This game is fantastic, and ate ~20 hours of a business trip earlier in its development lifecycle.
I have one warning to you which I am not aware of seeing elsewhere for it: something about the color palette gives me severe eye strain, to the point of "physically painful to play", in a way I have never experienced before or since.
There exist several other games on Steam these days with the same core build-a-(semi-)autonomous-factory mechanic. My favorite of those that I've played so far is Big Pharma. It's substantially less advanced in terms of factory mechanics than Factorio [+], but the strategy is very, very deep, much deeper than you'd expect from looking it it. (For spoilers on that score, see my Steam review, which is the topmost one on the page. Capsule non-spoiler summary: best $20 I spent last year.)
[ + ] A fairly key skill for Factorio, which is present in Big Pharma but not relevant except at the highest levels of play, is timing the production of multiple subcomponents (which might happen in different quantities, at different rates, at variable distance from where they are consumed) such that one's production line never starves, blocks, or overproduces. It's Totoya Factory Simulator 2016 in this respect. When you get it right you get visual feedback (absence of congestion on your production line as e.g. coal stacks up because your furnaces aren't burning it because they're blocking on insufficient supplies of ore because you have insufficient electrical capacity because...). It feels like you're playing a symphony of borglike capitalist efficiency.
Have you tried Infinifactory (3d FPS ala Portal + assembly lines)? I loved Big Pharma and its not exactly the same, but it felt like the same parts of my brain were working on it.
I think Infinifactory is mind-blowingly amazing on many levels - an epic triumph of game design. The components are few and simple, but provide enormous combinatorial possibilities. There's a logic-language and aesthetic that emerges, that includes the very things patio11 mentions: input ratios, timing, and pipeline issues. The puzzles are sequenced so that each level is initially shocking, but gradually yields to the player's contemplation and experimentation. I think I've had more pure delight from this game than from any other.
I liked TIS-100 a lot too, and Infinifactory is kind of like a visuospacial, high-production version of it.
I remember playing 'KOHCTPYKTOP - Engineer of the People' years ago, and loving it. I've also really enjoyed SpaceChem, Infinifactory, and TIS-100. All around very interesting and challenging games.
Currently working my way through this and it's awesome. The simplified 'transistors'are more like relays but since I want to build a relay computer some day, that's perfect. :D
You would enjoy pretty much all of the games by Zachtronics, including Infinifactory. They're all puzzle-oriented though, as far as I know, rather than sandbox.
I will second Big Pharma, I liked it much more than Factorio. Factorio was challenging because it has elements of frustration, whereas Big Pharma was challenging because it has tough puzzles. Factorio is pretty technical, which I found too tiring for evening gameplay.
I have been playing this for a few years and just started again with the release of the steam version.
If you ever enjoyed Tekkit (minecraft) or the more automated part of Dwarf Fortress, you will like this game a lot.
My favorite part is that basically any action or building (up to the far late game) usually pushes you to build it by hand once or twice, and then automate the process forever.
It is extremely satisfying to build your first solar panel array while fighting for every resource, and then a few hours later have your 5000 strong robot army assemble a blueprint of that same array in 5 seconds while you watch.
The game also has a really great mechanic where you are constantly unbalanced for what resource you need to build up, but only because you decided to expand and create, so that your plans always digress into other plans and other problems to solve.
Also, the multiplayer is great and works really well, though it has a weird setting where you can set your own latency, and it seems like the host and clients are in lockstep not allowed to skew (so if you have a laggy client its a problem.)
I have been avoiding this game like the plague due to its potential life-ending, productivity-destroying effects (at least for some people).
This is one of those games where it starts innocently enough, a few hundred hours of gameplay accrue, and the next thing you know you're wondering where the last two months went.
Part of the reason for this is related to the decline of the SimCity franchise over the years. Cities: Skylines was pretty, but it didn't really hit the same notes in terms of gameplay. The last real SimCity game was 2004, so it's been well over a decade of waiting for the next truly addictive builder/simulation fix to arrive. Based on the amount of people I know having sunk triple-digit hours into Factorio, it's the closest we've come to a real SimCity game since.
