
Factorio 1.0 - Akronymus
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-360
======
karpathy
Addicting and dangerous. When I was in the thick of it my nights were restless
as my brain continued to spin on my factory and various ideas for its
refactoring. I also suddenly can't not see our global economy and its gradual
automation as a massive ongoing MMORPG game of Factorio. The end state then
becomes as clear as the state of my final factory - we'd feed raw renewable
energy into the system and automatically manufacture an abundance of all goods
that people desire. Maybe they all just pop out of the automaton and we
gradually lose ability to understand it, fix it, improve it, etc. Depressing.
:)

~~~
VikingCoder
Why would the people who own the factories just give the output to people?

What could people possibly offer, when all the things they're capable of
making can be produced at zero cost?

I'm not being snarky, this is something I genuinely worry about. I think
Universal Basic Income is the only reasonable answer.

~~~
didibus
> Why would the people who own the factories just give the output to people?
> What could people possibly offer, when all the things they're capable of
> making can be produced at zero cost?

The answer is simple, protection from them taking it by force. This is
literally the reason for liberal democracies.

Dictatorship, feudalism, and other forms of authoritarian structure always
come with the downside that the ones at the bottom are trying to get the ones
at the top. Thus if you are at the top, you live in worry and fear of a
rebelion, revolution, a coup, from your family or friends to betray you, etc.

In that scenario, your day job becomes maintaining your power and authority at
all times. Which like any other job, is taxing, tiresome, and hard work. So
even though on paper it seems you've got all the goods and services at zero
cost, there's a tremendous cost to yourself to maintain that position when
others are trying to steal it from you.

That's why, the "right to property" is fundamental. You want a society which
can guarantee that right, and give you piece of mind that what you own is
yours and no one is going to take it by force. So you can relax and enjoy the
fruit of your labor (or inherited factories output).

One solution for this is to create a system that is governed by the rule of
law, where no players is in such a bad state that they could be willing to
risk it all to steal your piece of the pie. Thus a balance must be struck,
where everyone can find satisfaction, even if some get to have a lot more than
others.

~~~
kukx
"and give you piece of mind that what you own is yours and no one is going to
take it by force" except for the government that takes stuff by force eg by
collecting taxes etc.

~~~
didibus
That's one solution to not have people take it by force. You agree to a
taxation scheme, which trickles down, yet you still retain most of it
yourself, and it satisfies everyone. You know exactly how much to give, and
you can achieve the right balance of just enough to keep everyone content.

So its way better to willingly agree to participate in a tax scheme, than
being at risk of beheading from masses or poison in your drink.

There are other schemes, but it's always the same idea, you need to keep
people happy enough and satisfied so they don't come for your stuff. That way,
you can enjoy it in peace.

Edit: Well assuming a liberal democratic taxation system. Otherwise taxes can
be a way to take even more from people at the bottom, like in feudalism, where
land owners tax their labourers for the right to use their land.

~~~
kortilla
> So its way better to willingly agree to participate in a tax scheme, than
> being at risk of beheading from masses or poison in your drink.

Is it really willingly agreeing when there is no option to opt-out?

~~~
XorNot
People always say "why can't I opt out?" but the reason they say it because
they want to opt out while not moving country, or really changing anything
about their lives, they just want to not pay taxes right where they are.

As though taxes, government and broader social organization has _nothing at
all_ to do with why the roads are paved and there's a municipal sewer system.
Or why it seems like it's so hard to find a body of land on Earth where you
aren't subject to another, possibly much worse government (military is funded
by someone...)

If moving somewhere you wouldn't have to pay taxes always seems like it would
be too hard, maybe think on that.

------
pulkitsh1234
Best game I have every played ! (source: trust me) 8.5 years in early access
is no joke, the game is definitely something !

Some of my favourite youtube videos on it:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF--
1XdcOeM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF--1XdcOeM) [Self expanding factory,
recursive blue prints]

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feHq2Ken43M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feHq2Ken43M)
[Factorio Rocket ballet, for reference it took me 30 hours to launch a single
rocket]

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KoV_Zk2IRs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KoV_Zk2IRs)
[Factorio base tour, this base looks like a CPU die when zoomed out]

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjtXHsv5E6M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjtXHsv5E6M)
[Another Factorio base tour]

~~~
DonHopkins
Satisfactory is like a 3D version of Factorio, which lets you build huge
multi-layer mega factories up into the sky. But it's not as deep and
sophisticated as Factorio, and doesn't have drones or blueprints. (That would
be a lot more difficult to accomplish in free-form 3D, than with Factorio's 2D
tile grid.) It's kind of like the giant simple Legos for younger kids, as
opposed to Factorio that's more like Lego Technic.

Satisfactory is well worth playing if you yearn for a 3D version of Factorio,
but I still keep going back to Factorio, which is more like "Dwarf Fortress"
in its depth and sophistication. Satisfactory's world is breathtakingly
beautiful, lovingly hand-crafted by artists instead of procedurally generated,
which makes it all the more satisfying to despoil and ruin with huge mega-
factories belching out smoke and radiation.

This guy's videos stress testing and abusing Satisfactory are awesome:

I Produced so Much Nuclear Waste the World Is Ruined Forever - Satisfactory

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh2oF-
eZTD8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh2oF-eZTD8)

I Built a 600 Meter Human Cannon That Ends All Existence - Satisfactory

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2X3wlvoShg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2X3wlvoShg)

I Made the Game Unplayable with This Gravity-Destroying Tractor Ball Pit -
Satisfactory

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTvAmwnhIxM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTvAmwnhIxM)

I Crippled the Game by Building to the Heavens - Satisfactory gameplay - Let's
Game It Out

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X77MHTOEwXo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X77MHTOEwXo)

What Happens When You Let a Maniac Build a Factory - Satisfactory gameplay -
Let's Game It Out

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vYYhL9Vt8o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vYYhL9Vt8o)

