Ask HN: Are you playing Factorio this week?

[tiniuclx]

As some of you may be aware, the Factorio: Space Age expansion came out on Monday, adding as much content, if not more, as the base game itself.

I've started a fresh save & ended up automating production of the first two science packs before being distracted by the biters enough to warrant investing in better defenses.

Currently working on a new mall design using the whole belt reader feature [0]. Having all inputs on the same belt makes extending the mall very easy as the input inserters can just grab whatever it is they need!

Planning to visit Fulgora first, and also hoping to start messing around with Quality [1] soon, as it seems very useful for space platforms.

How's your Factorio run going?

[0] https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-405

[1] https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-375

[ActorNightly]

Any game where there is significant building/optimization involved is a bad combo for me and my ADHD.

There is another game called Stormworks (basically a vehicle design/engineering simulator with physics, all the way down to writing PID controllers in LUA for stability), on which I spent over 2000 hours in designing a nuclear powered VTOL with automatic defense systems that could also complete all the rescue missions.

[elihu]

I've been playing it quite a bit. Seems the early game is pretty much the same as old plain Factorio, just with a few subtle tweaks and quality-of-life improvements.

So far I've got up to blue science and managed to get a nuclear reactor going. Next thing I suppose is to get purple and yellow science going and get construction/logistics bots doing their thing.

[tiniuclx → elihu]

Are you using the new temperature signal for the reactor?

In my last playthrough I managed my reactors by measuring the tanks of steam - the temperature signal looks like a much nicer way to achieve the same thing.

[elihu → tiniuclx]

Is that to conserve fuel by not running the reactors at 100% all the time? I usually just do that.