That said, it seems like a fantastic game and I look forward to playing it some day.
Kudos for waiting, but the game is in a very good state. I think it reflects on the ambitions of the devs that they're keeping it EA even at this point. It is certainly improving, but it's really solid.
Even with very big factories, the game performs well. The improvements to be made are really just related to the UI and some game mechanics that could be modified or extended. Generally, there are lots of mods that will hopefully make it into the base game (e.g. rail tanker cars), but good mod support is part of the game.
It's quite different from SimCity, but I agree that both games are enjoyed by a similar audience for similar reasons.
>It's quite different from SimCity, but I agree that both games are enjoyed by a similar audience for similar reasons.
Definitely. Factorio has a crafting system, so that's a major difference.
I'd say the "similar reasons" you mentioned above are twofold:
a) You design systems and observe how they behave. There's kind of an awe or wonderment associated with watching how living, breathing systems behave within a complex simulation.
b) There's also a feedback loop where the player attempts to make their systems more efficient. This kind of massages a specific part of the brain in people with OCD tendencies, generating huge amounts of pleasure.
as I watched the trailer I was thinking, gotta download this NOW. and then had this dreadful foresight of being glued to the simulator trying to squeeze out marginal productivity gains while my family says goodnight. life ending.
If you like this game, you might also like Modded Minecraft. Many technical mods strongly associate with developers who love to tinker on absurdly complex physical systems. I've found the process to be a nice change of pace in the evenings.
You might also like our Minecraft Modpack, Resonant Rise. You can grab it on the ATLauncher (just search for ATLauncher). It's designed around complex and interesting engineering challenges.
There's a similarly REALLY cool Minecraft mod on the scene for Minecraft 1.8 called "Psi" that you can try (available here: http://psi.vazkii.us/). It lets you use a visual dataflow language and trigonometry to create "magic spells" that are very technical in nature. It's a very fun exercise, and it's neat to write a program (with almost NO flow control!) that does things like dig a tunnel or build a bridge or throw zombies skyward, all by magic.
As my 3 year old began to recognize Minecraft, I decided to sit down and play it for the first time. The base game was ok but the modded versions... let's just say that was 3 months ago and I'm completely hooked. Like factorio, it's basically programming in video-game form, building abstractions to tame complexity to build yet more complex abstractions.
I've been playing Infinity Evolved recently but Resonant Rise is also amazing. Thanks for that work.
I've been working on a 1.8 experience, and our RR core team is working on the most epic skyblock you can imagine. I won't spoil it, but it starts off with a time limit. :)
This is an amazing game, especially in multiplayer.
When playing with others, it's comparable to programming with others. It's about communication, people will try to optimize stuff that already works, people will argue about how to build stuff or when to refactor stuff.
Sometimes they will build something in a weird way and argue why this is the best way etc.
It can be a nightmare with the wrong people or a lot of fun with intelligent people who can control their emotions.
Also, the community is amazing and there are tons of mods.
I would love to play Factorio multiplayer with someone that is interviewing to become a colleague.
Playing this game in coop is like programming in many ways. You see the result of your design mistakes, and you have to be able to communicate well but not overcommunicate. To be independant but a team player at the same time, etc...
The whole game is stunning quality for what is still "alpha", where in games that frequently denotes "so buggy it's a miracle if the game runs for 10 minutes without crashing and burning".
It just works, and it's smooth as silk. It seems like they've concentrated heavily on the game engine and now are focussing on content, but there is plenty of content already to play with.
The trick is to realise that thanks to the rise of "early access" in indie games, "alpha" means release, but released absolved of any sort of commitment to continue to develop the game or ship quality software. Final "release" versions are often really "end of life" _final_ versions with no future expansion.
It's not to say that many indie (and not-indie) devs produce good games under this model, it's just there's been a huge shift in what players and developers expect from each other, as well as how they market it.