~~~
willis936
I feel like if you want a 3D favtorio then going back to the mother: modded
minecraft, is the best option. I have put multiple thousands of hours into
industry games over the past ten years (few hours in the past two years
though). Gregtech was what got me started and in some ways is still the best.
GT6 is complete and a standalone game (Mechanatia I think) is currently being
worked on. Factorio definitely wins on ability to automate and scale up, but
it is very wide and not very deep. That is to say, there is no exponential
growth power or resource requirements by moving up 5+ tech tiers. Combining
many tiers with powerful automation would be a very fun combo. Modded factorio
is probably the best place to look for this. For now, afaik, the biggest
factorio mods are focused on going even wider.

~~~
DonHopkins
I love Minecraft, and have played waaaay many hours of that too. But I'm not
up to date on the latest mods, so thanks for the recommendations!

Both Minecraft and Factorio use grids, which make automated building with
blueprints a lot easier.

But I can't imagine a good way for Satisfactory to support reusable blueprints
in an unconstrained 3D world, the way Factorio does in a gridded 2D world (or
the way Minecraft could in a cubic 3D world), where a big part of Satisfactory
is building around the landscape, natural artifacts, and threading tangled
conveyor belts around your other machines and belts and architecture.

When you're working with a 2D grid, it's easy to make reusable blueprints that
you can systematically stamp out and plug together. (It's a lot like GPU
programming, parallelizing tasks by spreading out the data to multiple
processors, processing it in efficient units, making tradeoffs about bandwidth
and buffering and transports, and merging it all back together again).

But there is so much variation in Satisfactory's 3D world and degrees of
freedom in construction, that everything you build is unique and not nearly as
modular and replicable as Factorio's blueprints.

On the other hand, Satisfactory's 3D building tools are fantastic (and it
would be frustrating and impossible to play if they weren't so good): they
make it really easy to connect up machine inputs and outputs with conveyor
belts and pipes, and route them around like spaghetti code.

Here's something I posted earlier, quoting Dave Ackley on why he didn't
transform his Moveable Feast Machine from 2D to 3D, who said: "I need to
actually preserve one dimension to build the thing and fix it. Imagine if you
had a three-dimensional computer, how you can actually fix something in the
middle of it? It's going to be a bit of a challenge. So fundamentally, I'm
just keeping the third dimension in my back pocket, to do other engineering."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22304110](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22304110)

Dave Ackley, who developed the Moveable Feast Machine, had some interesting
thoughts about moving from 2D to 3D grids of cells:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21131468](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21131468)

DonHopkins 4 months ago | parent | favorite | on: Wolfram Rule 30 Prizes

Very beautiful and artistically rendered! Those would make great fireworks and
weapons in Minecraft! From a different engineering perspective, Dave Ackley
had some interesting things to say about the difficulties of going from 2D to
3D, which I quoted in an earlier discussion about visual programming:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18497585](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18497585)

David Ackley, who developed the two-dimensional CA-like "Moveable Feast
Machine" architecture for "Robust First Computing", touched on moving from 2D
to 3D in his retirement talk:

[https://youtu.be/YtzKgTxtVH8?t=3780](https://youtu.be/YtzKgTxtVH8?t=3780)

"Well 3D is the number one question. And my answer is, depending on what mood
I'm in, we need to crawl before we fly."

"Or I say, I need to actually preserve one dimension to build the thing and
fix it. Imagine if you had a three-dimensional computer, how you can actually
fix something in the middle of it? It's going to be a bit of a challenge."

"So fundamentally, I'm just keeping the third dimension in my back pocket, to
do other engineering. I think it would be relatively easy to imaging taking a
2D model like this, and having a finite number of layers of it, sort of a 2.1D
model, where there would be a little local communication up and down, and then
it was indefinitely scalable in two dimensions."

"And I think that might in fact be quite powerful. Beyond that you think about
things like what about wrap-around torus connectivity rooowaaah, non-euclidian
dwooraaah, aaah uuh, they say you can do that if you want, but you have to
respect indefinite scalability. Our world is 3D, and you can make little
tricks to make toruses embedded in a thing, but it has other consequences."

Here's more stuff about the Moveable Feast Machine:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15560845](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15560845)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14236973](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14236973)

The most amazing mind blowing demo is Robust-first Computing: Distributed City
Generation:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkSXERxucPc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkSXERxucPc)

And a paper about how that works:

[https://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/papers/paper_tsmall1_11_24.pd...](https://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/papers/paper_tsmall1_11_24.pdf)

Plus there's a lot more here:

[https://movablefeastmachine.org/](https://movablefeastmachine.org/)

Now he's working on a hardware implementation of indefinitely scalable robust
first computing:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1M91QuLZfCzHjBMEKvIc-A](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1M91QuLZfCzHjBMEKvIc-A)

~~~
willis936
Buildcraft’s builder can stamp complicated structures, but if you want to use
it in factories then every stamp will need some hands on work. Ticking tile
entities have fragile metadata that don’t like getting placed by non-players.
There may be workarounds, but then you need to implement a blueprint system
that can handle arbitrary ticking tile entity metadata. It might not even be a
good idea to do this even if you can. Anyway, assuming these are solvable
problems and someone has solved them, then you could have a factorio-like
experience.

The thing is, factorio came out swinging with better automation than any
minecraft mod. It is much easier to place things together and have them run
free. Logistics bots are an absolute game changer in industry games. The bar
has been raised.

~~~
DonHopkins
I think there could be a whole book about designing reusable Factorio
blueprints, like "C++ Template Metaprogramming".

The kind you can easily stamp out rows of, and then hook up easily to
standardized busses.

You can sacrifice some space and efficiency and cost for modularity and ease
of building big banks of them with robots.

------
flixic
It's the game to teach people what technical debt and refactoring is.

When you start building your factory, you think about how to get first steps
just done (ship it!). Over time complexity and scope of your factory
increases, but old code, I mean old machines, are still there, getting in the
way.

You can choose to ignore it and work around it using underground belts and
similar solutions, or you can take on a proper refactoring, limiting your
progress in the short term.

~~~
dom96
This is actually what ruins the game for me. I get to a place where I need to
recreate large chunks of the factory and it just feels too much like work.

It's one of those games that I wish I could love, but whenever I attempt to
start it now I just remember that feeling of "ugh, why don't I instead code
something, at least I'll create something".

~~~
amelius
To me it's surprising how many games can actually be viewed like work.

~~~
JorgeGT
I'm convinced that some games are actually Ender's games. Forklift simulator
2020? You're actually controlling a forklift somewhere in Germany and Hans is
now out of work.

~~~
kortex
For those missing the reference:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forklift_Driver_Klaus_%E2%80...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forklift_Driver_Klaus_%E2%80%93_The_First_Day_on_the_Job)

The wiki page is fine, but the video is quite literally Not Safe For Work. My
German boss at the chemical company showed the whole team. Kinda gorey but in
the Monty Python Black Knight sort of way, and similarly hilarious. Klaus'
story is made up but it's based upon thousands of tales written in blood.
Definitely gave me an enhanced appreciation for safety culture.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Just in case you aren't at work:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C37MnfXD1z8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C37MnfXD1z8)

------
rgoulter
I played one game of Factorio that took about 30 hours; I 'almost' finished
then decided I was done with that.

Then, when I was between jobs, I thought "oh, I see how I could do a better
job; I'll just play one more game.." and my playtime quickly went up to 120
hours. I was writing TODO-lists in a book, etc. (The "craft no more than X
items by hand" achievement was fun).

I mean, +1 to both "if you're on here you'll love it" and "if you're on here,
be careful you don't spend too much time on it".

~~~
ecmascript
Recently, my gf found me still awake at 05:00 playing factorio. Had completely
forgot the time and thought it was closer to 02:00. That's when I realized
that I had to stop playing the game because it is so addictive. I simply can't
play that game in moderation.

~~~
andrewjrhill
Oxygen Not Included has the same sort of effect for me and my experience with
that game has kept me from picking up Factorio. Once you start getting into
ONI's automation tools and design optimization; time just ceases to exist.

It remains the first and only game I have ever fully removed from my Steam
library (not just uninstalled) after purchase.

