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