Similar parallels can also be drawn to the pre-paid kickstarter systems which were originally intended to help pay for upfront costs like manufacturing, but are now really used as risk-management tools to help ensure a certain number of sales before a project starts in earnest. There's no reason Peter Molyneux should need to ask players to pre-fund a game [1] of unknown quality and even scope, for example.
Well factorio is actually following the minecraft design. They have a bunch of things they want to add, but due to the complexity of the game it takes time to get there. Like in minecraft where they kept adding blocks until they were like "alright we have all of the ones we initially designed in". Factorio hasn't reached that point yet.
It's a fun game but please, at some point you have to release and stop pretending it's alpha to avoid any responsibility. It is now not unusual to buy an "alpha" release of a game, play for a few years, shelve it and move on and then notice 5 years later that the final release has shipped. I can't be the only person who finds this silly.
Factorio EA is like Kerbal Space Program used to be: it's a completely viable and fun game, but not feature complete. They have a vision for what they want the release to be like, and they're making progress toward that.
I disagree that it's a way to shift responsibility. The devs are responsive and the game is very stable. I can't tell you the number of times I've watched a bit of an older let's play series and some minor complaint or wish has since been addressed.
Many games are like that, but not Factorio. So, it just comes down to semantics and what EA means, vs. what perhaps it should be.
The "alpha" release vs. "final product" in game development is an artifact of the shift in the way software is developed in general. Even in traditional big biz software development, instead of a waterfall process with a quarterly release, you have much more frequent releases and much more incremental process with active user feedback built in to the cycle. All you're seeing is this process moved to game development and relabeled with a marketing term that's acceptable to consumers.
Where does it say that? All I see is that it is on Steam, they started developing in 2012, and that they call it "very stable". I don't see "alpha" anywhere.
Yeah like 60% of the indie games I played have barely made it to better before I was done with them. But this kind of thing is very typical for indie games. There are also a lot of open source games that people play for a decade but it's "still" 0.1.x.
I can forgive them since that often means that they focus on realising their big dream instead of making a big buck out of half their dream. Imho not good for them but quite good for me, since I get to play deeper games.
How would you call it? If you call it "released" things like "story not finished", "might want to do large changes later" become harder to accept. (?)
(On the other hand Minecraft released one day, but is still changing quite a lot. I don't know what a good label for "well-playable, but evolving" is... )
I picked this up a few days ago on Steam and spent considerable time on it since then. It's really addictive for people who like automation. It has a nice pace, throwing in some interesting challenges, but generally let's you focus on those little details on how to optimize the structure of your base. Resources are generally bountiful, but they do run out eventually, so you are forced to think about acquiring new sources - and until then you have plenty of time to fill your conveyor belts..
By the way, thanks for supporting this on Linux! Wouldn't play it otherwise.
I think it would be cool to be able to play the natives too and have to come up with super ingenious ways of dismantling these unholy factories of the invaders destroying your planet...
My new favorite game is Factorio (http://factorio.com). It's like a cross between Minecraft, SimCity, and Civilization, and the result is massively better than any of them. The game is currently in "alpha", but I'm not sure why; it's far more polished and less buggy than many finished professional games I've played.
Overhead view. Like Minecraft, you start out punching trees for wood to craft a pickaxe with which you can then mine some ore to craft other things. But soon, you are building an automatic mining drill, then a conveyor belt to bring the ore to a smelting furnace, then robot arms to insert the ore into the furnace and take the smelted bars out, then more conveyor belts to bring those to other places where thy can be used. Eventually you can build power plants, labs to research new technologies, walls and turrets to defend against attackers, oil refineries, robot delivery drones, trains, and more.
The game is incredibly addictive (especially for programmers?). But what really impresses me is how the game illustrates the complexity of the real world. Factorio is a lesson in how logistics trump tactics and strategy ("strategy is for amateurs, logistics are for professionals"), and in how to build a complex system for changing requirements. The lessons are broadly applicable to the real world.
It's fairly easy to analogize Factorio to city planning. In your first game, you will quickly discover that the city you built for the early game is all wrong for the late game -- and then you realize: every real-life big city is a horrible mess and this is exactly why.