~~~
nomercy400
ONI is great, yet one 'game' is much longer than Factorio. I bet you can
launch a rocket much sooner in Factorio than in ONI. Also, I found Factorio
easier and less stressful than ONI. There's no real 'lose' case and the
progress feels faster.

------
raxxorrax
Great game and it has come a long way. Even the early versions were quite
addicting. For me this is one of the best games in the last 10 years along
with Kerbal Space Program (there may be others, time is in short supply these
days).

If you are not into computer games, I would still recommend to visit their
site. They have "friday facts" where they describe the work they did over the
week an what challenges they had to solve. It is very well written and poses
interesting problems. Really interesting for software devs, even if you are
not in game development.

~~~
seer
Oh if only I was not a programmer!

KSP has taught me so much about subjects I was interested in, but afraid to
put in the time in - rocket science/engineering, orbital mechanics etc.

I’ve not tried Factorio myself but I’d wager it will try to teach me stuff I
mostly already know - queue theory, concurrency, automation...

~~~
me_me_me
Factorio is much easier. (Cracktorio a running joke)

Its base appeal/game loop is building new system and then doing optimization
and refactoring. As you progress through game you itch to improve things and
do them better at bigger scale.

You build a small setup to produce a wire.

Wire is used to build next thing. Next thing is used as input for another
thing, and so on.

But you now need ton of wire. So you have to go back and create more wire
production, but there is no space there... so you refactor or build more wire
production elsewhere... but how do you connect it... and copper ore is low,
need to build train to ship more ore from somewhere else... and so on and on
until you realize it Sunday 10pm. Where did my weekend go?

KSP forces you to learn how things work if you want to go beyond mun. Transfer
orbits and plane equalization done by feel doesnt work outside of Kerbin SOI.
At that stage KSP has a huge step for player to take in order to progress in
game.

But also you now understand a lot about rocket science. Factorio doesn't
really do that. You might learn some at intuitive level like: planning for
future, leaving room for expansion, don't do everything at once, don't forget
to build automated death traps outside you home xD

~~~
seer
One of the most “high” moments I’ve ever felt in a game was the successful
lunch of my first orbital craft.

That first orbit I felt so excited I had to stop the game and run around the
house. I tried to explain it to my SO but she couldn’t understand why that
was.

Maybe because I’ve been taught the math part of it in school, but when the
rocket equation, gravity losses, earth gravity assist, drag losses etc
“clicked” I actually related all of those independent things in my brain to
make a tough task possible.

I got as far as visiting Jool moons but it was not as exciting. Well maybe
except the first time I calculated a hochman transfer orbit to Duna.

~~~
me_me_me
Imagine if schools could teach like that.

Oh, the world we'd be living in... one can only dream.

------
avery42
I think it's fairly well-known at this point, but I find it interesting that
the game will never be on sale [0]:

> We state it on our steam page, but people are still asking about it so I
> want to state it officially. We don't plan any Factorio sale. I'm aware,
> that the sale can make a lot of money in a short period of time, but I
> believe that it is not worth it in the long run, and since we are not in
> financial pressure we can afford to think in the long run. We don't like
> sales for the same reason we don't like the 9.99 prices. We want to be
> honest with our customers. When it costs 20, we don't want to make it feel
> like 10 and something. The same is with the sale, as you are basically
> saying, that someone who doesn't want to waste his time by searching for
> sales or special offers has to pay more.

I like their reasoning, and I think it helps to show how focused they are on
the quality of the game (as well as, you know, 8 years of early access).

[0]
[https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-140](https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-140)

~~~
munificent
I don't have any moral problems with sales. Some people have money and less
time. Others have less money and more time. Sales let each of those groups use
the resources they have acquire the product. People with less money but more
time can spend that time hunting for deals. Busy people with cash can pay full
price.

~~~
CameronNemo
This is a type of price discrimination, which has highly debated morality and
unequivocal efficacy.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination)

~~~
s3cur3
Obviously people might not _like_ it, but can you summarize the moral
arguments against it?

~~~
CameronNemo
Moral arguments against price discrimination center around fairness and
inefficient outcomes.

For example if a vaccine for an infectious disease was priced higher for
people who are more likely to be exposed to that disease (because they have a
greater willingness to pay), it could create an unfair burden on this buyer
segment and even place the overall population health at risk. Just because a
seller knows they have greater leverage over this vulnerable population.

~~~
munificent
I think medical care is a problematic example to use because health is already
fraught with moral connotations, and medicine as a product category is not _at
all_ conducive to an efficient market.

Arguing, even correctly, that price discrimination is bad for healthcare does
not necessarily imply that it's bad for other things. Healthcare is different.

~~~
CameronNemo
Take education as another example

Parents a and b are considering whether to enroll their children in a private
school.

Parent A lives in a nice neighborhood that can lobby for better funding for
public schools.

Parent B lives in a worse school district.

The private school realizes that parent B has worse options, and that they can
upcharge parent B. The private school knows that at a certain price point
parent A will simply decide to send their child to the high quality public
school in their district, so they charge that parent less.

Parent B is disadvantaged because they have weaker bargaining power, and the
price discrimination is simply exacerbating existing inequalities in the
community.

I don't think that price discrimination is inherently unethical. But the
criteria used to discriminate can certainly be unethical. Look up "reverse
redlining" for example.

~~~
philwelch
Except if you try and price gouge parent B, it doesn’t work because they’re
poor. So instead you price gouge parent A because they are rich, by raising
tuition and giving a charitable scholarship/discount/etc. to parent B.

~~~
CameronNemo
Who said parent B has less money for education than parent B? I just said they
live in a worse neighborhood for public schools.

------
NKosmatos
It would be good to watch managers, CEOs, CTOs or other higher management
playing Factorio. I would pay for a Twitch/Youtube stream with Elon, Bezos,
Mark, Nadella, Gates and other "famous" people to see how they play such
games. On a second thought, that would make a good documentary/interview,
seeing how high profile managers and engineers handle similar games, what they
enjoy in their spare time :-)

~~~
hirundo
Since Musk and Bezos are actually building rockets I'd think they'd find a
simulation to be less fun in comparison. But maybe they'd enjoy it the way a
chess grandmaster enjoys playing blitz as relaxation during a break in a
tournament game.

~~~
slimginz
Musk has joked in the past in some Reddit AMAs that he models all his rockets
in Kerbal Space Program first so who knows.

~~~
halfFact
This is more likely to be marketing than reality. If he really works 100 hours
a week.

~~~
sujinge9
Maybe modeling rockets in Kerbal is part of that 100hrs of work.

------
Akronymus
I personally think that quite a large part of the HN community will find or
have already found enjoyment in the game. So I wanted to share the release of
the 1.0 version.

~~~
StavrosK
Ooh, I found 100ish hours of enjoyment over two weeks or so. Good thing I lost
interest after I launched the rocket (the endgame), otherwise my productivity
would have been gone forever.

~~~
awalton
The achievements in the game are a lot of fun to go after - they're mostly the
right amount of painful/challenging and interesting to make you actually want
to try for them.

