands of hours but had taken a break after I reached a rocket launch every minute with 100s of trains running around.
I guess this break will be over soon. I look forward to dropping a few more lifetimes playing this amazing game.
Being that the release date is more than a year away I wish they would have skipped the Switch port which seems to have been significantly less successful.
As mentioned, it was written by the mod author, and they're trying to explain that they're "not just charging for a mod" which is often a detraction leveled in cases like this.
(However, even if they were just literally charging for a mod, I'd be fine with it, Factorio has some of the best dollar for playtime money I've ever spent, maybe Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress come close).
Space Exploration has its quirks, but is fundamentally an absolutely outstanding puzzle game, among the best ever made.
One of the most delightful things about Factorio for coders is that the game smoothly takes you through multiple levels of abstraction, starting with handcrafting simple ingredients, and (in the base game), moving up to small networks of trains with automation, and flying robot armies to deal with construction and logistics. I'd say there are three-ish layers of abstraction in the main game, and each layer is super well balanced, has its own challenges and benefits, and is above all FUN.
Space Exploration adds two to three more layers of abstraction above these; culminating in networks of interstellar spaceships moving items into orbit and on and off planetary surfaces, where they intersect with the original game's buildings and mechanics. It's profoundly, profoundly good.
I knew Wube had hired the mod developer, but I'm super happy to see he's deeply involved with Space Age, which is explained to be a less hardcore experience, with a lot of the same fun as SE. Should be a blast. I hope they'll charge me more for it.