I also find myself comparing Factorio to software, especially distributed systems and networks. I find myself constantly using phrases like "buffer", "flow control", "back pressure", "throughput", "refactor", "under-utilized", etc.
One transition I find particularly interesting: around the middle of the game, you research the ability to build "logistics drones", which are basically like Amazon's quadcopter delivery drones. They can transport materials from point to point around your base -- you set up "request" points and "supply" points, and the drones pick up whatever items land in the supply points and bring them directly to whichever requester is requesting that item.
Up until this point, you mostly use conveyor belts for this task. When you first get logistics drones, you think "These are WAY more expensive than conveyor belts and have much lower throughput. Why would I ever want them?" But you quickly realize that the advantage of drones is that they are rapidly reconfigurable. Once your base is entirely drone-based, you can switch factories to build different items on a whim -- no need to re-route any conveyor belts. This gets more and more important in the late game as the number of different types of things you are building -- all with different input ingredients -- increases, and maintaining a spaghetti of conveyors becomes infeasible. This is tricky to grasp until you do it.
For a while, of course, you'll have part of your base running on drones while another part is still based on conveyors. It's like using Google Flights in your browser to search for airline tickets, while on the back end it is integrating with 60's-era mainframe-based flight scheduling software.
I can't help but imagine that conveyor belts and logistics drones represent two different programming languages (or, maybe, programming language paradigms). Choosing your programming language based on how easy it is to do something simple is totally wrong. The true measure of a good language is how it handles massive complexity and -- more importantly -- reconfiguration over time.
Another thought: In 10-20 years, when we have everything delivered to our houses via drones and self-driving taxis populating every major street, will we be able to just get rid of small residential side-roads? You won't need to drive a car up to your house anymore: it's easy enough to walk a couple blocks to the nearest major street and hop in a cab, or better yet to a train station. You don't need to carry cargo since it's delivered by drones. Delivery trucks: also replaced by drones. Will we suddenly be able to reclaim a ton of inner-city space? What will we do with it?
In any case, thanks to +Michael Powell and +Brian Swetland for introducing me to this game!
PS. Factorio is multiplayer! We've been having a lot of fun with it at LAN parties, and I just completed a coop game with +Jade Q Wang, who is also addicted. We tend to forget to do things like eat or sleep when we're playing.
To your point about drones vs. conveyor belts as programming paradigms: I think belts are procedural while drones (and chests) are declarative. With belts, you have to layout routes and concern yourself with coupling (belts literally getting tangled with each other) between different steps in your automation. With drones and chests, you can just set demand for a given input and trust that it will happen. I try to use drones for the most expensive components because that gives the most throughput. Yes, this game is "crack for programmers".
Indeed. And much like my opinions on imperative vs. FP, I have now come around and no longer like logistics drones very much. :P
In the last year of playing Factorio I've learned that it's much more efficient to build your base in units of several factories that are directly connected to each other and balanced such that each factory is consuming inputs at exactly the rate the producers are producing them. Within these units, you can often avoid having either belts or drones, because you're moving items directly between neighboring factories.
With this approach, the problems of flow control, congestion, etc. are vastly reduced (they only matter between units, not within a unit). If you're using drones, you need far fewer of them. But honestly I usually prefer to just use belts because it's really hard to understand and debug throughput issues in logistics networks (... much like Haskell).
I'm pretty sure there is a programming analogy here but I'm not going to think too hard about it right now. :)
Nah, you've just re-discovered Just In Time and the Theory of Constraints. You've read "The Phoenix Project," right? Go read "The Goal" by Eliyahu Goldratt. TPP was based on The Goal, and reading both illustrated how many of the solutions that software development experts have landed on to improve productivity and the chance of a successful project are the same as the manufacturing problem solutions that manufacturers landed on twenty to thirty years ago.
I have a degree in logistics, but I work as a scripting-heavy systems engineer. My hobby is home construction, especially building systems like drainage planes, vapor management in walls, and structured wiring and plumbing. It's literally all the same thing with almost identical sets of problems.
Wow! I remember reading your original lan build blog! I did not live in the Bay Area at the time but it definitely defined how I imagined the software world out here.