That being said, I've put more than a few thousand hours into the game over
the past few years and I think the base game finally got stale enough for me
to move on to something else right as they're reaching 1.0, but that's okay.
(The big problem for me is that I've been sinking a lot of time into mods like
Seablock and after nearly 100 hours into this run I can't see starting over
from scratch again just to be on 1.0. I'm not even sure I want to finish this
run either knowing I'm unlikely to see bug fixes in the Seablock mod packs,
and they definitely could use some work.)

~~~
cybrox
I think the "Lazy Bastard" achievement is probably the worst in the beginning,
it's quite an interesting one, though, since you later notice how much easier
your life has become because you had to automate every little thing properly
in the beginning.

~~~
awalton
I can't lie - this was one of the harder ones for me to figure out. I
eventually found the speed running community to be quite good at this, as
rain9441 would stream his 100% runs (that is, getting all of the achievements
in one go), and it gave me a good hint on how exactly LB was supposed to work
- I kept on screwing up saving the necessary crafts for oil refineries, since
the way the game was setup before you literally couldn't build oil refineries
in the machines you had, so you _had_ to save a certain amount of crafts for
them.

But yeah, it's just a good balance of "wow how the _!#(_ does this work" to
"ohhh I'm so glad it works this way."

------
Cyphase
For anyone who doesn't know about it, Mindustry is a similar game with a more
tower-defense angle. Linux, macOS, Windows, and Android.

[https://mindustrygame.github.io/](https://mindustrygame.github.io/)

(I have no connection to the project, I've just enjoyed playing it.)

~~~
Dylan16807
If you can tolerate building the same infrastructure from scratch every level,
with a need to max out production and/or do levels multiple times to get the
unlock points you need.

At least that's the impression I got from a couple hours of time into the demo
before I threw it away in disgust. It was like minutes 15-30 of factorio on
loop, plus tower defense. The tower defense was good but not enough to make up
for the tedium of setting up drills.

Also if I'm remembering right the conveyors were unreasonably finicky for such
a core mechanic.

~~~
Ajedi32
I like both. Factorio certainly has a lot more depth to it, but Mindustry
feels more streamlined. Less focus on the minutia of optimizing the factory
and logistics, and more on getting everything set up as quickly as possible so
you don't get overwhelmed by waves of enemies.

For Factorio players, here are the biggest differences:

1\. No inventory. All structures get automatically crafted as they are built
and the resources taken from your central storage core.

2\. No inserters. Structures that output resources output them directly into
adjacent belts or other structures. This simplifies construction and can allow
for amazingly compact designs if you put sufficient thought into them, but can
also lead to accidentally mixing the wrong items into your belts and clogging
up your production lines if you're not careful.

3\. You have blueprints and the equivalent of construction bots right from the
start of the game. In singleplayer, it is normal and expected that players
will pause the game, queue up a bunch of things to be built, then unpause and
let their ship handle the construction automatically.

4\. Belts are streamlined and much faster work with. 1 lane per belt, and the
UI for constructing belts includes a pathfinding algorithm allows you to
easily construct a belt between two points in seconds provided you have enough
resources on-hand. Crossing two belts automatically creates an intersection so
resources don't mix.

5\. More focus on combat. Lots of different turret options, each with their
own specializations, logistical requirements, and types of enemies they are
good against. The PVP and attack modes are also quite fun.

6\. More arcadey. Unlike with Factorio, you aren't expected to keep growing
and expanding your factory forever. There is limited space and sooner or later
you're either going get overwhelmed, or retreat back into space with the
resources you collected. You can finish most stages in an hour or two.

~~~
Dylan16807
> You have blueprints and the equivalent of construction bots right from the
> start of the game. In singleplayer, it is normal and expected that players
> will pause the game, queue up a bunch of things to be built, then unpause
> and let their ship handle the construction automatically.

> Belts are streamlined and much faster work with. 1 lane per belt, and the UI
> for constructing belts includes a pathfinding algorithm allows you to easily
> construct a belt between two points in seconds provided you have enough
> resources on-hand. Crossing two belts automatically creates an intersection
> so resources don't mix.

Blueprints, belt pathfinding, and automatic intersections did not exist 11
months ago when I played it.

Thanks for letting me know, because that makes a huge difference. I'll give it
another shot some time.

------
reedf1
One of my favourite games of all time - sometime in 2018 I overloaded myself
on it though. Designing systems at my job then coming home to design
systems... well it might have been fun but I think I needed more variety in my
life, ha!

------
lebed2045
unpopular opinion.

I've spent several hundred hours playing this game and I think this game
should be treated as an addictive drug. I know it's my own psychological
problems but there's whole Reddit thread about how it ruined people's plans
etc and wasted hundreds of hours of their lives. In contract, real
"prohibited" substances like LSD, MDMA didn't make any negative impact on my
life nor addiction. How is that?

I feel like all these additive games (especially one which uses psychological
tricks like Skinner box) are some equivalent of brain exploits and should be
treated with great caution. Maybe labeled somehow and have a reference where
all these "exploits" and risk properly explained. Can anyone explain what
tricks it uses to become so addictive?

~~~
Majromax
> Can anyone explain what tricks it uses to become so addictive?

Good game design.

In particular, I see a few broad strokes of good game design here:

* There are always a variety of tasks to accomplish of varying scope and complexity. If a player doesn't feel like adding on the next stage of the factory, they can perform other maintenance tasks like cleaning up local bottlenecks or aesthetic optimization (e.g. straightening out a section of the power network).

* Almost every single problem is directly caused by the player's own actions, through a logical chain of events that's obvious once the player becomes familiar with the game. Why is the widget facility starved for inputs? Because the player previously split off 3/4 of the bolts for other production. The resulting challenges (see the point above) become meaningful because of the history, giving the game a level of intrinsic motivation that is usually reserved for sim games like city builders.

* There's no single "right way" to win. Some players treat the game as a size/speed challenge, to produce the most stuff in the fastest time; others look towards the most efficient or compact layouts; still others are content to reach the basic "win" condition (launching a single rocket) with a bare minimum of facilities and a lot of patience. The game doesn't condescend to the player to explain at them that their playstyle is wrong.

* The game separates "doing something" and "doing something at scale," but it makes the player progress to the latter eventually. As a more concrete example, the player can build the first few science packs (progression tokens) in their inventory, Minecraft style, but they very quickly need to set up automation to produce the ever-increasing required number in a timely way. Over a typical game, the most central aspects of production will go through three or four wholesale renovations as the player designs around different bottlenecks. It's a kind of intrinsic progression that I've seen _no_ other game replicate -- even if you had access to all the whiz-bang shinies at the start of the game, the fixed costs of using them would still push the player to a "starter base -> big base" progression.