This is going to be a shameless ask but if you ever need an extra person for a lan event I would love to fill that spot.
When I have been programming the whole day at work, cranking my stress/anxiety levels up, then playing an "automation game" does not sound very compelling, to be honest :)
I remember reading a story about farmers who like to play farming simulator games in their off time and truck drivers who like truck driving games. It was kinda weird, but it seems that people who found employment with something they enjoy will have fun playing games simulating their day jobs but without the stress and consequences (and annoying bits that reality forces us to deal with).
I would have thought the same thing, especially given that I used to play Starcraft 2 but stopped because it was too stressful, however a friend of mine introduced me to factorio, and it is actually very relaxing.
> Another thought: In 10-20 years, when we have everything delivered to our houses via drones and self-driving taxis populating every major street, will we be able to just get rid of small residential side-roads?
To nitpick one small part, yes, we will, because ambulances and fire trucks still need to be able to get around, and helicopters are typically cost-prohibitive.
Does this mean: not significantly more addicting than other games but used primarily by a minority so punishment is 100 times worse due to scare stories bred by systematic racism?
It seems to be a great game! Sadly, I think it encourages resource exploitation as to what we, the human race, have been doing to Earth as a whole.
I think a very good extension would be to provide new technology for sustainable energy generation and even further the ability to harness and excel the planet as a super living thing (as Asimov could imagine in its Foundation series).
This would provide an even more constrained and challenging environment as to maintain planet's equilibrium on one hand and progress on the other.
Maybe, those aren't really valid concerns from the beginning of a game. But afterwards, it'll be important as massive industrialization reaches ecological relevance.
The thing that bothered me in Factorio when I played it some time back was that once you hit the end of tech tree, which is pretty easy (or at least was back then), then there wasn't really anything else to do, nothing more for your highly tuned factories to produce. That said, I really liked the part of building your factories, I just would like to have more reason to keep on building. Maybe competitive multiplayer spices things up, but I don't feel like that is where "the scene" is.
- The "no crafting challenge" mod, where you can't build anything by hand, only in factories. You get a factory to start with in order to bootstrap. Playing in this mode actually taught me that I had been relying on hand crafting way more than I should have -- it turns out that automated crafting of a lot of the stuff you normally hand-craft can actually speed up the game a lot. (Incidentally, I tried to create a "no inventory challenge" mod, where you start with a mobile roboport train car and have to use robots to build everything, but I found the modding API wasn't quite powerful enough to make this work well. But it worked well enough to allow me to conclude that this would be a pretty interesting mode of play if it worked.)
- Use a mod that makes resources spawn further away, so you have to build more trains. Trains are like a game in themselves.
- I hear people talking about "bob's mod" a lot, which apparently adds a bunch of new resource types and things to build with them, basically multiplying the game complexity.
There's mods, like marathon, which add additional levels of complexity and make ordinary things more expensive so that it slows the game down some. There is a space-based end game that's planned by the developers. And there's upcoming achievements, like make <111 items by hand.
You can try to build a CPU and have your factory run programs? I bet there are a lot of tricky solutions to be used (I tried for a bit, but didn't explore very far)
Sidenote, I love how both Factorio and Big Pharma accept bitcoin for purchases. It's by far my preferred payment method, and I'll buy one of the two just to support them for that.
I appreciate the fact that you can automate some, but not all, things. Your manufacturing is ultimately sourced to raw materials, and sooner or later those supplies become exhausted.
I'm a huge fan of the Anno series (Anno 2070 multiplayer is amazing) because of how much fun it is to try and maintain supply chains and production lines of 50+ different resources. Have spent over 400 hours playing it according to steam.
Looks fun. Is it potentially productive leisure? I run a business, and have automated portions of it with processes. These run very well. Others I've found harder to automate.
I'm wondering if playing a game like this can help train a habit of automation. Thoughts?
Yeah, potentially. I've found the automated trains to be particularly effective at illustrating deadlocks and resource contention. Your early factory will (by the early mid-game) have no doubt taught you all about technical debt. :)
> I'm wondering if playing a game like this can help train a habit of automation.