In some ways, it might be better to treat Factorio not as a single game that
is 'won' or 'lost' through arbitrary rules, but instead as a hobby. "I've
spent several hundred hours playing with model trains" doesn't sound
outlandish.

~~~
cwkoss
Will Wright has a great quote on game design that I can't find, but it's
something like "What makes games fun is when the player has as many choices as
possible, and all of them are good choices."

I think factorio succeeds in this well: there are always many things to do
which will improve things, so you have to try to optimize which is is the best
decision to advance furthest with a given amount of time.

------
PoissonVache
You can look at the dev dayries
[https://factorio.com/blog/](https://factorio.com/blog/) They are very
interresting, I've learnt a lot of technical things reading them. It's a well
programmed game !

~~~
louwrentius
They are going to stop it now, no Friday facts anymore.

------
scrumbledober
A huge congratulations to one of the best and hardest working dev teams out
there on one of the most unique, challenging, and fun games I've ever played.
I have put far more hours into factorio than any other single player game. It
is an inspiring work. Reading the Friday facts blogs has also been one of my
favorite development blogs.

------
tech2
I never got in to Factorio, though I'd been tempted several times. I recently
bought the early-access Satisfactory though which is a similar game type,
mostly to support the developers (Coffee Stain) who make another game I quite
enjoy (Deep Rock Galactic).

The refactoring bit hits hard, how do you structure your factory to minimise
time/cost/space, can you increase throughput, do the outputs line up where you
need them, how do you ensure a sufficient power supply, etc.?

~~~
lawl
> The refactoring bit hits hard, how do you structure your factory to minimise
> time/cost/space, can you increase throughput, do the outputs line up where
> you need them, how do you ensure a sufficient power supply, etc.?

There are different 'designs'. I'd recommend a main bus design for your
starter base. Basically you take key materials, like copper plates, iron
plates, steel etc. and then run (multiple) full belts of them down a long
line. and build your factories to the side of it, taking your input materials
from the main bus.

See here:
[https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Main_bus](https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Main_bus)

Alternative designs (for much later in the game, if you want to buiold a
megabase) are e.g. rail grid, sometimes called city block design. Looks like
this:
[https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1as3oMAgOy4/maxresdefault.jpg](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1as3oMAgOy4/maxresdefault.jpg)

You have a grid of rail tracks with standardized squares and standardized
input/output locations. Then you automate input delivery/output collection to
them either by pure circuit logic, or of you don't hate yourself quite that
much using the Logistic Train Network mod:
[https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Optera/LogisticTrainNetwork](https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Optera/LogisticTrainNetwork)

~~~
munchbunny
Once you play Factorio enough times you find that there are some general rules
of thumb you can follow, in terms of resource consumption at various stages.
Once you know those, it's partly just a matter of figuring out your scale
milestones.

I do three stages, a main bus starter base which is enough to fill out the
tech tree and launch a rocket, and then once I've automated most things, then
comes the first megabase, which after enough time I rip up and build the
modularized, distributed megabase (mostly solving the problem of keeping train
traffic spread out and avoiding long multilane belt busses). The interesting
thing is that building a megabase isn't necessarily just 10x-ing your start
base, it's actually doing things differently because how you move resources
around starts to become a problem in ways you didn't encounter at the smaller
scales.

------
Havoc
Factorio always looked appealing. From a distance though. Never played this
for the same reason I don’t do WoW and EVE online. Scared it would suck up
every minute of my life.

~~~
scrollaway
I concur with moritonal; although you can easily spend hundreds to thousands
of hours in Factorio, it is much, _much_ easier to put down. Unlike with MMOs,
the game offers you no incentive for logging back in regularly.

Try it and see how you feel after ~2 hours of gameplay.

~~~
reificator
> _Try it and see how you feel after ~2 hours of gameplay._

Coincidentally "try it and see how you feel" is also how people sell heroin...

They're saying they're concerned that they might get addicted, and you're
telling them to try just the tip, just to see how it feels?

I'm a big fan of Factorio but if you're concerned it could take over your
life, there's definitely a chance it could.

True it's not _as bad_ as an MMO. There's no daily quests, no social features,
(though multiplayer is fun) and most importantly no lootboxes or variable
ratio rewards. Doesn't mean it can't addict you for a little bit though.

~~~
scrollaway
[https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/11/26](https://www.penny-
arcade.com/comic/2014/11/26) ;)

No, seriously though, I'm speaking with full experience: My main WoW character
has a 4-digit days playtime (and that's from several years ago; I eventually
did put it down for good).

Factorio is addictive the same way that Civilization is: You want to keep
going. Or like Tetris pro players, you might think about your factory when
you're not playing and "see" it everywhere. But unlike WoW, you can put the
game down at any time: there's no responsibilities you're taking on, there's
no grind you must finish, no daily quests that reset calling you to re-do them
tomorrow. The game world stops the moment you pause/exit the game.

There's no comparison to a MMO.

> _Doesn 't mean it can't addict you for a little bit though._

Every good game will. Every good TV show will make you want to binge. It's up
to you to manage your time. I believe GP is a reasonable adult and can manage
2 hours of a game without having to check into rehab :)

~~~
oefrha
Warning: unlike Civilization, Factorio UI doesn't feature a real-world clock,
and AFAIK there's no mod that can add one, so unless you set an alarm or have
a spouse it's really easy to get sucked up ;)

~~~
joshstrange
There are mods to add the time [0] but yes, it's very easy to lose track of
time playing this game.

[0] [https://mods.factorio.com/mod/clock](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/clock)

------
birisi
For those who like this I would also recommend Mindustry, a similar game which
is open source and available for mobile. I actually have spent quite a lot of
time with it.

------
bbrazil
I bought it for €10 5 years ago, in terms for gaming value for money I think
only the €10 I spent on Minecraft beats it.

~~~
sshagent
There is a fun minecraft modpack inspired by this game
[https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/modpacks/manufactio](https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/modpacks/manufactio)

------
barbs
Relevant Vice article: Why Do We Play Video Games That Feel Like Work?

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4x38aq/why-do-we-play-
vid...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4x38aq/why-do-we-play-video-games-
that-simulate-work)

------
drivers99
I like to look at my factory in terms of the Theory of Constraints. Improving
anything besides the bottleneck is a waste. Find the bottleneck and fix that
one thing, then figure out what the new bottleneck is. Avoid creating excess
inventory (buffer chests).

~~~
chillacy
Yup, not unlike how actual factories operate apparently. It's also a never
ending process because once you unblock one bottleneck, a new one is revealed
somewhere else. That the primary challenge in the game is an emergent
phenomenon of producer/consumer systems is what makes it so beautiful of a
game.

------
rvdca
For anyone who has wondered what would Factorio would look like in 3D, the
game Satisfactory from Coffee Stains Studio would be a good idea.

------
LatteLazy
This is like Heroin getting an upgrade. I might have to go break my computer
now...

~~~
lebed2045
would be interesting to learn the nature (or psychological tricks) the game
uses to become so addictive

~~~
simias
You always have a next step, a next upgrade to look forward to. It's an
uninterrupted treadmill from building your first mine to building you
hundredth mega-factory. That's how even quasi non-games like Cookie Clicker
can become addictive. It's effectively a Skinner's box.

Gameplay-wise Factorio is a lot more interesting that Cookie Clicker of
course.

~~~
sbennettmcleish
It's an uninterrupted treadmill cos you just spent 3 hours extra doing
seventeen other things and realise you still haven't actually "fixed the
copper" or whatever the heck it was you were meant to be doing :)

1600+hrs in ... still pushin' all my buttons.

------
bregma
I'm stuck on 0.18 until I reach 1000 SPM. Real soon now, I just need to
improve my iron throughput to relieve a bottleneck in flying robot frame
production then I can turn to working out the rocket control units not meeting
production quota.

~~~
McDuglas
0.18 was just Release Candidate for 1.0 - the only feature added on release is
Spidertron, the rest is just fixes. I think you should update.

~~~
Coincoin
They even made 0.18 mods to be 1.0.0 compatible this way the game releases
with all mods already up to date.

------
KuhlMensch
Can we make this the UI for AWS please?

~~~
jiggawatts
I had a co-worker who used to joke about that, but now that I've spent 4 weeks
making a JSON template for basically just two VMs, I'm starting to take his
idea more seriously.

Fundamentally, the product is similar, but everyone far prefers the Factorio
UX over fifty pages of serialised REST objects.

------
samvher
Does anyone know if performance/efficiency of the game has gotten better over
time? I played it quite a bit ~2 years ago or so, but my 7 year old MBP got
really hot and very slow by the time I started using blueprints. From what I
read at the time the game was very dependent on single-threaded CPU
performance. Maybe they found a way to make better use of multiple cores?

I really want to pick it up again but am not excited to start a new factory if
I know I won't be able to complete it.

~~~
Aeolun
Considering what factorio is displaying, I’ve always thought the performance
is amazing.

Then again, my computer is not 7 years old, but when I played it my desktop
was running on an AMD Phenom.

~~~
samvher
Yes I definitely didn't mean for this to sound as a complaint, I think for
what it is it's quite lightweight. It's just that it seemed to be using a
single core and if they managed to make it multi-core perhaps it could be even
more performant now.

~~~
dmurray
I think it's still largely single-threaded. They value complete determinism:
you should never get a different game state one tick later based on a CPU race
condition. This is for easier debugging, repeatable testing, accurate
multiplayer simulation - and also just that it fits the theme of the game,
players expect to be able to design certain systems to work deterministically.
This design decision has a performance cost, of course.

Still there have been major performance improvements, including parallelism-
lite. And just the fact that it's mainly the same engine that ran on low-spec
computers from 6 years ago means it should run very smoothly on modern
machines - not all of the Moore's law improvements since then have been about
parallelism.

~~~
lucb1e
I wouldn't say 'largely'. There are definitely single-threaded parts and if
you have 64 really slow cores then you won't get 64 times as many FPS (or UPS,
really) as with 1 core running at 64x speed, but that's with all software.

If you have a _somewhat_ reasonable per-core speed, multiple cores should all
be loaded with work. Personally I can't say that I've noticed it helped, but
that's anecdotal and I've seen the improvements as they came in incrementally
rather than in one big jump from some old single-threaded version to 1.0.

> including parallelism-lite

What does that mean? When I look it up I get results for some other game with
a similar name.

~~~
dmurray
> What does that mean? When I look it up I get results for some other game
> with a similar name.

I didn't mean to refer to any established term. I meant parallelization by
breaking the game up into systems, e.g. I believe the electrical system can
run completely separately to the main thread without losing the deterministic
guarantees, while I would think of full parallelization as allowing each
assembler or inserter to be simulated in its own thread.

Maybe there's a more established term for this? Parallelization through doing
different types of things at the same time, rather than doing many copies of
the same thing at the same time.

------
swiley
Games like this and openttd are how I fail classes and lose jobs.

~~~
lucb1e
And make friends!

------
fs2
Looks like fun and it's a game that's been on my watchlist for years. But I've
reached an age where I'm pretty sure that once I finish the rocket and escape
the planet (that's what seems to be the main goal) I'll never play it again.
Just can't be bothered anymore by endless grinding and optimizing. Addictive
games like MMOs and building games stopped being addictive for me once I
figure out how it works.

~~~
Dahoon
That doesn't mean it isn't worth playing the games. Time you enjoy wasting
isn't wasted time.

~~~
lucb1e
I don't know anyone who launched their first rocket faster than most story-
based games that you pay €60 for and get one or two dozen hours of content if
you're lucky.

Factorio is half the price for more hours of entertainment, even if you never
touch it again after your first rocket launch (assuming you do enjoy it until
the first rocket launch and don't put it away before then).

A minority of players (like me) likes to continue expanding and optimizing
after the first rocket launch, but indeed most people go play something else
first and start another map later, perhaps with friends. On your second run,
you'll build a much better factory. Not necessarily because you like
optimizing so much, but now that you know the game you can do things much
better and most people enjoy seeing that they really made progress in learning
how to play a game.

------
markdown
Must be getting lots of traffic:
[https://i.imgur.com/TNIeMoj.png](https://i.imgur.com/TNIeMoj.png)

------
aljungberg
Great game. Without being critical of the team's awesome accomplishment, I do
wonder if there's something to be learnt here about software development
productivity. How did the Coffee Stain guys develop Satisfactory apparently so
much faster than the Factorio guys?

Factorio started in 2013. Satisfactory started development in 2016 and
released 2019. At the time Satisfactory was released it seemed already more
advanced than Factorio -- and after only having been developed for half as
long. (The visual complexity of Coffee Stain's game is off the charts compared
to Factorio. Factorio has a board game style whereas Satisfactory is a modern
3D game. Look at the launch trailers.)

Coffee Stain has about 25 employees working on 2 games (Goat Simulator and
Satisfactory), Wube Software has 15 employees working on 1 game (Factorio).

Having read Factorio's dev blogs I feel like there might have been a bit of
not invented here syndrome. They wrote their own UI toolkit for instance.
Maybe they kept inventing technologies while Coffee Stain found ways to reuse
existing tools?

~~~
Deestan
The comparison isn't completely valid.

Satisfactory is not yet released, and still in Early Access.

Factorio was in EA and enjoyable by 2016.

The Factorio team has slowly grown to its current size - for a few years it
was just one or two people and no funding.

Coffeestain was a fully formed team with some funding.

~~~
aljungberg
At the point of comparison in 2016, both games were in early access, and, I
think, both games were enjoyable. Factorio had a more complex late game in
terms of available structures and they had liquid pipes which is a major
feature. But Satisfactory also had some things Factorio did not like varied
terrain, automated trucks and some interesting first person elements.

You're right about the early funding. Factorio started out with just €21,626
of crowd funding. But after a while they do seem to have reached similar
levels given the comparable staffing levels they have now.

------
LandR
I love that when you click things on the site it actually responds to the
click (like you've physically pressed a button).

~~~
barbegal
Up until circa 2006 all interfaces were made that way. Web forms and native
interfaces all had inputs resembling real buttons. See 98.css
[https://jdan.github.io/98.css/](https://jdan.github.io/98.css/) if you want
to see what interfaces looked like in the early 2000s.