Sure, why not?
The way you grow a habit of automation is to determine if you're spending "too much" time on a task, and if it would probably be worth the effort required to automate that task.
However, in Factorio you have no choice but to automate if you want to reach the main scenario's end goal in any reasonable amount of time. In real life, it's often not so obvious that this is the case.
Strong suggestion: Don't play in Peaceful Mode. Getting your projects interrupted by P0 drop-everything issues (and figuring out how to effectively deflect those issues) makes life so much more interesting.
Can someone explain me the difference between 0.11.22 version and 0.12.26 version? The demos for both of the versions are available in the demo page, and I can't figure out the reason why such an older version seem to still be available for demo.
The 0.11 demo is probably still up because it is known to be very stable. I haven't encountered any stability problems with 0.12 in recent months, though.
The big difference is the endgame: 0.11 had a placeholder "Rocket Defense" and 0.12 has a multi-step rocket and satellite assembly process. You would play several hours before encountering this. There are also a lot of performance improvements and quality-of-life things like personal roboports and more detailed logic combinators.
I'm looking forward to 0.13 which will have much nicer train track placing, fire that spreads, and maybe new vehicles and chest-loaders.
Wow, this really sucks. I had the exact same concept in mind for my next game. Like, during the trailer when he shows the crashed ship, my jaw dropped. Almost every aspect of the game is the same as what I had in mind. I had the exact same idea and I was really excited about it. Oh well.
I mean: a friend of mine has a 11 years old child. Another has two girls, one 8, the other 13... Should I suggest one of this games to them? If yes, which one?
Another +1 for the game as well. As I get older, it takes a lot more for a game to put me into "binge mode". This game did and then some. If you enjoy solving puzzles / architecting software / survival games, you will probably dig Factorio.
I am the 42 school and (a french progamming school) and evryone is playing it (myself include). This is a trendy game especially for programmers (for those who love problem solving).
This game is awesome, it was already great in 2013 when I supported them and it keeps getting better, the developers are listening to the users and really working with them
I bought this game one friday, and have now clocked 46 hours into it. It is a fantastic game, and it can really keep you up at night if you aren't careful.
It's ~$15 on steam at the moment, and a relatively tiny 300MB download. If you spend even 2-3 hours on it, enjoyed, then it's definitely cheaper than the price of a movie.
Unless a game delivers hundreds of hours of play in both single and multiplayer, is moddable, gets at least an 85 on Metacritic and the devs have signed a contract to ship free updates and content quarterly for 10 years, it's a casual game and you should seriously think twice before spending even 99 cents on it.
Or you should buy it on Steam, play for an hour and 59 minutes, then get a refund and proudly proclaim how it didn't meet your standards, alongside the other four games you refunded in the last couple weeks.
Or pirate it, because you like the game but you don't want to support the industry's high prices.
I have one warning to you which I am not aware of seeing elsewhere for it: something about the color palette gives me severe eye strain, to the point of "physically painful to play", in a way I have never experienced before or since.
There exist several other games on Steam these days with the same core build-a-(semi-)autonomous-factory mechanic. My favorite of those that I've played so far is Big Pharma. It's substantially less advanced in terms of factory mechanics than Factorio [+], but the strategy is very, very deep, much deeper than you'd expect from looking it it. (For spoilers on that score, see my Steam review, which is the topmost one on the page. Capsule non-spoiler summary: best $20 I spent last year.)
[ + ] A fairly key skill for Factorio, which is present in Big Pharma but not relevant except at the highest levels of play, is timing the production of multiple subcomponents (which might happen in different quantities, at different rates, at variable distance from where they are consumed) such that one's production line never starves, blocks, or overproduces. It's Totoya Factory Simulator 2016 in this respect. When you get it right you get visual feedback (absence of congestion on your production line as e.g. coal stacks up because your furnaces aren't burning it because they're blocking on insufficient supplies of ore because you have insufficient electrical capacity because...). It feels like you're playing a symphony of borglike capitalist efficiency.