------
iamjohnsears
Heard about this game from Tobi Lutke on a podcast. Bought the early access
version while I was in bed recovering from surgery and promptly lost track of
the next eight hours. Didn't play for a couple weeks after that, then lost a
weekend. Terrific game-- it really does build the muscle to search for the
bottleneck in any process.

------
EndXA
An interesting AMA with the founder of Factorio from a few years back:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/6e6tkw/im_the_fou...](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/6e6tkw/im_the_founder_of_factorio_kovarex_ama/)

------
buixuanquy
If you like this game, I suggest you can try “Oxygen not included”

~~~
wcoenen
I was a bit annoyed by photosynthesis not working as expected. In one of my
first games, I used algae to create oxygen. However, this did not remove
carbon dioxide, and the overall gas pressure in my base mysteriously kept
increasing. I know it's not a physics simulator, but given the name of the
game I expected a bit more realism around oxygen production.

Overall the game is a strange mix of physics sim and quirks that don't make
sense. For example, industry produces heat and heat spreads as expected.
Solid, liquid and gas phase changes happen more or less as expected, leading
to fun stuff like steam explosions. But then heat can be deleted in unphysical
ways, heat can't be radiated away into space like in the real world etc.

~~~
tomatotomato37
The heat management is one of my biggest frustrations with the ONI gameplay
loop. You go from gradually adding niceties to the base like lighting and
plumbing to immediately needing some unholy water-cooled system that uses more
power than the rest of the base combined, is stupid expensive in refined
metals, and doesn't even permanently solve the problem because soon the
heatsink waste pool is boiling and searing any dupe that walks past the
general area. Oh and you have to do all this before the greenhouse gets
slightly too warm and dooms the colony to starvation.

~~~
fuoqi
Heat management is super easy with aquatuner and steam turbine, you only need
some steel and plastic, which are not so hard to get. Personally for me ONI
heat-management is one of minor dissapointments, I think it would have been
much more fun and deep if this system was more physically accurate.

------
zokier
As someone who tried it 5-6 years ago when it first popped up in my bubble,
reached end-game and got bored, is there some summary of how the game has
changed since? Of course listing every single change doesn't make sense, but
any big changes to the core game?

~~~
dragontamer
Endgame options have grossly improved. Overall, combat has been automated at
endgame (artillery trains automatically destroy, and automatically explore the
map for you). Nuclear bombs can be used to one-shot endgame biter bases.

"Alien Tech" has been removed. All technology options are built traditionally,
and now have 7-tiers with names. Red, Green, Grey, blue, Purple, Yellow, and
White (aka: Space/Infinite research).

Infinite research are ~7 or so techs at endgame which go on infinitely.
+Weapon damage for the most part, but there is also +Productivity (which makes
mines last longer and mine faster).

In effect, the core gameplay loop has been extended into an infinite endgame
loop. The late game techs are extremely powerful and automate everything that
was boring ~5 years ago (ie: killing biters became boring. So its now fully
automated with artillery trains).

~~~
suyjuris
> Nuclear bombs can be used to one-shot endgame biter bases.

Forget biters, nuclear bombs quickly remove large numbers of trees, which are
the _true_ enemy!

On a more serious note, there have also been countless quality of life
improvements, like high-resolution graphics, reworked UI, or copy-and-paste
(literally just Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V, I have used it even without robots, its so
convenient). If you have radar coverage, the map allows zooming in fully
(rendered just like the normal view) and you can place blueprints and issue
deletion commands anywhere on the map without moving.

Incidentally, you can also order artillery strikes to play a 'prank' on your
unsuspecting friend who is standing motionlessly. (Which is why I made a habit
out of standing close to the most expensive thing in the vicinity.)

------
itchyjunk
Games can help you figure out parts of your personality in weird ways. I used
to do swimmingly with the early game with all the hack and slash building
techniques all the way up to ~500 spm. Then the whole set up for trying to get
to mega base got me anxious and such. I found most of my bottleneck to be
electricity. Since I played on deathworld, placing solar was tedious.

I knew a few different people who struggled early on a lot. They would be
stuck handcrafting too much and rarely have those hack job factory setup. But
once they got their early base with ~50 spm and robots going, they would start
scaling up with neat little blueprints and what not.

Then there were the speed runners who launch the rocket in a few hours.

~~~
awalton
> I found most of my bottleneck to be electricity. Since I played on
> deathworld, placing solar was tedious.

If there's a major criticism to be had over Factorio, it's that power
generation in the game is rather boring, and the Power poles and Light classes
are designed somewhat poorly. Solar just doesn't scale in Vanilla - it costs
too many materials for too little power, when really it should be one of the
easier scalable techs (but should still require lots of research since it's a
no-consumable power technology).

You can get through an entire game of Factorio on nothing but coal power if
you're diligent about when you expand, but most seasoned players will just
burn the excess oil as power, since it's rarely a real bottleneck and oil's
one of the most economical resources in the game to get setup - you build it
once and... you're done. Forever.

And then there's the super ridiculous late gamers who _have_ to build nuclear
because once you start talking in tens of gigawatts, there's just no way to
squeeze that out of anything else and remain even close to efficient; the
nukes take an absurd amount of concrete, but you're usually swimming in excess
stone anyways. Trying to get there on solar is an exercise in actual pain,
since you'll mine most of the map just trying to build panels and batteries...
so you have energy to mine the map... The bootstrapping never ends.

Some of the mods have done real work to make this better. There's a mod that
has fusion as a late game tech which feels like cheating, but then there's
modpacks like Seablock where you're forced to continuously rebuild power
through your tech generations as there is no coal, your starting wind turbines
don't make enough to get you past the first 10 hours, and each successive
science step unlocks a new power generation technology that roughly feels in
scale with that level of technology (from harvesting low grade algaes for
biomass, to growing trees, to farming alien plants and extracting oils, and
then to nuclear in the latest parts of the game).

But no amount of modding can fix things so you can have a power pole that is
also a lamp, so you can use Brave New World and see things through the stupid
unfixable dark night without also spamming the map with build-wrecking lamps
(since that mod removes your character and thus your ability to build night
vision goggles).

~~~
BlueTemplar
You can install the mod that merges lamps and power poles or the one that
makes it always day.

------
wadkar
If you want to see how complex and yet beautiful this game can get, checkout
Nilaus’ Factorio Master Class on YouTube:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLV3rF--
heRVu2xlDGZiRb...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLV3rF--
heRVu2xlDGZiRbdb7nbwzM9Vyz)

He also made those designs with community participation on his Twitch stream
if you’re into watching old streams. I believe he is one of the best Factorio
content creator.

I also want to mention about how Factorio developers have been continuously
blogging their weekly updates, FFF - Friday Factorio Facts throughout the
development. They’re really interesting and show how the game evolved and it’s
history.

------
UK-Al05
This game looks appealing but when I start playing it, it feels like an
extension of my job.

~~~
bregma
Yeah, I love my job, too.

------
xrisk
Great game and it gave me quite a few insights into how systems should be
designed.

~~~
gotts
Can you share a take-away example please?

~~~
acallaghan
For me in Factorio you have to think carefully how to place your primary
(mines, power, oil) and secondary factories (factory generation, batteries,
plastics, ammunition etc). Some of this placement comes from the map, but in
the early game you tend to place them too close to each other, which you then
need to optimise later on when other tech (like oil & nuclear) become
available.

Just refinining oil into primary products in this game took me like a week of
work and tweaking.

You then get to the end of the game & build a rocket, but think to yourself --
"Yes, but I could maybe do all of this again but properly and without manually
making things and the same mistakes". So you start another game and the whole
process repeats!

------
kissiel
I think this game made me a better engineer. I'm not saying it was worth
investing hundreds of hours, but it was fun playing. One of very few games I
really enjoyed in the last decade.

------
billfruit
I did take a look at it very early on in Early Access. I sort of did not like
that it was so deterministic, like many games of the type.

If there was randomness like machines churning out defective parts, machines
ageing due to wear and tear etc it would have been more interesting, would
even perhaps lead to more interesting tradeoffs. Some type of risk vs reward
decisions were not there, which to me is generally a fun component of games.

~~~
otr
I'm sure there are mods
([https://mods.factorio.com/](https://mods.factorio.com/)) like that, and if
not feel free to write one
([https://wiki.factorio.com/Modding#Creating_mods](https://wiki.factorio.com/Modding#Creating_mods)).

edit: now that I think about it factorio is purposely deterministic because
otherwise it would break multiplayer almost totally.

~~~
billfruit
May be possible that it can be modded in, but I get a feeling would likely
break the game, and things will go out of balance, since the core game perhaps
was not designed for such probabilistic behaviour.

Actually some amount of probabilistic behaviour including variation in the
quality and rate of outputs of machines, even atleast variability between the
different instances of the machines of the same type would have made it vastly
more interesting is my view.

~~~
bspammer
There is probabilistic behaviour in the game for reprocessing uranium [1],
presumably they found a way to keep the RNG in lockstep across clients. I'm
pretty certain it's possible to make a mod that does what you've described,
but I'm also pretty certain it would make the game less fun :P

[1]
[https://wiki.factorio.com/Kovarex_enrichment_process](https://wiki.factorio.com/Kovarex_enrichment_process)

------
Insanity
The comments here made it seem more interesting than anything on the webpage
of the game. Guess I'll have to give it a shot :D

~~~
lucb1e
Note that there is also a demo and the binaries are DRM-free (for me the demo
was a bit small to justify 30 bucks, but after playing on a friend's version
for a few week it became quite clear that I had to buy this game).

------
miguelmota
There's so much overlap between programming and Factorio which is probably why
I enjoy playing it. It's like visually creating algorithms. You get to build
and compose things from smaller pieces and then create larger things on top of
previously built machines and so on while also learning how things work along
the way.

------
atum47
it's very inspiring to see factorio in the first place on HN. It's been a
while that I'm trying to publish a successful game. I read that the version
1.0 took you 8.5 years. Do you mind talking a little bit about that? Were you
always funded? Did you had any investors?

------
simonebrunozzi
Provocation: if I ever do another (tech) startup in the future, I want to only
hire that have played Factorio (I haven't). I would be curious to see if the
company can be wildly successful solely based on this criterion.

------
jeremyis
This is one of the most clever and engaging games I’ve ever played. When
myself and some friends discovered it, it ate up hundreds of hours of our time
in the matter of a few months .... per person. It’s basically visual
programming with monsters.

------
singularvalue
I’ve wanted to try this for a while but I’m a bit reluctant because I’m not
sure that after an entire day of systems design, refactoring, building etc I
need a evening game of it.

Would it be too much or still refreshing? My favorite unwind game is
battlefield 4.

~~~
moviuro
They have a demo version, that's free as in free beer. Try that, see if you
like it!

------
grensley
I always find I start running out of patience for the game once I get to
fluids.

------
secondcoming
I only discovered factorio a few weeks ago, bought it immediately after
playing the demo. Great stuff.

What's especially impressive is how little CPU it uses and my GPU's fans don't
go mental.

~~~
lucb1e
Meanwhile my decent laptop runs a base producing 1000 science per minute at
~40fps... enjoy 60fps while it lasts ;)

~~~
secondcoming
I hope I get that far!

------
drhodes
Sounds like Danny Elfman wrote the music to the 2 minute video :) has strong
resemblance to the simpsons / beetlejuice / men in black, couldn't imagine a
better fit.

------
bootlooped
If you scroll through the Steam reviews it's not infrequent to see people with
over 1,000 hours in this game. I've seen one person with over 11,000 hours in
game.

------
mdoms
The problem with these very long early access periods is that I was deeply
bored with this game well before the final release. I can't imagine I'm the
only one.

------
benlivengood
Factorio; the only game I've seen with timeseries, graphs, tiered alarms and
notifications, and you get to automate yourself out of a job.

It's like SRE 101.

I love it of course.

------
stormbeard
I used to love this game, but stopped playing once I heard about Satisfactory.
It just takes things to a different level.

~~~
munchbunny
Satisfactory scratches the same itches, but it's a less deep game than
Factorio. That's not a bad thing (Rimworld vs. Dwarf Fortress comes to mind),
but personally the transition to 3-D didn't do much for me, and the reduced
complexity of production layouts in Satisfactory made it less interesting for
me.

------
Koshkin
But, do you get to destroy other people's factories? (If not, where's fun?)

~~~
lucb1e
Sure, pvp exists. It's not the most popular mode (co-op is the default and
most popular way to play), but there is full support for this kind of scenario
or mod: each object in the game is of a 'force' and you can't do things like
open chests or mine (pick up) objects belonging to other forces (enemies).
That's also how biters and player-built objects work. There is even a pvp
scenario built into the game if I'm not mistaken and setting up a server is
very easy (either with the in-game GUI or, if that's more your thing, with the
dedicated server on Linux).

------
spiral90210
One of the single greatest games for programmers ever written. Buy it.

------
ezoe
I wasted 2000 hours for this game. Highly addictive.

------
aminozuur
Why is this Red Alert 2-like game on the top of HN?

~~~
carry_bit
If it's not clear from the other comments, Factorio is basically the closest
you get to injecting pure engineering joy into your veins.

Given HN's audience, there are a lot of fans here.

------
TedDoesntTalk
Most of that website works without JavaScript!

------
novaRom
Wish to have this on mobile phone...

------
all_blue_chucks
Blocked by Windows Smart Screen Filter. Curious way to manage a release.

------
xiaodai
the blue print feature confuses me

~~~
Aeolun
It just gets your robots to build stuff for you so you don’t have to.

~~~
lucb1e
Or design things without committing to actually building it yet.

Or hint/show others how something could be built.

Or remind yourself of how you set something up last time.

(I use blueprints extensively.)

------
a6h
I'm genuinely afraid of trying this game.

